.... who ever attended a Jimmi Hendrix concert and slept right through it?
Fri, 31. December 2010
Could I Be The Only Person.....
Isle of Wight Music Festival. Wednesday 26th - Sunday 30th August 1970.
I'd been in 100,000 Wembley crowds at two FA Cup Finals and a World Cup Final but this was by far the biggest crowd I have ever been in - a staggering 600,000 people crammed into spacious farmland to hear some of the greatest musicians of the era. Five days of 24x7 music. It was England's answer to Woodstock but with a larger audience. I attended the last three days with my tent, a workmate and his estranged wife, which was an unusual mix, to say the least.
There were superb performances from many bands, including The Doors, Ten Years After, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, The Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Joni Mitchell, Ralph McTell and Joan Baez together with stand-out performances from The Who and from my all-time favourite, Leonard Cohen.
I had burnt the candle at both ends that summer and when Hendrix came on it was two in the morning and I had already missed one night's sleep watching an incredible 'small-hours of the morning' performance from The Who, including the entire 'Tommy' opera. I knew Cohen was up after Hendrix and I would be incapable of staying awake for both, so it was a simple choice: Cohen or Hendrix. Sorry Jimmi. After listening to his opening piece, I put my head down on the grass and slept right through, only thirty metres from the stage. Since then, I always believed I must be the only person in the world to have slept through a Hendrix concert.
I'd only seen Cohen once before and I did not want to miss this performance. Fortunately I woke up to witness a classic show that lived in the memory of many for many years. Little did I suspect at the time that - forty years later - I would be sitting comfortably in my lounge room down-under, watching a recording of the very same Cohen performance all over again on SBS TV or that I could buy my own copies of it.
Watching it again was a bit eerie but the astonishing thing I learnt from it was that Leonard Cohen had to be woken from his slumber in a back-stage caravan to come on stage for his concert. So now I know - I was not the only person to sleep through a Hendrix concert. I can share that distinction with the man whose unique music has travelled with me and given me so much pleasure for the last forty-three years, the amazing Leonard Cohen.
I never did get another opportunity to watch Jimmi Hendrix perform - sadly he was found dead in London only eighteen days later.
<EDIT> However, I did get to see Leonard Cohen perform again, in November 2013 , in Sydney.
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