Love &Peace:When Jimi came to the island

It was to be the German Woodstock:Thousands of hippies made the pilgrimage to the Love &Peace Festival in Fehmarn in 1970 to pay homage to their guitar god:Jimi Hendrix. It will be his last festival gig.

by Sabine Leipertz

One year after Woodstock, in September 1970, three North Germans want to write music history on Fehmarn with the Love &Peace Festival. An ambitious goal, as other festivals had set the bar very high in previous years:Monterey, Altamont, Isle of Wight and above all Woodstock. Those were the then already legendary festivals where the flower children celebrated themselves and their ideals of love and peace.

Love &Peace on Fehmarn:rain, chaos, red numbers

The Love &Peace Festival actually goes down in history - if not necessarily in the musical one. Due to the meteorological imponderables of the island and bad planning by the organizers, it sinks into rain and chaos and ends up in the red. Nevertheless:Since then, Fehmarn has adorned itself with a Jimi Hendrix memorial stone and the legend of being the place where the guitar god had the last live performance of his life.

1970:The Beatles split up, Jimi Hendrix soars

Musically, 1970 was a tough one:In April, the Beatles announced their separation, Queen with Freddie Mercury and Kraftwerk started their careers. Mungo Jerry landed one of the biggest summer hits of all time with "In The Summertime" and Roy Black was at the top of the German single charts for nine weeks with "Your most beautiful gift". Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" only managed to do this for seven weeks. Ever since his appearance at the Woodstock Music and Art Festival in Bethel, New York, Jimi Hendrix has been at the peak of his career and one of the most innovative and important guitarists of his time. The documentary film "Woodstock - 3 days dedicated to love &music" is coming to the cinemas and spreading the flower child feeling to the furthest corners of the northern German provinces.

Summer of Love:Beate Uhse brings money and condoms

Helmut Ferdinand, Christian Berthold and Tim Sievers - all around 30 at the time - want to stage the German version of the love and peace happening with the Love &Peace Festival on Fehmarn. It starts with 200,000 D-Mark sponsorship money. Beate Uhse made this sum available, and the erotic shops they opened at the time also serve as advance booking offices. The company boss wants to use the festival as a promotion platform for her shops and later throws condoms among the hippie crowd herself.

Stars of the scene - but no know-how in management

Everything that was rank and file in the music scene is booked:Jimi Hendrix, Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Taste, Colosseum, Cactus, Ginger Baker's Air Force, Sly &The Family Stone, Procol Harum, Mungo Jerry, The faces There had never been a music festival of this magnitude in Germany before. However, the organizers have no idea about the music circus. The costs are exploding, the catering for the visitors is poor - and so the project really goes down the drain. The appearance of a Hamburg rocker gang does the rest.

The beginning of the end of an era

When thousands of hippies from all over Europe made the pilgrimage to Fehmarn, the end of the flower power era had already begun:it was literally dying out. Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson, founding member, lead guitarist and singer of the American blues rock band Canned Heat, which was part of the standard line-up at the big festivals at the time, will start in early September. Wilson died of a barbiturate overdose on September 3, the day before the festival began, aged just 27. Other stars of the Love and Peace generation are to follow shortly thereafter. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin:two of the most famous members of the so-called Club 27 - a myth that surrounds the death of musicians, all of whom died at the age of 27.

Rain and mud:Joan Baez and Taste don't even come

The hippie fan community on Fehmarn has no idea of ​​this. On September 4th, around 20,000 music fans are waiting in the mud on a meadow near the Flügger lighthouse to pay homage to their icons.

Veit "Fiete" Marx-Haupenthal from Neustadt and Wolfgang Klockmann from Hamburg are also among the festival-goers. While Fiete and two friends drive in the old R4 to the Fehmarnsund Bridge and then walk across the island with a tent, Klockmann is on the road with the "luxury variant". He and his buddies arrive in VW buses and motorbikes - packed full of liquid and solid food, including enough tobacco products. But the weekend is not under a good star. The weather didn't cooperate from the start - and neither did some of the announced bands. Storm, rain and mud bother the flower children. Taste, Ten Years After, Colosseum, John Mayall, Joan Baez and Procol Harum don't even come.

"No love, but lots of peace"

Fiete was 21 at the time and a real hippie:"Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, that was our music. We all went there to listen to beautiful music and have three great days of Love and Peace. With a physical one But love was nothing, it was all just too wet, muddy and dingy. The girls were freezing," he recalled on the 50th anniversary. "But the mood among the people was great. They met up with neighbors in the tent and asked, 'Do you still have something to smoke, drink or eat', almost all of them were hippies. So there was nothing about love, but there was peace among them There was a lot of people."

