Original subtitles

You have another LP coming out?

Yeah, another LP right now.

It's finished, completely finished. It'll be out in about 10 days.

So that, yeah.

It's called Electric Lady.

Have you ever been?

Have you ever been to Electric Lady? It's all for LP, Jimi Hendrix, Electric

Lady Line.

The magic carpet.

Title of LP, Electric Lady Line.

Directed and produced by Jimi Hendrix.

Photography, Linda Eastman.

Engineers, Gary Kelgren and Eddie Kramer.

Recorded at the Record Plant, 321 West 44th Street, New York City.

We would like to make an apology for taking so very long to send this, but we

have been working very hard indeed during shows and recording.

When that album came out, man, I mean, it just

sensed it for him. He was absolutely

the man on the scene.

He made the leap.

In 68, you know, 20 years, you know, that day, when you heard that record,

were thrown into the future.

There was no question about it, Jimmy was tremendously gifted, and he was

to play guitar, but by hell, he worked at it. I always felt with Jimmy that he

was, you know, a very major artist, you know, as a musician and as a

composer. I knew that he was going to sort of, like, take the whole form

somewhere else.

And I believe that he only just began to do that with Electric Ladyland.

Well, all the albums with Jimmy ran into one anyhow.

As we're doing, all your experience, we're messing around with songs that

part of Axis Bowler's love. As we're doing Axis Bowler's love, we're doing

that end up on Electric Ladyland. We just kept rolling, and as soon as we had

enough songs for an album, we'd put that one out. I was quite grateful to get

into the studio.

Really, I mean it was never like that's planned This is the next album.

There was never time enough to To do like a complete plan of campaign

lady then I'd say was even you play it now is Well ahead of its time and it's

still valid Musically beautiful album. I think it's a well balanced album and it

definitely broke some rules and it pushed the

boundaries way, way out there. I mean, that's probably the most experimental

album that Jimmy had ever done.

Yeah, the whole LP means so much. You know, it wasn't just slopped together.

Every little thing that you hear on there means something. You know, it's

game that we're playing.

It's a little.

Quite an accomplished keyboard player. I think it's the first time he ever

played harpsichord on a record. The idea for the harpsichord was right there

from literally as soon as the playback came back. It was like, yeah, it needs

something there.

Harpsichord. That'll be nice.

This is a combination track with wah -wah guitar.

And a very strange sounding instrument. It sounds like a mandolin, but it's not

really a mandolin. It's Jimmy playing electric guitar that's been recorded at

.5 IPS and then played back at 15, otherwise recorded at half speed. So you

this... Very strange

mandolin effect.

I was the first time we worked with Gary.

It was just one of them things. We were in New York and the studio was free. Tom

Wilson had recommended the studio to me.

And so we just went down there and tried it. It was good.

I met Gary Kellgren when he was still at Mayfair. He, of course, was the

creative genius who was working with Jimi Hendrix and Tom Wilson and Bob

and all those guys.

And on April 18th, 1968...

I'll never forget it. Eddie arrived in New York with his black cape and we

picked him up at the airport.

We were fortunate enough to meet up with Eddie Kramer, who really, he did know

his stuff.

I mean, he had quite a classical background.

And he came swishing into the New York record plant. And that was also the

we had the first real session with Jimmy. And, of course, Electric Ladyland

our very first big hit.

Bass guitar played by Noel Redding, a very funky...

Dirty sound growling away in the background.

For the most part, a pretty distorted sound, but when

it's mixed in with the drums,

pretty

hard driving force.

And here are the angelic voices of City Houston and the

sweet inspirations.

This was Aretha's background vocal group.

They all thought it was quite strange.

And Midnight Lamp sort of threw them a little bit, but they liked it and did a

great job on it.

You know, for a man who really thought that his voice stung and was so

embarrassed, I mean, this was an amazing vocal performance.

He

was

always laughing and carrying on on the sessions, and you can hear there was a

very jovial Hendrix.

that underlying the intensity of his vocal, at the end he would just explode

into laughter and make a joke about something.

