Dana Mathewson

Some of you may remember Woodstock. No, not the bird in "Peanuts." The music festival where everybody got rained on, stoned, etc. Here, the drummer of the group that opened for Jimi Hendrix's closing set tells what it was like. The group? A group that was just gaining some traction, called Sha Na Na. Some of you may remember them!

This is a great article, and there are some neat photos, and rather than chop it up with excerpts, I'd rather just give you the link and let you enjoy the whole thing. It's here: https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/sha-na-na-jocko-marcellino-woodstock-jimi-hendrix

The article says that Sha Na Na's still together. Well, there certainly will have been a few personnel changes over the years; it's inevitable. For one thing, do you remember Bowser, the singer with the incredible bass voice? He'd already left the group sometime in the 1980s (or perhaps early 90s) and put together his own group called Bowser and the Boys, and I worked with them two or three times in Buffalo at the Variety Club Telethon, which existed to raise funds for Buffalo Childrens' Hospital. I played in the house band for that venture for years.

Bowser, whose real name was John Bauman (or perhaps Baumann) was quite a musician, at one point issuing a "challenge to all you greasers out there," after which he sat down at the piano and ripped off a fine performance of one of Chopin's Fantasie Impromptus. I had a chance to chat with him for a few minutes one time and he was very pleasant to talk with.

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