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Before Woodstock, Hendrix Took the Stage at Miami Pop
In May 1968, a horse racing track in Hallandale became a rock festival site. Gulfstream Park hosted the Miami Pop Festival, with Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker and other performers on the bill. HistoryMiami Museum identifies it as the first East Coast rock festival.
The location is an essential part of the story. Gulfstream Park is north of Miami, in Broward County; the festival carried the Miami name. It drew the region into a new kind of large music gathering at a time when promoters were still learning how to stage one.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience performed on Saturday, May 18. Hendrix played afternoon and evening sets. “Hear My Train A Comin’” appeared in the afternoon performance; the evening set included “Hey Joe,” “Fire,” “Foxey Lady,” “Red House” and “Purple Haze.” The performances were recorded by Hendrix’s engineer Eddie Kramer, preserving music from a festival that might otherwise survive largely in photographs and memories.
Then the weather intervened. Torrential rain and high winds disrupted Sunday’s plans, and the second day was canceled. The official Hendrix account says the cancellation left the promoters in financial difficulty. It also recounts engineer Kramer’s memory of Hendrix beginning lyrics for “Rainy Day, Dream Away” on the trip back from the festival; the song later appeared on Electric Ladyland.
One of the organizers was Michael Lang. The following year, he helped organize Woodstock. HistoryMiami’s exhibition on Miami Pop used photographs, footage and artifacts to recover this earlier event, and cited Lang’s description of Miami as a place where the seeds of Woodstock were sown. Miami Pop was neither a rehearsal with a guaranteed outcome nor simply a footnote to a later festival. It was its own ambitious event, with its own performances, audience and costly lessons.
Gulfstream Park hosted another Miami Pop Festival in December 1968, with a different lineup that included the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac. The two festivals are sometimes compressed into one memory. They deserve to be kept separate.
The May festival lasted less time than its organizers intended. Its place in music history has lasted much longer: a Saturday of remarkable performances, a Sunday lost to rain, and an early demonstration in South Florida of what a large rock festival could become.