Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, planned as a nonprofit event (hippies disdained profits), gave further impetus to the counterculture. It was Paul McCartney who pressed festival organizers to invite a young African American guitarist and his band, which was as yet largely unknown to Americans but had wowed English audiences. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, which featured a twenty-four-year-old lead guitarist and vocalist who could neither read nor write music, would show the world just what might be done with an electric guitar. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, consisting of singer and lead guitarist Jimi, bassist Noel Redding, and drummer Mitch Mitchell, had toured widely in the United Kingdom and Europe in 1966; the band's initial album, Are You Experienced , which introduced American listeners to Hendrix's astonishing electronic pyrotechnics in songs like "Purple Haze," was rapidly climbing the charts. As to the man and his music, critics were baffled and divided.

His eclectic and colorful attire combined with an anarchic Afro hairstyle joined to his band's unique sound, which was built around thunderous electrically amplified chords and soaring, often dissonant guitar solo "I'm Wasted, and I Can't Find My Way Home" flights matched to poetic and mystical lyrics that simply defied categorization. A Melody Maker writer resorted to the terms "mau-mau" and "wild man" in describing the young musician. An Ebony critic described Hendrix as looking like "a cross between Bob Dylan and the Wild Man of Borneo." Rolling Stone 's John Morthland later offered one of the least charitable assessments, mocking Hendrix as "the flower generation's electric nigger dandy--its king stud and golden calf, its maker of mighty dope music, its most outrageous visible force." Critic Robert Christgau denigrated the guitarist as "a psychedelic Uncle Tom." But the negative criticism was heavily outweighed by the response that Hendrix drew from his astounded Monterey audience. Scheduled for a nighttime performance on the festival's second day, the left-handed guitarist, whose large hands and lengthy fingers afforded him a reach that eluded many others, turned his soft smile on Eric Burdon of the Animals as he prepared to go onstage. "I'm really looking forward to tonight, man," he enthused.

"I'm so high, livin' on my nerves. The spaceship's really gonna take off tonight!".