I’ve also heard Jimi was the highest paid performer at Woodstock.
I have some doubts. There was this guy named Robert Johnson, for starters.
And on electric slide, Ry Cooder sure holds a candle to Duane.
And two years earlier he was opening for the Monkees.
Yes, I had a CD called something like “bottles & knives” with old slide players I got because it had Robert Johnson and even his mentor Son House on it.
Of course there is the infamous myth that Johnson was merely average till he met the Devil at the Crossroads who tuned his guitar and sent him to greatness. He died at 27 - it has been said he was poisoned. Dunno if that bestows “27 club membership” but why not.
There isn’t too much Robert Johnson to hear, yet Duane Allman has the Fillmore East and the few AB albums he played on, along with a ton of session work prior to the AB’s with some of the greats. Also, anybody who out-performed Eric “Derek” Clapton on “Layla” deserves some recognition. That screaming, bending slide-guitar intro was all Duane though the whole song is an incredible “duel” if you will between two great guitarists.
And those 40,000 who stayed at Woodstock till Monday morning 9AM saw him play for two hours - his longest set ever - and if Rolling Stone ever wondered “how he was contributing to the anti-war movement” his use of feedback and distortion to mimic the sounds of war in his “Star Spangled Banner” would have to wait till the movie came out for the Teeming Millions to see it.
This reminded me of a myth about the electric Newport show. According to legend, Pete Seeger was so aghast at the noise that he picked up an axe to cut the cables and was only averted at the last moment. This story has been told a gaziilion times, but Seeger himself always denied that it ever happened. Incidentally, I saw the Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” just yesterday, and the script had an elegant twist to this: in the film, Seeger (wonderfully played by Ed Norton btw.) first angrily storms to the mixing board and urges the sound guys to turn down the volume and when they refuse, pushes at the board, causing a short crescendo of noise and feedback. He then catches sight of a couple of axes leaning to a table and makes a move to pick one up, but first he looks at his wife who just shakes her head and rolls her eyes a bit, and he surrenders to the noise. Very clever scene.
I thought so too. The whole time watching it I was wondering, will they go with the truth or will they go with the legend? They threaded that needle nicely.
Meanwhile, a certain complete unknown in the crowd, who was toiling away as an R&B sideman at the time, listened to the noise and feedback with great interest, and took notes 
JK of course- never happened (AFAIK… 
).
I’m sure we would know if Jimi had been in the audience 
, but I’m quite sure that he knew Michael Bloomfield and his work, who really played a mean guitar in those three electric songs at Newport 1965.
I know…just trying to create some new music myths, in case we run out of existing ones 
Guess this can be my entry in the “Obvious things…” thread, lol.
The myths about Robert Johnson probably are the most notorious in music history. We don’t know much for certain about his life, so his whole life (and death) is one big myth. We don’t even know where he’s buried, there are at least two places that claim to be his grave. Of course songs like “Hellhound On My Trail”, “Me And The Devil Blues” and “Crossroad Blues” stoked the myths.
Another thing in Jimi’s favor was that he was using his own PA equipment, while the Who was using a rented PA rig that was not quite up to snuff. I think I remember hearing that detail in the “500 Songs” podcast.
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VH-1’s Pop Up Video lied to me then! That’s where I first heard that story.
I believed that story for years too, until I learned fairly recently (within the last 5 years or so?) it was false.
I heard the story on the radio a few times, so it’s certainly widely repeated.
But not true.
I saw him (with the Doors) in '67, '68, and August of '70. At the '70 show I was only about 20 feet away from him and although he was no longer slim he wasn’t what I would call “fat.” Yet. But by the time he fled to Paris, most definitely bloated, and sloppy.
Indeed.