"Jimi Hendrix Experience: this means musical balance, a way upwards, and adaptation of many different styles of guitar: blues, rock, gospel, soul, and concrete music in one. Enormously electrified, amplified by huge loudspeakers, distorted by modulations going head over heels, an ecstatic divine service is taking place on stage, a service that comes down to a fight with the instrument, moreover a conquest, with the obstacles being swept away, plucked, torn. The guitar shows what it can do, and Hendrix is the master. Musically he reaches far beyond the listening habits of his audience who is familiar with occidental harmonies...and his generally young public honors every varient with ecstatic applause...This is utopian music, very close to Free Jazz and 'Musique Concrete.' How else can we interpret the sound convulsions?...Into the droning of the instruments he throws code signals, key sentences which enlighten his own mentality as well as his audience's, who, in its enthusiasm, understands it all. Thus the event develops finally into an exorcism, into a future utopian sound painting, synthetic and abstract like the world that is to come...This aspect lifts Hendrix and his two musicians above the usual rock and beat groups. Here we can hear music which one day will enter the history of music as a revolution like bop or free jazz."

Wolfgang Vogel - Frankfurter Rundschau - Jan. 20, 1969

[NOTE: Years later, after Microsoft's Paul Allen arranged to destroy my career at the Hendrix company, the people who were given my job there used this Guitar School article as a blueprint for promoting the concerts that I single out here as exceptional performances. Today we can hear Jimi's Frankfurt recording, along with other live recordings described in this article (L.A. Forum 1970, San Jose 1969, Baltimore 1970, etc., etc.), featured on the Hendrix company website's "Digital Network" section, with comments claiming the relative specialness of these concerts over other shows by Jimi. But the people who run that website will never acknowledge that their decision to showcase these performances results from my Guitar School article. The truth is that they truly don't know the difference between a musically outstanding Hendrix performance and an average performance, so they lifted the insights from this 1990 Guitar School article, written while I was employed at the Hendrix company, yet they are careful to deny and conceal my influence in their decisions.]

1969 TOUR OF AMERICA

From April 11 to June 29, 1969, the Jimi Hendrix Experience toured through 25 American cities. They were the most in-demand and highest-paid touring band at that time. In my evaluation, the 12 concert recordings that have survived from this period represents the band's stage music at its most evolved. Jimi's instrumental work attains a startlingly new logic, balance, and resolution. Never before, nor since, has a rock musician so single-handedly broken so much ground with such stirring sophistication and grace.

In his book Hit And Run, author Jerry Hopkins describes Jimi's Toronto (5/3/69) show as "mediocre," it was obvious that Hopkins has never heard a tape of the Toronto show. That concert was one of Jimi's best! But surely no other live Experience recording reaches the dizzying heights of the San Jose Pop Festival (5/25/69). This is the musical equivalent to Jimi's visual blow-out at Monterey. San Jose is simply the best Experience (with Mitch & Noel) concert I've ever heard. Red House and Voodoo Child are among the greatest versions ever recorded. San Jose is Hendrix at his finger-lickin' slickest, steamrolling the band into one incredible climax after another.

"The king of rock held court here yesterday afternoon, sending nearly 20,000 of his subjects into stunned, delicious rapture...at the Northern California Folk Rock Festival at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds...[Hendrix] belted out the blues sound that won him Billboard Magazine's artist-of-the-year title this year.He played it hard, soft, slow, fast, cooking and wailing up and down with a thunder beat that brought the entire audience to its feet surging to the stage...Thousands stood arms flung skyward, both hands flagging the "V" peace symbol...Hendrix did strange magical things to his followers. He just barley worked up a sweat singing and playing seven long sets, including his hit tune Purple Haze. 'I'm going on the road, make a pile of dough, come back and buy this town and put it in my shoe,' he sang. And with a few more performances like Sunday's Hendrix might not be kidding. Totally pacified, whether by pot, blazing sun, or the rumble of sound from what must be the largest outdoor stereo system ever assembled, the onlookers stood in rapt attention or jived in place...Most fans preferred just to savour each of the heady notes and cried out for more." - San Jose Mercury News, May 26, 1969

"The first time I saw Jimi was at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds in San Jose. It was probably the most incredible concert I ever heard in my life. I have never heard him play better after that. The show was absolutely incredible. Jimi was at the peak of his art, at one moment he would get caught inside a proton or a neutron and the next minute he would throw you to the Milky Way. I've never been exposed to that drastic form of expression. Somebody actually recorded it that day. I listen to it and I'm still blown away. You can hear all these waves of spirits crying through his guitar. We were like - 'Oh my God! How can he do this?' It was scary, I had never heard anybody express electric music the way he did that day. It was incredible to be assulted with all these screaming winds. He would really control that instrument like a jazz player or a blues player would. It was like controlling a demon and making it sing."

