For Gregg Rolie, then serving as singer/keyboardist in Santana, Woodstock didn’t exactly loom large. In fact, as the festival — which kicked off on August 15, 1969 — grew to truly epic proportions, Rolie was mostly concentrating on the music.
It was only later that he understood the magnitude of what had just happened.
“At the time,” Rolie tells us in an exclusive Something Else! Sitdown, “it was just another festival. We flew in and we played, then stayed and saw Sly Stone — who was awesome. But as we drove out, we started passing all of these people, 500,000 people. That’s when it dawned on me. If I had known what it was going to be, I might have been scared. At the time, we thought of it as just another gig. It turned out to be the mother of all of them.”
