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.