Original subtitles

Jimi Hendrix is one of the most important American musicians of the 20th century.

He revolutionized the electric guitar.

There were a lot of great players in the late 1960s,

but no one pushed the envelope like he did.

I can't express myself in a conversation.

I can't explain myself like this or that sometimes

'cause it just doesn't come out like that.

When you're on stage, it's all in the world. That's your whole life.

He connected with people.

And he connected in his faith

that the guitar could take you someplace you've never been before.

There was no one like him around, not only in rock 'n' roll, but just around.

He was startling.

I don't think I've ever heard a guitar player

who had as much power, as much sexuality, as much genius

as Jimi Hendrix.

You're considered one of the best guitar players in the world...

No.

Certainly...

Well, one of the best in this studio, anyway.

- How about the best sitting in this chair? - Yeah.

When he was playing, he was supremely confident.

When he wasn't, he was desperately insecure.

I think, like a lot of artists, he would be unsure of his own worth.

You never got the feeling that this was someone who's gonna show off

until he got on stage.

There were a lot of people that didn't understand

Jimi the artist, Jimi the human being.

The only thing he wanted was to be able to play his music.

I was in the service when he was born.

I got a letter from his aunt that I had a son.

At that time, his mother and I, we weren't together.

Yeah, I missed all his baby days.

Jimi's father came back from the service.

Jimi wasn't here in Seattle.

And he found out that Lucille, Jimi's mother,

she had given Jimi to a friend of the family to kind of take care of.

And he ended up getting Jimi back,

and came back to Seattle and then put his little family together.

Lucille, she enjoyed the party life,

and she'd be with Al for a while, and then she'd kind of drift off.

I know a couple of times that he'd said that she'd come over in the middle of the night,

and she'd be kind of drunk and stuff, and it was just a bad time for him.

So I don't think he really had a chance to have a good relationship with his mother

because she just was never there.

It was always Al that was raising him.

Jimi and I, we just lived from one place to another,

just various places around Seattle.

Just stayed with my niece.

He'd stay with my family.

We never thought anything different about it.

"Jimi's gonna come and live with us for a couple months."

I was, "Hey, cool, man. That's great."

A friend of mine, well, he had this acoustic guitar

that he wanted to sell for $5.

So, Jimi told me about it, and I told, "Okay."

And he used to be working away on that all the time.

Any spare time he had, he used to be playing that guitar.

So after he got good on that, I went and got him an electric guitar.

When Jimi first started really getting interested in music,

he listened to his dad's record collection.

His dad, of course, had a great blues collection.

He used to listen to Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters,

all of these great blues guys.

Jimi would kind of pick up what they were playing,

and then he'd practice for hours.

We knew he was talented.

For him to be able to play the guitar by just listening

and picking it up without knowing how to read music,

we knew that.

We started coming to my house after school,

'cause I had a piano in my little playroom.

And I start playing the piano and he'd play the guitar,

and we started saying, "Well, we could be a band,"

and started a band called the Rocking Kings.

We just started harmonizing and trying to play groups together

and play little songs that we'd heard on the radio.

Rock 'n' roll was starting then, and it was a new music and it felt good,

and it was so different than what our parents would listen to

that it just suddenly took us over.

He loved Chuck Berry.

That was his love, because of the hair and the flamboyant clothes,

and Jimi loved that kind of stuff.

Due to our poor economic condition,

we didn't have that many clothes and things,

so we had to makeshift stuff.

So in his early days, you could see him sometime,

he'd have a hat with an ostrich feather coming out of it, or a peacock feather,

and people thought he was so weird and stuff,

but he was already setting the tone to what he was gonna do in the future.

I remember him telling his dad,

one time we were over there, and he said,

"You know, Dad, I'm gonna make you proud of me one day.

"I'm gonna be very famous. I'm gonna make it. I'm gonna make it."

There's more for you in today's action.

Bet you didn't wear this in the paratroops.

Not necessarily.

You were, what is it, a paratrooper or parachutist, or shout-ist?

101st Airborne. Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

It's part of the thing that most young, black men did at the time.

If you weren't able to go to college and get a college education,

the next best thing was to join the service.

When Jimi went in the service, I think it was a way of getting out of Seattle.

He's got three meals a day.

He didn't have to worry about where's he gonna sleep tonight.

And when he has free time, what's he doing?

He's playing the guitar. He's learning his craft.

It was very fortunate that when Jimi goes into the service,

that he meets almost immediately a fellow musician

that he will have then a lifelong relationship with,

and that's the bass player, Billy Cox.

I went in, introduced myself and told him I play the bass.

So we jammed, and there it was, we clicked.

He didn't have a lot of idle time where he sat around and did nothing.

He sat around and played his guitar.

He walked down the street, he's practicing. He'd go to a movie carrying the guitar.

He was on a mission.

Fate is fate.

Who would have known that on his 25th jump, he breaks his ankle,

gets booted out of the service on an honorable medical discharge?

But he's out of the service. Now what's he gonna do?

All I remember is getting out of the army and then trying to get something together,

and then I was playing in different groups all over around the States and in Canada,

playing behind people most of the time.

He hits the Chitlin' Circuit,

and the Chitlin' Circuit really is nothing more

than a series of mostly African-American clubs

where you could maybe make a meager living,

but at least enough to survive and call yourself a professional musician.

He does that with Wilson Pickett, he does that with Little Richard.

It was like going to college for him,

because not only did he go on a stage and watch

how audiences reacted to the music that was coming off the stage,

he also got to basically learn how to be a performer.

Nobody told him what to play. How can you?

And he starts playing and that energized everybody,

just because you had a player that could play like that.

Most groups I was with, they didn't let me do my own thing.

When I was with the lsley Brothers,

they used to make me do my thing there,

because it made them more bucks or something, I don't know.

You gotta remember he was not "Jimi Hendrix" Jimi Hendrix at that time.

He was still playing everybody else's stuff because that's what the clubs wanted.

He was real naive, real fun and he was so painfully shy.

He was such a shy baby.

Every time we went out in Harlem, he had that guitar hanging,

all the time.

Never went anywhere without it.

When he was playing blues, he got my undivided attention.

But most people didn't want him to play any blues.

So, he was reduced to playing Top 40 stuff.

I knew a lot of sidemen. They were gonna be sidemen.

They weren't trying to go somewhere.

But Jimi was trying to do something else.

Many nights, I had to prop my eyes open to listen to him try to do...

He wanted to have vibrato in his voice like Elmore James.

He wanted to sound like Howlin' Wolf.

He wanted to sound like everybody.

He wanted to do the blues and he wanted to do his special stuff.

When he came with us, he was more free to do the things that he wanted to do.

He was not only a guitar player, but he was a showman, too.

