10 Wild Woodstock Stories You’ve Never Heard from the Festival’s Musicians

Richie Havens’ Improvised History

Late folk star Havens was the very first musician to hit the stage during Woodstock weekend. Originally, there were four acts ahead of him.

However, due to a massive traffic jam that caused major delays for artists to get to the concert site, Havens took the stage and extended his scheduled 20-minute set for much longer to entertain the audience until event organizers could track down the second act, Havens said on The Tavis Smiley Show in 2004 (via NPR). He liked to say it was three hours, but it was actually closer to 50 minutes.

“So I’d go back and sing three more [songs],” Havens said. “This happened six times. So I sung every song I knew.”

At that point, Haven scrambled to think of what to play next. That’s when he started to improvise a melody and ad-lib lyrics to “Motherless Child,” a song he would later title “Freedom.”

“The word ‘freedom’ came out of my mouth because this was our real particular freedom,” he said of the festival, which took place during a time when the country was grappling with the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Stonewall riots and other human rights issues.

He added, “We’d finally made it to above ground.”

The song helped propel Havens into his long career as a musician until he died on April 22, 2013, from a heart attack at age 72, as reported by The New York Times.

Sweetwater’s Big Break

Lead singer Nancy Nevins was only 19 years old when she arrived to play at Woodstock. She and her former bandmates can say with pride that they were the first band to play at the festival, following solo act Havens.

In a 2012 interview with CBS2 News, Nevins revealed how a schedule conflict helped Sweetwater become “the soundcheck of Woodstock.”

“We had to get back to Los Angeles because the keyboard player was in the Air Force Reserves to stay out of Vietnam, and it was that weekend he had to be in Riverside at 6 in the morning to report to Uncle Sam,” Nevins told the outlet. “So we said, when we got the call for Woodstock, ‘Sure, we’ll go on, but we have to go on first.’ ”

The famed appearance and coveted spot helped the band land several big gigs, until a drunk driver hit Nevins from behind while she was stopped in traffic on a California freeway just four months after Woodstock. The accident damaged her vocal chords, and the band eventually called it quits, though the surviving members reunited to perform at Woodstock ’94.

Melanie Safka’s Time to Shine

Then-22-year-old Melanie Safka (née Melanie Anne Safka Schekeryk) went from unknown folk singer-songwriter to full-fledged superstar after her Woodstock performance, which almost didn’t happen.

The singer — whose life story was adapted into the 2012 musical Melanie and the Record Man — dropped several gems about her transformative festival experience during a 2018 interview with Best Classic Bands.

First, she and her mom drove to Woodstock together, but were separated once she had to get settled backstage to perform.

“I never really asked her how she spent the day,” the “Brand New Key” musician told the outlet. “I know how I spent the day. It was in a little tent. I didn’t even think about it; it didn’t even faze me.”

When Safka feared heavy rain might send concertgoers heading for their cars, she saw something surprising instead.

“Right as I’m waiting [to go on], I hear [festival organizer] Wavy Gravy making an announcement about his collective passing out candles, and something inspirational happened … the crowd started lighting the candles,” Safka said. “So, when I got on the stage, the candles were being lit.”

She added, “So, forever after, I was associated with the lighting of things at concerts.”

Safka died in January 2024 at the age of 76.

Carlos Santana’s Trip Through the Cosmos

Guitarist Carlos Santana’s eponymous rock band, which performed the week before the release of their debut album, became one of the breakout stars of the festival — despite an unexpectedly druggy set.

Carlos told PEOPLE in 2023 that he was “higher than an astronaut’s butt” during his band’s performance.

He claimed that he wasn’t expecting to perform for several more hours, so he took mescaline offered to him by Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia, according to The New York Times. Then, about two hours into his high, an organizer told him it was time to go onstage.

He had to perform in front of hundreds of thousands of people while hallucinating colors swirling around him.

“It was like being inside a kaleidoscope,” he said of the harrowing experience. “And then somebody told me, ‘Trust in God. Just ask him to keep you in time and in tune.’ So I said, ‘God, I really believe in you. If you help me right now, I won’t poo my pants in front of everybody.’ Next thing I knew, we hit the notes and the people went, ‘Wooo!’ ”

The musician noted that the unusual body language visible in performance footage of that day is a result of his drug trip.

“The neck of the guitar started wavering like a snake, and I was like, ‘Oh, uh-oh,’ ” the Grammy winner said in an interview with MetroFocus in 2019. “So, I just started making faces because I was trying to keep it tame, you know? I was trying to keep it from slithering all over the place.”

The Grateful Dead’s ‘Terrible’ Set

The pioneering San Francisco band’s lead drummer, Bill Kreutzmann, revealed to former late-night host Conan O’Brien that they were bombing their performance long before terrible weather conditions threatened to take the band from the Grateful Dead to the Electrocuted Dead.

