Gary James' Interview With Alex Del Zoppo Of
Sweetwater



They toured with The Doors. They opened for Eric Burdon And The Animals. They recorded three albums for Warner Bros. They performed at all of the big festivals of the day, including Atlantic Pop, Newport '69, Texas International Pop Fest, Miami Pop, Palm Beach Music And Art Festival with The Rolling Stones, Detroit Pop and Woodstock '69. In fact, they were the first band to perform at Woodstock. They were also featured on American Bandstand, The Steve Allen Show, Red Skelton Show, Merv Griffin and Hollywood Palace. The group we are talking about is Sweetwater. Sweetwater's keyboardist Alex Del Zoppo spoke with us about his group.

Q - Alex, before I dig into your past, I'd like to talk with you about what you're doing today. You offer private lessons on song writing?

A - Yeah. I'm a songwriter's advocate, if you will. I help them straighten things out before they get too far with it. Typically what happens in L.A. is there are a lot of people vying to be the next hit songwriter, right? This has gone on for decades actually, And almost every one of them gets all excited about their project and does a demo at great expense and there's things wrong with it they hadn't seen because they're too close to it. It's very common. People just get all excited about whatever they're working on at the time. They want to get it down and spend a couple thousand dollars in a studio and hire people. Then there's big flaws in the thing they didn't see. It's just a common thing. Look at it this way. When people have ugly babies they don't look at them as ugly. They're their babies and they cannot find it their own heart to look at them as ugly. They find something they really love about 'em. That's what people do with their own songs and so this is kind of a way to catch 'em before they do that, to refine it. Basically a lot of it is just sanding down the rough spots, that kind of thing. Every once in awhile there's something really goofy that doesn't belong there. Some times people will even argue with you, but I get paid to do this, so it's okay, they can argue with me. It's all about making it better.

Q - I've always regarded songwriting as a God-given gift and something that not everyone can do because if everyone could do it, we'd all be doing it.

A - Well, you'd be surprised how many people are doing it whether they've got a gift or not. A lot of them study. Diane Warren for instance used to come to these meetings that I myself used to go to back in the '70s that John Braheny and Len Chandler did. John Braheny wrote the original book on the Craft And Business Of Songwriting. It was a really comprehensive book on every possible angle of the whole aspect. In my mind he's a genius. He passed away some years ago, but we became good friends over the years. But, Diane used to come in there and she didn't know one end of a song from another when she first came in. She was just a kid. A young girl. She eventually became the commercial songwriter of all time. If you look her up, she's got page after page of hit songs that she wrote that she didn't sing. She's an outside writer. She writes for other people. She learned by attrition. You keep bringing things in and you keep getting 'em knocked back. Years later some partners of mine and I started the L.A. Songwriters Co-Op, which was kind of based on John Braheny's thing that he had quit doing a decade or two before, and made it work. The same kind of thing. Something called Songwriters Vantage, which was an online version of that thing. We were trying to do a subscription model of it and we had a number of people around the world who were doing it for awhile. Then, pretty soon everyone just sort of wanted everything for free on the internet and so it didn't really work out for us. There was four of us and we ended up breaking even for about three years of that. But basically it was that sort of thing where you listen to someone singing and you give them some feedback on it. You tell them what really stands out. After doing this for awhile, and I studied this at U.C.L.A., we used to call it feedback instead of critique, although it was a critique. We'd give everyone five minutes and they'd play their song whether it was recorded or played or part of each or sing live or whatever. Then we'd give 'em five minutes and look through the lyrics and look through the music and see what works. There's got to be a connection between the music and the lyrics, like a good story to a movie or seeing a scene and if the music doesn't make scene better it detracts from it. So, those two have to be married. So, that's what you're looking for in a good song and it's gotta hit you right away. But I did this for years. I studied at U.C.L.A. and privately with a number of different people around Los Angeles. And so that got to be the thing I enjoyed most. It's so intuitive for me, it's just something I keep doing. And lo and behold I can do it at home now. So, here we are.

Q - It almost seems to me that if you hear someone come in the door with what sounds like a hit to you, you'd start your own record company. Wouldn't you make more money that way?

A - Yeah, but this is what schmucks have done forever and us songwriters have always hated those guys 'cause they sort of do that. It's not a bad thing if they're sincere. They just want to lock you down. I've had that done too. I was trying to make it as a songwriter in and of itself for about a year or so. I was losing ground all the time. This was way back. It had to be in the early '70s, after Sweetwater broke up. I should say for the first time. (laughs). You know how bands are. But anyway, I was trying to do that for a long time and then I realized it takes forever to get a song off the ground, if you're lucky, and when you get paid it's months later. So, I just became a mercenary like everybody else and started working for different people, Eric Burdon, The Beach Boys, where you just go out and play. It was something I could do, so let's get some money flowing here. But I understand what you're saying.

