Almost by the time the flames had gone out on his mangled Stratocaster and the wreckage had stopped smouldering, Jimi Hendrix’s performance at the Monterey festival in California in June 1967 had transformed his profile in the US from little more than an underground figure with a still-to-be proved reputation filtering over from Britain, into a full-blown supernova superstar.
With that one ‘homecoming’ performance in which he pulled out all the stops (and a can of lighter fuel with which he anointed his sacrificial Strat), Hendrix had arrived. So too had the popular music festival – and its ability to give artists unprecedented exposure for one show, and in some cases, give them their big break.