One of the things that annoys me most I've seen, you know, since Jimmy died

the people who ran his estate prior to this, always made out Jimmy to be some

sort of tragic character, you know, and sort of gloomy, mystical and all the

rest of it.

He was anything but. If I think of Jimmy, I think of him with a smile on

face because he was full of fun all the time.

A lot of humour for him was in what he did in his music.

If you watch him on stage, you can see when he's laughing to himself, when

he's playing something.

We'd go up to his room, he'd have all the curtains closed, all the lights off,

and he'd put scars all over all the lights so you couldn't see anything in

room.

And he'd have the telly on, and we called him The Bat.

He was a great mimic.

I mean, he used to have us in stitches with these imitations of Little Richard,

who we toured with.

He had one tale after the other of Little Richard coming out, you know. You

to see him to believe it. He just became Little Richard.

There was so much joking around and jokes and goofing and just doing voices,

imitating people. I mean, just so much fun stuff.

Jimmy James.

What's wrong with you today? I said, you know what?

Go look in the mirror, look at your head.

Your curls done come undone, brother?

He said, I've tried Braille cream, but it doesn't seem to work these days.

Thank you very much, sir.

The Electric Ladyland session started way back in England at Olympic Studios

Barnes, London, where we cut the basic tracks for Cross Down Traffic and All

Along the Watchtower, a course written by Bob Dillon.

Whenever I mention, or whenever somebody mentions Bob Dylan's name,

just his name, I mean, the man's eyes and body and mind was just like,

you know, you know, he's like, where is he? You know, he's like,

he's my messiah.

He liked a lot of Dale Dylan. I liked the early Dale Dylan. But between the

of us, there's someone in your mind that, you know. He would...

Keep in his flight bag a Bob Dylan songbook and refer to it on a daily

He loved Bob Dylan.

He did all along the watch there, didn't he?

Jimmy, you obviously just heard.

Watchtower and just fancy doing it. I've never heard it before It's actually

like a quick playthrough maybe of the original but it was the usual thing the

strum the guitar and This is how it goes This

is a great example of Jimmy's

ability to orchestrate direct

and really focus the attention on all the intricacies of the song.

Here's the timing we're doing, you know, sometimes we're... Again, okay.

Six, one, two, one, two, three.

Jimmy played a sixth string.

And... We just sat opposite each other.

And there was just, there was just, and Mitch. So we just put it down with just

the acoustic guitar and Mitch Mitchell. I think Noel was over the road.

The red lion or the green cow or whatever it was.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. You have to basically only get a fit like that, like

that part right there. Control one more time.

One, two.

It's great how Jimmy is telling Mitch exactly where to put the bass drum part,

because he knows instinctively what the rhythm should be.

We obviously have a visitor, none other than Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.

Stumbled by the session, decided to help out and play some piano. But I think he

valiantly tried for a couple of takes and then, as we can hear, it was

abandoned. And they went back to cutting the basic track without him.

Actually, I think Brian Jones was involved in some of that kind of deal

percussion effects.

You know, it was like, anyone that was around, here, hit this, let's try and

what works.

He would just take a cab to the studio, and when we was doing the Electric Lady

album, the cab driver said to him, hey, aren't you Jimi Hendrix? He says, yeah,

yeah. He said, where are you going, man? I'm going to the studio.

The cab driver says, oh, yeah, I pay coggers.

He says, well, go home and get them and come down.

And the cab driver went up and got his congas and came down and played in the

studio that night, you know.

He was a cab driver.

But that was pretty typical.

If somebody could play something, you know, they could play.

Jimmy Hendrix playing bass.

Probably Noel's P bass, his Fender Precision bass, played upside down.

That's when we were having a few problems within the band already.

And I said I didn't like the tune.

I saw Jimmy frustrated, running around trying to get a sound out of what he had

in his head and not being able to do it. And grabbing different bottles, beer

bottles, soda bottles, knives and everything, trying to get that middle

where there's a Hawaiian guitar sound.