Q - Of course it is costly to start a record company.

A - Oh, yeah. It used to be. These days most people are doing their own thing. They're their own manager, their own producer, their own record maker. Every single part of what they do it theirs. And you know, if you've got nothing else to do, that's great for singer/songwriter types that you find pop up. They just live to go perform all the time. So yeah, be your own boss. Why not? Some of 'em make it and a lot of 'em are banging against the door and no one ever answers. So, it's sort of sad. Indeed the internet has leveled the playing field. It's also kind of weakened the playing field because it's very difficult to get attention now. Every day everyone gets e-mails. Their in-boxes are flooded with people they've never heard of and everybody's tootin' their own horn. It's too much.

Q - Is there a version of Sweetwater that exists today?

A - Well yeah, but a pared down version. There are three principals and we are survivors as it turns out. That's myself, Nancy "Nansi" Nevins, and Fred Herrera, the three of us who survived somehow. (laughs) We, I would say are three of the four principals who began Sweetwater.

Q - You were one of the co-founders of the group.

A - Indeed.

Q - What were you doing before Sweetwater? Or was Sweetwater your first band?

A - Oh, no. You know how it is when you grow up in a neighborhood. Lots of people in it, you're always in a band if you have musical inclinations. You're always jamming with somebody. Fred lived near me, so I met him years and years ago. Not quite like a Simon and Garfunkel thing, but sort of. So, we knew each other since we were young teens, 12 or so. And we both played in various bands. I played in some without him and he played in some without me. But at some point I had been in the Service and done my active duty part and I was a Reserve in the U.S. Air Force. I couldn't seem to find anything better than the U.S. Air Force at the time. I was being drafted into either the Army or the Marines or the Navy because during the Vietnam War they were drafting anyone into anything. No one was volunteering to be a Marine. Duh! So, I had twenty-one days to figure out what I was going to do, so I joined the Air Force and got in a program where I spent two years active and four years reserve, never thinking that I'd have a band, (laughs) at some point where I'd have to take weekends off and skip the Reserve meeting. But, that did come along. But I resumed my studies at City College. I was taking music, that's L.A. City College, which is pretty much in the heart of L.A. During that time I would get together with a bunch of people who were studying with me, people that I'd meet through the music program. We'd get together and have a little jam and it turned out there was this little place called The Scarab. It turned out there was enough space for people to jam in this place, but it was really kind of a coffee house with a little bit of space. We would get together in these terms: Anyone who showed up on a given night was in the band that night. That's how loose this was. It was a really loose jam. There were tons of music people, people who were studying just up the street at the college who would drop in. So there was always enough to make like a quorum, so we'd jam. And that's kind of how this started.

Q - And in walks someone from a record company and signs you up.

