Original subtitles

Hendrix was a major part of my background.

Jimi Hendrix grew on me very quickly.

- Who? - I don't think I'd ever heard of him.

I like his first album the best.

Oh, yeah. I remember him.

He used to play on a broom.

He could just make the guitar talk.

There was something different about him.

I was pretty good at it, but I wasn't as good at it as he was.

This guy is just unbelievable.

It was a sight to behold.

He's just so cool.

Jimi Hendrix was outstanding.

Because he could blow you offthe stage.

It was Jimi in front of a sort of mediocre rhythm section.

He didn't need much.

He who plays loudest gets noticed.

No one could follow Hendrix.

Chas Chandler, right, English guy in New York

runs into a black guitar player in a bar

and there's this whole electric-guitar explosion going on in London,

so he flies this guy back to London where he's treated like a god

because he can play guitar and he's black,

which all the white English guys wanted to be.

Chas was offto New York. Met Linda Keith.

Linda Keith said there's this guy

who really deserves to be heard more than he is,

and I think you should see him.

He said, ''There's this guy called Chas Chandler.''

''He wants to take me to England.''

England was probably the first time he'd ever been abroad.

Actually, that's not quite true.

He was in the Paratroop Regiment in Vietnam.

But that was a completely different experience.

Offto London with Terry McVay, my road manager,

and my old friend carrying Hendrix's guitar through customs and immigration,

so that they wouldn't suspect him of coming in to work,

and he was immediately taken to Zoot Money's house,

because that's where we all hung out,

and we felt that he would be most comfortable there.

And, by the way, did I have a guitar in the house?

He was going to take him to the Bag O'Nails or one ofthe clubs

and have him sit in.

So minutes later or half an hour later,

they turned up and that's where I met Jimi.

And the first I knew that there was something going on

was when they started a jam session right underneath my bedroom.

There was this banging and crashing going on.

Ronnie, Zoot's wife, came up and said,

''God, you should see this guy that Chas has brought back from America.''

''He looks like the Wild Man of Borneo!''

''They want to change my name to Jimi. J-I-M-I instead of J-I-M-M-Y.''

''Jimi Hendrix. It sounds more English.''

Jimi had been in England for ten days when he jammed with Eric Clapton.

What kind of courage would that take?

It was the Students' Union at the London Polytechnic.

Chas brought him to see us play.

And Chas said to me, ''Can you ask the band if Jimi can sit in?''

Well, nobody had ever sat in with Cream.

No one had ever asked to jam with them.

They were shocked that someone had asked.

This guy shows up, you know, and asked to play.

And he looks like he might know what he's on about.

Ginger Baker didn't seem... The other two didn't seem so keen.

But because Chas was one ofthe guys, they reluctantly agreed.

He went on stage, I plugged him into Eric's amp.

He did the Howlin' Wolf song, Killing Floor,

which is very difficult to play.

It's got a very tricky bass line. You need to know what you're doing.

And I thought, ''This guy's a player!''

Everyone was speechless!

They were all sort of... Chas was grinning.

And it left them reeling a bit.

They thought they were going to get some two-bitjunior up there

who was going to spoil their first gig,

who's a sort of amateur guitar player.

But he was a fully developed musical personality already.

The balls and courage that it took... Jimi was in the audience.

It wasn't like he was backstage and anyone knew who he was.

He was literally an audience member. They said, ''Can this guyjam with you?''

And partially because of his race, they said, ''OK, I guess.''

And he plugs in and he wipes Cream offthe stage!

Probably the only one... I've seen Buddy Guy, I've seen Little Walter,

I've seen Matt Murphy with Memphis Slim,

I've seen Muddy Waters, I've seen...

But this is a young guy doing what they do,

but he's kind of somehow brought it into this decade.

Suddenly appearing fully fledged, ready to take over,

I think people began to take themselves a bit more seriously

and not take anything for granted any more,

because he could blow you offthe stage, Hendrix.

They got the show oftheir lives, I'll tell you.

It made them sit up and take notice, that's for sure.

One ofthe reasons why he was embraced in England the way that he was

was because all the great rock 'n' roll guitar players

were coming out of England.

And he knew about every one ofthem.

He was very well versed on his peers.

One time I met him which has always stuck in my mind

and is a very vivid memory

was him coming down to the Speakeasy in Margaret Street,

where all the musicians used to go and hang out and play.

John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, including me at the time, obviously,

were playing down there and he came down.

He decided he wanted to sit in and have a play.

There was... I was the only guitar player.

So instead of him sitting in, I just gave him my Les Paul.

And he turned my Les Paul upside down, because he's left-handed,

and fiddled around with the toggle switch a little bit

and he just starting playing the most incredible blues guitar I've ever heard.

It was just soaring and singing.

And I was just absolutely amazed by this.

No one knew who he was. Word just passed.

''There's this great African-American guy playing at the club.''

''You've got go see him.'' It was word of mouth.

It wasn't notices in the newspaper at that point.

It was mostly musicians too, who were going to these clubs.

When people think about that scene, yes, London was a happening place,

but most ofthese clubs held 200-300 people.

It wasn't like thousands of people were seeing these performances.

It was a dozen musicians, but they all knew somebody else.

I was in the Scotch of St James's one night.

Chas Chandler was there

with this guy with this freaked-out hairdo and some Levi's on.

Chas, as it turned out,

was taking him around these clubs that there were in London.

There were some semi-private clubs in the '60s that everybody frequented.

Everybody would hang out together.

It was great how musicians from that era all joined hands,

and all kinds of bands came out of it.

London specifically was quite, as they say, happening.

But here and there, among the conformist fatcat crowds,

is a lean cat or two, looking like it might swing, given some encouragement.

And in among the chain stores and supermarkets,

is here and there a shop that may have something all its own to say

to the character who can send up a mass-production car,

to people who can put ''living'' before ''a living''.

World's End means where the King's Road ends,

which shows what the King's Roaders think of themselves.

Many different types of art forms were all intermingling together,

and the same thing was happening with music.

A lot oftimes, you'd stop by other people's sessions,

and just through other people, you kind of got to know each other.

It was a real small community in a way.

There were only a certain number of clubs everybody went to.

You could go into the Scotch of St James's or the Bag O'Nails,

but you'd walk in there and there could be McCartney and Lennon

or Jagger and somebody else,

and this band or that band, whatever was going on.

At that time, every week there was a new act coming up.

We were just thrown together. We weren't friends, we'd never met.

It was one ofthose things, three guys being thrown together.

''You're a group now, see what you can sort out.''

They had to get them together pretty quickly.

And I remember going to see the auditions, going...

There was Aynsley Dunbar, Mitch Mitchell.

With Aynsley and Mitch, they couldn't decide which one,

so they tossed a coin in the back of a taxi and it fell for Mitch.

Noel, I was there for Noel at the Birdland.

He'd gone for an audition with the New Animals,

and ended up with a job.

And I remember Chas saying, ''Can you play the bass?''

And he went, ''Well, I'm not really a bass player. I could try.''

He said, ''Well, here, try!'' And that was it.

He said, ''OK, got the job.''

''As long as you can play a steady bass line,'' that's what he said.

As luck would have it, Jimi was spotted at one of his gigs

by the Elvis of France, AKA Johnny Hallyday.

Johnny was extremely impressed

and insisted Jimi support him on his French tour.

Chas quickly threw a group together,

and after being a group for only a week and barely knowing each other,

the trio were carted off by Chas Chandler to France.

The tour hit Paris for a sold-out show at the Olympia.

The audience was there to see the Elvis of France.

They got the shock oftheir lives with Jimi's cover of Wild Thiig.

Everybody sing, alright? You, yeah, that's right.

High on success, the Experience headed back to England for more.

They started to manage to book them into sort of small gigs,

pubs and small venues,

until the first record came out, HeyJoe.

And then that got to number six,

because they all ran around buying them up in all the shops.

Once he had that hit record, they could push the price up

and get better gigs, and so on and so forth.

And that's how it really got started.

But young people were just beginning to break out ofthe 1940s after the war

and do their own thing,

and it was a burgeoning musical scene.

And it was very small.

Everybody knew each other, everybody knew everybody,

everyone went to the same clubs,

for example, the Scotch of St James's, which is where Jimi first played,

went the first night.

They had acts there like Sonny & Cher.

You had the American groups and bands and whatever coming in.

They met all the English ones and they all got on very well together,

so there were lots of parties and things were going on.