The whole club wanted to know who he was,

what was his name and where he was gonna be playing next.

He was just so outstanding and so different from anyone else.

And we didn't know what to call him. We didn't know his name or anything.

But you never forgot him once you saw him, and we called him Dylan Black,

because he wore his hair

kind of the same way that Bob Dylan did at that point.

In 1966, I was going outwith Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.

And one night, Keith was on tour and I was with a bunch of friends.

So I was in New York just hanging out, and we ended up in a club.

The guy on the guitar completely blew my mind.

I definitely had the impression that he had desires where he wanted to take his music,

but wasn't capable of actually putting those steps together to attain that.

He wanted to be a rock star.

He didn't want to be a struggling blues artist,

drinking gin in these little clubs

and trying to catch the next Greyhound.

He never let on that he was broke, but he certainly was scuffling in the Village.

So, just for him to have an apartment

would have been delightful for him at that point.

He needed to be looked after, and that's why he always had

one or two or three women dotted around for his every need.

And he used to go up to Harlem at least once a week.

He'd say he was going to see his Aunty Fayne,

but he said it not like a big lie or anything, he said it with a twinkle in his eye.

There were no obligations to me

and there were none to him,

but he came and went as he wanted to.

I never knew what was going on until he told me.

He was forming his own band, the Blue Flames,

and it got a gig at Café Wha?

I did bring a couple of music business guys down to see him.

They both passed, which absolutely flabbergasted me. I couldn't believe it.

And both Jimi and I felt, when the second guy passed,

that maybe we were all mad.

I was introduced to Chas Chandler from the Animals.

He was saying how he wanted to get out of the Animals,

how he wanted to get into production and management.

And I said,

"I happen to have an artist that you will be very, very interested in.

"Come on down to Café Wha? tomorrow afternoon and check him out."

I'd been out the night before with a girlfriend of mine,

and she had played me a recording by Tim Rose, Hey Joe.

And it had been out about 10 months in America at that time.

It was very folky, great song.

And I said, "At the end of this tour, I'm gonna go back to England

"and find an artist to record this song with."

We made arrangements to go down

to see this guy Jimi Hendrix.

And the very first song he played was Hey Joe.

I knew the only thing I wanted to do was take this guy to England,

'cause I thought he would change the music face of England,

if not the world.

I knew he was gonna be a sensation in England.

The universe opened the doors.

It just happened that he got on the path where he was supposed to get on,

and did what he was supposed to do.

I wasn't thinkin' about nothin' but the idea of going to England.

That's all I was thinkin' about, 'cause I like to travel.

One place bores me too long,

so I have to try to see if I can get something together

by moving somewhere else.

And the idea of England, this was the idea of England itself. So, wow.

I'd never been there before.

This was actually a very smart move on Chas' part,

because, unlike America where you had a music scene in New York,

a music scene in Nashville, a music scene in LA,

a music scene in San Francisco,

in England, everybody finished up at one place, London.

There was this revolution happening in London, in style, in clothes, in music.

So we were all converging on London.

I think if Jimi had just arrived on his own with some manager who is just some guy,

there wouldn't have been the "in"

that Jimi was afforded by Chas,

because Chas knew all of us.

First flat we had belonged to Ringo Starr.

We're looking for a flat and Ringo lended us his flat

up on Montagu Street, for the tour.

And then we moved to Upper Berkeley Street.

And it was just great because we went out to gigs, partied,

worked on songs.

The whole direction was just on making it a success.

He had enormous faith in Chas.

And he also knew that Chas was gonna look after him

and that was very important for Jimi.

He had to make sure that he was gonna be

in the hands of somebody who was gonna take care of him.

He needed looking after, and he always did.

When he came to London, he needed looking after 100% more.

When Jimi Hendrix first came to London, as far as I was aware,

he was managed by Chas Chandler.

But behind the scenes, it was Michael Jeffery,

who actually managed the Animals.

And he was Chas' business partner, really.

Chas was very essential for what he did for Jimi.

But without Mike, it would have gone nowhere.

Mike really was a very clever negotiator and wheeler-dealer.

We used to all go down to a club called the Scotch.

The Beatles, the Stones and us by this time

used to go to the Scotch club of Saint James.

Jimi sat in there with a band called the VIPs that became known later as Humble Pie.

And Jimi sat in with them.

It's like, "Whoa!"

Wait a minute.

He knows his way around the guitar, this guy.

There was hardly anyone in the club.

So it was kind of,

"Where is everyone? They've gotta see this."

He didn't just sit in and play,

he sort of did his act.

With the teeth, behind the neck, I mean, the whole nine yards.

I'm getting very emotional just remembering and just thinking I was there.

But that was a great thing.

Thank you very much.

Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp were the managers and producers of the Who.

And they were in the throes of making a deal with Polydor for distribution of a label,

which was to be known as Track Records.

We got the SP.

We got the fact that Jimi was over here with Chas.

And we said, "Well, can we produce him? We'd love to produce him."

And Chas said, "Well, I'm gonna produce him."

We looked at each other, said, "Has he got a record label?"

Of course he didn't have a record label.

So we immediately

got into the machinations of creating a record label because of Jimi.

And we sat at the table and, literally, did a deal on a beer mat

for Jimi to be on Track Records.

I was surprised to get this call from London, England.

And I knew who that'd be coming from.

I hear Jimi, he said to me, he said,

"Dad, I think I'm on my way to the big time."

He says, "I'm over here in England now and they're building up a group around me."

And he said, "I'm gonna name it the Jimi Hendrix Experience."

We're going back to, what, September '66

when I actually went to do an audition as a guitar player

for Eric Burdon and the New Animals, 'cause the Animals had broken up.

And I was handed this bass. We played three tunes.

The American gentleman just sort of told me the chords.

And we went through them.

And then the American bloke said, "Do you wanna join my group?"

And that was it.

Noel comes down expecting to play the guitar.

He was trying for the Animals.

So I dug his hairstyle, so I asked him to play bass.

I got a phone call from Chas Chandler.

"Hey, I got this guy coming over from America.

"Do you fancy having a play with him?"

And he's the first person I ever heard that knew

how to play that Curtis Mayfield style of guitar.

And also, "You want Wes Montgomery?"

I mean, without being a flash git.

Our first gigs were in France on the 13th of October, 1966.

And then we started doing what we called the club scene in London.

You knew people in America who were great, like James Brown.

But he was a guy, he was in London, so he was now kind of one of ours.

And here he was just being phenomenal.

Well, there was a ready audience, a lot of people thought was the source.

People wanted to see black artists in Britain

because they were the inspiration for all our young musicians.