A - No. Not quite that fast. In walked Nancy. One night it was just a bunch of us guys and of course we were all dweebed out, passing a joint around, which was highly illegal in those days. Somebody would start a riff and we'd just go from there. It became a scene. It was good for me because for about a year or so I was really learning how to improvise on the spot in different keys with different instruments. I'll give you an idea of what the scene looked like. People would drop in that played trombone. Usually there was a bass player and I'd play keyboards. So, I'd bring my electric piano. I had a Wurlitzer electric. And there was even this poor guy, I forget his name, nicest kid in the world, who was a paraplegic. He was in a wheelchair. He could move his arms and not much else and he played percussion, but we'd have to lift him up on the stage because he was always in the wheelchair. But, everyone was welcome as long as they could contribute something. That's how loose, but how crazy it was. It was really interesting. You just never knew who was gonna show up. And so, out of this jam one night, Albert, who was the fourth of the originators in this band, was a tall, thin, Black guy and he played flute and sang. One night he's playing over this microphone and there's a girl singing in the audience. So, he looks at her and you can sort of hear part of what she's doing. It seemed to fit what were doing. And so he beckons her up on stage and she comes up while we're continuing to play this jam, something that I had started and we just continued doing it. She walks up and sings this old Spiritual, "Motherless Child", and it was bloody fit. It was so bizarre because it was like another dimension that we hadn't really thought of. I recognized that she was singing those words, but I didn't recognize the way she was singing it and it certainly was odd in the context of what we were playing at the time. Then she nails it and then everybody applauds in the place, which normally they didn't 'cause it was kind of a low key thing in those days. They'd applaud when you were done, but they applauded when we were still playing. And it was the same song we were continuing. (laughs) Then she jumps off the stage, is giggling, and runs out. And so several minutes pass and we finish playing that song, and ostensibly the set we were doing. Then we thought, "What the hell was that?" So, we go outside looking for her and she's nowhere to be found. We look all through the place. She's nowhere to be found. No one knows where she was. Then somebody said they recognized her, but didn't know what classes she was taking at school. It took us three months to find her. We found a guy at a Head Shop around the corner from there who knew about her because some guy he knew was going with her. It turned out it was so difficult to find her because she was not a collage student. She was still in high school and happened to be going with some college guy. And so, we located him and we located her and said, "Hey, you want to be in a band?" I decided this was an omen. It was a good time to take this to the next step. And so she said, "Yes." Then she gave us the lowdown that she was 17. I thought, "Oh my God, this is going to be difficult," but we decided, "Okay. Let's see what we can do. Let's see if we can make it work, figure out some kind of rehearsal schedule and see what we've got." We spent the entire Summer, the entire year mostly of 1967, putting together a couple of sets for Sweetwater. We wanted to do all original music and do it in a way that was conducive to the picture we had in mind, which was kind of a jam band with people singing, which was very Grateful Deadish at the time. But the Grateful Dead hadn't quite got around to that yet. They always did a bunch of covers. We wanted to do our own stuff. As it turned out, Nancy was a hell of a writer. I had already been writing and Fred had been writing and Albert had been writing. So, we decided, "Let's do this, but let's do it as a Rock 'n' Roll band." The only thing is, we never did get a guitar player, (laughs) not 'til the '90s when it turned out it was very difficult to replace the people who had already passed away, which turned out to be our cello player and our flute player and our actual original drummer. We always had a percussion guy even when we were jamming. So, we kept him, although I wouldn't call him a principal. He was a fellow from Cuba who had studied percussion and done that thing in Cuba and moved to the United States when Castro took over way back then. We basically made him fit in every song. It kind of worked. We actually had a sound that was so similar to what Santana eventually did, with out the guitar of course, which is (Carlos) Santan's instrument, but you can almost blend the two at the time. So once everything took off for us we met Carlos in San Francisco when we were playing the Filmore. He wasn't playing with us, but he showed up in the afternoon to check out what we were doing. He was fascinated because at that time he had a Blues band. It was called Santana Blues Band and that's what he was doing. He said, "Oh my God. You're using Latin instruments with Rock 'n' Roll. What a great idea!" And the next time we saw him he owned it. (laughs) He turned it into Santana and changed his whole schtick and went for it. He literally became a monster just based on having played Woodstock.

Q - And in the film of the same name as well!

A - And got in the film. Well, Bill Graham had a lot to do with it. Bill Graham was his manager and he had a lot to do with Woodstock. He was at least moral support. A lot of his people from Fillmore East actually did the light show at the original Woodstock. So, there was a lot of ins and outs there, things that were connected.

Q - What would've happened to Sweetwater if Nancy hadn't walked into that coffee house the night she did? Would there even have been a band Sweetwater?

A - I imagine we'd be mostly instrumentalists. If we did form a band it wouldn't have been with everyone who showed up because there were probably twenty-five different people who would show up at different times, not all at once, thank God! You know, they were just students. We were all students. So, different people would show up on different nights, but that was the fun of it. That was the challenge to me, playing with different people, some that I just met. Some guy would walk on sometime and just be some student. Students in college those days, you have to go back.

Q - How did Sweetwater get a record deal?

A - Basically, during the Summer of '67 we had a plan. We were young people. We didn't know our ass from a hole in the ground as they say, but we had a plan. The plan was to play The Whiskey, as The Doors did. The Doors played there for months and months and months and finally got signed there. So we thought that's what we want to do. That was an L.A. band we could kind of model our business model after and go for it. But during that Summer, it was the Summer Of Love and we started hearing about this thing in Monterey that was going to happen called a Pop Festival. None of us had ever heard of a Pop Festival. People didn't really amalgamate popular music into the word Pop at that point. To go back even a little further, when we were studying in college, in high school and in college, the level at which you studied Pop music was really square. I mean, you could play in a Jazz band, which was probably the hippest thing you could do in those days. They did not have Rock 'n' Roll. They did not teach Rock 'n' Roll. They did not examine it in any way, shape or form and teach the details of it to people who were in school then.

Q - It was just too new. There wasn't enough history behind it.

A - Yes.

Q - Today you can take a course in The Beatles' music. And you can do that because The Beatles broke up fifty years ago.

A - Yes.

