Love and Peace Festival
The Love and Peace Festival (also known as the Festival of Love ) was a music festival with a total of around 25,000 visitors that took place from September 4 to 6, 1970 on the Baltic Sea island of Fehmarn near the Flügge lighthouse . Jimi Hendrix had his last festival appearance at the chaotic event before he was seen live with Eric Burdon for the last time on September 16, 1970 at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London .
Preparations by the organizers
The organizers Helmut Ferdinand (then 33, engineer), Christian Berthold (then 28, innkeeper) and Tim Sievers (then 30, student) planned a German response to the legendary Woodstock Festival in 1970 . Since they liked the concept of holding the festival on an island off the mainland , as was the case with the Isle of Wight Festival, the Baltic Sea island of Fehmarn, which had recently had excellent infrastructure and tourism, came into their focus. In the hope of being able to hire some of the artists from the Isle of Wight Festival in August for their own festival immediately afterwards and to take advantage of the sunny days on the island of Fehmarn, which in September was considered weatherproof, the date was set for September 4 to 6, 1970.
The Fehmarn Festival GmbH was founded in order to organize a festival at which 30 to 40 music groups were to perform and for which up to 60,000 visitors were expected . Beate Uhse gave the organizers an advance payment of 200,000 DM and made their then 20 sex shops in the Federal Republic of Germany available as advance booking offices for the tickets.
A suitable site was found: A 50- hectare meadow belonging to the farmer Störtenbecker near the Flügger lighthouse, including the 55 existing toilets from the nearby campsite, was rented. 100 more mobile toilets were obtained; A 140-bed auxiliary hospital was to be installed at the school in Puttgarden . A covered sleeping area for 4000 people was planned. After a contract with the company Dr. Oetker could not manage the entire catering for the festival, breweries and dairies in the area were supposed to secure the supply of drinks. The German Red Cross was to provide hot meals with a mobile large kitchen. Two fences were built around the festival site and some telephone boxes were installed on the site. The organizers rented a huge sound system in England for DM 30,000 , which was supposed to fill the festival area with 150 Phones from 32 boxes. A revolving platform 20 meters wide and 10 meters deep should avoid breaks in conversion. The festival management resided in two residential containers stacked on top of each other about 500 meters from the stage.
Ten psychedelically painted minibuses set off from Kiel to hang 100,000 posters all over Central Europe and Scandinavia, distribute bumper stickers and sell a festival newspaper printed in six figures. Big names like Ginger Baker , Canned Heat , Sly & the Family Stone , Ten Years After , Procol Harum , Keef Hartley , Rod Stewart and Jimi Hendrix should attract rock fans and hippies from all over Europe to Fehmarn.
In the meantime, the company's costs had risen to DM 500,000, while the total of 600 advance booking offices had only sold 10,000 tickets at DM 28 each. Some artists like John Mayall and Joan Baez canceled their participation. However, the hopes of the organizers rested on Hendrix, whose management had negotiated a fee of 70,000 DM and special treatment (transfers to the festival in a Mercedes, a luxury caravan on the festival site). Hendrix was at the height of his popularity in Germany after the Woodstock film had just opened in theaters.
On September 2nd, the authorities and the organizations involved went to the festival site with the organizers and discovered considerable grievances: The waste disposal was not regulated, the protection and securing of dykes and roads was not ensured. There was also ominous news from the Isle of Wight: there, rowdies had caused riots, and it was feared that the troublemakers might make their way to Fehmarn.
The festival
Already on September 3, around 4,000 fans who had traveled from far away were on the site and the supply stands opened. On the night of Friday, September 4th, wind and rain came up. 180 Rocker of Bloody Devils came that night with their motorcycles from Hamburg , forced in Gremersdorf free fill-ups and delivered in Petersdorf with hippies and some as provided Persian student folder a brawl, were injured by knife wounds in the four Persians. Probably by setting up a threat scenario, the rockers managed to get the festival management engaged as stewards.
Friday September 4th 1970
The day was stormy and it rained continuously. Around lunchtime, the visitors streamed en masse on foot onto the festival site, where they had to endure the "entrance control" of the drunk rockers armed with chains and knives. People were kicked and mocked, cars were kicked, alcohol brought by visitors was confiscated from the self-styled “stewards”.
Shortly before the start of the festival, Beate Uhse appeared with her three sons, advertised her company and gave autographs.
Alexis Korner , who was to lead the fans through the program in German and English for the next three days, opened the concert half an hour late at around 4:30 p.m. It all started with the band Cravinkel , whose performance was drowned in sound problems. The Danish formation Burnin Red Ivanhoe followed with an hour-long performance and fought against the storm and the pitfalls of wet technology. The following appearance by Renaissance had to be canceled due to technical problems. Korner had the thankless task of explaining the other cancellations of the evening to the audience: Taste had to leave due to scheduling problems, Colosseum was stuck in a traffic jam and Cactus had not even come. Only the electronics formation Kluster made their appearance. At around 11 p.m. the festival day was declared over to the dissatisfied fans.