But whether here at Tiles or here at the Bag O'Nails

or at Samantha's or George's or the Saddle Room,

or any of the in gaffs where they go,

just don't take any of it too seriously or you'll miss the whole point.

At that time, everyone was very conscious of fashion.

The music industry, which was sort of forming at that time,

were sort of hanging out at the Speakeasy,

and we used to go down during the day to the Chelsea Market.

And everyone was buying Edwardian, Victorian clothes, male and female,

and basically dressing up, meeting at the Speakeasy.

There was this shop called Granny Takes a Trip

and that was the meeting point for a lot ofthose artists

that lived around the Chelsea area.

Granny Takes a Trip the shop behind the face calls itself,

and it's typical of the non-typical,

conforming to the non-conformist image of the in,

what they used to call ''way out''.

And before that, ''with it'', and before that, ''groovy'',

and before that, ''hep'',

and what Granny herselfwould have called ''the very latest thing, my dear''.

There was this shop called Lord Kitchener's Valet,

that started in the Portobello Road,

and Mick Jagger bought a jacket,

and, of course, Jimi bought a jacket and I in fact bought a jacket.

The first time I saw Jimi Hendrix was at the Seven and a Half Club.

It was the opening night for the club,

and he'd agreed, for a small sum of£40 a night,

to play there as long as he could rehearse his band.

I'm sitting there in the Seven and a Half Club

next to Paul McCartney, Brian Jones, the Beatles.

I was just absolutely amazed at the turnout.

And suddenly, the atmosphere was just electric,

and lights dimmed and Jimi literallyjumped on this small stage

wearing this fantastic hussar's militaryjacket

and went straight into Wild Thiig.

I showed up at the Marquee one day

to support Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers,

and there was this band rehearsing on the stage and trying to learn a song.

And the guitarist was black,

and there was a couple of other scruffy looking guys,

and they were trying to learn...

And Noel Redding just couldn't get it.

I thought, ''Oh, God. Give me the fucking bass.''

Noel was relatively unknown. He'd never even played bass before.

He says the first time he ever played bass

was the audition with Jimi Hendrix.

So I went out to the front and saw Jack Barry, the assistant manager.

I said, ''Why is this band... You don't have bands rehearsing here.''

He said, ''They're supposed to be here. In fact, they're the headliners.''

And so I went, ''Oh, dear.''

And there's Jack Barry taking ten-bob notes hand over fist from people.

And there was a sea of people trying to get in there,

and as I passed, I said, ''Jack, what's going on?''

He goes, ''I don't know!''

''It seems a lot of people are coming here.''

I said, ''I saw them rehearsing and they couldn't learn five notes.''

''It took them 15 minutes and then they dropped it from the set tonight.''

And I looked there at the fucking 60 people sitting there.

All ofthe Beatles.

Most ofthe Stones.

Keith Moon, Pete Townshend, Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton.

Every one of my heroes was sitting down in the first row.

The first floor is chock-a-block. All the Beatles.

All my heroes were watching my band open for a black guy who can't play.

And Hendrix came on and I have never in my life witnessed so much power.

That's the power that I think Jimi Hendrix had.

Notjust over musicians and fans and people who buy his records,

but over the guitar gods and the icons

who were going, ''Hey, man, this guy's burning us in our backyard.''

''We better go check him out.''

They were in awe of his feedback, of course, immediately.

You could see the look on Clapton's face was, ''This changes everything!''

I thought, ''What was that band I saw rehearsing? This is not that band.''

''This is some guy who's like from heaven,

who's just come down here,

and the drummer and the bass player seem to know the notes.''

And, of course, it was quite incredible.

I think guitar players were overwhelmed by him.

Eric Clapton was, Jeff Beck was, Pete Townshend was.

All ofthe guitarists from my generation

who, you know, thought we were pretty good blues guitar players,

were immediately impressed.

The reason they all were there was to steal.

I know that Lennon did.

He stole sounds, guitar sounds and things.

You can hear it on the albums.

Mark it off on your counter when Jimi arrived in town,

and then the next recording that was being done by the Beatles at that time,

and then you would hear a certain kind of guitar sound.

That's how it started, and so he played in the nightclubs.

All ofthese other rock stars were in these nightclubs.

''Wow, what's this? We've got competition.''

Ring, ring. ''Hey, phone me up, man. We've got a problem.''

Townshend said, ''What's that?''

Clapton said, ''We've got this guy in our backyard.''

And Townshend went, ''Who's this?''

He says, ''It's this black guy named Jimi Hendrix.''

''He's, like, filling up the clubs.''

''Well, we better go check him out, man, if he's in our backyard.''

So they get together, they go see Hendrix.

Can you imagine this?

The two ofthem go to watch Jimi Hendrix and they're both just transfixed.

I'll tell you what bothered me.

That was just before we went offto America, I think,

and Hendrix had completely taken over, with a trio.

What a surprise, you know. And I thought, ''This seems a bit...''

And that's all anyone could talk about.

Clapton and Townshend,

they actually clutch hands as they're watching Jimi Hendrix.

It's like they're watching their entire careers change at that moment.

And we were suddenly yesterday's newspapers.

Noel Redding isn't anywhere near the standard of Jack or Mitch Mitchell

or anywhere near the standard of me.

He doesn't cope, in my opinion.

It always has been that Eric's far the superior guitar player.

Jimi was a fantastic showman,

but, you know, Jimi was more in awe of Eric.

Eric was in awe of Jimi too to a certain extent.

Everybody was in a sort of friendly competition in a way,

rather than the sort of cut-throat horrible thing

it became only ten years later.

The Brits were really the pioneers,

as my dad put it, of making rock 'n' roll interesting.

A lot of people thought Hendrix was like this English guy,

this black English guy, which he wasn't.

But he had two English players with him and that's kind ofwhere it started.

In a way, race in America had defined Jimi.

White radio stations wouldn't play music by African-American acts and vice versa.

Jimi tried to straddle both worlds and couldn't find success in the US.

He ended up going to England where his race was not the defining thing.

It was never an issue about being black in Britain at that time.

People just welcomed black people.

It was part ofthe community and Jimi was part ofthat.

So there was never a question about segregation and stuff like that.

No, not at all.

Especially when somebody plays like he does.

I mean, he made a point straight away, you know?

It was like, ''Whoa, this guy's so talented.''

To see the man play, you just thought of him as guitar.

But the fact that he was black was exotic for a lot British chicks

because they'd never seen a black guy play that kind of music,

and they haven't seen one since, really.

He came to London with a completely unique character

relative to what was going on in that scene at the time.

And so, with his musical experience,

with his talent, with his background and so on,

he was completely apart and different from the other guitar players.

He was first black guy in my life I'd ever had a conversation with at all.

Guitarists were God and they didn't ever talk to bass players.

So this black guy says to me,

''A friend of mine has got a bass like that.''

I was, ''Whoa, I'm a bass player. You're not supposed to talk to me.''

And then I had a half-an-hour conversation with Jimi

before I had any clue who he was or what he was capable of.

I saw him on the TV.

It was on Sceie at 6.30 and there was a DJ called Pete Murray.

He didn't know who Hendrix was. Nobody knew who Hendrix was.

''Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from America,

here they are, Jimi Hendrix.''

And he was like this,

and you could see his face go like that. It dropped.

Hendrix came on with his hair and he played HeyJoe,

and it's absolutely fantastic because it was blues,

and the way he played the guitar, it had everything.

It had John Lee Hooker in there, it had the old blues story,

and then he had the image, which was wild, it looked great.

And to cap it all, in the middle ofthe song,

he picked his guitar up and played it with his teeth.

I mean... You died right there.

And he finished the song

and they cut the camera back to Pete Murray, the DJ,

and Pete Murray was still standing there going...

Bless him! He was still there... ''Oh, and that was Jimi Hendrix.''

The whole country was just blown away.

Anybody that was into music anyway.

It's strange in a way that Jimi Hendrix had to come to England

to get the recognition that he really needed.

I feel that that's because he was so far ahead of his time

compared to other black musicians in America.

That's why everybody in England seemed to embrace him.

Some people have said he was one of us, you know?

I don't know whether he was one of us. I think he was from another planet.

Most ofthe guys growing up in England loved these blues records,

but hadn't had a chance to see many ofthese acts

until Chas finally took a tour through England that people saw

and it changed the world.

