The Legend of Jimi Hendrix

In 1966, he arrived in London an unknown. A week later, he was a superstar

By CHARLES R. CROSS

Jimi Hendrix took his first footsteps on British soil on Saturday, September 24th, 1966, arriving at Heathrow at nine in the morning. As he walked off the plane, he carried a small bag that contained a change of clothes, his pink plastic hair curlers and a jar of Valderma cream for the acne that still marred his twenty-three-year-old face. These few items, along with his precious guitar, were all he owned.

Escorting Jimi was Chas Chandler, formerly the bassist for the Animals, who was launching himself as a manager. Chandler had come upon Jimi in a Greenwich Village club and spilled a milkshake on himself, convinced that Jimi was his ticket to riches. Jimi was penniless at the time, having spent the previous three years as a backup musician on the chitlin circuit. Though Jimi had been born in Seattle, and didn't even begin to play guitar until he was fifteen, by the time Chandler met him he had already toured the nation with countless R&B combos, including Little Richard and the Isley Brothers. In Greenwich Village, fueled by both LSD and Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, Jimi was attempting to re-create himself as a solo act. He was playing to twenty teenagers when Chandler arrived, yet Jimi still only agreed to follow him to England if he promised to introduce him to Eric Clapton.

Once in England, Chandler immediately set out to turn Jimi into a star. On the way from the airport, they stopped by the house of bandleader Zoot Money. Jimi attempted to play his Stratocaster through Money's stereo, and when that failed, he grabbed an acoustic guitar and began to wail. Andy Summers, who a dozen years later would help form the Police, lived in the basement and heard the commotion. When he came upstairs to join the informal party and found himself mesmerized by how Jimi's huge hands seemed at one with the instrument's neck, he became the first of Britain's guitar players to be awed by Jimi's phenomenal skill.

Also rooming in the house was twenty-year-old Kathy Etchingham, who would soon also be smitten by Jimi. She worked as a part-time DJ and had dated Brian Jones, Keith Moon and a few other rock stars. Money's wife tried to wake her to tell her about the new sensation in the living room. She said, "Wake up, Kathy. You've got to come and see this guy Chas has brought back. He looks like the Wild Man of Borneo." The tag would later end up as one of Jimi's nicknames in the tabloids, a consequence of his unkempt physical appearance and his race, both of which were so unusual on London's music scene that he might as well have been a new anthropological discovery. The name was racist, of course, and the description would never have been used for a white musician. Still, Jimi enjoyed the nickname, as it sounded mysterious and foreign, qualities he hoped to cultivate.

Etchingham was too tired to take a peek at the so-called wild man, but later that evening she went for a drink at a club and discovered Jimi onstage. As he started to play blues tunes, the club went silent and the crowd watched in a sort of shared rapture. "He was just amazing," Etchingham recalled. "People had never seen anything like it." Eric Burdon of the Animals was one of the many musicians at the club that night. "It was haunting how good he was," Burdon said. "You just stopped and watched."

Walking out of the club, Jimi -- unaware that British cars drove on the left side of the street -- stepped in front of a taxi. "I managed to grab him and pull him back, and the taxi just brushed him," Etchingham said. Later, Jimi asked her to come to bed with him. She found him charming and handsome, and consented. They would stay together for the next two years, and Etchingham would be one of Jimi's longest-term girlfriends. She knew everyone on the scene, and she became his entree into Swinging London and friendships with the Who, the Rolling Stones and many other bands.

Jimi had been in England less than twenty-four hours and he'd already wowed a key segment of London's music scene, bedded his first English "bird" and narrowly avoided death. He had spent twenty-three years of his life struggling in an America where black musicians were outcasts within rock music. In one single day in London, his entire life had permanently been recast.

Chas Chandler's partner was Michael Jeffrey, the Animals' manager and a former British intelligence officer who did little to defuse sinister rumors that he had killed people as a spy. They placed a "musicians wanted" ad in Melody Maker, which drew in a twenty-year-old guitar player named Noel Redding. He had never before played bass, but Jimi liked Redding's frizzy hair, which reminded him of Dylan, and he was hired.

Even after Redding was hired, Chandler phoned Brian Auger, who led the blues-based jazz band the Brian Auger Trinity, and proposed a radical idea. "I've got this really amazing guitar player from America," Chandler told him. "I think it would be perfect if he fronted your band." Auger declined. As a fallback, Chandler asked if Jimi could at least jam with the Trinity at a show that evening. To this, Auger agreed.

The Trinity's guitarist, Vic Briggs, was setting up his gear when Jimi came onstage. Briggs was using one of the first Marshall amplifiers, an experimental model that had four six-inch speakers -- smaller than the later Marshall stacks but still capable of tremendous power. When Jimi plugged his guitar into the amp, he turned the amplifier volume knobs to their maximum, much to Briggs' amazement. "I had never had the controls up past five," Briggs said. Seeing Briggs' look of horror, Jimi said, "Don't worry, man, I turned it down on the guitar." He shouted out four chords and began.

The sound was a wall of feedback and distortion, which itself was enough to turn every head in the club; the moment also marked the beginning of Jimi's love affair with Marshall amplifiers. "Everyone's jaw dropped to the floor," Auger said. "The difference between him and a lot of the English guitar players like Clapton, Jeff Beck and Alvin Lee was that you could still tell what the influences were in Clapton's and Beck's playing. There were a lot of B.B. King, Albert King and Freddie King followers around in England. But Jimi wasn't following anyone -- he was playing something new."

Just a week after Jimi landed in England, Cream were playing a show at the Polytechnic in central London. Chandler bumped into Clapton a few days before and told him he'd like to introduce Jimi sometime. Meeting Clapton, of course, was the one promise Chandler had made to Jimi before they left New York. Clapton mentioned the Polytechnic gig and suggested Chandler bring his protege. In all likelihood, Clapton meant he would be glad simply to meet Jimi, but Jimi nonetheless arrived with his guitar. Chandler, Jimi and their girlfriends stood in the audience during the first half of the show, and Chandler called up to the stage and summoned Clapton over to ask if Jimi might jam. The request was so preposterous that no one in Cream -- Clapton, Jack Bruce or Ginger Baker -- knew quite what to say: No one had ever asked to jam with them before; most would have been too intimidated by their reputation as the best band in Britain. Bruce finally said, "Sure, he can plug into my bass amp."

Jimi plugged his guitar into a spare channel and immediately began Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor." "I'd grown up around Eric, and I knew what a fan he was of Albert King, who had a slow version of that song," recalled press agent Tony Garland, who was at the show. "When Jimi started his take, though, it was about three times as fast as Albert King's version, and you could see Eric's jaw drop -- he didn't know what was going to come next." Remembering the show later, Clapton said, "I thought, 'My God, this is like Buddy Guy on acid.' "

When Bruce told his version of the fabled event, he focused on Clapton's reaction and alluded to graffiti in London that proclaimed, "Clapton is God." "It must have been difficult for Eric to handle," Bruce said, "because [Eric] was 'God,' and this unknown person comes along and burns." Jeff Beck was in the audience that night, and he, too, took warning from Jimi's performance. "Even if it was crap -- and it wasn't -- it got to the press," Beck later said. Jimi had been in London for eight days and he had already met God, and burned him.

STILL LOOKING FOR A DRUMMER, Chandler phoned John "Milch" Mitchell, who had just left Georgie Fame's band, and asked him to audition. From its first rehearsals, the newly formed trio was startlingly loud. At one early practice, composer Henry Mancini appeared at the studio door and asked them to keep it down. Jeffrey came up with the name the Jimi Hendrix Experience. "We really were 'an experience,'" Redding said.

A month to the day after Jimi's arrival in England, Chandler took the band into the studio to cut "Hey Joe," its first single. For the B side, Jimi had suggested "Mercy, Mercy," but Chandler told him he'd have to write material of his own if he ever wanted to make money from music publishing. Though Jimi still felt unsure of himself as a songwriter, with Chandler's encouragement he wrote "Stone Free" in one evening, his first complete song.

The Experience then traveled to Munich, where Jeffrey had arranged a four-night stand at the Big Apple club. The band played two shows a night, common for its bookings during the next year. Jirni did his entire routine — which included humping his guitar, picking the guitar with his teeth and playing behind his back - twice each evening, and with each show the crowds were more enthusiastic. "That was really the first time we all knew something big was going to happen," Redding said. Making use of a long guitar cord, Jimi walked in the audience as he played. One night when he went to get back onstage, he threw his guitar ahead of him, and in doing so cracked the neck. Upset about the damage, and knowing that it would cost him two months' pay to buy a new instrument, he grabbed the neck of the guitar, raised it above his head and brought it down on the stage with a violent fury. It may have been one of the only moves he made all night that wasn't rehearsed.

The audience went mad and dragged Jimi offstage. Seeing that response, Chandler determined then and there to have Jimi smash more guitars. The destruction of a guitar -many times the same guitar patched up nighht after night - became an occasional part of Jimi's set, done when all the other gimmicks had failed. It became his great exclamation point and a way for him to exorcise years of anger and frustration. A boy who had waited so long for his first guitar was now onstage destroying them.

JIMI TURNED TWENTY-FOUR IN NOVEMBER 1966. Despite his growing fame, he carried a wadded-up bill in his boot, a remnant of his years of poverty. He had originally used a silver dollar, back in his chitlin-circuit days, but in England he substituted a pound note and moved the cache to the brirn band of his hat. He told Etchingham, "When you've been penniless, you never forget it."

Four weeks earlier, while checking out a recording studio, Jimi met the Who for the first time. "He looked scruffy," Pete Town-shend said. "I was very unimpressed." Jimi tried to ignore drummer Keith Moon, who was in a foul mood and kept yelling, "Who let that savage in here?" Townshend gave Jimi a few hints on where to buy amplifiers but also wondered whether this Yank really needed top-rated equipment.

A few days later, Townshend saw Jimi perform and finally understood what the fuss was about. "1 became an immediate fan," Townshend said. "I saw all of Jimi's first London shows. There were about six." Those dates included club gigs at Blaises, the Upper Cut, the Ram Jam Club, the Speakeasy, the 7 1/1 and the Bag o' Nails. Though all of these were smallish venues and none paid more than twenty-five pounds, Jimi was already being touted as the hottest guitar player in London. Members of bands far more famous than the Experience - including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles- began to chat him up. Brian Jones became Jimi's biggest booster, dragging other stars to come see him play. At one gig, Clapton and Townshend stood next to ach other in rapt attention. As Jimi played Red House," their fingers accidentally brushed. Clapton grabbed Townshend's land the way two schoolgirls might while matching a particularly gripping film.

Another night, Clapton invited Jimi back to his flat. Jimi came with Etchingham, and though the mood was friendly, neither Eric nor Jimi was particularly talkative. "It was a very strained meeting," Etchingham recalled. '"They were both in awe of each other. We had to center all the discussion around music." As Jimi left several hours later, he remarked to Etching-lam, "That was hard work."

LSD WAS ONLY THEN MAKING its way through London, and initially it wasn't a common drug in the Experience tour van. Instead, the group members favored cheap speed, which helped them stay up all night. That winter they played numerous dates all over England, trying to raise money to pay for studio time. It was not uncommon for them to perform in northern England, then rush back to London for a graveyard studio session, when time was less expensive, "We'd be playing in Manchester, and then we'd drive back to London," Redding said. "We'd get back at three iri the morning and put down the tracks. And then we'd go to bed at five and get up the next morning only to have to go back up north again for another show. And we'd be back in London that next night doing more recording. That was how we made the first album."

On the day the band taped the television show Ready, Steady, Go'., it later went into a studio and cut "Red House," "Foxey Lady" and "Third Stone From the Sun." Studio engineer Mike Ross was dumbstruck when their roadie brought in four twin Marshall amplifier stacks. Ross asked Jirni if he should mike every one, but Jirni suggested puttinga single rnike twelve feet away. Once the band began to play, Ross was forced to retreat to the control room because of the deafening volume of the band's sound. "It was the loudest thing 1 ever heard in that studio," Ross said. "It was painful on your ears."

"Red House" was one of many songs that Jimi had been working on since his New York club gigs. During January 1967, driven by a desperate need to finish an album quickly, he was writing a song every other day. He felt that winter as if the songs simply came to him, almost unconsciously.