People who had grown up listening to B.B. King and Muddy Waters

and Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

They were the idols, and the great thing about Jimi Hendrix,

of course, he was much younger and much hipper and cooler.

People had started off doing covers like he had.

He did Hey Joe, Stones did Little Red Rooster.

Everyone was coming out of that world.

But there was a germ in the air,

which was like, "Hey, we could write this ourselves, you know."

It was essential that Jimi be there, in London, at that particular time

to soak it up and create this hybrid sound

of blues, R&B, rock and psychedelia, all mixed into one.

Cleverly, he made the connection with the English rock

and the way English people were interpreting blues.

That was the genius of it.

So, Jimi's solo is about to come up.

And this is amazing, this thing.

It freaked everybody out because it's one of the great classic

initial solos where psychedelia and blues all rolled in together.

He was accepted by the British audience

with a reverence that had happened with the Beatles.

He was loved in England, and immediately,

and appreciated as the great artist that he was.

Jimi must've felt like a prince.

He must've felt like, "I am finally being appreciated." And he was.

The reason he took off so quickly in England

was because of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.

They'd say, "You've got to go see Jimi Hendrix."

I put another thousand on the door the next day

when Mick Jagger or John Lennon or Paul McCartney were saying,

"This guy is great."

We got Jimi on the Savoy Theatre,

which was the theater being run by the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein.

Jimi decided to come on and play Sgt. Pepper.

Sgt. Pepper literally had been released that week.

Jimi had learned Sgt. Pepper

and opened with it, so for me, that is one of my proud moments,

that someone I loved as much as that,

and someone who was destined to be great, one of the greats,

would open with one of our songs.

We'd been tipped off, actually, by John Lennon,

he said, "You got to come and see this guy."

And so I think we all got in limos

at about 4:00 in the morning, which was de rigueur

in London at that time.

We had never really seen anything like that before

or heard anything like that before, what he did with the guitar.

And so then began the negotiations with Chandler and Jeffery,

and we met Jimi, but he didn't get involved in the business at all,

and so we did our deal for North America.

But that's the first time I became really aware of him.

He'd achieved the kind of

level of acceptance that had gone another gear.

And Chas now had to move towards the next stage.

And the next stage was obviously to break America.

Jimi's first two US releases were two singles, Hey Joe and Purple Haze.

Neither of which had a huge market impact

'cause there was no context for them, it was just out of the blue.

I think it was completely understandable that they didn't find a market

and the name "Jimi Hendrix" became kind of a sub rosa thing.

Those of us that were proud hippies in the day

were looking for the next new thing.

And so we were becoming aware of him,

but he certainly didn't have a widespread popularity.

"Monterey Pop" was the first major rock festival.

And the first major festival to include

pop music from many different genres.

Everyone was encouraged to submit names that they thought would be interesting

and a good reflection of the "Monterey International Pop Festival."

John from The Mamas & the Papas

said, "Look, we're putting on a festival. 'Monterey,' it's gonna be great."

He said, "Would you play it with the Beatles?"

We were very involved in the studio,

so I said, "We won't be able to come over.

"But I'll tell you who you've got to get."

I said, "Jimi Hendrix," and they look quizzical and said, "Who?"

So, they looked at me,

"Yeah? I must look into it." I said, "Yeah, look into it."

And they booked him.

If you're an American,

and you play in and around the Village, and you play a bunch of small clubs,

and you never really make it, and then you go to England

and you're starting to become a success,

and you've got a chance to go back to America

and say, "I told you so," I mean, that's really important.

I sat next to him on the plane, going over.

And he said that he was a bit frightened

because he didn't really know whether he'd be able to get across

what he was trying to do.

This was the Summer of Love,

so you couldn't do anything that was too outrageous for that crowd.

Here to introduce him, he's come all the way over from London,

it's Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones.

A very good friend, a fellow countryman of yours.

The biggest performer. The most exciting sounds I've ever heard.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

It was a thin line-up, just three.

But when the music started, it was 10, it could've been 20.

It was that powerful.

Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell were these tiny, frail Englishmen

with this wild man fronting the act.

Yeah, baby, good lovin'.

Man, this, I've been around, went to England to pick up these two cats,

and now here we are, it was so groovy to come back here this way

and really get a chance to really play.

I cannot imagine what it was like to see that first time out.

He arrived without a great deal of fanfare, without a great deal of advance notice

and basically blew that crowd away.

You can say that the stars were in alignment.

I would actually say that he had everything he needed.

He showed up and he didn't waste a single bit of it.

When you watch the Penny Baker film and he goes to the audience

and captures the look on a couple of the girls in the audience,

it's like astonishment, "Is this really happening?"

I was in the audience and I was appalled.

It wasn't the sexuality of the show that appalled me,

it was what he did to his instrument.

Here he was throwing lighter fluid

on his guitar and setting it on fire.

And I had never seen anything like this in my life.

I could imagine somebody coming home from that

and trying to describe it to their friends.

"He was really loud, he set his guitar on fire."

"What? Why?" "I don't know, but it was amazing."

People take it for granted now

because they've seen it, they've seen the DVD of it,

and it's not the same as like...

Well, before that day,

there was nothing like that that ever happened in the world.

Hendrix!

There is a contention that "Monterey" broke Jimi Hendrix.

It didn't.

"Monterey" was the foot in the door for Jimi Hendrix.

"Monterey" proved to all the music critics that were there

that this was something special, this guy.

Well, the reaction to him in Monterey

reached the promoters, the concert promoters around the country.

So Jimi started getting dates.

He went straight from Monterey to play for Bill Graham

at The Fillmore hall in San Francisco.

He did The Fillmore,

and then someone had this brainstorm to put him on tour with The Monkees.

And the logic, I kind of understand.

It's a huge audience, The Monkees are super popular,

but the reality is, that audience is not predisposed

to liking anything as jarring and as groundbreaking as that.

Dick Clark was the promoter of the tour.

Dick Clark and I sat down and worked out a tale

that the Daughters of the American Revolution objected to Jimi's obscene act.

I thought that would do as a story to save Jimi's face, pulling him off.

And so they played three or four dates, I guess,

but we got the call right away from Atlanta.

"Get him off the tour.

"Get him out of there."

He was such a sweetheart.

He was so conservative and he was shy and reserved and stuff.

And they had him out as this wild man from Borneo, and he wasn't any of that.

Well, you only would've seen him being flashy and extrovert when he was playing.

I don't know. Are there interviews where he's flashy and extrovert? I doubt it.

Because he was two different characters.

When he was playing, he was super confident,

he was in total control, his focus was immaculate.

But when he wasn't playing, he was desperately insecure.

I think, like a lot of artists, too, he would be unsure of his own worth.

You never got the feeling that this was someone who was going to show off

until he got on stage and then...