I walked into Chess Records one afternoon and I says, ''Hey!''

Dude working there named Sonny. I said, ''Hey, Sonny baby!''

''Y'all make records in here?''

He say, ''I ain't the one you want to see. You want to see Mr Chess.''

I say, ''Well, he's the right dude if he's the big dude.''

He say, ''Yeah, well, he's the one you want.''

In England, Jimi could take that African-American soul tradition

and mix it with rock, and it was incendiary.

The irony is that Jimi then takes that same music that he's been playing there

and goes back to America and is finally embraced.

It's the exact same stuff he'd been doing in America before,

but once he became famous in England,

people in America began to listen to him.

I never saw Jimi Hendrix as a black guy.

I just saw him as a psychedelic, colourful man,

that could do tricks with his guitars that nobody else could do.

I think he probably had a bigger issue in the States

where it was torn between white music and black music

and everything that went along with that.

You know, most ofthat music was written by black people,

but they had to sell it to the white people to get it on the radio.

In America, because he was an African- American and music was so segregated;

literally, segregation was still going on when Jimi was coming up.

He couldn't stay in the same hotel with white musicians in the South.

He couldn't eat at the same restaurants.

There are several stories people told me;

one was just heartbreaking, of a time the bus that Jimi is in...

He might have been with the Little Richard Band.

But they stopped at a restaurant.

They had one white guy in the entire group.

They sent that guy in to buy all the food.

He bought all the food and was carrying all these big boxes of food to the bus.

He got to the bus and an African-American member ofthe band

came out to help him carry the stuff that was falling.

The guys in the restaurant came, took all the food and threw it on the ground.

We couldn't play with the black kids, we couldn't play with the white kids.

We were kind of in the middle. We're, like, off.

Look at me and Jimi. We're different.

That's the world Jimi grew up in.

It greatly affected his music and who he was.

We were kind of poor. We lived in a government complex

that they had built for the navy

because they thought that Japan was going invade the United States,

so they built these navy barracks,

which after a while they called it the projects.

They essentially lived on welfare for a significant part of Jimi's early life.

His mother struggled with alcoholism, his dad struggled with alcoholism.

They would always drink and argue,

and Mom would leave or my dad would leave, and me and Jimi would be there.

Like many great poets and musicians, Jimi wrote about his troubled childhood

and expressed himself through the lyrics in his songs.

The most autobiographical song to date is Castles Made of Sand.

The first verse is about my mom and dad arguing,

and he goes, ''Oh, girl, you must be mad.''

''What happened to the sweet love me and you had?'' You know?

And then Momma... We could see Momma right now, walking down the...

My dad arguing and my momma leaving, you know? That's the first verse.

The second verse is about me,

the little Indian boy who, before he was ten,

played war games in the woods with his Indian friends.

And he built a dream that when he grew up,

he'd be a fierce warrior Indian chief.

But a surprise attack killed him in his sleep that night.

That's when the welfare people took me.

When his parents divorced, he lived primarily with his father,

and there were a number of families in the neighbourhood

who liked Jimi and took an interest in him.

They would come over and take us to their house across the street

and feed us, and me and Jimi would love it.

Truly, the neighbourhood raised these kids.

He didn't really consider that he had a family,

but he did talk about his brother Leon with some affection.

He just didn't like his dad, and didn't think that he was his dad.

As a little kid, I think I'm three years old,

I think that Jimi's my dad because he's the only one I know.

He takes care of me, he makes my little cheese sandwiches,

he'd scramble some eggs.

Jimi, though, was the kind of kid that was a great adapter.

Just like he, to a degree, adapted to the guitar,

he adapted to that environment.

He was not sad in this kind of life.

We thought that life was just fantastic, because I didn't know we were poor.

Jimi was only 15 when his mother died,

and the impact of her death affected him for the rest of his short life.

He thought she was beautiful and he used to talk about her beauty

and how light-skinned she was and, you know, pretty she was.

Nobody that met Lucille ever had a bad word to say about her.

He was always looking for somebody like his mother.

Really I think he had a completely romantic idea of his mother.

Unfortunately, he ended up having a series

ofvery short relationships with women, primarily,

rather than someone that would nurture him the way his mother did.

He wrote several songs that are so clearly a reference to his mother,

and there's very little in his music that are references to his father.

Al refused to go to her funeral,

and the funeral was being held

and they held it up for almost two hours waiting for Al, Jimi or Leon to show up.

Al told Jimi, according to what Leon told me,

''You can take the bus down there.''

I think he regretted it, because he told me later that he did.

He felt bad about it, he said he was sorry.

And they never got a chance to say goodbye to her.

Jimi had said, ''When I get big, I'm going away from here.''

''I'm not going to stay here.''

''I'm going to leave Seattle. I don't like it here.''

He said, ''Tell Dad

that I got drummed out ofthe army on a medical.''

Or something, I don't know what it was.

''But I'm going to New York from here. I'm not coming home.''

Because Jimi left home because he didn't like it in Seattle

because my dad was on him constantly about playing music

and yelling at him and screaming at him about he'll never make it.

''You need to start working with your hands.''

Jimi said, ''I am working with my hands.''

''Did you ever notice that when I play guitar, I use both my hands?''

And my dad said, ''Don't talk back to me!''

But Ray Charles loved him

because he was the best guitar player in Seattle at the time.

And then all the bands loved him.

He played with James Thomas and the Tom Cats,

he played with the Rocking Kings,

he played with Luther Rabb and the Stags.

They would hire him on Friday for the gig and fire him on Sunday,

and Jimi was very happy with that.

So he could play at home and do his crazy shit,

experiment and do all the stuff he wanted to do by himself,

because he was still the greatest guitar player in Seattle at 15.

He'd been playing for almost four years

without anybody giving him any attention.

Jimi started going to New York City and hanging out in Harlem

and being exposed to different sources.

He was happy. He was laughing all the time.

He said, ''I'm playing at the Cafe Wha?, I've got a girlfriend and a car,

I'm making $100 a week and I'm loving it!''

He said, ''Leon, I'm on tour with Little Richard!''

I'm going, ''Wow!''

And then the next week he said, ''OK, I'm on tour with Tina Turner now.''

I'm going, ''Wow!''

He said, ''Yeah, you know, Little Richard fired me.''

''Your brother was just too pretty. Too pretty!''

You know? He said, ''I'd like to...'' Because he was gay.

He wouldn't always wear the uniform

and Richard would get mad and he'd fine the people.

Jimi was making something like $25 a gig.

When Little Richard gave him a $25 fine, he'd make nothing for the gig.

Solomon Burke, the great soul singer,

claimed that Jimi was traded among these bands,

almost like you'd swap baseball players in Major League baseball.

One band would trade Jimi. ''We can't work with him any more.''

''We'll trade you for a horn player and a drummer to be named later.''

But Jimi played with everybody, but nobody for very long.

It wasn't the success that Jimi found in England that made him a great player.

Instead, it was the lack of success

that gave him a purpose to explore his own muse.

Across 110th Street was black New York and below that was white New York

and the musicians did not interact.

And there's four clubs

on Bleecker Street in New York.

Jimi, however, was the only African- American guy playing in the Village,

and then he'd go up to Harlem and play there, too.

But one day he went up to Harlem to an African-American club,

went up to the DJ booth and said, ''I got a great new single I want to play.''

He goes and he puts on Bob Dylan's Blowii'ii the Wiid.

Jimi loved Bob Dylan.

He would say, ''Listen to this, Leon.'' Because he was such a poet.

They probably would have killed him

ifthey didn't think he was crazy for doing this.

He was encouraged by Dylan. Thinking he had a terrible singing voice,

he found out what you could do with a terrible singing voice.

He admired Bob Dylan as a songwriter and that's why he did some of his songs.

And he loved soul music and, to a degree,

what he created with the Jimi Hendrix Experience

was a combination ofthose two things.

It was like the punk thing in a way, Dylan.

He demonstrated that you could make great records and sing great songs

without being a master singer.

Jimi's deep admiration for Dylan

inspired him to record All Along the Watchtower.

The finished version was released on the album Electric Ladylaid

in September 1968.

The Johi Wesley Hardiig album, I think he brought that back from the States,

and he loved it.

Absolutely loved it.

That was played and played. And I liked it as well.

After a while, even I sort of was into it, so he played it a lot.

And he wanted to do a Bob Dylan cover.

Nobody else except for Bob Dylan does he want to do this with,

and he wanted to do I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine.