You know, he just played that with a...

With a cigarette lighter.

I love Dylan.

I think this became the definitive version of the song.

Oh, yeah.

I prefer Dylan's version.

On the 16th of April, we got back to America.

There was no major plan. It's just, you know.

Jimmy was an American, and naturally an American wants to be big in America.

So we just went there.

We play in Toronto one night, and then Texas the next night, and then New York,

and then Seattle, and then Florida.

It wasn't planned.

It was silly, really.

I'm glad I'm still here.

I think it's giant stupidity.

from the management point of view, from agents point of view, you know, you've

got fans going from one side of America to another and you know more or less

you're told to be grateful because hey in my day used to be on a Greyhound bus.

And they put him on at one side of the country for one day, and you're supposed

to be 3 ,000 miles away the next day to do another gig. No one seemed to think

of a schedule where he could go from one place to the other quite in a normal

manner.

And I think we did something like nine weeks worth of gigs, and we didn't

have too many days off in that nine weeks, maybe four or five days.

And in that nine weeks, I think I have recorded in my diary 19 ,000 miles of

driving alone, and that doesn't include flying.

When you're in a band and you're on a roll, you don't get tired.

You don't get tired from playing, you get tired from partying.

Going to bed at four, getting up at eight, that sort of stuff, getting on

aeroplanes.

Doing another show, doing a press reception in the afternoon. Thank you

much.

Got half an hour off, you can go and have a beef burger.

And gig, club, bed, aeroplane. Thank you very much for about three months.

Going on the road for, like, three or four days, coming back into New York,

going to the studio for, like, two to three days, trying to get something

which isn't very good, I don't think. If you're going to try and get some work

done, you should sit and think about it, at least, and without running around

playing all the time.

I have a certain amount of bitterness, especially for my friend Jimmy.

It's giant stupidity.

You can't do that. You must take some time off to write, to record.

You can't do two, you know, or three or four things at the same time.

I think pressure is an overused word in the industry.

You know, what's a musician really doing? Doing what he wants to do more

anything else in the world, whether it has the pressure or not.

It was Michael Jeffries who said, would you like to come down to Miami and

record Jimmy at the Miami Pop Festival?

The first night Jimmy did the show and that was all right. The second night it

got totally swamped out. I mean, rained in buckets.

There was a drought in that whole part of Florida, which had gone on for about

month.

And I guess sometime the night before the show, they sent some planes out to

the clouds over the Everglades.

And it worked.

And the whole show was canceled.

And I remember I got in the limo with Jimmy and Mitch.

And Jimmy was furiously scribbling in the back of the limo. I glanced over. I

could see rainy day, dream away.

When you hear the beginning of Rainy Day, you can hear some changes being

played, and that's basically just us talking about different sections of the

tune.

And there's not a whole lot of changes to it. A lot of it's just in D.

It's just comping in D.

Later on, like on a cue, I remember we talked about doing this, that

kind of thing. There's a sex in there, you know, I

think.

And he goes...

Freddie Lee Smith on sax. Freddie Lee Smith on sax. He's not with us,

unfortunately. Right. And then I was playing drums.

And this tune itself was one of the highlights of my whole career. Most

definitely. Do you remember who was on bass?

There was no bass.

Mike Spanigan was playing, as we know it, shamming.

The first thing I did as far as a bass line was that kind of feel.

So that was cool, you know.

I think a couple of times I did some walking lines, you know, and he said,

no, don't be walking, just keep pumping, you know.

Rainy day, dream away.

Let the sun take a holiday.

Flowers fade and I see the children play.

You know, just check out the words, rainy day, rain all day, ain't no use to

getting up tight, just let it groove its own way.

Let it train, worry the worries of the day, lay back and groove on a rainy day.

And that's just the thing that you do on a rainy day.

If he had a lyric, I didn't know about it. You know, if he had like a form, he

kept it to himself, because as I said, it was like a very loose construction.

The first half was like mellow, and the second half was insane.

I told you, since there's no bass player at the end of the tune, we get into a

little climb thing.