At the same time, Jimi Hendrix , Ten Years After and Canned Heat performed at the Berlin Super Concert 70 in Berlin , organized by Fritz Rau , which had been moved from the Waldbühne to the Deutschlandhalle due to similar weather problems . The Fehmarns did not have such an alternative.
During the night, the rockers demolished a car of the festival management, who felt compelled to try to solve the "folder problem": the rockers were paid out and should be removed from the festival site by buses.
Saturday September 5th, 1970
It had stopped raining, but it was still cold and stormy. The day began in a peaceful mood, as the rockers could only be seen sporadically. Inga Rumpf's blues rock formation Frumpy opened the festival day punctually at 12:00 p.m. and delighted the frozen audience for the first time. After the English rock band Aardvark , Ginger Baker and his group Ginger Baker's Air Force managed to keep the fans in the mood with their driving Afro-themes. The following Peter Brötzmann and his band, however, did not meet the taste of the audience with their free jazz, especially since it had started to rain again.
Alexis Korner tried to gently teach the fans that Procol Harum and Ten Years After would not perform. The crowd called for superstar Jimi Hendrix. However, he had only just arrived, tired and exhausted, at the beach hotel Dania in Puttgarden. It was decided to move Jimi's performance to Sunday.
The shows of Mungo Jerry , whose In the Summertime was just a hit, and Canned Heat made up the crowd for waiting for rock legend Hendrix. Woodstock veterans Sly & the Family Stone ended the second day of the festival.
At night, the remaining rockers camped under the stage by a campfire, which they fired with stage boards. The doors of the latrines were dismantled in the dark to provide visitors with protection from wind and rain.
Sunday September 6th, 1970
The day was windy and cold, but clear and sunny. In order to bridge the waiting time until Hendrix's appearance, some groups that were on site as reserve artists were hurriedly sent to the stage in the morning. Korner invited the visitors to come on stage themselves in the manner of a happening and make music. However, he could hardly calm the tense, expectant audience, and even had to put up with whistles. The completely unknown Witthüser & Westrupp, on the other hand, managed to pull the visitors to their side with humorous "music" and sayings such as, "Don't exhaust yourself, Jimi Hendrix is coming soon, he should also be quite good".
At around 11:00 a.m., Hendrix and his entourage arrived at the festival site, where he initially retired to a caravan that had been provided. 12:56 the time had finally come: Hendrix entered the cheers, but also whistles and boos from the audience, the stage and played with his backing band ( Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox ) hits as Hey Joe , Purple Haze and Voodoo Child (Slight Return) . His appearance seemed rather uninspired, listlessly routine. Be it because of the external circumstances, be it because of his troubled mental state. After the performance, Hendrix immediately left the premises and left for London, where he died a few days later on September 18, 1970.
Many visitors left after Hendrix had left the stage, especially since the following bands did not promise an increase. But the following band Floh de Cologne from Cologne - with political cabaret - received a lot of applause, Limbus 4 and Embryo played Krautrock . In front of the remaining approximately 4,000 visitors, clay stones shards , still under the name of red stones , made their first big appearance. In the meantime, the mood among the 500 volunteers had become more and more irritable: the festival management had delayed paying their remuneration until around 7.45 p.m. the organizers and the box office had disappeared. The organizer center went up in flames to the sound of clay stones shards " Break what breaks you ". However, the police managed to get the inflammatory mood under control. A few hundred visitors stayed overnight on the square before the festival area was completely cleared the next morning.
aftermath
The destruction and damage to the fields went far beyond the guarantee of DM 5000 paid to the authorities. Overall, the festival was a financial disaster in which many creditors were left with their demands. The Deutsche Bundespost (telephone charges and installation costs), rental companies and hotels were particularly affected .
Since 1997 an approximately 2.5 m high memorial stone made of red granite, which has been placed on the site of the former stage, has been a reminder of the Love and Peace Festival and Jimi Hendrix's last festival appearance (inscription: “Jimi Hendrix - Fehmarn - Love and Peace Festival - Sept. 4-6, 1970 ").
Jimi Hendrix Revival Festival
The Jimi-Hendrix-Revival-Festival took place annually from 1995 to 2010 on the first Saturday in September in Flügge on Fehmarn. In 2011 and in the following years it was banned for nature conservation reasons.
literature
- Jürgen Rust: Jimi Hendrix - the last appearance: the Fehmarn Festival 1970. Husum 1988, ISBN 3-923146-07-8
- Thorsten Schmidt (ed.): Jimi Hendrix and the storm on Fehmarn. Culture book Bremen 1997, ISBN 3-9804670-4-X
- Brigitte Tast, Hans-Jürgen Tast: Fehmarn - The Rain Festival. Stories and myths about a media event. Schellerten 2012, ISBN 978-3-88842-041-2
Web links
- LOVE & PEACE OPEN AIR 4. – 6. September 1970. Detailed website about the festival with information, photos, super 8 mm films
- Experience report of the duo Witthüser & Westrupp about their appearance at the Fehmarn Festival
- Jimi Hendrix auf Fehmarn (1970) 15 tracks, live recording
- Jimi Hendrix Revival Festival, History and Pictures
- Mud bath with Jimi Hendrix , for one day