For some reason, he just loved that track,

but he thought that was too personal to Bob Dylan.

So I said, ''What about All Along the Watchtower?''

I played the acoustic guitar on it,

with Jimi sitting opposite me kind of doing all that...

All that kind of accent stuff.

But pretty much, it was...

That's pretty much what I play underneath it.

And it's sort of...

Dave Mason was in this little studio with Brian Jones

and Jimi was in the main studio.

And anyway, they did it and when he'd finished,

everybody behind the console just stood up and went, ''Wow!''

''Can we believe that?''

It was me and him and Mitch.

The first time I heard Jimi Hendrix play,

I figured, ''I should probably go find another instrument to play.''

But...

So anyway, I think you know what this tune is.

It was a period oftime when we were hanging together.

Like I said, we were sort of hinting at maybe playing bass with him.

So that's kind of how that came about.

The solo's actually three different solos, really.

The slide part,

he played it with it sitting on his lap with a cigarette lighter.

And then the last part of it is a different tone.

There's really three different sections to that solo

in the middle of Watchtower, if you listen to it.

Most ofthat track was pretty much done in...

I don't know. A lot of it was done in a day.

But he still wasn't happy with it.

No, no, no. Not Jimi.

He had to do it over and over and over again.

He had to take it to the States and do it.

See, that's the thing with Jimi.

He needed someone to stop him from doing this.

This is the trouble, the problems that he had with Chas Chandler.

Chas Chandler was ofthe old school of a four-minute pop song, see?

Whereas Jimi wanted to go on for hours!

It was really tedious.

Because only he could hear what he needed.

To you or me, it sounded just like he had it right anyway.

And then he would go on for another six hours.

He was creating new things that weren't even there to invent.

They had to come up with stuff at Olympic for him

to get things that he wanted to do.

- Like guitar sounds, you mean? - Sounds and...

I think they actually built a couple of limiters and stuff in there for him.

In those days, I think the restrictions upon you to make any different sounds

inspired you instead of discouraging you, for some reason.

But we were all fucking optimists in those days anyway, you know what I mean?

He had nobody there helping, supervising in the studio,

and so consequently he was doing take after take after take after take,

and running through tapes,

and everybody was a little bit afraid to erase anything,

and so consequently the tapes were just piling up in the studio

with no usable material on it.

And so I just started to help from a production point ofview.

I think that...

I've been criticised for saying what I'm going to tell you,

but it's the truth as far as I'm concerned.

You couldn't produce Jimi Hendrix, you could only help him produce himself.

He knew what he wanted to do but he didn't know how to get there or why.

So you could only try to help the situation with the musicians,

with the studio, with the production part of it.

It was all about work. No goofing off, no messing around.

People come in there and start to goof off,

he'd just tell them to get out, leave, get out of here.

He was very serious about what he was doing.

In early June, 1967, the Beatles' Sgt Pepperalbum

was released in England and was a massive phenomenon.

Everyone in England was listening to the album.

Two days later, the Experience were playing at London's Saville Theatre,

Brian Epstein's place and obviously the Beatles' home turf.

Jimi insisted on opening the show with his own rendition

of Sgt Pepper's Lonely hearts Club Band.

Members ofthe Beatles and the Rolling Stones

and many others were in the audience. It was obvious the guy had balls.

If Jimi would have fucked that up, his career would have been over that moment.

Paul McCartney apparently was there

and went straight out and bought a guitar the next day

and thought, ''You know, this guy is something special.''

''I'm going to learn how to play blues guitar.''

Afterwards, Paul McCartney says, ''You need to play the Monterey Pop Festival.''

It was at Monterey the first time I heard him play.

That was the day that I met him.

He was kind of new to all of us here on the West Coast.

I'm there in my full-blown Indian headdress.

This whole Monterey scene was not as friendly as everybody thought.

Everybody wanted to be a big star

and everyone saw this as their launching pad,

so they flipped a coin to see who was going to go first.

Hendrix loses and he's pissed about it.

But he's going to top them somehow, and vice versa.

He's backstage and says, ''Get me lighter fluid. I've got to top these guys!''

And it was absolutely amazing,

and I was all day with a crush of people photographing him

setting his guitar on fire and all that voodoo stuff.

When Jimi started smashing his stuff, Mama Cass turned to Pete Townshend

and said, ''That guy, he's stealing your act!''

And Townshend's response is, ''No, he's doing my act!''

I mean, he came out there all colourful, and the way he made it talk.

He could just make the guitar talk!

And it was coming from an African-American performer

who had been in that blues tradition, who had known the chitlin' circuit,

who had known the degradation and segregation ofthe American South,

and who brought his own angle and take to the music.

Hendrix playing guitar with his teeth, picking the guitar with his teeth,

it was just mind-blowing.

He did his 20-, 30-minute set and people were just gobsmacked.

The day that performance was over, the moment it was over,

he was the biggest star in America that moment.

He was unheard of 45 minutes before. No one knew who he was!

I think I had heard HeyJoe a couple oftimes,

which is a folk tune that I knew.

I just loved the energy of it and the anarchy ofthe whole thing.

The only part I disagreed with was burning the guitar,

because we'd all been poor not very long before.

So the idea of destroying an instrument was appalling.

The only thing was is I remember how hard guitars were to get

so I've only broken, on purpose, a couple of guitars in my career.

Some say the sound ofthe wind rushing past his ears

and the roaring of a drop plane heard during his time in the army,

might have influenced his desire

to subconsciously recreate those sounds on his guitar.

We happened to clean out this lady's garage,

and there was a ukulele there with one string on it.

One old raggedy ukulele.

And the first song he played was Peter Gunn.

Remember? OK. Because it was simple; you can play it one string.

So he kind of figured out that,

''If I tighten the string, I can go to another key note, right?''

That's what he did to the music that night when the Top 40 came on.

He'd figured out that... He only had one string, right?

But he knew that if he lowered it, he could lower the key,

and if he tightened it he can higher the key.

He finally got to where he was playing songs on one string on a ukulele.

Not only could he virtually play anything,

somebody could say, ''This song's in this key,''

and he could pick it up immediately.

He had an intuition about music.

I guess he could feel the music.

He could feel the notes, he can do all that shit.

Al didn't like Jimi playing the guitar anyways,

but if Jimi was playing left-handed and Al came in the room,

Jimi would just simply flip it over immediately.

But the fact that he could continue mid-song doing that is the amazing part.

When my dad found out he was playing left-handed, my dad gave him a whupping.

I mean, he's a great lead player. Hands down, everybody knows that.

But he was a phenomenal rhythm player.

He was a phenomenal picker for arpeggios and that kind of stuff.

But he also did amazing two-note sort of riff kind ofthings.

He really had it all going on.

I mean, you can be of any style of guitar player,

from jazz to rock, blues, whatever, and appreciate Jimi's playing,

because he was really tapped into so many different things.

And all delivered with this unique style.

It really made him just a fascinating fucking musician.

The fingers on his right hand, when he played leftie,

were so strong that it almost sounded like he was playing bottleneck.

So that's why...

I think Jeff Beck is almost as strong,

and Eric on occasion.

Stevie Ray Vaughan had that, too,

where they're digging in so hard, it almost sounds like bottleneck.

He had really big hands, right?

And he had just a way of knowing where these notes were.

He'd drape his fingers over the strings in such a way

that he knew exactly what he was hitting and what he shouldn't be hitting.

But if you look at the way that he formed chords,

they were unique to him.

He was the guy that in rock guitar, I think,

made draping your thumb over for the bass note

and doing the other four fingers for the high notes as a bar chord.

I don't recall too many guitar players doing that before he came along.

- Hands like tarantulas. - And he used his thumb a lot, right?

I used to say to him, ''You should have been a fucking pickpocket.''

He made a lot of chords with his thumb over.

That would be halfthe chord. Then he could play lead underneath it.

I can't bend this finger back, right?

But he could definitely bend it back.

He had the flat 9, the minor 7 flat 9 chord,

which is in Purple Haze and Foxy Lady, and he used it a lot,

where he could drape his ring finger over all the strings

and not hit them with the bottom of his finger.

He could bend this to lay it down over three strings.

He had a unique way of forming chords. It was very natural to him.

He liked the fact of having a Strat upside down,

because the pick-ups came in at a certain angle.

The only thing it affected

was that he had the whammy bar under his arm, at the top.