But that's like a lot of artists, they can be quite quiet.

And then they get on stage and now they're let out of jail.

When I'm on stage, I'm a complete natural,

more so than talking to a group of people or something.

When I feel like playing with my teeth, I do it, 'cause I feel like it.

The audience that was being exposed

to what Jimi was doing had probably never seen it before.

Playing guitar with his teeth.

Back behind his head.

Those were old tricks that had been around since the '50s.

That was kind of stock-in-trade showmanship guitar tricks.

There was a guy who used to be an older guy named T-Bone Rocker,

he used to play the guitar on the back of his head.

Now the biting of the guitar and playing it like

he was having some kind of a love affair was...

That was basically his original.

He did act up a bit.

But he was a great musician.

And none of the showmanship he did

was done to cover up anything that he lacked in his musicianship.

Absolutely no way.

It's not like he was doing something easy

and that's why it was easy for him to dance around and do the things he did,

he had all these showman skills while he was doing something really complicated.

He hated being referred to as having gimmicks

and all that stuff.

But it wasn't a gimmick, it was who he was, period.

Jimi, how much do you rely on gimmicks?

Gimmicks, there we go again.

Gimmicks, I'm tired of people saying I have gimmicks.

What is this? The world is nothing but a big gimmick, isn't it?

Wars, napalm bombs and all that.

People get burned up on TV and it's nothing but a big gimmick.

Why do you wear your hair like that?

Yeah, well, these hair strands here,

each one stands for a vibration and all are supposed to be good.

But... There goes a strand there.

He was an entity unto himself.

He was unique, his thought processes,

his music,

his verbalizations of things.

His body language, his clothes.

He was unique, he didn't follow a pattern at all.

He looked like an exotic bird at that point.

He had the big hat on

with the feather coming out the back of it,

and he had the chains, and nobody else looked like that.

He was very clever.

Don't think this is just,

smoke a little weed and decide to dress this way.

I think he definitely wanted to look as original as his music was.

He wanted to look like that all the time

because that was who he was.

Not somebody who was going to put this on right now and take this off

and go into the street.

It was him, he was expressing who he was.

And that didn't set well with everybody.

I tried to get him onto "Ed Sullivan."

I got Bob Precht to see them perform at one point.

And he said, "That's too far for us, we're not going there.

"Ed won't like that."

So Jimi Hendrix had to make it without the help of "The Ed Sullivan Show,"

which the Beatles had, the Stones had, the Doors, Dave Clark Five.

All these different people did their turn on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

Some people don't need it.

A lot of what success is for some people, it's just word of mouth.

Although music was cast in terms of racial context,

R&B is black music,

rock is white music,

but what you didn't see is a black man fronting a rock band.

It just didn't happen before.

A month after "Monterey," the Are You Experienced? album came out.

Now you had graphics,

you could see what the Jimi Hendrix Experience looked like.

When I saw that cover, I knew I wanted it.

The fact that he was a black guitar player, for someone who was into rock 'n' roll,

who knew Motown, who knew soul,

for this to be a black American rock guitarist, it was really...

It was something that I really wanted to know about.

Are You Experienced? as the first album just blew people's minds.

We tried anything and everything to make the sounds different

because we could, we were given that freedom to do that,

and I think the album represents that.

Before that record was made, a lot of those sounds had never been heard.

And so just to be able to say, "Hey, I just recorded something

"and it's got stuff on it that's never been heard before."

That was a time when you could do that.

What set it apart was everything.

There was the lyrics,

which seemed... They seemed very psychedelic,

but when you look at it now, they're actually very grounded in blues.

When he sings about the Wind Cries Mary,

that's not much more different than the old bluesmen saying,

"The blues fell down like rain."

You have to wrench your mind back to a time before the social network.

No Twitter, no Facebook.

When something new like that would come along,

it was very organic, it was word of mouth.

And the people on the radio, we would hear this.

The west coast stations started playing him, and then it worked its way back

across the country.

The underground radio is going together so nicely,

I just hope that this keeps on, with the stereo and so forth.

Everybody makes a little better records

and stereo singles and so forth.

That means music itself is being presented to the public in a better way.

Are You Experienced?

The record was fantastic.

The ones who got it never stopped talking about it.

Nascent FM radio was starting to play it.

By February of '68, he's on a major US tour.

The '68 tour was

best described as complete madness.

The gigs were far and wide, we would do

Virginia Beach, and then we would do Quebec

and Cleveland, and then we were back in New York.

And we were all over the place.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience comes to Tampa.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Rhode Island Auditorium in Providence.

Two shows this Friday night at the Anaheim Convention Center.

You were gonna listen to him on the radio, but you were not going to see it on TV.

When he came to your town, you had to be at that concert,

'cause that was the only chance you were going to get to see him.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

The number one progressive rock act in the world.

I recorded driving 19,000 miles in eight days.

I didn't sleep at all.

All I did was took

Dexedrine or anything I could take.

So it was pretty ridiculous.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience on stage.

In person with the most dynamic experience of a lifetime.

We did 57 gigs in 55 days, or something.

That's when we noticed we were playing to bigger things,

we were now doing 20,000 to 30,000 people.

He'd come home to Seattle.

We went down to where he was playing and we went backstage.

You got to remember, I just got out of the service, so I've got this crew cut.

I'm very severe looking.

And I look at Jimi and I go, "Buster, what have they done to you?"

'Cause he had these bellbottom pants and all this great look,

and I'm looking at him with wide eyes, and he's looking at me and he's going,

"Bobby, what have they done to you?"

He left in 1961.

Just a poor kid from Seattle

joining the army so that he could serve his time.

Though he contacted my dad and he kept in contact through letters,

they really hadn't seen each other.

The meeting, the homecoming.

He was so excited to see him.

Jimi was the last person to come off the plane.

He had his big hat.

My dad had shaved all the hair off his face.

My dad had never been without a mustache.

So here he was, all clean-shaven, even had a tie on.

If you knew my dad, he didn't wear ties.

I can count on one hand how many times he wore a tie,

but he was just so proud of Jimi, and he was so excited to see him.

I mean, after all, it'd been seven years.

No longer was he little Jimi Hendrix, Buster,

whatever other names that our family had for him.

He didn't do the big limos and the big hotels,

he stayed at his dad's house, drove his dad's old jalopy around town

to go see his friends and stuff,

he was always the same kind of guy.

He was very humble, he was a gentleman, and he was very caring for his friends

and for people that worked for him.

The only thing he wanted was to be able to play his music.

He was so concentrated on music,

there wasn't a sport he liked, I never heard him talk about a sport,

he didn't read the papers, he really had no interest

for anything other than music and women.

