Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Beamish
“…The world's highest-paid performer,[2] he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia on September 18, 1970.”
The world’s highest paid performer. I don’t know. Seems sort of significant to me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix |
I started, and then thought better about a long, researcher's post on details about Hendrix and business and billings. Not worth anyone's time to read here.
Yes, Hendrix was famous, on par with a lot of other acts in the emerging "Rock" scene that became a big business soon after his death. Here's a couple of things for others who (like me) were alive and around as adults in the time before Hendrix's death to reply to:
It's just a side point to your opinion, but did Hendrix really "Headline" Woodstock? Not in my memory. Headline or Headliner means to me that you're first billed, usually in larger type, because you're the big draw, the one ticket buyers will want to pay to see. Here's the famous Woodstock poster:
Question 1: Did any of us old folks here on the AGP go (or wanted to go) to Woodstock because Jimi Hendrix was going to play? I'm not talking retroactively, but in the summer of '69. Me? There were rumors that unbilled, Bob Dylan was going to play Woodstock. My logistics in 1969 made Woodstock impossible, but I'd have gone for Dylan.
Question 2: I've already asked it, but we've stayed in the relative weeds of what's famous and how famous. Again, it's for those who were adults (or maybe quasi adults willing to think about the flow of time and the future) in let's say 1972, after Hendrix's death was absorbed.
Would you have predicted that we'd have this much attention and concern for Jimi Hendrix in 2022, 50 years on? I was writing "rock criticism" (at a low level, I'm not famous) and hanging out at a college radio station in that era. I would not have.
Think about the four most famous "Rock Deaths" near the end of The Sixties: Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Hendrix. Now again, if you're a fan of anyone one of them I'm not saying they weren't significant artists, or that some don't make some notice of them. But how many of them have Hendrix's profile
today in terms of publication features (web or the remaining print), song covers, tributes, etc. Jones star was already fading at death, and musically he's never given out as an influence in the 2020's. Joplin, similar, despite being a front-woman. Morrisson? He had a huge bump later in the 20th century, and without being able to measure it to the millimeter, higher than Hendrix for a while. Now? Not-so-much. That's remarkable that Hendrix's value to music and guitar has been retained I think.