I often wonder what it must have been like to see Hendrix play that Sunday-whether it felt like watching something being invented right in front of you. He applied a similar sensibility to his sound, which drew from electric blues, hard rock and R&B. Hans Carl Schmidt, Hendrix suggested that his style was mostly directed by an internal sense of cool: “ anything I see that I like, regardless of what it looks like, and regardless of what it costs.” In a 1967 interview with the German radio D.J. For his Monterey performance, Hendrix wore a black vest over a ruffled, canary-yellow blouse, with red bell-bottoms and black boots. His aesthetic ran to rich, unexpected embellishments drawn from startlingly disparate sources: ruffled blouses, patterned bell-bottoms, jeweled medallions, brooches, silk scarves, rings, headbands and sometimes even a cowboy hat. This burgundy velvet vest, from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture collection, was owned by guitar legend Jimi Hendrix. Even today, more than half a century later, it’s still recognizable as pure Hendrix-colorful, extravagant, audacious. It’s not certain, but Hendrix may have purchased the black vest he wore that weekend during his performance at Monterey, and this burgundy velvet version in a similar style, now in a Smithsonian collection. While at Nepenthe, Hendrix did some shopping at an adjacent store, the Phoenix, which sold all sorts of exotic clothes, including velvet vests from Central Asian countries like Afghanistan. The Monterey organizers had booked him on the recommendation of Paul McCartney, but few people in the crowd knew who Hendrix was or what he could do.Ī few days before his performance, Hendrix visited Nepenthe, a bohemian restaurant 800 feet above the Pacific Ocean, overlooking the Santa Lucia Mountains in Big Sur, California. Hendrix had recently released his debut LP, Are You Experienced, but the album wouldn’t crack Billboard’s Top 10 until the following year. The lineup included the Grateful Dead, the Who, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar and Jefferson Airplane, but the breakout performance came from a young American guitarist named Jimi Hendrix, who was making his first major appearance in the United States. “It sowed the seeds for Woodstock, and so many festivals to follow.” “The Monterey Pop Fest introduced the mushrooming counterculture to the world,” Holly George-Warren, the author of Janis: Her Life and Music and co-author of The Road to Woodstock, told me. Today the festival is considered a kind of informal opening ceremony for the Summer of Love: A new, liberated ideology was taking hold in the culture, and here was its soundtrack. A crowd estimated in the tens of thousands gathered at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Northern California in June 1967 for the Monterey International Pop Festival, a three-day extravaganza.
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