So, Jimi had two areas of expertise,

he had his guitar-playing,

and then he had an immaculate and intense sexuality.

He was usually pretty polite.

You could see he was a real player,

he could just walk up to a chick and whisper something to her,

and they'd go off.

If I get up at 7:00 in the morning, and I'm really sleepy,

but then I open the door and I see somebody that appeals to me,

well, first of all, I say, "What in the world is she doing here?

"What does she even want?" Or something like that.

I stand there and she says, "Can I come in?"

And I stand there really digging her. She's nice-looking, you know.

She's about 19, 20, beyond the age of so and so.

Well, I probably stand there, and then I go biting into an apple maybe.

Axis: Bold As Love was out another six to seven months after Are You Experienced?

The album became a lot more complex, and, I think, a better sound.

The rawness is there, but it's a much more refined-sounding album.

And then we bring in all the phasing and all the special effects,

which we'd refined between the first album and the second album.

You can hear the changes from Are You Experienced?

Loud and brash and frustrated

and rebellious and so forth,

and with Axis, then try and maybe cool everything down a little bit.

And bring some beautiful stories together, maybe say certain things here and there.

He'd have bits and pieces of paper,

like hotel stationery, backs of envelopes, matchbooks, whatever,

and he'd be always scribbling.

He'd have a bag full of bits and pieces of paper,

which he'd finally bring out and then start reassembling the lyrics for the final time,

then he would go into the studio and then he would sing it.

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.

He always wanted to have his voice buried, and I always wanted to bring it forward.

He'd say, "I've got a terrible voice. I've got a terrible voice."

I said, "You might have a terrible voice, but you've got great rhythm in your voice.

"It's important for the song, your diction, and the way you deliver the words."

It was always a controversy between us,

which I always won by pulling his voice forward.

For a guy that really didn't like the sound of his own voice,

his voice was incredible,

absolutely phenomenal on this, beautiful, soft tones.

He'd put his head around the booth,

'cause we always used to construct this little booth for him,

he never wanted anybody to see him, of course, he was so shy,

but he'd say, "How was that?" "That was great, Jimi."

"I gotta do another one."

There was this desire to be better.

The desire that I think all great artists have in them,

whether you're a painter, or a poet, or a playwright, or a musician,

that you're very rarely satisfied with your work.

That whole LP means so much, it wasn't just slopped together,

every little thing that you hear on there means something,

it's not a little game that we're playing,

trying to blow the public's mind or so forth,

it's a thing that we really, really mean, it's a part of us, another part of us.

He was looking for something,

and he'd always have these little parts that worked like a little puzzle, you know,

it could be five, six, seven, eight guitar tracks, all to make one texture.

And it was in the early stages of all of that recording technology,

so he was pushing the limits of what could be done to make his music.

During Little Wing, there are three rhythm guitars,

here's one of them.

Slightly dirty guitar, but not that dirty.

And then there's this one.

A really clean one.

And then in addition to that one, there's also a Leslie guitar.

And when you put them all together, you get this.

People always made out Jimi to be some sort of tragic character,

sort of gloomy, mystical, and all the rest of it,

he was anything but that.

If I think of Jimi, I think of him with a smile on his face,

'cause he was full of fun all the time.

And if you really look at the bunch of pictures,

apart from when he's actually on stage playing,

if you see all the pictures,

in nine out of 10 of them, he's always got a smile or a secret grin on his face,

he was a very funny guy.

He would imitate people.

He would tell you jokes.

He was a prankster. He was a prankster.

He was very funny,

he was just so lovable, he was such a sweetheart.

His friendliness just drew people to him, like a magnet.

He was just likeable, and you wanted him on your friendship train.

He connected with people.

And he connected in his faith

that the guitar could take you someplace you'd never been before.

And he made you believe it.

He's a pretty far out guitar player. I like his riffs.

He flows.

He says things with his guitar, man. You wouldn't need words, right?

We have to turn from looking at everybody else

sometimes to looking at ourselves,

I think that Jimi's music turns people a little more inward

and they can figure out where their own head's at

and how to get together.

He embraced the counterculture, he dressed like a hippie,

he spoke like one, he took the same kind of drugs,

so he infiltrated the counterculture

in a way that instantly brought him attention

mostly from young, white kids.

He was a black kid,

suddenly, thousands and thousands of white guys are coming up to see him play,

he was the first artist that had done that in America, in real terms, in the modern era.

You have to remember that Hendrix arrived in '67 with the Experience,

black guy and two English guys,

and this was actually a year before the major race riots,

after the killing of Martin Luther King.

People say, "Well, you know, why aren't you playing with black guys

"and getting political about civil rights in America?"

Ultimately, what Hendrix was doing was expressing the ultimate civil right,

to do whatever the hell he wanted

with his art and with whoever he chose to do it with.

He didn't have to come out and march, he didn't have to come out and do anything,

just being there with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding,

that was a statement about where we're going,

it ain't the same world anymore.

I just want to listen to this guy play music,

and I don't care that he's with two white guys,

and it's a black guy, or he's purple. This guy is great.

And that was a huge breakthrough.

He's the big star now, he's had two records out,

he's been touring America, you know, he's the big cheese.

And everybody comes to see Jimi.

In less than a year from the time that

Jimi Hendrix and the Jimi Hendrix Experience

came over to do the "Monterey Pop Festival,"

to the time Jimi Hendrix was headlining "Miami Pop,"

he became the biggest concert attraction in the country.

That's fast.

His arrival was kind of interesting.

We were waiting for him to show up, and he wasn't showing up,

the cars that we sent missed our pick-up,

and it was getting late, so finally, I said, "Just go find a helicopter,

"get over here."

Somebody had slipped him some STP on the way over, apparently,

and so, they were blasted.

But played an unbelievable set.

He literally took off like a rocket.

This was a weekend event, and we planned two performances a day,

and, Sunday, I guess pretty early in the morning,

the clouds descended.

The second gig, he couldn't play, of course,

we're in the limousine going back from the gig back to the hotel,

and I'm sitting next to Jimi and I'm looking over,

and there he is, he's got a pad out and he's writing Rainy Day, Dream Away.

And that's when he wrote it.

There's no question about it, Jimi was tremendously gifted,

he was meant to play guitar, but, by hell, he worked at it.

He worked at it more than anybody I've ever seen.

Thinking about it, most of the time,

I never saw that guy without a guitar in his hands,

in or out of the studio, or sitting around in the apartment.

Jimi used to get up in the morning

and put a guitar on before he walked out of the bedroom.

He'd be walking in the kitchen to make breakfast, playing guitar,

he went to the loo with the guitar on,

he had a guitar on eight, nine hours a day.

Well, he only wanted to be noticed if he was playing the guitar,

he wanted to meld into the background otherwise.