And then doing those things. It was all head cues and hand signals and eyebrows.

It was real easy for me because one of my specialties was playing a shuffle,

which they call gut bucket, to where you can really flirt with time, you know,

and you kind of get that.

Like, in other words, like, when you're flirting with time, you're back like

this, you know.

Yeah, man, that's cool.

It wasn't like this, you know, wild party thing that a lot of people might

associated, you know, with Jimi Hendrix, you know, like all this mad, mad

moving, lots of women and people getting high.

Nothing like that. It was like real kind of quiet and thoughtful.

What's he say in the background?

The harmony, the harmony.

Something

like

that.

I think we were playing like the ugliest thing we could find.

I didn't know that was going to be on his album, for sure. Hell, I never got

paid for the fashion, man.

If you're out there listening, I want my money.

I am proud of it. I'm proud of the fact that I was able to be...

on a record with him, you know, and because of the fact that he's so

and it has more to do with being in the right place in the right time than it

does with my ability, you know.

You know, I'm glad I was able to be there, and I'm glad I was good enough to

hold up my end, but, you know, it wasn't something where, hey, you know, I'm

going to do this, get Finnegan.

Lord, I'm a voodoo child

This was

the time where I you know It was his time of going back to New York after

a chitlin circuit and the times he would go to New York were you know through It

wasn't really under his terms, you know of going doing the cafe war and really

struggling in Greenwich Village.

I mean now You know, the guy is back under his own terms, and I can't say,

know, Europe is his, but, you know, he decided to make it a

base.

You've got to remember, Jimmy's first success was in Europe.

Then he went to America.

And it had to be great satisfaction for him to suddenly... He was a black kid.

Suddenly thousands and thousands of white guys were coming out to see him

He was the first artist to have done that in America, in real terms, in

Europe. It had to be tempting to want to go out and do the lap

of honour at every opportunity.

Everywhere he went, he took his guitar.

He'd leave the show, and everybody after a while knew the best place to see Jimi

Hendrix.

was in a club, you know, after the show. So it doesn't matter where you went,

you would always go out that night and play with somebody.

We had, like, the theme club just around the corner, two blocks away, where some

of the best sort of jam sessions, if you want, ever took place.

And it was breaking down a lot of barriers at that point. I mean, you

People, be it Roman Kirk, Gabor Zabo, playing with Albert King, who was in a

road with a 400 -foot lead playing outside in the street.

And here's this tiny little club, you know, in the basement.

I mean, it was a real crossover period. People would play with, hey, with

anyone. When things got a bit silly in the studio, we'd all go down the scene

club at three in the morning because it was still open until like six in the

morning or something.

And it was like our second home, actually.

It was like a Paris disco in that it was a cave style.

It had three rooms that focused in like a cross on a stage.

And as a subterranean basement, it had this sort of Paris cave disco style

to it.

There were some great nights there.

I think it was a night with Dylan and Hendrick, just jamming one night.

A lot of people would just walk in and go, God, look at that band.

If you're rocking all heaven up there.

I'd like you to hear what you played originally. It's kind of fun.

I love that slapping of the strings. It gives it that front edge.

The session itself was after a rather long evening.

I believe it was somewhere around daybreak, maybe 7 o 'clock or something,

we started working on that song.

And B .B. Wynwood was there, and my buddy Mitch Mitchell, a comrade in

and insanity, and with Jimmy. And it was a

great experience, a lot of fun, and very close.

Lots of fun. It was a musical highlight.

This one thing that he always kept and kind of returned to as a concept was the

idea of getting together with Stevie Winwood and starting a band and playing.

But every time he would go to the phone or just about at the point that he would

make the move and be really determined that that's what he was going to do, he

would back, he would chicken out of the idea. He'd get a frighten of the idea of

calling. And he'd say, he's not going to play with me. He'd never play with me.

Woody, who do you think?

he was always kind of exploring a bit and i think he was always ready to do

of different things you know and maybe one of the things was he might have and

i did do something with me we would have killed at any time

night day month year to have been able to

persuade under any circumstances

Steve Wynwood to be any part of any situation.

