Sweetwater – "What's Wrong" (1968)

What's wrong with our folks? . . .

What’s wrong in their head?

Won’t they just try to see it once our way instead?

If it wasn’t for bad luck, Sweetwater wouldn’t have had any luck at all.

Sweetwater was an eight-member band from Los Angeles that was supposed to be the opening act at the Woodstock Music and Art Festival, which took place 50 years ago this month.

But they got stuck in traffic, so Richie Havens opened Woodstock instead.  He ended up performing for three hours – after he played every song he knew and there was still no one available to take his place on stage, he improvised a song based on the traditional spiritual, “Motherless Child.”  

Sweetwater performing at Woodstock

Havens called the improvised number “Freedom,” and it ended up being included in the Woodstock documentary movie and on the Woodstock soundtrack album.  On the strength of his Woodstock performance, Havens had a pretty successful career – he released four albums, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and even performed at President Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration.

Sweetwater eventually got to Max Yasgur’s farm – Woodstock’s promoters had them helicoptered in –  and they went on after Havens.  But they don’t appear in the documentary movie, and none of their songs are on the original soundtrack album.

In fact, there were no Sweetwater songs on the two-record Woodstock 2 album, and the group doesn’t appear in the almost four-hour-long director’s cut of the movie that was released in 2009.  

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Missing out on possible stardom because of traffic was bad enough, but fate had an even crueler surprise in store for Sweetwater.

Nancy “Nansi” Nevins

A few months after Woodstock, Sweetwater’s front woman, Nancy “Nansi” Nevins, was in a serious car accident that resulted in severe injuries to her brain and vocal cords.  

The band recorded two albums without Nevins, but neither one sold well.

Nevins eventually recovered from the accident and recorded a solo album in 1975.  (Sweetwater was kaput by then.)  

She and two other original members of Sweetwater appeared at Woodstock ’94. 

Former The Mamas and the Papas member Michelle Phillips portrayed Nevins in a 1999 TV movie about Sweetwater.

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Did you make it to Woodstock?  Neither did I.

If we had been there, we would have heard Nansi Nevins and Sweetwater play today’s featured song, which is one of the many anti-war songs that were performed there.  (That’s assuming we didn’t get hung up in traffic even longer than Sweetwater did.)

Click here to listen to “What’s Wrong,” which was released in 1968 on the group’s eponymous debut album.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: