There’s something you have to understand about Jimi Hendrix. He wasn’t just another guitar player. His blue jeans were not of this earth. His white fringed jacket was a little harder to reckon.
I was 16 when I drove with Chris and Paul to the Woodstock Festival. Chris’ VW bug pooted on until the traffic on the I-road got stupid so I suggested we get off and take local roads. I had been to summer camp in the area so I knew some of them. By some stroke of luck, I managed to navigate us to within a quarter-mile of the stage on a hill overlooking the site. We set up Paul’s huge tan canvas tent next to the vehicles of the band David Peel and the Lower East Side and the East Village Other, a weekly magazine. It was sunny, T-shirt weather, although many of the crowd wore much less.
A year older than I, Chris was my science and guitar buddy. Sandy haired and athletic, his girlfriend was the lead singer in the band I played bass for at the time. He had a Fender Stratocaster that he played reasonable rhythm on and like me, he was far ahead of the high school science curriculum. We used to take his light blue bug into the City to hear concerts at the Fillmore East, and had been to scores of shows. He was a major Jefferson Airplane fan and had seen them over ten times.
Paul was industrial strength weird. He had long straight blonde hair usually clipped into a methodical pony tail, a handlebar moustache, and he affected three-piece suits at school. His eyesight was almost legally blind at 20/900, and his glasses were so thick, they were very amusing to wear while stoned on pot. He had been an Explorer Scout and had a huge tent, cookware, and other Boy Scout gear that proved very handy at the Festival.
He was the half-brother of Wavy Gravy, the stand-up comedian who became leader of the Hog Farm, a commune of historic significance, and we carried pots and pans in the trunk that the Hog Farmers would use to feed the masses over the long weekend. Wavy was friendly but too busy to talk with us, and I didn’t get a chance to talk to him much until we attended his father’s funeral some years later. His father was a well-known architect who had designed PS 1, the school-become-museum in Queens, and who had been President of the American Institute of Architects.
Leaving our stuff in the tent but our valuables locked in the car, we ventured down to the stage at around 4 to hear the first act, Richie Havens. The sound system was unbelievably loud and clear and Havens gave a performance that immediately made him a star. We caught a few more acts but the weather got colder and it started to rain. We went up to the tent, cooked a bit of dinner, and went back down to hear Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez. The music ended around 2 a.m. and then we slept like babies.
I woke up first around 9 a.m., freezing because my sleeping bag had gotten wet in the night from touching the canvas tent skin. Shivering, I emerged from the tent to confront a disaster of near epic proportions. Hundreds of thousands of people had not brought tents or sufficient shelter, and were clearly miserable. Our fireplace, prepared in the best Boy Scout manner the night before, was a pond. I drained it and collected some wood but even prolonged exposure to flame wouldn’t ignite the soggy sticks.
I woke up Paul and complained it out to him. “Paul, the fireplace is flooded and everyone’s freezing. The wood is wet and won’t light. What are we gonna do?”
Paul put on his Coke bottle glasses, rummaged in his pack, and brought out a brown lump. “Here, try this.”
“What’s this stuff?” I examined it suspiciously.
“Arabian camel dung. Just light it and watch it burn!”
“Get outta here,” I muttered.
“No, really, Arabian camel dung. It’s peat.”
I put the peat under a pile of thin sticks, got a match near it, and it practically exploded into flame. I got some larger sticks going and gave some to David Peel and the other neighbors so they could start their fires. We were the heroes of that hill. People thanked us profusely and offered us food treats. Paul told me later that he bought the peat at a camping supply store.
We left the fire smoldering and around mid-day, went down to hear Country Joe and the Fish and Santana. Setup between acts was very slow due to the crowded stage and muddy conditions so we all went for a walk around the neighborhood. Someone offered us a drink of Kool-Aid and we drank, unsuspecting. About an hour later, we happened on a fruit stand selling apples. I had never seen the small red Winesap variety, and I’ll never forget how tart and delicious they were.
While we were walking along rutted farm paths in the woods trying to find our way back to the concert grounds, the utter boldness of the whole event boggled my mind. How had the promoters convinced everyone that there wouldn’t be a disaster and that scores wouldn’t die in a stampede or riot? A glimpse of the newspaper estimated the crowd at 500,000, a mere fraction of which would have been astonishing. My mind went from there to estimating how many cans of tomatoes there are in the world and other such profound subjects. It was about then that we figured out that the Kool-Aid must have contained LSD, as later explained in Tom Wolfe’s book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Presently, we found ourselves back at the stage watching The Grateful Dead. The sound system shorted and I went up to the tent to crash for a while. Chris woke me up in time for Janice Joplin and we staggered groggily down to see her. We had entered a new world, and we were excited by the tinge of foreign blues culture and the scariness of our parents dying and people of our generation having to run shit. The Jefferson Airplane finally played at around 8 a.m. and then I went to sleep until the next afternoon.
I woke up as someone else. A Sufi whirling in the stream where white stones lay. A friendly forest troll reciting badass ballads. A citizen of a land where nobody meant me any harm. I felt a little cracked but very far from broken like now.
I stood through The Band and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young but we were only waiting for Jimi Hendrix. I never believed in organized religion, unless you count rock ’n’ roll. I had already been playing guitar for a third of my few years and could mimic large sections of Jimi’s music verbatim, like a sheep in the flock. I had seen him live six times and had gotten used to memorizing his hand positions backward, since he was left-handed.
We used marijuana—we would never become smelly drunks like our parents. We grew our hair long and our parents were bald and fixed by hair spray. We were young and we had sex a lot, experimenting with new methods like Tantric, S&M, and triads. We would reinvent sex. And oh yes, politics. No more wars. We were going to take over and everything would be all right.
A familiar face came on stage, dressed in white leather fringes and bell bottoms, like a cowboy of Venus? Jimi’s Strat wailed the “Star Spangled Banner” and my tears came. This spinning in my head was a birth as well as a funeral. Our baby-boom time in the sun was so brief!
It was 1969. I didn’t know that I was going to see the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, and forever after.