What I liked about Jimmy is he conducted it very naturally, very open. He had

his ideas and he conveyed them pretty clearly without a lot of talk.

And what was nice about his approach, it sort of reminded me of some of the...

Musicians I had grown up with in Washington, D .C., was that you just

got in a room to do some picking and do some playing and communicate that way.

So it really didn't take a lot of talk, just paying attention to each other,

which is sort of the essence of playing together.

There was a kind of sense of camaraderie, you know,

or being in it together, really.

And often, you know, we would jam together and bands would play when

we were maybe setting up or what you would call sound checks today. We would

just set up and try and add an instrument and someone would come on and

would kind of play.

It's interesting hearing this so many years later and it's still fresh.

It still feels that it's...

It was done yesterday.

You know, you're revisiting something you've done. And I put the faders up and

feel... It feels... That it falls under my fingers. It feels a little creepy.

It's like we're entering into the vault or something. Well, we are.

But it's amazing.

I can really remember the feeling on the floor of the

studio. What it comes down to is the music.

And that night or morning, you know...

The music works.

That's the voice, isn't it?

He had so much rhythm in his voice.

And all he could hear was his voice.

All he could hear was his rhythm.

And that's where the rows always came in.

If we had a constant row in the studio, when I say row, it was disagreement.

It was where his voice should be in the mix.

I mean, he always wanted to have his voice buried. And I always wanted to

it forward. And he was saying...

I've got a terrible voice, I've got a terrible voice. He says, you may have a

terrible voice, but you've got great rhythm in your voice. This is important

the song, the diction and the way you deliver words.

It was always a controversy between us, which I always won by pulling his voice

forward.

The vocals were done by me and Dave Mason, four people.

You know what else is on here?

No. The did it, did it, did it.

That's Jimmy with a cone. The kazoo is an instrument that's always been

associated with hee -haw and hillbilly music.

And he was doing cross -town traffic.

couldn't seem to get the sound that he was trying to express across.

And someone in the studio said, you've got a comb on you, man?

Give me a comb. Somebody get me some cellophane.

And if you take a comb and you put cellophane across it and blow through

gives a kazoo sound.

So the guitar track on the solo and the figure on Cross Sound Traffic, the

guitar is laced by the sound of a kazoo. And that's Jimmy with this particular

comb, which I just thought was amazingly brave for someone to do.

Jimmy would reach and grab anything he possibly could get his hands on if he

thought it would produce the desired sound for him.

Guitar and bass together.

What were we doing?

There must be some good reason.

Probably run out of track.

Excellent rhythm player. And I think that a lot of that had to do with the

that he spent.

You know, backing other people and playing with Little Richard and Isley

Brothers and people like that, you know, like your basic, you know, like R &B

chops, you know, like learning how to fit into a band in a subordinate role.

And there's a lot of guys that can play, you know, a handful of solo kind of

things, you know, that don't have the first clue of how to comp changes and

stuff, you know, and he certainly knew how to do that.

He was playing rhythm in parts, but it was...

really lead, but it was rhythm.

He just had these great big hands.

Yeah. To do it all.

I'm the only soul accused of hit and run.

Tire tracks all across your back.

I didn't see you had your fun.

Darling, can't you see my fingers turned from green to red?

And with you I can see a traffic jam straight up ahead.

That piano track, the chords for that, I remember I was messing around with

those jazz chords and Jimmy came in and said, whoa, what's that chord, what's

that chord?

So I showed him the chord and he said, well, you play it. I've never heard of

anything that's specifically a jazz chord, do I?

It was a jazz chord.

It was a augmented mind score.

I mean, there.

The great thing with recording, Jimmy, was the rule was there was no rules.

That's what made it interesting. That's what made it exciting.

22nd April, 68, recording.

Went to the studio, did Little Myth Drain.

He had a song called Little Myth Drain. It's a beginning track on one of the

sides. It's a fourth side of the whole.

