Sha Na Na? Who Wudda Thunk

by David Safier

For those of you who haven’t heard of or don’t remember Sha Na Na, it was a popular rock group in the 1970s whose members acted as if they were a doo-wop group from the fifties, complete with retro clothes, hair styles and attitudes. If any group epitomized street corner proletariat rock-and-roll in those days, it was Sha Na Na.

So where are they now? as they used to say on the old MTV show. According a NY Times article, one is the director of the linguistics program at Hofstra University, another is provost at Jewish Theological Seminary, another a professor at San Francisco State and another a lit prof at Texas Tech.

Either they learned a hell of a lot hanging around backstage, or there’s more to the story. The fact is, they were at Columbia University when they formed an a cappella group. Jimi Hendrix saw them perform and got them booked at Woodstock, their second professional gig. The rest, as they say, is history.

A similar anecdote:

In May, Imperial College in London awarded Brian May a doctorate in astrophysics. Mr. May had set aside studies for the guitar in 1971 — to help found Queen. His 48,000-word thesis: “Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.”

“Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.” Wasn’t that a song on Queen’s third album? Or maybe it was on Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” One of those.