Jimi Hendrix’s dream for the future of Woodstock
There are few moments in music history as iconic as the moment Jimi Hendrix took to the stage at Woodstock. It’s not even just that the performance was epic, because of course it was. It was the entire story leading up to it, what it meant for his legacy and what it said about him as a person. It was a moment that seemed to mean as much to him as it did to any fan watching or any historian since, and it was a moment he hoped, one day, to recreate.
Hendrix at Woodstock almost didn’t happen. Part of why the 1969 festival has become so mythologised is simply because it was an absolute miracle that they managed to make it take place at all. Tens of thousands more people descended onto the site than expected. It ended up being free simply because they couldn’t build ticket booths in time, and they even had to call in support to ensure they could actually feed and water the number of people there.
Backstage, too, it was chaos. The stars of the 1960s are not known for being punctual or easy to work with. With the sheer amount of drugs being passed around, it’s a surprise to no one that the festival was running behind, but by the time Sunday evening rolled around, they were running five hours behind due to a thunderstorm and general logistical chaos.
It all led up to the famous moment when Hendrix took to the stage at 9am, playing to a crowd of 40,000 hangers-on who stuck it out to see the show. No doubt, the people who went home early regretted that for the rest of their lives.
Hendrix was offered the chance to jump the queue and go on earlier to beat the delay and the crowd leaving, but he said no. That wasn’t what the festival was about, and it wasn’t what he was about. It seemed that sticking around and playing to that crowd as the sun rose was equally as inspiring to him as it was to the audience.
The language of peace: Hendrix’s dream beyond Woodstock
Around the time of Woodstock, Hendrix was also busy with another project: building Electric Lady. It was a huge undertaking, as the artist wanted the best not only for himself but also for his peers who would use the space. In 1970, the year after the festival, there was an opening party, and a young Patti Smith, who had yet to even perform, got herself on the list.
“When I got there, I couldn’t bring myself to go in,” she wrote in Just Kids about the shyness that overcame her at the prospect of meeting one of her musical heroes. As she waited outside, trying to gather the courage, the man himself came out: Hendrix. “When I told him I was too chicken to go in, he laughed softly and said that contrary to what people might think, he was shy and parties made him nervous.”
So for a while, Smith got to simply sit with her hero outside the party, hearing about his life, his career and crucially, his Woodstock plans. “He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play,” Smith recalled, “It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their dischordance until they found a common language.”
Electric Lady was part of the dream, too. “Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his new studio,” she recalled, remembering his tag line for the entire dream; “The language of peace. You dig?”
But obviously, he never managed to make that happen. Hendrix sadly passed later that year, with Smith going on to honour him by recording his song ‘Hey Joe’ as her first ever single in homage to the courage he gave her in that moment to get up and go take up space in his studio and in his dream for the future of music.