So he could use the whammy bar without taking his hand offthe strings.

That was the only advantage it gave him, but it's a big advantage.

He played upside down backwards. He was like a dyslexic genius.

He used to play on a broom.

Do air guitar to Chuck Berry and Mickey & Sylvia,

and black artists like Muddy Waters and stuff like that.

Jimi was wah-wah man. That guy could use a wah-wah pedal.

I've seen the rigs that these new guitar players have.

There's $20,000 worth of pedals in an Anvil case, man.

They're dancing and pushing pedals and they're trying to play chords.

They're so busy technologically.

Jimi took a wah-wah pedal and feedback

and did what these guys are doing with $20,000 rigs.

When it came to performing live, he had a pretty limited pedal board,

which was a Fuzz Face and the octave thing, the octaver,

and the wah-wah pedal, and it was pretty simple.

And that's all he had, really.

He didn't have any effects apart from that.

And the things he used to do with that guitar was just beyond all reason.

He just holds it up in front of him

and it's going all over the place but he's not moving it, hardly.

It's like, ''Wow, man, where do you come up with that?''

It's a clever thing.

You can do a lot of different speeds with it,

you can do a lot of different stuff.

You can use a long one right through half a verse.

It's only been pushed once,

and you can do it really fast and get that ''wah-wah-wah''.

So he was constantly experimenting with shit like that.

You listen to some ofthe stuff live.

We always used to go see him at Winterland, the Fillmore East,

the Avalon Ballroom.

I'd stand behind the amps and I'd go,

''Look at this guy. This guy's controlling his feedback.''

Like, most guys hit a chord,

and when it dissolves, it doesn't dissolve into a melody.

It dissolves into white noise and it don't go anywhere.

Jimi could make his guitar sound like a race car.

I'd look at that guy and go, ''Wow, how's he doing that?''

Nobody's ever done that before or since.

Nobody's ever had that much control over it. You know what I mean?

He'd have a pause in the song and he'd hit a thing.

It would be feedback out of control, but in the right note and controlled.

I don't think that he was controlled at all.

I think that when he pushed the human button,

he was just totally out of control.

Jimi used to have an expression. He always used the word ''sounds''.

He would use it at the end of his sentence, and so on.

All sounds fascinated him, you know?

Whenever he heard a sound, he thought,

what could he do with it or how could he play with it

or how could he manipulate it?

And so feedback and wah-wah and all those things

were just some additional methods for him to get at some more sounds.

Jimi told me one time, ''Leon, I wish the guitar was a bigger instrument,

because I have so much music to play but I'm limited.''

''I've got six strings and I have to deal with six strings.''

So he was very smart, so he said,

''I think I'll tune to E flat, give myself an extra fret.''

He knew what he wanted to do and he knew what he wanted to hear,

and he knew the sounds he was trying to create that he heard in his head.

He just went for it. He tried to create those sounds.

If he heard something that was right by moving closer to his amplifier,

he would.

He was just fearless.

He was very experimental with a lot of electronic gadgets that he used to use.

And he said, ''Make me this little box

that makes my chords and my notes and tones sound fuzzy.''

So this... Now they call them nerds.

Before we called them very intellectual engineers.

They invented this little box that he could plug his guitar into

and then go into the amp.

And he got this fuzz... warm fuzz tone.

The fuzz box basically comes out of Jimi's stuff, really,

but what he was doing in the studio with what he was laying down

was very different, too, and the way he was approaching it.

I think he's the most innovative electric guitar player.

I've sat with him...

I sat with him a couple of nights and he'd just always have a guitar.

He'd just sit and play, and just play and play

and never repeat himself and come up with something.

He had a little arsenal of gear and he was, from what I'm told,

really fascinated with different little pieces of electronic wizardry

that he used to emphasise whatever it was he was trying to communicate.

But as just a straight-ahead guitar player with his most basic approach,

it was a Marshall turned all the way up, the guitar and a wah-wah pedal.

He didn't need much. Just a loud amp and a guitar!

He came to me and said, ''I like that gear.''

So I said, ''Well, come to my shop in Hanwell.''

''Mitch'll bring you, and we'll talk about it.''

So he came and he said, ''I just want to play Marshall.''

He said, ''I will need probably three ofthose stacks.''

And almost in the next breath, he said, ''I don't want anything given to me.''

''I want to pay the full retail price.''

He said, ''What I want is service wherever I am in the world.''

And we were never called out once.

But then Jimi bought four complete stage setups

to have them in different parts ofthe world

so he wouldn't have to transport them too far, wherever he was playing.

Marshalls are really good.

Naturally I wanted the loudest, the biggest amp possible.

As long as you have the loudest and biggest,

then you can bring it down to whatever level you want, or keep it there.

A double stack of Marshalls is by definition super-loud.

That's 16 speakers and two 100-watt heads,

but in series, so already, the voltage was taken down a little bit.

But it was very warm and fuzzy and all-embracing

and was plenty loud for us.

I don't think you could have turned any other amp up

to the volume that Hendrix did with a Stratocaster

and got it to sound like that.

I remember seeing bands since where I had to leave the stage

where I was standing alongside ofthe stage

because my molars hurt so bad from just being overwhelmed.

And Jimi was never that loud.

He was just a regular stack of Marshalls loud, which was plenty enough.

It's more the player, who that person is.

You find something that you identify with,

be it an amplifier, a guitar or a pedal or whatever it is,

and if you like it, if it appeals to you, it becomes part of your thing,

and that's part ofthat individual.

Jeff Beck was another guy that took a Strat with a Marshall

and cranked it all the way up.

Then there's a myriad of guys that it doesn't work with.

For me, a Strat and a Marshall never worked.

A Les Paul and a Marshall worked.

Each individual has how they communicate what they want to sound like.

Believe me, those of us that kept using that kind of amplifier

are paying by having to wear these.

He has moments of being in your standard blues kind ofthing,

but he'll use some unorthodox notes,

which is probably one ofthe key things that I picked up from him.

He exposed a chord that he could feed back, use his wah-wah, hit a chord,

it would come out ofthat dimension, that thing he hit where it was like...

There are certain key notes that make rock sound like rock,

and there's other notes that you can use and get outside ofthat box

and go back to certain key notes.

He was really good at doing that. I always wanted to be able to do that.

Jeff Beck is actually one ofthe masters of doing it,

ofjust using unconventional phrasing but still getting a rock sound.

But he'd tune up while he was playing,

which I've never seen anybody else do either.

He'd go...

Every time I listen to a Hendrix album,

I always walk out ofthat room feeling like a warm puppy.

It was very warm.

He used the lead pickup on a Strat, the one that's all the way up,

and he stayed that way most ofthe time.

Actually it would be all the way down.

A great tone, it was very round.

Even when he was screaming, it still had some weight to it.

Probably one ofthe biggest gifts that he had was he was insanely fluid.

It was like Jimi flowed through the music.

He never thought about it.

It was back in the day when spontaneity was the thing,

and you'd go up there and say what you had to say that given evening,

as opposed to it being like a rehearsed, choreographed show every single night.

So you'd go up there on the spur ofthe moment

and play your songs the way that you felt them that day,

and even then, he just had amazing tone and amazing control.

As great a guitar player as Jimi was, he was also a phenomenal showman

and knew how to rise to the occasion

when needed to get past the barriers to make a performance happen.

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

All the flashy stuffthat you think about when you think of Jimi Hendrix,

lighting the guitar on fire,

playing with your teeth, playing behind your back,

every one had been done by somebody else before Jimi Hendrix.

He didn't invent any ofthem, but he managed to put them into this show

and to play it to a different audience.

To a degree, he was brilliant marketer.

The idea ofthe show was a big deal in African-American culture and in R&B.

It was not a deal in white rock.

Jimi took the African-American R&B show and integrated it into rock.

That was a touch that no one had been able to do before.

Freddie King, Albert King,

those two guys were guys that Jimi stole the big part oftheir routine.

T-Bone Walker had done a lot of the stuffthat Jimi had done beforehand,

but within the blues and in that circuit, nothing's patented.

Every performer is constantly stealing and learning from other people.

No one had patented the idea of playing the guitar with your teeth,

and you couldn't,

but when people thought of it, they soon thought of Jimi Hendrix

and not the 20 guys who'd done it beforehand.

So many musicians right now are playing 20 times better

than any Chuck Berry or any Fats Domino.

I'm not putting these people down.

