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On September 24, 1966, Jimi Hendrix arrives in London, immediately begins a romantic relationship with Kathy Etchingham, experiences racism due to the color of his skin and gender-bending clothing, and wows fans of the British “blues boom” by performing with American bluesmen in town for the American Folk Blues Festival. At another club performance he stuns attendees with his unprecedented volume and skill at playing an “upside-down” Fender Stratocaster. This draws the attention of French superstar Johnny Hallyday, who invites Hendrix, who has yet to form a band, to open for him during his upcoming tour of France. By month’s end Hendrix has recruited Noel Redding as the first member of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Redding, a guitarist, agrees to learn how to play bass.

This case study continues the discussion of Jimi Hendrix. Once again, it is not the familiar image of Hendrix as the flamboyant and excessive guitar hero that is the focus, but rather the essential solitude that characterizes his most developed improvisations.

Bitches Brew was not created in a void. This chapter illustrates how Davis coincided with the emerging status of African-Americans in late-60s America. The innovations of artists such as Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and Sly Stone--the trumpeter’s key influences, illustrated the importance of African-American artists and helped shape the transformation in Davis’s life and music. As Davis did on Bitches Brew, these artists pioneered new approaches in self-expression that coincided with the changing cultural and political conditions surrounding them. Davis would insist that Bitches Brew was his music for his generation regardless of how progressive it sounded.

This memoir once again recalls a vanishing moment of improvisation. Recounting the (apparently forgotten) solo improvisation by Jimi Hendrix prior to the late arrival of his two band members, a strange link is made between this and another performance he gave at Newark Town Hall the day after Martin Luther Kings assassination. The issue in both cases was the erasure of both of these improvisation from history except for the accounts of myself and one other witness (now dead).

Throughout his career, Carlos Santana has used music to express his idiosyncratic spiritual beliefs. Pursuing the guidance of guru Sri Chinmoy in the 1970s and subsequently seeking his own spiritual path, Santana sought to channel a higher power through his guitar technique and tone, describing the process of music making as a mystical endeavor. In order to attain these goals, Santana used amplifiers that prioritized depth of sound (described by himself in synesthetic terms), feedback loops for his signature sustained tones, an avoidance of hypermasculine performance, and a peaceful stage presence. This chapter investigates the role of timbre in Santana’s spiritual journey from the 1960s to the present.

In the concluding chapter, the focus remains on Hollywood representations of the counterculture. The chapter suggests, however, that from the mid-1960s, many counterculture-inflected actors, directors and producers shape far more nuanced representations of the counterculture than had occurred in the 1950s. While the chapter’s focus is on Woodstock, Deliverance and Easy Rider, attention is also paid to independent filmmaking by Sam Brakhage, Andy Warhol and others.

The counterculture consisted largely of young, middle-class white people who had consciously rejected the lifestyle of their parents in favor of more experimental paths. Hippies were notorious for their dislike of organization. Nonetheless, despite the importance of dress, visual, and verbal expression, it was above all in the realm of musical style that the counterculture forged its self-identity. The psychedelic style represented a decisive challenge to the styles that dominated the pop airwaves between the early and mid-1960s. While psychedelic music's emphasis on soloing and lengthy instrumental sections was obviously indebted to rhythm & blues and jazz, though, its eclecticism, its mixing of different styles, was something quite new. These factors all had a great impact on the development of progressive rock as a style. There seem to have been at least three distinct wings of psychedelic music in England. One wing of English psychedelic music was dominated by Cream, the Yardbirds, and Jimi Hendrix.

This chapter recounts the process of upgrading certain older apparel, a transnational process led by the wealthy and famous, including rich collegians, titled nobility, and rock stars like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Celebrations of affluence, elitism, individuality, and fame framed this path. The invention of "vintage" responded to a desire for visible distinction, one almost classically linked to affluence and in keeping with the 1899 thesis of economist Thorstein Veblen. For example, the 1956-7 college fad for old raccoon-fur coats from the 1920s was emblematic of a rising class of wealthy youth to whom chain department stores like Lord & Taylor eagerly appealed—and for whom the word “vintage” was first applied to clothing. Vintage exhibitionism usually disavowed political affiliations while reveling in bucking convention.