How Jimi Hendrix’s Obsession with Bob Dylan Led Him to Woodstock
By: Barney Hoskyns
Tags: Rock, The Bookshelf, Music

Hendrix was staying in the Wiley Lane apartment when he drove down Rock City Road one afternoon and heard an old New York acquaintance jamming on the village green. Juma Sultan had been commuting between Woodstock and the city since 1966, when he became involved with the Saugerties-based arts collective Group 212. He and percussionist Ali Abuwi had formed a loose Afrocentric entity known as the Aboriginal Music Society, playing around Woodstock and bringing together jazz and R&B musicians united by a commitment to black consciousness.

“Their scene was 24/7, and they had connections in New York with great players who came up,” says drummer Daoud Shaw. “But I never saw a real master plan.” When Sultan told Hendrix what he was up to, the guitarist invited him back to Wiley Lane for a jam. “He was telling me about how he wanted to start a new band,” Sultan remembered. “He was thinking about getting a house in the area, and that’s when his quest for a house started, looking for a place that could become a band house up in Woodstock.”

Though Hendrix kept a low profile in town — since it was rather harder for him to blend in than it was for, say, Rick Danko — he was occasionally seen bombing along Tinker Street in a red Corvette. “Nobody in Woodstock had a red Corvette,” remembered Leslie Aday, who worked for Albert Grossman and befriended Hendrix that summer. “They were all into organic vegetables and making their own clothes.” On at least one occasion, Hendrix went to the Elephant to see a gig.

“The vibe was that he wanted to hang and connect the dots and not be Jimi Hendrix,” says musician Jon Gershen, who observed him at the club. “He was really hungry to understand how Dylan had undergone his transformation. He was feeling the Woodstock thing and wanting to make it work for him, even though it was too much of a stretch to go from where he had been to being, you know, a farmer.”

Two months after Hendrix returned from his last European tour with the Experience — and with a heroin bust from Toronto hanging ominously over him — Mike Jeffery asked Jerry Morrison to find the guitarist a house in the Woodstock area. With Juma Sultan in tow, Morrison took Hendrix to see at least four properties around Woodstock, including a large place that Johnny Winter had rented across the Hudson in Rhinecliff. Eventually they settled on an eight-bedroom stone manor house at the end of Traver Hollow Road in Boiceville, four miles southwest of Woodstock. For a city boy it was quite the retreat, complete with horses in stables and a gatehouse where Sultan and his Chinese-American girlfriend would soon install themselves. A half hour’s drive away was the beautiful Peekamoose Road Waterfall, where Hendrix and his guests took acid trips.

Hendrix with Larry Lee at “the Shokan House” in Traver Hollow, early August 1969

When writer Sheila Weller visited the Traver Hollow house, she wrote that all the talk with Hendrix was about “puppies, daybreak, other innocentia,” and that she’d climbed down some rocks to an “icy brook” with the guitarist. He told her he wanted to “write songs about tranquility, about beautiful things.” He put John Wesley Harding on the turntable and played along to “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” “riding the rest of the song home with a near-religious intensity.” At the same time, he was leaning toward the kind of avant-garde Afro-jazz-rock espoused by Sultan, who dressed in robes and pushed his friend to explore the fusion of jazz with tribal percussion.

If Hendrix was undergoing an identity crisis — did he want to be Bob Dylan or did he want to be Miles Davis? — he was keen to jettison the Experience, complaining to Sheila Weller that he didn’t want to be a “clown” anymore. The sprawlingly eclectic double album Electric Ladyland of 1968 had made his ambitions clear, though the sessions had so frustrated Chas Chandler that he quit and left Hendrix to the mercy of Mike Jeffery.

Jeffery himself was perturbed by any threat to the cash cow that was the Experience, which played its last show on June 1. Used to regular income from the group’s festival appearances, Jeffery watched with unease as a motley crew of musicians rolled up at the Traver Hollow house.

“Because he had the resources,” says singer Martha Velez, “he just brought everybody up to woodshed in that house and ride horses and try that Woodstock meditative approach to writing and creating. He was a very intelligent person who was getting trapped in his own creation. It was important to break out of that, but on his own terms. And to do that he had to have a space where there wasn’t a lot of observation.”