Half a century later, Wolfgang Klockmann, then 19, has only good memories of the "good vibrations" among the festival visitors:"The atmosphere was excellent, the whole vibration, everyone was full of expectations and there was this we-feeling." Perhaps the good mood was also due to the intoxicated state of some hippies. "I guess that a good half of the visitors smoked weed. That's probably why the weather and the adverse conditions were better endured."

Storm, electrocution and a brave Alexis Korner

When it's clear that some of the expected bands aren't performing and the storm is getting heavier, a lot of discord is mixed in with the good vibes of the hippies. "It was more of a visual concert than an acoustic one," Fiete remembers. "The system was really small, nothing compared to today. There were no PA towers. The loudspeakers hung on wooden poles and were not at all suitable for providing sound for such a large square. And when there is a storm on Fehmarn, then it is storm too. You can yell against the wind and still not hear anything. That's how it was with the music, of course. On stage it was probably really dangerous at times. Some musicians got electric shocks because everything was wet. That's one of the reasons why then some bands canceled their gigs."

The British blues rocker Alexis Korner is engaged as an announcer for the festival and tries to keep the mood up during the intermittently longer breaks - partly with his own music, partly by inviting the audience to come on stage and see happenings to celebrate. Initially with success:bare-breasted girls quickly bring back Woodstock feelings.

Tents down, Jimi is coming!

After two stormy days, rain, mud and some forgiving to brilliant performances by Canned Heat, Ginger Baker, Inga Rumpf and Frumpy, Sly &The Family Stone, Mungo Jerry and the Faces, everyone is just waiting for Jimi Hendrix. It's actually announced for Saturday evening, but prefers to stay in Puttgarden in a warm hotel. Neither the helicopter nor the luxury limousine requested by Hendrix bring the star to the festival site. Until Sunday noon it is not clear whether he will come at all.

At least the folk duo Witthüser and Westrupp manage to keep the crowd happy. The hours pass, Alexis Korner continues to try to bridge the time and passes on another wish of the long-awaited artist:People should take down their tents because they reminded him too much of his time in Harlem when he had to sleep in tents . The otherwise anti-authoritarian hippie community dutifully lets their tents fall in the mud.

"I don't give a fuck if you boo or not"

Then it's time. "It was twelve o'clock and they said:He's on the field. That's when the hooting started. But it still took an hour," said Fiete. "Then it stopped raining, the storm died down. Jimi stood on stage in his parrot robe and the sun was shining. That was awesome. Crazy!" The situation also left a lasting impression on Wolfgang Klockmann. "The moment Jimi came on stage, the sky opened up and the sun came out. It was really magical," says Klockmann to this day.

The cheers are mixed with whistles and loud boos - people are fed up with waiting. But Hendrix reacted calmly:"I don't give a shit whether you boo or not, as long as you do it in the right key," was his answer. And starts playing.

Chaos finale:rampage and flames on the last day of the festival

However, there is no happy ending for the Love &Peace after the Hendrix performance. Right from the start of the festival, there are power struggles and rivalries between the stewards organized by the organizer and 150 to 200 Hamburg rockers, who probably also want to ensure order on Fehmarn in their own way. Already on the first evening there are fights and injuries in the groups. The organizers apparently feel compelled to "engage" the rocker squad as well and thus to pacify the situation. The situation escalated at the end of the last day when a group of stewards gathered in front of the organization center to demand their money for the multi-day assignment. A few rockers also mingle with the group. But the responsible organizers have disappeared, the till:empty. At Rio Reisers - at that time Ton Steine ​​Scherben were still called Rote Steine ​​- "Destroy what destroys you", the organizers' containers finally go up in flames.

Years later, the rumor persists that it was a delegation of Hamburg's "Hells Angels" who, under massive threats to the organizers, acted as security guards and later rioted. However:The Hamburg charter of the "Hells Angels" was not created until 1973.

Memorial stone for - almost - the last live gig

However, many are no longer aware of the sudden end of the festival. Most of them, including Wolfgang Klockmann, skipped the last acts and left, exhausted and frozen, right after Jimi Hendrix's performance. By the way, his gig on Fehmarn is not - as claimed in many places - the last of his life. On the night of September 16/17, 1970, Hendrix jams again with Eric Burdon and War at London's Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club. A day later he is found dead in the Samarkand Hotel. But even if the Love &Peace Festival wasn't his last concert:Fehmarn can take comfort in the fact that Jimi had his last open-air performance there. Not bad for a small island in the Baltic Sea. And:Jimi Hendrix will remain connected to Fehmarn forever. Or vice versa?