I'm just saying that music is better now.

People don't know it. It's right in their faces.

It's so much better.

They have to have gimmicks and imagery to go by.

Ifthey don't have these things, they know nothing about music.

That's how some people think, which is a big fat drag sometimes.

I've just actually remembered another show I did with Jimi Hendrix

in Zurich in Switzerland.

It was in one ofthose indoor cycling arenas.

Three reasons I remember it.

One is that when I was doing the show with John Mayall,

somebody ran up the cycle track and stole one of John Mayall's harmonicas

and started running around the cycle track with it.

There were people chasing after him.

I remember standing at the side of the stage for Jimi Hendrix's show.

I was standing there with Jon Hiseman, John Mayall and a few other people.

And it was phenomenal.

The power and the intensity and his sense oftiming were just so good.

He was a great performer as well.

What a player. Just phenomenal stage presence.

He was this completely wild thing on stage.

Setting fire to his guitar and changing songs midway through,

having sort of like no respect,

but, like, ''I am the man and just look at me and listen to me.''

Then he'd come off stage

and be this incredibly mild mannered, very well mannered...

If a lady came in, he'd always stand up and he'd shake hands.

Very polite, well spoken.

He was this complete Jekyll and Hyde character.

There was a sort of dichotomy

between his off-stage persona and his on-stage persona.

He was very extrovert and explosive on stage,

but off stage, he was very quiet and gentle and almost shy in a way.

He was incredibly well mannered off stage. He was really quiet.

But on stage, he was this howling demon.

Chicks used to like a bad guy a lot better in those days.

There was certainly a persona that he put on.

And I'm not saying that it was like Alice Cooper,

but Alice is a good example of someone who had created a persona.

He only felt comfortable when he was playing the guitar.

He was trying to create this character, Jimi Hendrix,

but he was trying to combine the lyricism of Bob Dylan

with the show of the African-American R&B review,

with the calypso look on stage.

It was a mix ofthese disparate elements,

and he did it and put it all together and made it magic.

If you look at Jimi then

and you go, ''This guy's wearing these pirate shirts, these puffy shirts,

these slick things; that looks like calypso.''

So, to a degree, Jimi takes all these different elements around him.

He combines the calypso shirt with what he calls Bob Dylan hair.

That's what Jimi was trying to do, give himself Bob Dylan hair.

He loved Dylan so much he wanted to look like Dylan.

He was African-American. He couldn't.

The later thing like Madonna, wearing all her clothes at the same time.

Sometimes it was like that, a bit.

He was really lanky,

and he moved like a spider on greased rollers.

He sort of made it all work.

He was a good-looking guy.

We used to call him the Bird.

And I said, ''Why?'' He said because he had such skinny legs.

You'd never seen anything like him for women either.

Women would just go fucking nuts the minute he walked on stage.

Boyfriend forgotten.

Down the front, bras on the stage, the whole thing.

He was just a snake for chicks, and it was anything remotely approaching...

It was like the Elvis thing: take a number and wait.

If I get up at seven o'clock in the morning and I'm really sleepy,

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

or like, first of all, thinking of all...

First of all, I say, ''What in the world is she doing here?''

''What does she want?'' or something like that.

She says, ''Can I come in?''

And I'm standing there and really digging her.

She's really nice-looking.

To tell you the honest-to-God truth,

she's about 19, 20, or beyond the age of so-and-so.

And so I'll probably stand there,

and then, they're inviting me to a nightclub maybe or something.

That's the truth. That's the way I am because I...

When it comes to that, you know...

The prime-most idea in all our heads then,

and I think I can speak for more than just myself at that time,

was that we just wanted to ball every chick in sight, basically.

That was the prime moving object.

We just used to have a continual party.

Like most human beings, he liked to have somebody, some company,

and he liked to have a girlfriend, somebody with him,

until he got his confidence.

It took a while for him to build up enough confidence.

He was quite shy and reserved.

He wasn't the sort of person that would walk into a place

and start making conversation with everybody who was around.

The new group with the Monkees is called the Jimi Hendrix Experience,

and theyjoin the Monkees' concert tour ofthe US.

They weren't in there in the beginning, just the past couple of days.

We're keen to bring you the Monkees in Detroit on July 29th.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience will be with the Monkees.

I was in New York doing a press junket I think for the Monkees.

Somebody said, ''You've got to come down to the Village, so-and-so's playing.''

''There's this guy playing tonight that plays guitar with his teeth.''

That was what he was known as, the guy that plays guitar with his teeth.

I was like, ''Cool, man. That would be cool. Alright, yeah.''

I just remember going down to the Village, ending up in this club,

sitting there, and sure enough there's this guy playing guitar with his teeth.

So, fast forward, '67 Monterey Pop Festival.

On come these three guys, and I look up and I go,

''Wait! That's the guy that plays guitar with his teeth!''

We happened to be looking for an opening act at the time.

I thought, ''Well, he's very theatrical. He'd be a great opening act!''

Can you imagine, especially in the South?

One ofthe first dates was in the deep South somewhere,

and all of a sudden, this black guy comes on

dressed like a cross between Ronald McDonald and Charlie Manson.

And he's like...

I don't think it was so much the fans.

They wanted to see the Monkees.

But it was probably more the parents that were like, ''What? Jesus!''

It was tough for him because nobody knew who he was,

certainly not in the Monkees' demographic,

which was essentially ten-year-old girls, 12-year-old girls.

But he ran into the same problem

that a lot of acts have opening for any other big act.

You've heard the classic stories of Guns N' Roses opening for the Stones,

and it's like, ''Hey, where's Mick?''

Well, exactly the same thing happened,

and I tell the story on stage all the time. It's like...

''We want Davy! We want the Monkees!''

''Micky, Mike and Monkees!''

So I could see how that could frustrate anybody.

I mean, I'd like to think that maybe it helped a little bit.

But I have no doubt

that Jimi Hendrix would have done just fine without the Monkees.

That was a publicity stunt because they knew they'd fire him.

They couldn't keep Hendrix on the bill with the Monkees. It was impossible.

He'd just wipe them out every night,

or alienate the audience altogether.

So that was a plot to get him fired and get his name out in America.

I was hired by TigerBeat to go on the tour.

But they didn't hire me until about a week after the tour started.

So when I actuallyjoined the tour, the afternoon,

I walked into the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium

just as Jimi Hendrix was exiting the stage for the last time.

So I didn't actually get to see him play any ofthose concerts.

However, we all went back to the Warwick Hotel in New York City

where the Monkees had the whole floor to themselves and their entourage

and security at the elevators,

because they were as popular as the Beatles at that point.

So we were all in the hallway and Jimi Hendrix was there

and Micky and Davy and all my friends,

and somebody was passing out these little white pills.

This was the '60s, you know...

We were free, and so I took one, everybody took one.

It was psilocybin, which is quite a powerful psychedelic.

We all went off on our ways into the evening,

and I went down to Greenwich Village

where I had lived for a while, and knew my way around,

and I went into a little hamburger place there,

right near Bleecker and MacDougal.

I'm sitting there trying to get it together to order

and I look up and in the doorway comes Jimi Hendrix.

And he sees me sitting across the room

and he comes and he sits down next to me.

So we're both like little boys with these big wide eyes,

watching these people,

He would say, ''What is that guy doing?''

And I would say, ''I think he's eating a hamburger.''

And then you'd see some guy like...

It was like being at the zoo.

We were like two little boys at the zoo at feeding time.

He had some kind of capacity to take more drugs than anybody else.

People tell stories of being backstage where everyone else took half an acid,

he took 20 and still managed to play the way that he did.

It probably helped that he was always cataclysmically stoned.

We all were then. It was what everybody was doing: acid, lots of acid.

If it showed any signs ofwearing off, you'd take another five.

In the end, we were eating them like Dolly Mixtures.

Because they said that acid doesn't work two days in a row.

We found out if you double the dose, it does.

So we were doing all that stuff.

That's not what made Jimi Hendrix a great guitar player.

I don't think drugs had anything to do with it,

but I think some of the experimenting that he did

and some ofthe crazy sort of sonic things that he got away with

had a lot to do with drugs.

Made it a little bit more colourful.

It affected everything. Acid affected you completely.

It wasn'tjust get high and doze off.

I mean, acid was a roller coaster.

The original pure stuff was a great drug.

But it sent a lot of people to the basket-weaving factory.