“We had this thing about the big shows — ‘blowing the big ones’ — and I’m not sure why that was,” Kreutzmann said during his appearance on Conan in 2015, recounting the band’s subpar set.

Kreutzmann continued, “We were getting electrocuted on stage … We couldn’t even do a soundcheck because you couldn’t get near the microphones without drawing an eight-inch arc of fire.”

“It was so bad that we didn’t allow it to be in the movie,” Kreutzmann added, referring to the Oscar-winning documentary Woodstock released a year after the festival took place. “It was terrible.”

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Rock and Roll Lullabies

During a separate interview in 2015, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s lead vocalist and guitarist John Fogerty revealed during an appearance on Conan that the Grateful Dead’s chaotic set led to his own band’s seriously delayed performance — in front of a sea of sleeping concertgoers.

“Things went sorely wrong after they hit the stage,” Fogerty told O’Brien. “About the middle of their set, it went dead silent … It was quiet for about an hour and then they started playing again.”

By the time their set was over, it was “literally 2:30 in the morning” when CCR was able to go on.

“I come running out and I look down there and I see a bunch of people [who] look a lot like me, except they’re naked and they’re asleep,” Fogerty said. “So, we started rocking out in the middle of the night and in the middle of nowhere, trying to get things going here.”

Fogerty thanked the sleeping crowd to drum up some excitement.

“Then waaay out there, about a quarter mile out, some guy is flicking his lighter,” the rocker recalled. “He says, ‘Don’t worry about it, John! We’re with yaaa!’ So in front of half a million people, for the rest of my big Woodstock concert, I played for that guy.”

Sly and the Family Stone’s Peace and Love

The “Everyday People” band members from San Francisco were slated to close out night two of the festival — until their spot got swiped.

“We really didn’t care [when] we went, but a lot of people did. I remember one particular person, that group, I won’t say the name, because —,” said vocalist and trumpeter Cynthia Robinson during an interview, per American Archive of Public Broadcasting.

Her bandmates chimed in to confirm she shouldn’t “kiss and tell.” According to Robinson, the Woodstock organizers wanted them to close the show, but another group objected on the grounds that they were “the stars of the show.”

The Family Stone agreed because they weren’t as focused on fame.

“It wasn’t about what we were going to do to somebody else. I’ve played in groups where people say, ‘We’re going to burn them up,’ ” Robinson added. “We never went out with that attitude.”

Although the bandmates never revealed who demanded their spot, the Woodstock day two setlist placed The Who behind Sly and the Family Stone.

Bandleader Sly Stone died on June 9, 2025, at age 82, “after a prolonged battle with COPD,” according to the musician’s family.

The Who’s Rough Night

The English rock band was arguably the most aggressive outfit to perform at Woodstock, both musically and attitude-wise.

The New York Times reported that they refused to take the stage until the promoters paid them, which delayed their start time. Then, drug-averse singer Roger Daltrey got dosed with LSD in a cup of tea.

By the time they took the stage at 5 a.m. early Sunday morning to play their album Tommy in its entirety, they were tired and cranky. So, when peace activist Abbie Hoffman crashed the stage and started yelling into guitarist Pete Townshend’s microphone, Townshend was having none of it. He reportedly hit Hoffman with his guitar, though no footage exists of the incident.

Daltrey has no nostalgia for Woodstock. In his 2018 memoir, Thanks a Lot, Mr. Kibblewhite: My Story, he wrote that it was a really hard show to play because of the band’s conflicts and the state of the equipment.

“Looking out unto the predawn gloom of Woodstock, making out the vague shape of half a million mud-caked people as the lights swept over them, I felt in my sleep-deprived, hallucinating state that this was my nightmare come true,” Daltrey wrote (via Vulture). “The monitors kept breaking. The sound was s—. We were all battling the elements and ourselves. Music and peace.”

Sha Na Na’s Dream Day

The band, whose sound was reminiscent of the 1950s, reached immediate fame after performing at the festival and being featured in the Woodstock documentary.

Sha Na Na’s appearance at Woodstock jump-started a career that included several albums and their own eponymous variety show in 1977, per NYT. Not bad for a group that hadn’t even played a dozen shows before getting booked.

“Woodstock was only our eighth professional gig!” founding member Jocko Marcellino told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2014. “Because we played there and made it into the movie, it instantly gave us a career that is still going on, 45 years later.”

Jimi Hendrix’s Major Nerves

The legendary self-taught guitarist closed Woodstock — taking the stage at around 9 a.m. Monday morning — with an epic two-hour set that included hits like “Fire” and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” before famously playing his own interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Hendrix later revealed on The Dick Cavett Show that he had only gotten eight minutes of sleep the night before he hit the stage, and his exhaustion fueled a nervous breakdown.

“I didn’t know what was happening. I was so exhausted, you know. It’s like a — a nervous breakdown or whatever,” he said, confessing to Cavett that he had suffered from them in the past.

Hendrix died just one year after the fest on Sept. 18, 1970.