Jimi Hendrix: Rocking The Racial Divide
The day the greatest guitarist in rock history altered my perspective
By Anthony DeCurtis
On July 5th, 1967, I went to the Rheingold Music Festival in Central Park to see the Young Rascals. It was not a festival as we use that term today. The Rheingold Festival was a series of under-the-stars concerts held over the summer in the park’s Wollman skating rink, which had room for perhaps seven thousand fans. Among the other artists who appeared on that stage that summer were Leonard Cohen and Louis Armstrong. In other years, I saw Jeff Beck, Joni Mitchell, the Band, the Byrds and Van Morrison, among many other artists there. Performers did two shows a night, one at 8:00 and one at 10:30. Tickets were a dollar.
In the summer of 1967, the Rascals were on a roll. Their single “Groovin’,” released in April, had hit number one, and two days before the Central Park shows a catchy new single titled “A Girl Like You” had come out. It too would crack the Top 10.
I had just turned 16, and I was an avid music fan. For a New York kid like me, the Rascals, who formed in New Jersey, were a local band. That three of them, like me, were Italian-American (make no doubt about it — their names were Felix Cavaliere, Dino Danelli and Eddie Brigati) also counted for something. In that regard, though their music was much different, they provided a cultural link back to the Italian-American vocal groups that had dominated the charts and my musical attention when I first started paying attention to the sounds around me. A number of my friends, all Italian-Americans, still were loyal to those groups and that sound. Some of them were with me on this night.
Before I go any further, let me say that the Rascals, who recently reunited for a run of shows after years of acrimony, were a great band. Like so many Italian-American musicians, they were obsessed with black music, and even their most radio-friendly hits rested on irresistible R&B grooves. Dino Danelli, is, quite simply, one of the greatest drummers in the history of rock & roll, a master of rhythmic invention but always deferring to the needs of the song — no cleverness or showing off. Cavaliere is a soulful singer, able to combine grit with a seductive sweetness, and he and Brigati, who also sang, were a deft songwriting team. Together, they are in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rascals, deservedly, are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They were no slouches.
But 1967 was the Summer of Love, and things were changing fast. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had come out in May, and the world had seemed to transform from black-and-white into Technicolor. The Monterey Pop Festival had been staged in June, ushering in a new age of popular music. Psychedelia was moving into the mainstream.
When I had begun smoking weed the year before, it was still a forbidden activity, yet another illicit act I indulged with my hoodlum friends, a number of whom would soon find their way to reform school or, far worse, crippling heroin addiction or early death. But now marijuana and a new substance called LSD were being touted as means of self-discovery, roads of excess, in Blakean terms, that would lead to the Palace of Wisdom.
I was still a kid, and was trying to figure all this out. I was fortunate enough to live in Greenwich Village, right on Bleecker Street, in fact. Even if I was part of the Italian thug element of the Village, all the more progressive currents of what was going on at that time were available to me as soon as I walked out the front door of my building. Smart bookstores and hip record stores abounded, and newsstands stocked cool teen magazines from England, including one I particularly liked called Rave. The offices of the Village Voice, then on Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue, were right around the corner. Much of all that was alien territory to me still, but I could see it, evaluate it and make my way into it, to whatever degree I wanted to, at my own pace.
All this to say that, even though I was barely 16, going to see the Rascals felt a bit like a step backwards to me. Though they no longer wore matching outfits, they had started out doing so — short pants and pouffy shirts that made them look like characters from The Little Rascals TV show that I had grown up watching. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were a guilty pleasure for me — that would have been far too sophisticated a concept. But I was much more gripped by the direction things were heading in than by anything the Rascals represented.
So I was surprised when my friends and I arrived in Central Park, and I noticed how much hipper some of the people hanging around in the park outside Wollman Skating Rink before the show looked. They were older — meaning, in their twenties — and they had long hair. They looked like the guys who frequented the cool record stores along Bleecker Street that I would visit after school, still wearing the jacket and tie my loathsome Catholic high school enforced.