Spanish Castle Magic at San Jose Pop Festival

Red House Pt. 1 at San Jose Pop Festival

Red House Pt. 2 at San Jose Pop Festival

The 1969 American tour concluded with stops at two huge festivals?

Newport 16mm film June 20, 1969 - Fire concert audio

Newport June 22 AllStar Jam 8mm Film with sound

Newport June 22 AllStar Jam 16mm Film with sound

Denver Pop Festival June 29, 1969 8mm Film with concert audio,
It Starts with Tear Gas Scenes, From a Riot That Broke Out
During Jimi's Last Show with the Original "Experience"

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A BAND OF GYPSYS - NEW YEAR CONCERTS

In 1968, Fillmore East owner Bill Graham declared his distaste for Jimi's stage antics. Legendary critic Ralph Gleason quoted Graham saying to Hendrix, "You got on the bloody stage and you gave them the tongue, and you socked it to that girl and she wet her pants...but what did you give her? Does she know that you really know something about phrasing slow blues?"

So no one was surprised when reports of a confrontation between Jimi and Graham were filtered through the press following four Band Of Gypsys' concerts (featuring Hendrix, bassist Billy Cox, and drummer Buddy Miles). The BOG performed two sets at Graham's Fillmore East on New Year's Eve 1969, and two sets the next night for New Years Day 1970. In Graham's own words, his rap at Jimi went like this: "[Jimi] played the first set. And we were changing audiences from the early show to the late show...And he said, 'What'd you think?' I said, 'Well, you were one big giant shuck, man...You were a shuck from the beginning to end...you humped the guitar and put fire to it and you stuck it behind your back and you picked it with your teeth...you did everything except one thing: You forgot to play! You stunk." According to legend, Jimi performed the remaining three shows stock still. Parts of these "stock still" performance were eventually released as Band Of Gypsys (Capitol).

New Years Eve First Show

Bill Graham was actually fond of Jimi and the two of them shared respect for each other. However, the recordings and videos of the New Year shows don't support Graham's colorful account of what took place on stage. The recording from that first show (which Graham panned) reveals that Jimi did not play a single note with his teeth. More importantly, there is no lapse in Jimi's consistently brilliant guitar work. If Jimi performed visual gyrations during that first show, they were few and extremely limited. In fact, the verv first Gypsys' show was the only one where Jimi refrained from playing familiar Experience hits. The recording reveals music either too complex or too well composed to have accommodated any guitar humping. If Jimi did contort himself, it certainly did not detract from the first-rate quality of his music!

The whole tenor of the first show was one of leaving the past Experience image behind. Unlike the later shows, Jimi remained in tune and completely in control of the music. This is also the only one of four shows to contain a formal blues, Bleeding Heart (aka Peoples, Peoples, Peoples), so Graham really shouldn't have been complaining about Jimi not showing that he "really knows something about phrasing slow blues." Each of the next three shows reached beautiful peaks, but these shows (after Jimi's confrontation with Graham) also contain out-of-tune guitar work and faltering passages. The point is that the very first show, when compared with the later three shows, is in fact the tightest, most exuberant and, as a whole, the best of the four.

[NOTE: The shot at right was included as a full page picture in the 1992 issue of GUITAR magazine where my article "Clearing the Haze" was published. While I was writing the article I got a phone call from a guy who said he took a single picture of Jimi at the New Years Eve concert, and it had never been seen nor published before. So the editor at GUITAR contacted the photographer and arranged to publish this picture.]

Bleeding Heart - Jimi's Blues at Fillmore East

How insipid it is that Rolling Stone put down this music saying the songs "sounded like Purple Haze...the lingering feeling that he has failed to grow." Melody Maker chimed in, calling Jimi's futuristic funk "old fashioned." (!?)

"You wouldn't know the difference anyway, those of you who forgot your ear goggles." - Jimi

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