Forty-five years ago this weekend, the Woodstock Festival of 1969 changed the course of American music.
Among the several big-name performers (Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, The Who, Grateful Dead) was Carlos Santana, who performed an afternoon set on Sat., Aug. 16 with his band Santana.
Recently, he looked back on the event with Billboard.
"It was very memorable and monumental," he said. "We didn't know that there were so many people in the '60s that wanted to stop the war. People got involved in the '60s, with the Black Panthers and the students. We wanted to change the world, like Jim Morrison, from The Doors, said: 'We want the world and we want it now.'"
"I didn't realize till we got to Woodstock just how many freaks [there were] at Woodstock. There were women and men, an ocean of hearts screaming. I use this word 'freaks' as a positive thing. Freaks are great. Freak is a good word, because you're outside of the normal," he told Billboard. "We all wanted Vietnam to stop. We wanted to be liberated, emancipated from mental slavery. We are one family at Woodstock."
Billboard also had a chance to catch up with Primus bassist Les Claypool, who played at the 1994 festival two decades ago.
"I was on tour with a band called Sausage at the time," he said. "I hadn't even seen the Primus guys in probably two or three months. I don't usually get nervous before shows, but I was nervous before that one because I was in the dressing room trying to relearn parts. I was petrified because we hadn't played in so long. And it was telecast over satellite, with gazillions of people watching this damn thing. Sometimes you can be as well-rehearsed as you can possibly be, and you have a crappy show. And there are other times the planets just align and you have a great show. It ended up being one of the best shows we've ever performed."
The one thing people still talk about from '94 is the amount of mud, and Claypool said the muck was truly unforgettable.
"As far as the mud thing, once I started singing the words to "My Name Is Mud," all of a sudden huge chunks of sod started flying my way and it was pretty frightening," he said. "I still have those [speaker] cabinets to this day, and those cabinets still have mud in them."
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