Q - You were going to high school in what years?

A - We were in high school in the early '60s, but colleges didn't consider Rock 'n' Roll a serious thing. So, that was looked down upon by the academies and basically they would teach you Classical music, all the fundamentals of playing music, but not the idiom of Rock 'n' Roll. They wouldn't come anywhere close to it. So, in those days everything was either, and it's hard to understand, up until The Beatles, people did not take Rock 'n' Roll seriously. They're the ones that changed it. They changed everything. People started listening to them. At first they were just a copycat band. They sort of did a lot of American stuff. In my ears they didn't do it that well. When they started doing their own stuff, it was brilliant.

Q - Alex, I'm going to have to disagree with you about The Beatles not doing American covers well. The last time this discussion came up was with Jerry Blavat, an American disc jockey. I told him The Beatles' version of "Roll Over Beethoven" was better than Chuck Berry's.

A - Blasphemy! I'm with him. (laughs)

Q - Maybe part of the reason was the recording technology was better for The Beatles than Chuck Berry.

A - There are people who like "Twist And Shout" over The Isley Brothers' "Twist And Shout". There's no comparison. It's like if The Beatles started doing a Hendrix song. Holy crap! It just wouldn't be right. But that's what they were and that's what happened. When they did their own stuff, they were brilliant. They grew and grew. They continued to expand and became better and better and did more interesting writing. They changed the idiom and the whole world is watching. I don't think that'll ever happen again. It was just brilliant. Of course, you have to give their producer credit. He typically would tell them they were too brilliant! Once they stopped playing live and dealing with that, they just had the studio to create in, and boy did they create! One time my wife and I were in a store and they were playing one Beatles song after another. I thought somebody had a mix they had going. Then a d.j. interrupts. We were hanging around an art store. It was very quiet, probably for forty-five minutes and guy interrupts and says, "Don't forget to tune in tomorrow when we do more of The Beatles from M to Z." You knew every lick and every note and every word of every song they played and The Beatles had hundreds of songs and they were all great. It just dawns on you, "Wow!" So, going back to the Summer of '67, rehearsing at my dad's shop. My dad had a repair place and that's where I grew up. I didn't grow up in a swank joint. It is what it is. And we lived behind the business. But there was space, a place to rehearse. So that's where we chose to rehearse. And we could make noise without disturbing people. During the Summer of '67 we kept hearing about Monterey Pop. So, we finally figured out what it was by looking at these local Head newspapers, like hip people would look at, people in college. So, we had twenty cents between us and we went up there in two cars, slept in our cars and under the car and just wanted to see what the scene was about. We didn't even get into the arena where the music was playing. It was open air. You could hear every note. You could walk around the outside and hear it. Really, the experience of all these people enjoying themselves in what seemed at that time a hippie paradise was just something we had never imagined. Hearing all that great music was just astounding. The whole band went by the way. It was very interesting. It dawned on us, "Screw The Whiskey, let's do this!" And so we made that our goal, to play outside for as many people as we could. At that time we had a guru who was kind of guiding us what to do and what not to do. It was very helpful. A guy named Harvey Gerst. He was a great guy who used to hang around The Troubadour. He hung around with all these people and was in various groups. He played guitar. He knew his way in and out of the Folk/Rock scene, which was burgeoning at the time. He played with a group called The Men before he started nurturing us. He was just one of the best guys you could ever want to have on your side. For some reason he liked us. He thought we were quirky and weird. He didn't quite understand us. But he had seen Nancy play even when she was busking as a high school girl. Her and her friend used to go up to Hollywood and sit on the street and play for dollars. That sort of thing. Back in the old Hippie days.

Q - Alex, how did you get a record deal? Did someone come into the coffee house and see you perform?

