What Happened To Sha Na Na Founding Member Robert Leonard?

In 1969, Robert Leonard's brother George came up with the idea for Sha Na Na, which also included other members of a Columbia University a cappella group. They began performing at Steve Paul's Scene in New York City, where Jimi Hendrix saw them and convinced the Woodstock promoters to include them. "People like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead, they really understood what we were doing and they were friends of ours," Leonard told the Associated Press in 2010.

After their Woodstock appearance, Johnny Carson booked them on his show, the group got a record deal, and they began opening for some of the biggest rock acts of the era, such as the Grateful Dead. Leonard was trying to balance being a rock star and a student, but something had to give."I was offered a full fellowship at Columbia to go right through my doctorate, and everybody I knew was dying of drug overdoses," he recalled in The Hofstra Chronicle in 2018. "It was a hard decision, but it was a good one." It changed the course of his professional life.

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