He felt that drugs opened up his mind to colours, to a variety of other things.

He used colours, colours corresponding with notes.

He developed this thing called energy-sound-colour-dynamics

that he thought that...

See, he wanted to hold music but he never could,

because music is a spirit, music has no body.

So that's why he wrote that song that music drops through my fingers.

Soft music is blues and greens and purples.

Hard rock 'n' roll like Foxy Lady is like red and orange.

Well, that's kind of a contemporary view.

You had to be there for that one.

He simply couldn't have accomplished all he did in the four years of fame.

He played over 600 concerts, he recorded four albums,

he recorded countless other things that were never released.

He couldn't have done that all if he was as fucked up as everybody says.

Noel was getting more and more frustrated

by the fact that he was not playing the guitar, his favourite instrument.

They were seeing less and less of each other.

Jimi ended up playing many ofthe bass parts in the studio

on Electric Ladyland.

Jimi was also toying with the idea of having different bass players

and wanted to form his own band.

He flew his army buddy, Billy Cox, up to New York

and started recording and rehearsing with him as a replacement for Noel.

When I moved to Britain, and started making the solo albums,

and I started it and Jimi was around.

He ended playing on a song from that album called Old Times Good Times,

and then he shocked the hell out of me by saying,

''That should be the first one for our record.''

We fit together really nicely because I had a good, strong sense of rhythm.

I would have put down the guitar and picked up the bass for him.

He liked the way I played bass.

That was the first I heard that we were going to have a band.

At the time, there was a little rift going on within the Experience,

and there was talk of Noel leaving.

And Jimi and I had actually talked about me joining on bass.

There's some tracks hidden somewhere

of me playing bass and sitar and stuffthat we did together.

But Jimi played bass on pretty much all of Electric Ladylaid.

But Noel really hated playing bass. He wanted to be a guitar player.

''That fucking Hendrix, stealing all the limelight.''

''I was the best guitarist in Kent, you know,'' he'd say.

Imagine. But then Noel started making demands.

He brought his own band on the tour in '69.

Fat Mattress, they were called. What an inspiring name.

They had two ofthe Flowerpot Men,

a British band who were cashing in on the flower thing.

And they were really, really awful.

I'm afraid so.

That Little Miss Strange, that song on Electric Laidlady,

that's Noel's first composition,

which will give you a good idea of his later compositions.

Mitchell was a fantastic drummer. He was like Keith Moon.

They wouldn't have fit,

except there's certain people, like Moon fitted with Entwistle and Townshend,

and Mitch fitted with Hendrix perfectly,

because he could fill in or drop it down.

He was a great drummer. A jazz drummer.

Jimi's problems seemed to get worse.

The Experience was breaking up,

he was arrested for drug possession at the Toronto Airport,

and his loyal girlfriend was leaving him for good.

There were all these hangers-on that started to fly into London,

and just turn up at the door and invite themselves in,

or Jimi would invite them in and we couldn't shake them off.

And everyone was always on him and wanting something,

and he was constantly being followed around by people.

And he would come in the middle ofthe night,

and ditch his crowd and come and talk to me and Dan about life in general a lot.

I went to New York and we stayed in this suite.

And there was this guy

and he had a sports bag which he put down on the floor,

and it gaped open at the top.

I looked down and there was a gun on the top of all these bags of powder.

Jimi headlined Woodstock

with a hired five-piece band named Gypsy Sun and Rainbows

which he threw together without Noel.

This band didn't last long. They only played a couple more gigs together.

Along with Billy Cox,

Jimi lured in another one of his friends, drummer Buddy Miles,

and formed the Band of Gypsys.

But Jimi's performances were starting to slip

and Buddy Miles claimed that his manager, Michael Jeffery,

dosed Hendrix with LSD to sabotage the band

and bring back the Experience line-up.

Let me tell you something about Jimi.

He used to call us up when he was playing.

Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, or Maurice James.

He had these names that he would make up and he would want to do it.

That's the happiest time he ever was.

He'd call up laughing, saying, ''Leon, I got a car, I got a '57 Plymouth.''

''I have to turn it a hundred times before it turns.''

''It don't run good, but I'm rolling in Manhattan.''

''I got an apartment, I got a girlfriend.''

He was making $100 a week. He said, ''I'm making $100 a week, Leon!''

''And I'm happy.''

But when he got famous, thatjoy was never there again.

He didn't like being a star much.

Because at the Isle of Wight, which I was at, that last show,

he was really, really bad.

He wouldn't do his hits for halfthe show.

He was doing all his weird squiggly stuff he'd been doing at home

in the basement recording studio.

I think he went offthe rails in about mid-'68.

He started listening to people around him.

''Everything's great, do what you like.''

You couldn't order Jimi about,

and that was one ofthe problems that his management had with him.

Jimi was going to do what he wanted to do.

The biggest problem in life from a musical point ofview

is that he wanted to stay in the studio and record,

and his business people were constantly trying to push him on the road

to earn more money.

They were spending a lot of money.

They took a lot of money from Warner Brothers to build a studio,

and they owed money back, and so there were a lot of financial problems.

And the only way to solve those problems was to keep Jimi out on the road

earning, you know, the cash.

I didn't care for Michael Jeffery, for one thing,

because I heard that he was giving Jimi dope.

That's what I had heard. I don't know how that was.

Next thing I know, a few months later or years, he was dead.

Jim Morrison said when the music stops, turn out the lights,

and that's what kind of happened backstage.

Putting the guitar into the case

and a couple of girls popped their heads round the corner,

''Come on, man, let's go.''

''See you, Jimi.'' ''Yeah, bye.''

He was dead two nights later. He was gone.

Jimi took me to the airport in a taxi, said goodbye.

I went back to New York, went to sleep,

and woke up in the morning

and got a telephone call that he had died on that Friday.

He died because ofthe incompetence ofthe ambulance crew

that was sent to save him.

Because he was alive when he got to the hospital,

against every fact that you get told.

He was still alive when he got to St Mary Abbots.

He died while they were trying to revive him.

I received a phone call. That's how I found out.

And it was sort of, I don't know, one ofthose panic calls.

''Should I do anything? What should I do?''

So I didn't advise as such.

I just took in the information

and said, ''Well, your only bet is to let people know who need to know.''

If he's not with us any more, that's it.

I had a phone call from Madeline Bell,

and she said, ''Are you sitting down?''

I said, ''No. What's the matter?''

She said, ''Get a chair.''

I said, ''Stop it, Madeline. What's the matter?''

She said, ''Get a chair, get a chair.''

So I got a chair. I said, ''I've got a chair.''

She said, ''Are you sitting down?''

I said, ''Yes.'' She said, ''Jimi's dead.''

I got the telephone call. Why I got the telephone call, I'll never know.

And I went over to the house and I found this note by the bedside

which he'd obviously written,

and to me, it was obviously like a suicide note.

It was a farewell note.

It finished with, ''The story of life is quicker than the winking of an eye.''

''The story of life is hello, goodbye, until we meet again.''

And I looked at this thing and went ''wow''.

I folded it up, put it in my pocket and went home.

I copied it and then I gave it to his girlfriend,

because I thought it was her property,

because I thought they were a real item.

I didn't realise until later that they'd just met.

That stupid Monika.

Of course, the way she tells it is that he was drinking wine and stuff

and they had had an argument and they had been fighting

and this and that and the other, and so when they went home,

he couldn't sleep, he had a headache, he was feeling bad,

but he had stomach problems.

''He seems to be vomiting and he's lying on his back.''

''I'll just leave him, see if he wakes up soon.''

If she'd just turned him over on his side or something.

But she says she didn't know that.

Great. Brilliant.

It wasn't until years later that I met a friend in New York

who was doing a documentary on Jimi

and he had tons of interviews with Monika Dannemann,

and I said, ''I'll do an interview for you

if you let me look at the Monika Dannemann interviews.''

So I watched all these interviews

and every time she talked on camera, it was a different story.

Her storyjust did notjive with what I saw on the ground

when I was there in his room when they were carting out the body,

and the coroner's report and what everybody else said.

Unfortunately, it seemed that he'd died

due to lack of interest from anybody. Nobody was there.

Two days later, I was supposed to be auditioning for bass player.

Which really pissed me off.

Inconsiderate bastard, dying when it was my audition.

I heard the news and I cried.

And I just thought to myself, ''We lost a great one.''