He didn't want to be noticed at all, it was only his playing,

he only wanted to communicate through his playing.

He didn't want to communicate via words in any sense.

If you were in a group of people

and you were having a conversation and talking, he'd be part of it,

but he would be quiet and keeping his own counsel

unless he had something to say.

And he would always be playing the guitar.

It wasn't plugged in, but he was always playing.

He was constantly about making music.

Whatever else might be said about the drugs and the ladies,

his prime focus was on making music.

Everywhere he went, he had a guitar with him. Everywhere he went.

And if music was not happening,

then he'd go somewhere else to try to find where music was happening.

Whenever he did jams in places, if we went to clubs after a gig,

he'd just get a bass guitar and turn it upside down and play it.

I've seen him do that with a guitar as well, a right-handed, play it backwards.

I know a few people that can do that, but not many people can do that

'cause you have to think backwards.

Everybody wanted to be a part of it,

but it had more to do with him as a person

than it did just his playing.

He would know someone around the corner that was playing,

and at the drop of a hat, he'd go and play,

so his whole life was either playing with the band he was in, or other people,

or going in a studio.

Jimi loves to now expand his horizon with multiple takes,

many, many overdubs,

we're now in the land of 12-track, whereas before, we'd only had four,

and Jimi's going, "Wow, I got a bunch of tracks I can fill up."

It was no longer, do a quick three-minute song and another one,

you had time to stretch, and that was the fashion then.

Like, "Let's try it this way." "That's not quite right." "That's great."

"Okay, Well, let's build on that bit."

Which is much more how people record these days.

Having the luxury to be able to go into a studio,

and to try things out and to jam,

and to just make accidents happen with the tape rolling,

and try and develop those, that was all developing.

When we recorded our last LP, Electric Ladyland,

we were touring at the same time, which is hard to do,

because that means you've got to concentrate on two things,

you have to do a good show tonight, plus tomorrow morning at 6:00,

you have to go into the studio.

By the time we got to the middle of Electric Ladyland,

the songs started getting almost written in the studio,

which takes an awful long time, and it's very boring for a producer.

Jimi could be a manager's worst nightmare,

because he would live in the studio, given half the chance.

And either people like that atmosphere or they don't.

If Hendrix was into the thing, they'd end up doing 38, 39 takes,

and the first one was just as good,

by which time, we're all getting a bit anxious, as they say.

People started picking on us all the time,

they're always saying, "Why don't you do this, why don't you do that?"

So, well, give us a chance, things happen in time,

we're learning the studio, we want to do it all ourselves

because we have definite ideas.

To listen to the same song played 50 times in the studio isn't something I want to do,

that's trainspotting, it's not recording.

Chas came from this school of,

"We've got to get a three-and-a-half-minute, or a four-minute song,

"all these jams are all very well, but where's the bloody songs?"

You could really get the sense

that Chas and Jimi were getting further and further apart.

I walked, I just said, "Well, give us a ring when you come back to your senses."

I definitely got a sense that Jimi felt,

"Now, this is my record, I'm gonna do it my way."

The wait between Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland seemed interminable.

It's like, "Where is this thing?"

And then when it showed up, it was like, "Okay, you got homework."

It's four sides, there's all kinds of stuff in there,

you got studying to do.

It went to number one, it was his first number one album,

but that was just part of the story,

because the previous two albums were pulled back into the charts,

so he had three albums in the Top 20 at the same time.

The industry might have been taken by surprise,

but this was an artist that we knew we were gonna hang our hat on for many years,

so whatever numbers he sold, we kind of expected.

He had a hit single.

And he had a hit single on a Bob Dylan song.

It just showed that he was a fantastic instrumentalist,

a much better singer than anyone ever gave him credit for being,

and an interpreter of other people's music.

I mean, check every box, he's got it.

He was probably the biggest thing in rock 'n' roll at that time,

and rock 'n' roll was the biggest thing in music,

so he was at the top of the ladder.

He was Dylan, he was the Beatles, he was the Stones,

he was in that strata.

I think we were the highest paid act in America at that particular time.

When we'd put tickets on sale, they'd be gone in a couple of hours.

I mean, he was just so tremendously big.

He was aware of how big he was,

I just don't think that that mattered to him, what mattered to him was how good he was,

and he wanted to be better.

My friend and I went out and we found an apartment for Jimi,

a lovely apartment on 12th Street,

between 5th and 6th,

it was his first home in New York, and he really, really loved it.

He had dinner parties, he had friends come up and jam,

he loved being in the Village.

The Village was fun.

The first time I went down there, I said, "Wow, this is nice.

"I really like this place."

It's big, it's roomy,

he was showing me, "Look at this, look at that." The little kitchen.

I'm like, "Yeah, you're gonna cook."

Much to the frustration of his neighbors, he had an apartment,

we used to get an occasional call from the police,

saying that he was playing guitar at 4:00 in the morning

and everybody was on the street complaining.

He's going from room to room, there's lots of girls there,

he was just flushed with excitement,

and there was a sweetness to him still,

he wasn't cocky, he was just having fun with his fame.

He had fame and he was recognized,

but, in those days, you could walk around the Village without the paparazzis.

You could walk around without bodyguards or an entourage.

He felt free, and it was a good time for him,

those days were a very good time for him.

He was still sweet Jimi.

Kind, considerate, funny.

Tremendous sense of humor.

And his ego was still the right size.

And I don't think he was really bitten by the serpent of fame.

We have an interesting guest tonight. Jimi Hendrix.

You've met him.

I don't think he has ever been on television like this before.

Here is a naive and innocent Jimi Hendrix.

What do you like to hear when somebody comes up after a concert?

What kind of compliment do you like?

I don't know. I don't really live on compliments.

As a matter of fact, it has a way of distracting me.

I know a lot of other musicians and artists that are out there today, you know,

they hear these compliments, they say, "Wow. it must've been really great."

So they get fat and satisfied, and then they get lost and they forget about

the actual talent that they have, and they start moving into another world.

The problem of succeeding is a hard one for you

if your basis stays in the blues, or something like that,

and you suddenly make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Someone said it's harder to sing the blues when you're making that kind of money.

This assumes that you can't be unhappy and have a lot of money.

Yeah, sometimes it gets to be really easy to sing the blues

when you're supposed to be making so much money, you know,

because money is getting to be out of hand now,

like musicians, especially young cats, they get a chance

to make all this money and they say, "Wow, this is fantastic."

Like I said before, they lose themselves and they forget about the music itself.

They forget about their talents, they forget about the other half of them.

So therefore, you can sing a lot of blues.

The more money you make, the more blues sometimes you can sing.

I think he fended off the myth of his invulnerability and that he was

the world's greatest guitarist.