These guys were not like the other adults sprinkled among the crowd, who were primarily conventional moms good-naturedly taking their kids to see the Young Rascals. Taking in the scene, I got that feeling that seemed to come over me so often back then. Something was up, and I didn’t yet know what it was. What I did know was that the people I was looking at were not there to see the Young Rascals.
When the opening act took the stage, everything suddenly made sense. Three men strode out from the wings, upbeat and confident: The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell each had a huge halo of frizzed-out hair. No one, black or white, had hair like that back then. Indeed, Hendrix’s hair, which, looking back through the mists of time, seems like a modified Afro, was in fact inspired by Bob Dylan’s look around the time of Blonde on Blonde in 1966, though Hendrix and his rhythm section had carried it to far greater extremes.
The Young Rascals faction of the audience gasped, tittered and laughed. It wasn’t hostile or derisive — it was more like a combination of confusion and nervousness. Even at the height of the Summer of Love, Hendrix pushed the boundaries further than anyone else. I wouldn’t say the response was racist, but it definitely registered on the overwhelmingly white audience that he was black, and that fact sharpened the edge of his presence.
Unlike my friends or the vast majority of people in the crowd, I had seen pictures of Hendrix in Rave, though his visual impact in person was infinitely more compelling. I had also heard his haunted version of “Hey Joe” on one of the new FM stations that were beginning to redefine what radio could be, and I had loved it. Now I was excited. “He’s good,” I assured my friends, but they didn’t seem convinced. Hendrix, meanwhile, wearing what looked like a yellow Zoot suit, was standing on the stage as if he owned it, calmly tuning his guitar as the crowd’s exclamations grew louder.
Hendrix looked up from his guitar, smiled and leaned into the mic. “We tune because we care,” he said, and then continued fiddling with his guitar. A moment later, he lifted his arm into the air, and blasted into the opening riff of “Purple Haze.” The impact was cataclysmic. It was loud, but more important, I had never heard a guitar sound like that.
The sinuous way Hendrix moved made it seem as if he were playing the instrument not just with his fingers, but his entire body. His set ran about half an hour and included “The Wind Cries Mary,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “I Don’t Live Today,” “Hey Joe” and “Foxy Lady.” He closed with a tumultuous version of “Wild Thing,” which he described as “the British and American national anthem.” He ran through the entire repertoire of the highly sexualized stage moves he had perfected on the chitlin’ circuit — caressing the neck of his guitar as if he were masturbating; humping his guitar into his amplifier; extending the guitar from his crotch as if it were a penis; playing the guitar with his teeth. I had never seen anything like it. When he was done, it was as if a violent storm had ended. For better or worse, I was no l longer in the in no mood to see the Young Rascals.
When the Rascals came on, it was clear that they were completely demoralized. Unable to lock into the smooth grooves of their effortless pop, they were simultaneously lifeless and trying too hard. In one particular low point, guitarist Gene Cornish scraped his instrument along his microphone stand as Hendrix had. To this day, I feel bad about how poorly the Rascals played, because I would have loved to see them unleash an energized set of their hits. But Hendrix had sucked up all the oxygen in the park that night, and the Rascals were desperately gasping for musical relevance. It was a sign of the times, and it wasn’t pretty to watch. In another impossible culture clash about ten days later, Hendrix would open for the Monkees at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens.
I bought Hendrix’s debut album, Are You Experienced, the day after the Central Park show, and then went to see him when the Experience did a brief residency a couple of weeks later at the Café Au Go Go on Bleecker Street, just a few blocks from where I lived. Seeing Hendrix in such close quarters was stunning in terms of volume and in every other regard as well. The Café Au Go Go was tiny — it fit 375 people when its tables were fully packed. Hendrix was one of those performers who needed space for his impact to truly be appreciated. When that set ended, I felt as if I had to crawl my way out from under an avalanche. I saw him one more time in the theater at Hunter College in 1968. That was yet another revelation.