He had the beginning track on one of the sides.

A couple of nights I went in, and Hendrix didn't turn up at all.

So on one night, that's when I did Little Miss Strange, you see.

I'd written the song, and there was no one there, so I thought, why not?

Such an English -sounding track.

I mean, only as Noel could do it. He was a great rhythm guitar player. Before he

was the bass player in The Experience, he was a rhythm guitar player, and it

shows on this track. He's playing acoustic guitar on the two electric 12

rhythm parts.

28th of April, 68th. Went to the session at 2 o 'clock.

Finished mixing Little Miss Strange.

Did nothing else. Finished at 10 o 'clock.

Jimmy, on the other hand, is playing... the wah -wah with that strange sound.

I put the bass on top of it, and I put another rhythm guitar on top of it.

And then Hendrix, whenever he turned up the next day or whatever, I played it to

him, and he liked it, and he put the guitar on it.

I think Jimmy was really taken with the quirkiness of this track, and he wanted

it on the album, I think, as a nice shot to Noel, here I may have a song on my

album. Noel found this whole period very difficult. He had a certain frustration

because Noel, before he joined Jimmy, was a guitar player, and he only started

playing bass for them. He more or less got the job because of the way he

And Jimmy started doing a bit of the bass himself in the studio, etc., etc.

Noel... Didn't want to sit there all night waiting to maybe not even work at

that night. I used to get to the studio at 6 o 'clock to go to work and Hendrix

wouldn't turn up until 3 in the morning.

So we were expected to sit around and wait for him, you see, which I wasn't

prepared to do.

By the time we got in the middle of Electric Ladyland, we were working on

that they'd never worked on in terms of rhythms or anything. They were just

outline ideas, so the songs started getting...

almost written in the studio which takes a an awful long payment it's very

boring for a producer

Boy, imagine doing 40 takes of this.

A lot of them.

In real terms, I think he was losing his nerve a bit, you know? Didn't quite

believe what he was doing. And it was like, he wanted to do it over and over

again. By the time we'd started doing Electric Ladyland, he always had hangers

-on in the studio.

And he couldn't say no.

He found it very hard to say no.

And, of course, when he went round to the scene to jam,

and then come back dragging an entourage of 20 people into the control room, it

became out of hand. And I think in the beginning, Chas said, look, this is not

going to happen, Jim. We can't have all these people partying and cluttering up

the hallways and the control rooms. We can't get any work done.

New York's a capital of hangers -on.

By the time we were getting in there, there was 10, 20, 30 people sitting

the studio, and he started playing for them, not for the recording machine.

So you'd play a thing and...

20 hangers -on would laugh at something he did, so he'd do it again and again

and again and again.

I used to go in there and sort of go in the booth and sort of say, excuse me,

can I sit down? They'd say, hey, man, who are you?

I'd say, well, I'm just the bass player in the group, thank you.

If you were a car mechanic, you wouldn't take your friend along to watch you

repair a car, would you?

Chas didn't like the hangers -on, but they were Jimmy's hangers -on, and so it

was Jimmy's decision to have them around, and I don't think Chas... liked

that.

Many, many, many, many takes of this. I think by the end of about the 45th take,

Chaz, who was producing this track, said, See ya!

Just how I'm going.

I've had enough, you know.

You're not listening to it like you used to. When you decide to start listening

to me again, I'll be there. Goodbye for now.

Sam's had quite a valid point.

I mean, you know, time is money, and, you know, The House Arising Farm was

by Mickey Mouse for £10 or $10, and it's first take.

I remember the first time I saw you A lot of the sessions were just...

Yeah, an expensive ride.

Have some fun.

I

was

exhausted. I needed to get away from telephones and everything.

My first wife was pregnant.

She told me just at the time, I thought, let's get the hell out of here, you

know.

I asked Jimmy one day at a restaurant we used to go to call the 10 Angel in the

afternoon to meet, what that song was about.

He explained to me that the song was about a lot of things, but specifically

was about the Watts riots.

