“Have you understood anything I’ve said?”: The Dick Cavett Show, Jimi Hendrix, and the framing of the black counterculture in 1969

Abstract

This article examines the role of Jimi Hendrix in the late 1960s as a vessel of the Black Atlantic, what Paul Gilroy describes as the counterculture to modernity. Placed against the backdrop of The Dick Cavett Show, a newly created talk show in 1969 hosted by the white liberal Dick Cavett, this article explores the dialogue between host and guitarist in an attempt to trace the longue durée assumptions and ideological patterns of modernity and its late 1960s repercussions at the end of the American Civil Rights movement. Using the theories of Gilroy, James Baldwin, Raymond Williams, and Jacques Attali, I outline how the two visits of Hendrix on The Dick Cavett Show were analogous to larger patterns coursing through American society as popular institutions such as television and film formed important bulwarks against not only the countercultural ideas of the 1960s, but the more radical sets of ideas that increasingly took aim at the institutional nature of US racial capitalism and modernity itself. While The Dick Cavett Show embodied the assimilation of aspects of cultural radicalism, the show also offered lessons on how institutions such as television used cultural radicalism as both a point of sale and a reflective other in rehabilitating the frayed edges of American truth-constructing processes. As a guest, Hendrix often provided answers to Cavett’s questions which frequently opened doors to implicitly anti-systemic – or anti-modern – discussions. As a host, Cavett’s reactions can be read as parrying these blows, using comedy and his persona as a Midwestern straight white man as the blunting instrument.