This is something that he wanted, truly,

but what he really wanted was not to be distracted by that.

You're considered one of the best guitar players in the world and...

No.

Certainly...

Well, one of the best in this studio, anyway.

- How about the best sitting in this chair? - Yeah.

He didn't like being flattered.

He fended it off.

He actually found it corrosive.

He wanted to stay hungry.

We've been playing Purple Haze, Wind Cries Mary,

Hey Joe, Foxy Lady, we've been playing all these songs,

which I really think are groovy songs,

but we've been playing all these songs for two years,

so quite naturally, we start improvising here and there.

And there's other things we want to turn on to the people.

He really liked playing the blues, but of course the audience in an arena,

is not into listening to the blues that much.

I remember at one time him saying to me,

"All I have to do is smash my guitar and these crowds are fine with that.

"But I want to play the guitar."

He really was a consummate blues musician.

But there were marketing concerns, where they wanted more Jimi Hendrix.

He was getting disgusted with his own...

The whole carnival

of gimmicks that he was happy to use in the beginning

as part of his stagecraft.

But he felt creatively hemmed in by that,

he wanted something new.

As you get older, you do want to drop some of the showy things behind

and get down to the more serious things, so perhaps that was going on with him.

Thank you, thank you very much.

Jimi and myself, we had discussed about other people coming into the band.

There was quite a bit of pressure

from Mike Jeffery, as a manager who could probably see the writing on the wall.

Jeffery was still, in the back of his mind, I think, trying to keep

the Experience, as such, with Noel and myself together.

Whereas, you know, Jimi had other ideas.

Yeah. He reached out to me in '69

through a friend who was told that Jimi was going to be in Memphis

and wound up at the concert.

After the gig,

we went to his hotel room and discussed some things, musically.

There was a really special bond between Billy and Jimi.

I think the fact that they were in the army.

Billy was there at the beginning.

He trusted Billy, he trusted him musically and he trusted him as a human being.

We were playing in Denver,

and prior to the gig, someone in the hotel had said,

"Have you heard that Jimi had said to the press about extending the band?"

And I said, "Well, he didn't tell me."

Next, I got on a plane. I just couldn't handle it any longer.

Why do the super groups keep breaking up?

There are always rumors that your group is breaking up.

And Big Brother broke up and...

Well, probably because they want to get into individual things on their own,

or maybe they might want to get into other things besides music, you know.

Like Noel Redding, he's into a more harmonic thing.

You know, when you sing and so forth.

He went to England to get his own group together...

- Who's this? - Noel Redding, the bass player.

Noel Redding, yeah.

Yeah, Billy Cox is playing bass this time.

I see that we meet again.

Dig. Dig, we'd like to get something straight.

We got tired of the Experience, and every once in a while,

we just blow out our minds too much.

So, we've decided to change the whole thing around

and call it Gypsy Sun & Rainbows.

At "Woodstock," he showed up with one guy from the Experience

and a bunch of other guys, most of them I had never heard of.

But it was movement.

The band that did the "Woodstock" gig was really a kind of makeshift band

just to see what direction anything could go into.

He was growing musically like all artists do.

He had a concept that he wanted

to present and that was with two guitars.

I found Larry Lee and we added two conga players, Jerry Velez and Juma.

And then Mitch was there.

We were just friends having fun doing music.

We were scheduled to go on at midnight, but they were that far behind schedule

that we couldn't go on.

And we went on in the morning. There were still thousands of people there

at the time that we played.

It was 9:00 in the morning and half the audience is gone.

And there is just a sea of mud out there.

How do you get inspired at that time in the morning?

But he did. He just, he pulled off, I think, an enormous feat, that to this day,

people still listen to his performance from "Woodstock" and go,

"WOW. That is incredible."

It's one of the highlights of his career.

I think, in a way, "Woodstock" is one of his greatest performances.

As ragged as it is in places, because it has some of his most

poignant and explosive guitar playing, often in the same moment.

What was the controversy about the national anthem and the way...

I don't know, man. All I did was play it. I'm American, so I played it.

I used to sing it in school, they made me sing it in school, so...

it was a flashback, you know, and that's about it.

The first six, seven, eight notes, I'm right with him.

And then something inside me said,

"Wait a minute, you guys didn't rehearse this.

"You better lay off."

And then there was one of the greatest renditions I've ever heard in my life.

That rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner is so resonant,

in terms of what our lives had been for that decade.

It brought all those images to mind of what America's about,

and what we were doing in these wars and all those things.

The civil rights movements and all these struggles that were going on.

It really was a soundtrack to the country.

A country divided.

A country really at odds, a country in the ongoing Vietnam War.

He essentially rescored

the national anthem.

We don't play it to take away

all this greatness that America's supposed to have,

we play it the way the air is in America today.

The air is slightly static.

That performance has a life to it that he could never have envisioned

and certainly no one would've known.

A lot of people, when they think of Jimi, they think of that white guitar

and the Star Spangled Banner.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so very much.

The notion that Hendrix played one of the most important events

of that period, and his life,

under basically refugee camp conditions.

And with a new band, untested.

With new material, untested.

You sort of forget that live music at that time was not a dog and pony show.

You showed up with something that you thought was gonna be fresh,

that was gonna move people and move the music and move the times.

The great artists of the 1960s, in particular, had this ability

to reinvent themselves very, very quickly,

very effortlessly,

and very much on tune and on track.

The man was on a mission to constantly do better

than what he did the previous day.

He couldn't help himself but push that envelope.

After "Woodstock," he forms Band of Gypsys.

The Band of Gypsys was a strong statement

from three brothers.

We all had intimacies and love,

and we also had a feel for what we thought was right

and what we liked and what we enjoyed playing.

Everyone had contributed in some kind of way.

And so all the experience we had, everybody threw in something into this pot.

And it came out the Band of Gypsys. We had a very, very unique sound.

Jimi had signed a contract

years before the Jimi Hendrix Experience, when he worked with Curtis Knight,

that ultimately obligated him to deliver an album to Capitol Records,

to which he was never signed, but they became the rights holder of that contract.

I know he owed this album to Capitol, and that must've really

put a bit of pressure on him.

And the decision was eventually to make it a live album down at The Fillmore,

which in the end, I think, was a great decision.

Happy New Year, first of all.

I hope we have about a million or two million more of them.

If we get over this summer.

I'd like to dedicate this one to the draggy scene that's going on,

and all the soldiers that are fighting in Chicago and Milwaukee and New York.

Yes. And all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam.

I'm gonna do a thing called Machine Gun.

That night was very, very special.

And it was electric and it was magical.

And he was very happy playing that music.

You know, he was going back to his roots, really.