I think it was a sense of despair, really. It was like killing all the good

guys.

Martin Luther King had died in April, something like that, and

that certainly left a huge mark upon that.

Everyone. First of all, it was about the insanity of people burning their own

neighborhoods up.

And, you know, why you burn your own brother's house down.

There's no reason to burn your own self, baby.

Yeah, it's about time to get together, brothers.

Well, I asked my friend, where is that fax book coming from?

He said, it might snow some.

It was about the outrage and the anger.

that the inner city folks felt at that time about having a leader like Martin

Luther King killed.

Then a couple of months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated.

I say the truth is straight ahead, so don't burn yourself instead. Try to

instead of burn, hear what I say.

In one way, everybody was a lot more serious about what they were doing by

end of that year.

And then guys were getting gunned down, and we were going, well, you know,

knowledge change.

There started to be a lot of changes for him, and I imagine a lot of soul

-searching on his part, like for everybody.

The band itself is political.

The very fact that in 1966 that someone would even have a band that was

integrated was a political statement.

At the end of the song, there is a...

Something that Eddie does with panning the guitar sound that sounds like a cat

going... The

sound of a panther at the end of

it could mean a lot of things.

There were some political groups around at that time that were extremely,

extremely powerful and potent in the consciousness of this country.

Once Chaz left, Jimmy took over and began to experiment with sounds like in

1983, A Moment I Should Turn to Be, which was an 18 -minute sci -fi epic,

was the complete opposite of the Chaz -influenced four -minute pop -structured

song. And any sound that Jimmy could dream up, we included.

Listen to this. This is Jimmy making air sounds with his mouth.

Pretty neat sci -fi effect.

He was always writing lyrics or what looked like poems, in fact, I think, on

scraps of paper, even writing pads.

He wrote on restaurants. I've seen him write on cars, bags of cars or

limousines. I saw him write in clubs, at bars.

He was constantly writing, and he had these little pads that he would carry

around with him that he wrote on all the time.

Long, long, long night.

As far as my eyes could see.

My heart was way down. He's always making notes all the time.

He's always talking about psychedelic things, spaceships and all that sort of

stuff.

Where can you be, baby?

Where can you be?

That is Jimmy.

doing all the background vocal parts.

Fantastic gospel sound that he's created, just two voices.

And with Al Cooper on piano doing great gospel parts.

Where are you when it's a hot, cold summer? Where are you when it's a hot,

summer? Where are you when it's a hot, cold summer?

And even if the harmonies sound a little strange, when you put it in with the

whole band, it's just a wonderful blend.

He's just had this incredible ability to be able to pick the strangest notes in

harmony and stack them, and it just fits.

And here comes the rest of the band.

Boy,

well, how you doing?

Wednesday the 7th of August 1968.

Went and did some photos in Central Park with Linda Eastman.

Dear sirs, here are the pictures we would like for you to use anywhere on

cover, preferably inside and back, without the white frames around some of

black and white ones.

Please use the color picture of us and the kid from the statue for front or

cover. The sketch on the other page is a rough idea, of course, but please use

all the pictures and the words.

But the photos were good by Linda Eastman, Linda McCart.

We just said, well, we're going to Central Park.

And we just sort of sat there and did the photo session and got all these kids

sitting about. And we just sat there and had a bit of fun. Thank you very much.

We've had enough personal problems without having to worry about the simple

effective layout.

Thank you.

Jimmy Hendrix.

A guy called David King, who's the art director at Sunday Times, Colour

Magazine, he called me up and he said, we got this idea to do Jimi Hendrix for

Electric Ladyland and the idea is a bunch of nude girls.

There was the artwork that came out in England that Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp

put together.

As far as I was concerned, it wasn't the grand old tradition of, let's see, who

were kind of upset, you know. I didn't care.

