Hendrix, Dylan and music politics
Jimi Hendrix died in London 54 years ago on 18th September 1970. His last performance was at the Isle of Wight festival on 30th August 1970.
Hendrix died well before the age of the internet, mobiles and social media and, as importantly, before the ‘serious’ media- broadsheet papers and the BBC- took music culture seriously. Hendrix’s death did not pass unremarked but the impact was much less than it would be now.
Amongst a significant musical output Hendrix also produced what was one of the best known cover versions of the 1960s and probably one of the finest ever.
That was his take on Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower, which he played at the Isle of Wight on that late August day in 1970.
Dylan was not drafted to fight in Vietnam and said little directly about the war, or the opposition in the US to it which grew in the late 1960s. Hendrix by contrast had been a GI briefly in 1961/2 before being discharged. He too didn’t go to Vietnam.
Yet Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower was certainly about the US society that had given rise to the Vietnam War and Hendrix’s treatment of it provided an appropriate musical context.
The late Mike Marqusee writing on Dylan, notes that the Hendrix version of Watchtower was picked up on by both black and white US soldiers serving in Vietnam in the late 1960s. For black soldiers Hendrix was a symbol of a possibly changing situation. For white soldiers the radicalism of his music and of the lyrical content of songs like Watchtower fitted their disillusion with the US military.
As Dylan noted in the song ‘there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke’ before adding ‘that is not our scene’ underlining the seriousness of the times.
They were too serious sadly for Hendrix who died after choking on his own vomit in circumstances never quite fully explained just a few weeks after playing the Isle of Wight festival.
Marqusee suggests that Hendrix’s playing of the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock was the coda to his version of All Along the Watchtower.
Hendrix’s tortured guitar playing turned the US national anthem, like God Save the Queen essentially a patriotic war song, into an attack on US imperialism.
54 years on I’ll certainly be remembering Hendrix as a great musician and someone who stood against the political stream too
One of your best, Keith!