American blues guitarist Johnny Winter said,

''When I saw him backstage before the show, it gave me the chills.''

''It was the most horrible thing I'd ever seen.''

''He came in with this entourage of people

and it was like he was already dead.''

''He came in with his head down and sat on the couch alone

and put his head in his hands.''

The night that he died,

I was supposed to meet him at the Lyceum to see Sly Stone play,

and I'd brought with me a left-handed Stratocaster.

I'd just found it.

I think I bought it at Orange Music.

I'd never seen one before and I was going to give it to him.

And he was in a box over there and I was in a box over here.

I could see him, but we never got together,

and the next day, whack, he was gone,

and I was left with that left-handed Stratocaster.

To say that I wasn't surprised is really an overstatement.

It's not right at all.

Unfair.

Yeah, I thought it was pretty unfair.

And the aftermath is really sad.

Not when you know and understand that Jimi was very much part Indian

in his genes, in his DNA, and in his head, certainly.

They've moved his body twice.

I mean, you don't do that to an Indian. This is sacred stuff.

You can't hold down the coat tails of a whirlwind, as it were.

You can hang on for a while, but you can't tame that.

It's taken me years to get over it,

and I don't think that, still, there's a day goes by

where Hendrix doesn't enter my life.

It would have been interesting to know where Hendrix was going to go

if he hadn't passed away when he did.

Well, he never would have been a quiet, retired old man.

I can tell you what he wouldn't do,

but what he would do is probably too difficult to say

because I don't think he ever knew what he would have done himself.

I mean, I think he would have continued to explore and experiment

and make all kinds of discoveries.

Jimi was a very unique musician.

Of course, you know, that goes without saying,

but he was also a very unique person.

For him, there were no boundaries.

He got this electric orchestra into his head

that he was going to do with 20 guitar players or something, five drummers.

It would have been fucking horrendous.

Imagine that many guitar players trying to figure out who does the solo.

The big things that Hendrix was trying to do

was he'd established a certain thing and he'd done it,

and before he died, what he was grasping for was to go somewhere else,

and he was frustrated in that he was famous

and accepted for doing more or less one thing.

And he wanted to break out ofthat and reach another plateau,

and people weren't accepting that.

He wanted to write symphonies.

He said, ''Leon, I want a thousand violins over here

and a thousand cellos and French horns.''

He wanted to write like Beethoven.

He wanted to write symphony music and he wanted to be a conductor

and they wouldn't allow him. They said, ''You've lost your mind!''

''You need to play Purple Haze and Foxy Ladyto get paid!''

And Jimi said he hated to play Purple Haze.

We've been together for about two solid years,

and we've been playing Purple haze, The Wind Cries Mary,

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

which I think are groovy songs,

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

so we started improvising here and there.

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

As long as they're aware that we're trying to be a music group.

And I didn't realise until I saw Dick Cavett's show a few years later

when he was out ofthe Experience, it was all over, that he had actually...

Dick Cavett says, ''Well, Jimi, what are you going to do now?''

And Jimi goes, ''Well, man, I'm going back to my roots

and I'm going to play the blues.''

20 times in Jimi's career,

whenever anybody said, ''What do you want to do next?''

he said, ''I want a big band.''

In some ways he only got it...

People remember that when Jimi Hendrix was on stage at Woodstock,

there were half a dozen other players with him.

It wasn't the Jimi Hendrix Experience at that point with two other players.

He kept making a bigger and bigger band, but that big band was not embraced.

With the Band of Gypsys, he wanted that to be a big band again

and he ended up with a very small band, of course, once again.

I think he would have really screwed up, actually.

He was on his way to that when he died.

He had all these plans, grandiose orchestras of guitars and things.

I mean, I don't know. I don't think it would have worked

and I don't think people would have wanted to hear it either.

He would have gone into fusion.

But it still would have been R&B blues-rooted music.

Jimi, to me, was a searcher.

He was always looking to, like, do something different,

even though whatever he was doing at the time was working.

It still sounds great. It still... It's Hendrix.

It's, you know... It holds up.

Nobody's topped him. It's just so... You know, he's still the guy.

He is the greatest guitarist

because he was able to make those sounds that guitar players emulate to this day.

You go to any guitar player now and who do they listen to? Jimi Hendrix.

And to this day, Sony, all these fantastic Microsoft companies,

still cannot produce Jimi's sound.

But you can buy it.

You can buy a wah-wah pedal and say, ''Jimi Hendrix, right on it!''

But, listen, I bought so many wah-wah pedals searching for Jimi's shit,

it don't work good.

It's the individual person who is spinning those notes

and plucking that guitar.

And they can never duplicate that because Jimi's gone.

To me, his style was so indicative of his personality

because him and the guitar, probably more than any ofthe rock musicians

that I heard that came from that same period, were sort of one.

The guitar was just a real extension ofthe man himself.

First of all, he was egoless,

which made him into somebody special as far as I was concerned,

because all my life, I have been working with, quote, superstars,

and successful musicians.

He wasn't challenged by competition.

The biggest frustration for most musicians

is their head works faster

than their physical capacity to play their instrument.

I mean, that's the big frustration.

Your head is moving so fast, and your hands just can't deal with it.

Jimi never had that problem.

Jimi could play everything, anything he could think of,

and that gives you a capacity and a dimension

that I would say most musicians don't have.

I think you spend years and years trying to hear something in your head

and transmit it through the guitar as instantaneously as possible.

In other words, being able to express your thoughts with the instrument.

And it's something that takes years and years to master,

and he was just such a natural.

Maybe he was born that way.

Maybe he learned it on those years on the chitlin' circuit.

Maybe a bolt of lightning struck him at one point,

but somehow, that brain was wired and music was his gift.

He could do anything with music.

He was in cahoots with some kind of knowledge.

He was touched.

I think he was touched by God to do that music.

He touched into that ether that lies in between dimensions.

You ride it and it rides you, and it's from beyond.

There's no explaining it. I felt it.

Sometimes when you really get going,

just suddenly everything gets really easy.

He was like that most ofthe time,

because he was finally safe in front ofthose amps.

I think Jimi did things with guitars.

He took them simply into the ionosphere.

He did things with a guitar that not before or since,

to this day, in 2009,

that no guitar player has ever matched. I don't think they ever will.

For me, he set the standard.

I mean, he was the standard. He is the standard still to this day.

I don't know any guitar players that would deny that.

Hendrix was like a one-off.

You'll never see anything like him again.

You'll never see anybody have that much control of his instrument.

You'll never see anybody with that pure spirit, never,

because nowadays it's all for money.

Hendrix never thought about money a day in his life.

Everything that came out of Hendrix's guitar

was insanely melodic and totally human and emotional.

It came from a place that was very much heartfelt, you know,

so there's melody, there's song in just about every note that he hits,

which is one ofthe things that people are always trying to emulate,

but it's something that comes from within.

You can learn it, but you can only learn it to a certain extent.

Hendrix had the God-given talent

to be able to express himself completely with the instrument.

No individual artist playing the guitar and singing

has come along since then that I have been so impressed by.

I mean, Stevie Ray Vaughan came pretty close.

Eric Clapton I've always loved as a guitar player and as a person,

but Jimi Hendrix was just, well, a one-off.

If you analyse it, it destroys it.

He was how he was because it was how he was, you know?

The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts

in cases like Jimi Hendrix.

Yeah, he burnt bright, for a while.

He warmed the cockles of your heart.

If I had to tell that to Hendrix today, that's what I'd say to him.

''You've warmed the cockles of my heart.''

Hendrix was just other-worldly.

The emotional things that he had to express by way ofthe guitar.

He said, ''I want to fly. I want to keep on flying.''

He said, ''I'll go from star to star.''

He had altitude.

He kept climbing and climbing and climbing until the day he died.

Funny how that was his vision and that's what he did.

He said he was going to kiss the sky, and I guess he did.

So he's up there kissing the sky.

It's absolutely amazing to me what he achieved in those short 27 years.

That, to me, I think is the great legacy,

the work he created, those four years of fame.

He created a body ofwork that has spanned over 40 years since then,

and, you know, to me it's a life that is heroic for that reason.

He created this incredible body ofwork, however he died,

but that work will live on long past any of our own lives.

A few more years, a few more good things could have happened.

And long-lasting things, too, for himself personally.

He didn't have really have too much that was long-lasting for himself.

I really think that was his objective, to go home and be with his mother.

I think he always wanted to be with her.

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