When we did Machine Gun,

it was really taken from a style which was called Delta blues.

I think it was, most definitely, from the Deep South.

That was his ultimate luxury, to play what he wanted to play.

And everybody loved it.

It was short-lived because right after the album, the band was dismantled.

Unfortunately, that's not what was wanted from the handlers.

Hey, is Eric around anywhere? Eric?

After doing the Band of Gypsys with Buddy and Billy,

I think there was a band meeting.

The band was gonna be reformed with Noel and myself.

And we were going to do one more tour, you know, that kind of deal.

Jimi put his foot down that he wanted me as bass player,

so I guess myself and Mitch and Jimi got together and I started touring,

as with the Experience.

We had to start doing a tour spread over a few months,

but just working at the weekends.

When we were out on the road, we were on the road.

But when we were back at home or in town, we spent all of our time in the studio.

I'm sure he was spending about $300,000 a year,

which was a hell of a lot of money in those days.

And Jimi's jamming at this club down in the Village called the Generation.

And he said to Mike, "Why don't we just buy this?

"So I can have a place where I can jam

"and maybe we'll put a little, tiny studio in the back."

And I said to the guys, "Are you crazy? You wanna make a nightclub?"

"Let's build Jimi a recording studio.

"We'll make the best recording studio in the world."

I think, building that studio,

he thought would give him an incredible freedom

to be able to create as much music as he wanted to create,

which was enormous.

Jimi had very specific ideas of what it would look and feel like.

Very few ideas about the acoustics. He left that to Eddie, basically.

And then Eddie and I had to, sort of, translate that into sticks and bricks.

Construction started and stopped a few times,

usually having to do with money.

Jimi would either make another deal or do a concert or whatnot.

So a case full of money would appear, and a month later, we would start again.

Ultimately, performing became a way for him to pay for the studio.

Literally, as he was building the Electric Lady,

the studio down on 8th Street.

How you doing? You feeling all right?

Yeah, all right. Here we go.

Give us about a minute to get tuned up

and get rid of these joints and everything, all right?

He got a big advance from Warner Brothers, his American label,

to finance the building of Electric Lady Studios.

And, of course, they want some return for their investment.

We've got management pressures, we've got record company pressures.

The road pressures, the money pressures.

All of these things must play a role in your psyche every day.

Everybody wanted him to do something.

It was a movie, a TV show,

it was a concert, everybody wanted him to do something.

He had people coming out of the woodwork.

It was too much for him. That's really what it was.

Everything was getting too much.

And you just can't do... Well, you can do it with a certain amount of chemicals.

He didn't really adjust to celebrity the way people do now.

You know, there's a whole way to be a celebrity now.

And that just wasn't his way.

He had it all, but sometimes when you have it all, you find that

having it all isn't as much fun as trying to have it all.

Jimi was very simple.

He needed very little. What he needed was his music,

a few friends,

his recording studio was his biggest luxury.

And he deserved it.

And so, he would leave the apartment and go to the studio every day.

I don't know if there was another artist that owned their own recording studio.

Certainly nothing on the scale of Electric Lady, that's for sure.

If there was, there might have been,

some people had home studios or a small rig somewhere.

But nothing like Electric Lady.

I think for Jimi, coming into Electric Lady,

even though there were frustrating moments,

just being in the studio that he loved

and being with the guys he liked to play with, which was now Billy and Mitch,

I think it was a relief for him and a release.

Electric Lady was a safe harbor for him,

a place just to recover from the stress and toil and chaos of life.

It was part of his vision, of how he wanted to make music.

You know, without the distractions of the industry and the partying.

For a man like Jimi Hendrix as a creative artist,

he had to have a place like Electric Lady Studio.

So it became his and our laboratory.

The time period from when he first entered Electric Lady,

which was roughly May of '70 to the end of August,

there was a tremendous amount of material that he had recorded.

This is Dolly Dagger, it's one of the tracks that Jimi and I were working on

before he left for Europe in August of 1970.

We actually finished mixing this just before he left for Europe for his tour.

Part of the frustration of going to Europe was

that he was happy with what he was writing.

Before he left for London,

he said he was gonna die before he was 30.

He just had a premonition.

And I said, "Don't say that. You should never talk like this."

And he said, "No, I know, I know I'm gonna die before I'm 30 and that's okay.

"The only thing I'm sorry about is that I have so much music left that I want to do."

We get to the "lsle of Wight," and I don't know Jimi's state of mind at that time.

I would imagine, it meant a fair bit, as it was the first time he'd done a concert

in England for some years.

And obviously, I mean, that was the starting point for us.

Yeah, the guitar clip, do you have the guitar clip?

Jimi Hendrix was the one everybody wanted to see.

He was gonna be the headliner on the last night.

And he came on terribly late,

by this time, everybody was pretty tired and exhausted.

- Yeah, right. Hit it. - Are you ready?

Ask the road managers. Are we ready? Are we ready?

- Okay. All right. All good. - Okay. Ready.

Tell the emcee to go then.

The man with the guitar, Jimi Hendrix.

Hello, how you doing? I'm glad to see you.

We'll do a thing called Freedom.

The "lsle of Wight," you know, it was a festival.

I don't think he was that keen to do it.

It was very disorganized. We did it and we figured we'd just do the other shows,

get it over with and go back to New York.

They were on tour in Germany.

Billy got sick and had to go back to America.

Jimi then went to London and was hanging out there.

He didn't really know what was happening, or what he was going to do

or where the group was going.

He called me from England.

He was saying, "Hey, man, can you bring those tapes over to London?

"I wanna start working on them over here."

I said, "Jimi, we just built you a million dollar studio."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, don't worry about it.

"I'll see you in about a week. Everything's cool, you know."

Jimi called me.

He says, "Well, I need you. We gotta finish up

"then get some words and things straightened out in the studio."

I said, "Okay, I'll make it." He said, "All right, great."

The Jimi Hendrix Experience is over.

The acid-rock musician died today in a London hospital.

During his short career, Hendrix flailed his electric guitar

into some of the most unusual sounds of an unusual music.

You talk about the stars being in alignment when he shows up in Monterey.

Where the hell were the stars in September of '70?

I wish I knew.

I've never had any problems with my past with Jimi,

because the day before he died, we agreed to start working again together.

Unfortunately, he was dead 27 hours later or something.

I talk about him to my grandkids.

I show people the letters and stuff. I like my letters.

I'm so constantly reminded of him.

A great guy, one of my best friends.

I miss him, even today, 40 years later.

Like a brother.

I lost this wonderful musician friend, if you will.

But the world of music lost a genius.

That was tough. That was really tough.

Even today, nobody comes close to Jimi.

He was very, very special.

Didn't you think I'd do that?