All the issues involved in those experiences, particularly the Central Park show, have been on my mind recently. In fact, I’ve been thinking about Hendrix a lot — first, because as an artist whose every move as a guitarist, songwriter and performer was spellbinding, he’s rarely far from my thoughts. But, second, he’s been on my mind because of the renewed discussion about race that has erupted in this country over the past year.
Hendrix is a fascinating and troubled figure in that regard. Like Barack Obama as he was ascending to the presidency, Hendrix is someone who is often thought of as having transcended race. While Hendrix’s appeal to African-American music fans has grown significantly since his premature death at 27 from misadventure in 1970, his audience during his lifetime was almost exclusively white. More telling, his white fans, past and present, rarely mention his blackness when discussing his music.
However, during his lifetime, race was always at the center of conversations about Hendrix. He was bold enough to seek the same freedom to explore genres at will that white artists routinely enjoy, and he paid a stiff price for it. Black fans were confused by his reverence for the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, and essentially ignored him. While a song like “Machine Gun” chillingly channeled the anguish and violence of the Vietnam War, it was not a simplistic protest song.
In concert, Hendrix would often dedicate it both to anti-war protesters and American soldiers fighting in Southeast Asia, many of whom were black. A military veteran who instinctively understood the class issues that largely determined who ended up serving in the military and who didn’t, he rejected the counterculture’s easy contempt for American troops. His iconic version of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock similarly captured the mood of a nation at war with itself as much as any external enemy. “He created, he was, the soundtrack of the nation at that time,” guitarist Vernon Reid has said.
But while white artists routinely were (and are) allowed to be apolitical, Hendrix was not afforded that freedom. Black radicals criticized him for refusing to speak out more openly about civil rights issues, as well as for his playing with white musicians. White critics, meanwhile, were often merciless and condescending — and impossibly stupid. Hendrix was “undignified,” an “Uncle Tom” who indulged in Superspade antics.
While bands like the Rolling Stones ransacked black musical styles and reaped adulatory reviews, Hendrix was accused of ripping off white artists like the Who — who, of course, characterized their own music as “maximum R&B” derived from black American musicians, many of whom Hendrix had played behind as he was getting his start.
Finding his way through this thicket of issues in a manner that allowed him the greatest degree of creativity would become one of the most bedeviling problems of Hendrix’s short, difficult life. He, too, soon tired of the more extreme aspects of his stage show, but his fans demanded those extravagant gestures. He began playing with black musicians and, at the time of his death, hoped to collaborate with Miles Davis.
But it was impossible for him to escape the harsh realities surrounding him. The politically astute British musician Robert Wyatt led the Soft Machine, a band that opened for Hendrix during his American tour in 1968. He described watching the unappreciative reactions of white politicians and businessmen in the South who came backstage to share the glory when Hendrix performed in their town, but recoiled as they watched him flirt with the young white girls who had come there for other reasons. “You don’t have to go round making political statements on top of that,” Wyatt said. “He was living a political life of great importance.”
In terms of music, there is no telling what Hendrix might have gone on to do had he lived longer. The three albums released during his lifetime — Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland — are now undisputed classics. He has never lost his allure for younger audiences. Indeed, as controversial a figure as he was during his lifetime, his importance and influence have only grown since his death. For 45 years now, it has never been uncool to like Hendrix. Even his look — a highly idiosyncratic blend of pirate swagger, psychedelic flair and street improvisation — has become enshrined. He is both in the pantheon of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a style icon.
But had he been able to survive, it would have been gripping — and perhaps instructive — to follow how he would have guided himself and us through the harrowing realms of race and identity politics in the America of the past few decades. Whatever other gains have been made, operating with complete artistic freedom as a black man who does not conform to stereotypes is still a highly problematic journey. One thing is certain, however. Then or now, neither he nor anyone else would have transcended the intractable history of race in this country.
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Top Photo by K & K Ulf Kruger OHG | Redferns
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