How Herm Edwards wound up seeing Jimi Hendrix at 1967 Monterey Pop Festival

Herm Edwards has made plenty of history in his football playing and coaching career and is still doing so at Arizona State.

But like for Forrest Gump and really everyone, history sometimes comes to you simply by virtue of showing up.

So it was for 13-year-old Edwards on June 18, 1967, a Sunday in his hometown of Seaside, Calif. 

By then, Edwards' father Herm Sr. was retired military and working as a construction foreman near Grass Valley, several hours north of Monterey/Seaside.

"He would drive home Friday and on Sunday, he'd have to leave to drive back up there," Edwards says. "My mom worked at the (Fort Ord) officer's club waiting tables so Sunday night was kind of a big night, and she was at work."

Herm and his younger sister Irvina were in the care of a babysitter, who happened to have tickets to a music festival at the nearby Monterey County Fairgrounds.

"It wasn't that far from where we lived," Edwards says. "You could almost hear the music at night," during the first two days of the Monterey Pop Festival. "She says I've got tickets and I really want to go, but you've got to go. I went alright, I'll go."

Irvina wound up at the neighbor's house while, through adventures in babysitting, Herm wound up on the lawn of history at a festival predating Woodstock by two summers that has come to epitomize the 1967 Summer of Love. 

Consider that the Sunday afternoon session opened with now sitar legend Ravi Shankar to understand what young Herm was absorbing. Then came Janis Joplin, lead singer for Big Brother and the Holding Company, Buffalo Springfield, The Who and the Grateful Dead before 24-year-old Jimi Hendrix even hit the stage.

"I kind of heard the name before, but I never paid attention," Edwards says. "He gets up there, and the first thing I noticed is he's left-handed. People are going nuts then he comes in the last act and whoosh. I said this is my guy and became a fan."

The whoosh was Hendrix, after performing "Wild Thing," pouring lighter fluid on his guitar, kissing it farewell, setting it on fire then smashing it and throwing it into the audience. This after The Who's Pete Townsend smashed his guitar at the end of "My Generation."

Edwards can be forgiven for not remembering much of the acts that followed —  Flowers in Your Hair troubadour Scott McKenzie and the Mamas & the Papas, whose leader John Phillips already had done his job well co-organizing a festival that drew 200,000 over three days and launched many of the young performers into stardom.

For Edwards, who turns 66 in April, the Monterey Pop Festival remains a seminal moment for a teenager growing up in what was anything but a counterculture home. His father served as a master sergeant in the Army in World War II and Korea and was a radical only in the sense of marrying a white woman in an era when interracial relationships were not widely accepted.

Edwards went to college at California even though his father preferred Stanford. At Berkeley, one of Herm's required classes was Sociology of Sports, taught by Harry Edwards (no relation), a renowned civil rights/sports activist. One day at Cal, Edwards was sitting in Sproul Plaza listening to political activist Angela Davis.

"Some of the things I witnessed at Cal, you can't make it up," Edwards said. "I was there when Patty Hearst was kidnapped (in 1974). The thing I learned through all this, I was a good listener. It made me go don't get in a box, open the lens open. 

"They've taken a stance where they believe in something. You listen them and go I never thought of it that way."

He considers himself to this day to be an information gatherer, whether it's in game planning, recruiting or dealing with 18- to 22-year-olds.

"We see what matches us and what doesn't," he said. "Everything I've actually learned, I learned from somebody else. To be there in that era, you don't know what you're walking through. Now where I'm at in my age and people are talking about that stuff, I go guys I was involved in this stuff."

Edwards gets blank stares from some of his players when bringing up Hendrix, who is involved in their lives more than they realize.

ASU's Mandrake award, given to the Player of the Game after victories, is modeled after the British cover of Hendrix's "Are You Experienced" album, released in the U.S. following the Monterey Pop Festival. An English band called the Mandrakes, which included singer Robert Palmer, played at a March 1967 concert that included Hendrix and Mandrake Memorial was a psychedelic rock band from the Hendrix era. 

What Mandrake represents to Edwards is a mythical ideal of athletic perfection, akin to Hendrix's mastery of his Fender Stratocaster.

"His presence," Edwards said. "When he walked on the stage, it was almost mystifying. The dude was talented. He reminds me of Prince. When you approached the stage, you went 'oh man'. He had that air about himself."

Reach the reporter at jeff.metcalfe@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8053. Follow him on Twitter @jeffmetcalfe.