A - It's very interesting how it happened. It wasn't some guy that just popped in. It was a little more thoughtful than that. We had been doing all these outdoor things that Gerst had found us to play at, Palm Springs, places close by. Then, other states, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Mexico. Things that weren't too difficult to play for a band that didn't have too great of an income coming in. Then he found this place for us to play to keep our chops up. And that was The Whiskey A Go Go. That was what we wanted to do in the first place because of The Doors getting signed there. So we sort of became the house band there for several months. We would open up for everyone. Every hit act that was coming through town would play there and we were the opening act all the time. In those days, just like at The Fillmore, you'd play a set. Then there'd be a break and then you'd come back and play another set and the other band would play another set. A fairly long night. But it gave us plenty of practice and it was cool because you're doing it in front of people. It was great experience. It was a fun thing to do. All of a sudden our manager said, "This is gonna be it. I just heard that Janis Joplin is coming in. Every record label in town is going to be at The Whiskey because she's up for grabs." Indeed, we hadn't been signed yet. So he said, "That's the night you're going to have to do your best show, twice." (laughs) We said, "Okay." And that's when we got signed. There were all these different record labels in there and all of them were vying for us that night. It was really great, but our manager took two weeks and decided to go with Warner Brothers because at the time they were really kind of an inventive outfit. They were very eclectic. They signed people from Hendrix to Joni Mitchell to Neil Young. Not all super Pop people, but people who were somewhat inventive. And that's exactly what we wanted. So, Mo Ostin signed us. He was one of the greats of Warner Brothers in the day. So, we were really lucky. That's how that came about. What it then meant for us was that we then had to go out and make a record with them. That began in the Fall of '68. We were already touring, but we would have to come back to L.A. and make the record mostly during the week. And sometimes we'd be gone a week and then we'd come back again. So, it was a hit and miss and we did it. I'd say we spent a couple of months putting the record together, not consecutively obviously. By the time we did it they shot an album cover. We talked to the people about what to do next. It came out right around Christmas, which is actually a terrible time to put a record out, but that's what Warner Brothers wanted to do. The timing of that had to do with how many other people on the label had product that were coming out at the time. So, that's what happened. Then we had to go out and promote the record. We went around to different cities promoting the record. Sometimes they'd advertise in those cities and sometimes they didn't. So, sometimes you're hitting a city cold. It was difficult. Other times they had a little promotion. Sometimes it was on the air and sometimes it was only magazines. So, it was hit and miss.

Q - Where did you perform in the U.S.?

A - We went to some bizarre places. We actually played the Miami Pop Festival based on our having done festivals on the West Coast. One of the promoters was Michael Lang. This was before Woodstock. We were a virtual unknown because our record wasn't out yet. When we played Miami Pop we were probably the surprise hit of that thing. And we had never played in Florida at all before that. I remember we didn't sleep much on that day. We went on in the afternoon and killed it. It was amazing. From then on we had fans in Florida. We could do no wrong. So, we'd go back and play there from then on in various places. It happened for us in that way in Detroit as well. It happened in Phoenix. There were some cities you just catch fire in and it sort of happened in New York too. So, that was a blessing. So, our manager was hooked up with Bill Graham to a certain extent after awhile. So we ended up playing both Fillmores, the one on the West Coast and the East Coast several times. A minimum of three times on the East Coast and three times on the West Coast. I think we might have played a fourth one on the East Coast. So, that's what you did for record labels. You played in places where they heavily advertised you. In other places it was like, it is was it is. You were on your own.

Q - How did your record do?

A - "What's Wrong" was the first thing we had as a single. It actually started to be playing on AM radio across the nation, which was golden in those days. Then it didn't hang in there that long. And so, it was only played on the Underground stations, which was FM. And at the time there was a wide distinction between AM and FM. We were considered an Underground band at the time. We did well in that. We played anywhere and everywhere in the United States and Canada. We were set to play in Europe and Japan, but Nancy had an accident. I must say that because of that edict we set for ourselves, that goal to play as many outdoor, big festivals as possible, we were the band that played the most Pop festivals of any band ever. I mean, there's no doubt about that. We did many festivals in '69, including West Palm Beach and Woodstock. West Palm Beach was actually a more interesting festival that Woodstock. The Stones played there. It was a bizarre thing. It just rained all the time. No one has film of it. It was just constantly raining, but it was a neat one and that happened just before Nancy's accident, which was four months after we played Woodstock.

Q - Is it true that Sweetwater was supposed to be the opening act at Woodstock, but you were stopped by police?

A - No. You can forget that. That's bullshit.

Q - That never happened then?

A - No. I said it on stage as a joke. We had a police escort because we had a site escort. One of the guys from the performance site was a liaison who met us at the hotel. Everyone was in this building which was the Holiday Inn, in Liberty, New York on the Seventeen Thruway. It was the main artery into town or through town, but it was about twenty miles from the site.

Q - Where does the name Sweetwater come from?

A - We had already done a poll of what our name should be and that came to be Sweetwater because we wanted a one word name, which no one was doing then. That's what we wanted to do. So, we were unusual in every aspect. We had three Black guys in the band with a White girl, an Italian piano player, a Mexican bass player, a Cuban percussionist, a Jewish drummer. The percussionist was just about 30 already. Nancy and our drummer were 17. So there was a wide range of everybody in this band. I, by the way, had short hair because I was still in the Service. I was still in the Reserves. And so it was an unusual band.

Official Website: www.AlexDelZoppo.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

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