It was Jimi, not music, at its best

8/22/2006

“It was the place to come to. It wasn’t just a rock and roll show. It was not just about the music. It was really about that decade and that culture.”
— Michael Lang, Woodstock Festival promoter

The next time an old hippie strolls up beside you and starts on again about how Woodstock was the greatest concert of all time, be a pal and tell Moonbeam or Skywriter or Peachblossom or what-have-you the truth, and say Woodstock wasn’t nearly as good as you might remember, man.

Historically speaking, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was a concert for the ages. Billed as three days of peace and music, it brought half a million young people together to rural New York over the weekend of August 15-18, in the summer of ‘69.

Moonbeam would have you believe there were over one million beautiful people enjoying the free concert. Not exactly. The concert at Max Yasgur’s pig farm actually cost the bargain price of $6 per day, for a grand total of $18 for the whole event.
It didn’t actually become a free concert until enough peace-loving hippies burst through, or over, the fences that were put in place to keep the great unwashed, freeloading masses under wraps.

By and large, the performances were not that good. Some stand out, such as Santana, The Who, Canned Heat, Richie Havens, Janis Joplin, and Joe Cocker, but many were flat-out forgettable.

Originally, the promoters wanted Roy Rogers to close the show with his trademark “Happy Trails”, but had to settle for a hot, young, virtuoso guitarist named Hendrix, who just happened to live nearby.

Due to a rainstorm and the problems of organizing so many different bands, by Sunday night the acts were as backlogged as the crowd was waterlogged. Jimi Hendrix was asked to play Sunday at midnight, but refused to bump any other artists. Rather than rip through two or three songs with the crowd at its emotional and narcotic high, Jimi asked to play his full set on the Monday morning.

Taking the stage when most rockers are heading to bed, Hendrix and his band downed a jug of wine and played one of their all-time best sets. It was a tour de force of Hendrix music, with the smash hits mixed in with new songs, all walloping the concert stragglers with Jimi’s unique wall of sound.

Early on, when Tommy James was asked to play the concert, he refused, deciding a free show at a pig farm didn’t really appeal to him. That’s what is was, of course, until the event made it so much more, minus a few lies and lame-duck performers.

Woodstock served to punctuate what one generation could, and wanted to, become; and it planted the seed for the excess that lurked greedily around the corner of the 1970s. In the end, Jimi Hendrix became the perfect poster boy for that generation.