How much did Jimi Hendrix get paid for headlining Woodstock 1969?
As he gazed out upon a mass of bodies that stretched beyond the limits of his vision, Jimi Hendrix felt inspired beyond measure. His performance has since gone down in history as testimony of this. As the guitarist later poeticised: “500,000 halos outshined the mud and history. We washed and drank in God’s tears of joy, and for once, and for everyone, the truth was not a mystery. Love called to all; music is magic.”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of love, it was the age of folly, it was Woodstock 1969 – the high point of the counterculture movement in every which way. The famed festival marked the fuzzy peak of spring’s hopeful intoxication and forecasted the despair of winter’s comedown. For three days in August ’69, just north of New York City, in a small town in the Catskill Mountains, the great unwashed came together, and the world has been reeling from the miasma kicked up ever since.
Now, it is viewed as the pinnacle of the counterculture movement – both the good and the bad of it – embodying its anti-materialism and reckless abandon. But was it all that anti-commercial in reality? Well, if the figures the artists were paid are anything to go by, then by today’s gigs, it was essentially a charity concert, in fairness.
In today’s music climate whereby recording an EP will set a young band back £8,000-10,000 ($9,855-$12,321), and entry to perhaps the nearest Woodstock equivalent, Glastonbury Festival, will cost you £355 and a £5 booking fee ($455), the fact that you could slip into the iconic 1969 get-together for $18 (the equivalent of $143.50 / £116.50 nowadays), and an estimated 180,000+ didn’t even have a ticket, is indicative of how commercial music has become.
That extends to the headliner’s fees, too. Hendrix’s headline set is seen as one of the greatest and most important cultural moments in modern history. How much did he get for it? He got $18,000. In today’s money, that is $143,536 / £116,514. Considering that it is believed that Ed Sheeran received over £200,000 for headlining Glastonbury in 2017 and acts have been known to score $4million for topping the bill at Coachella, securing Hendrix to head up the dizzy height of a revolution in front of over 400,000 is hardly an astronomical figure.
Presently, U2 are expected to earn roughly $1million per show for their 25-date run at The Sphere. While the venue is certainly ground-breaking, will that run be quite as revered in the history books? Absolutely not. But if you were looking at it from an economic perspective, the shows are seven times more important.
And as for poor old Quill, the lowest-paid performers on the 32-act bill, according to The Bethel Woods Center, they only got $375 between them. That’s $2,990 / £2,427 in today’s money.