I think David King and Stamp...

uh went to nightclubs in london and um got these girls to come down i think

saying that jimmy was going to be here you know jimmy had a great love of women

and the idea of that sleeve was they were just beauties from the street and

they were all sitting there posing and they all loved jimmy i mean that was the

idea that was the shot it was meant to just show a sort of freedom the

was like a freedom it wasn't sort of like a sexual pose or anything when

saw the final artwork of the english

Cover which he had had no control over who's very very annoyed because it was

the antithesis of what he wanted He thought that the naked ladies was an

It was all down here and it started looking like a ladies shower room

said that there'd been a big thing in the paper about the experience We've got

this album out with all these women on the front of it and there's a huge

But it's great publicity for us a lot. They still had their knickers on in

underwear So they said, you've got to take those off. And they said, no way.

So I think they were making like five pounds each.

So they said, okay, another three pounds.

So... Was that some kind of statement?

When Jimmy got hold of the reference acetate, which was a test of what the

disc was going to be for Electric Ladyland.

It had been cut over at CBS Studios.

Now, the white -coated technicians over there, in their infinite wisdom, got the

name wrong, and it came back on the label written, Electric Landlady. I'm

A, he wasn't pleased about that, after all the hard work we put in, and B, the

sound of the acetate was not what was represented on the tape.

It was pretty awful, in fact.

Have you ever been?

Have you ever been?

Got Jimmy playing backwards guitar, a Leslie guitar, regular guitar, bass

guitar, and Mitch doing speeded up drums.

It's full of feeling and emotion.

There is a slight difference between a virtuoso and a musician.

He was both.

You know, he was a great accompanist. He had an understanding of, you know,

arrangement, voicing, chordal movement.

And he was virtuoso as well.

He was cutting tracks with just guitar and drums.

The only track I saw him do with the band was a track we did.

Jimmy played quite a lot of bass on this.

And from a drummer's point of view, I wish that had been there for me right

the start.

This is just rhythm guitar and drums.

By itself, it doesn't make any sense, one would think, and yet you put the

to it, and it becomes a wonderfully complex

rhythm.

He didn't read music.

He didn't use musical terms like arpeggios and all that stuff, those type

terminology.

Jimmy talked about colors a lot and sounds.

He said, make it sound like the ocean.

Or I want it to sound like the wind here.

There was nobody else doing what he could do on guitar. There was nobody

At all.

I seem to get inside

the guitar.

with his personality.

He didn't seem to be... You can hear all the influences, some of them, and then

some of them he just steps aside of all of that and it melts together and

produces new things.

The public perception of him was based more on this wild guy, you know, than

it was based on, you know, this innovative, musician, you know.

There's three beautiful falsetto background vocal parts, as well as the

voice on top.

He still has this charm and grace about his music that people just

still adore.

And it's just relentless, man.

I heard him as a guy coming out of the blues, you know, I mean, a really,

good blues player, but had gone had taken it to another place.

Similar to, you know, Charlie Parker or Louis Armstrong or John Coltrane or any

other great people in jazz that were responsible for the innovations that

occurred, you know. In the classical sense, I mean, I think he was like a

Mozart. I think that he actually was just beginning to sort of express his

That's the mark of a true genius, that someone who creates sort of a generic,

form all his own.

I need him so bad.

He was a very special person.

I have yet to meet anyone who had the same energy he had, and I miss him very

much.

It's got to be right up there.

I put it right up there with Sarge and Pepper.

I do.

Records like Electric Lady Langlois will be accessible

to all ages, and young people will always seek out good music.

Considering it's still selling 25 years later, I think everybody got their

money's worth and all those people who got frustrated by the length of time

should sit there and say we were wrong.

It's definitely a classical album.

It'll stand, it'll completely stand the test of time.

His music will last forever as far as I'm concerned. I think that, you know,

the next couple of hundred years, you're still going to be hearing Jimi

Hendrix's music. I don't think it'll ever die.

But Hendrix, obviously, a wonderful guitar player and a wonderful writer.

I still think about him.

I miss him a lot.

There are certain times I think of him a great deal.

Most of the time it's with, you know, a lot of laughter.

You know, people, it's the kind of connotation that people think of as a

character, which is not true. I mean, the man was a lot of fun to be around.