The best example of his mysterious muse was the song "The Wind Cries Mary." On the afternoon of January 10th, Jimi did an interview with Melody Maker in his apartment. That evening, he insulted Etchingham's cooking. Her meals were a common cause of their fights, but on this occasion, the scene turned ugly. "1 started throwing pots and stormed out," Etchingham said. When she returned the next day, Jimi had written "The Wind Cries Mary" for her. Mary was Etchingham's middle name.

The recording of this song was equally easy for Jimi. They had twenty minutes left in a session, and Chandler asked Jimi, "You got anything else?" Jimi produced the freshly written song, and the band learned it on the spot. "We simply didn't rehearse," Redding noted. "For The Wind Cries Mary,' Jimi just basically played the chords, and being an ex-guitar player, I could pick up the stuff really fast, and we got the feel, and we put it down. We weren't rushing it, but we son of knew that we had to throw it down quickly." That twenty minutes of recording time even included Jimi's guitar overdubs. The song became their third single.

No day in the entire history of the Experience was as productive as January nth, 1967. The hand's session at London's De Lane Lea Studio produced several tunes, among them "Purple Haze."Jimi had drafted the lyrics to the song backstage at a concert two weeks before. Though the tune would forever be linked in the popular imagination with LSD, Jimi said it was inspired by a dream he had that mirrored the novel Night of Light: Day of Dreams, by Philip Jose Farmer. In an early lyric draft, he included the line "Jesus saves." He later complained that the version of the song that was released - and became the Experience's second successful single - had been shortened. "The [original] song had about a thousand words," he told an interviewer. "It just gets me so mad, because that isn't even 'Purple Haze.'"

After that long studio session, the band had two shows at the Bag o' Nails. The Bag was a legendary dank basement nightclub that looked like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. The crowd gathered that night was a who's who of London's rock elite: According to most accounts, it included Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Mickjagger, Brian Jones, Beatles manager Brian Epstein, John Entwistle, Donovan, Georgie Fame, Denny Laine, Terry Reid, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Lulu Hollies, the Small Faces and the Animals.

Singer Terry Reid, the British I prodigy, had not yet seen the Expert-and recalled that at the show, "it was all the guitar players in the world shown up." When Reid sat down, he surprised to find McCartney sitting to him. "Have you seen this guy yet? He’s amazing," McCartney said.

Jimi started by announcing he was to cover a song that was Number One on the charts. "We were thinking," said Reid," if it’s Number One on the charts, it's not in our hearts, because if it was over Number Ten, we hated it." Jimi then introduced "Wild Thing." " 'Wild Thing' was pop throwaway, and it was what every stood against!" Reid observed. "And Jimi played it, and banged the shit out of bloody thing, and takes off into outer space.” Reid went to the bathroom at one point and coming back, bumped into Brian Jones. “It’s all wet down in the front," Jones warned. Reid replied, "What are you talking about? I can’t see any water." To which Jones said, "It's wet from all the guitar players crying.”

Jimi was living with Etchingham, but he seemed incapable of fidelity. Matters weren't helped by the fact that Chandler thought it better to present Jimi as a bachelor in the press, so whenever an interviewer showed up at their flat, Etchingham was hustled off. Sometimes the journalists would be females, and there were more than a few times when Etchingham returned to chase half-disrobed girls out of the flat. Jimi also suffered from tremendous jealousy, -which was ignited -when he drank -he imagined every man was after Etching-ham, even as he bedded other women himself. One night at the Bag o' Nails, Etching-1 ham was on the phone and Jimi thought she | was talking to another man. He grabbed the receiver and began hitting her -with it. She screamed. At that moment, John Lennon and Paul McCartney walked into the club and calmly took the phone away from him. It was rare for Jimi to be violent, and most aggression -was linked to his excessive drinking. But his mercurial, almost childlike nature could be painful to anyone -who cared for him. One night, Etchingham caught Jimi having sex in a women's restroom -with a girl he'd met after the show. She had already become hardened to such betrayals. Her only response was resignation: "Hurry up or we'll miss the train back to London." Jimi's excuse: "She wanted my autograph."

The Experience ended January with two shows at the famous Saville Theatre on a bill -with the Who. These were attended by Lennoon, McCartney, George Harrison and the members of Cream. At the end of one show, Jack Bruce left the theater, went home and wrote the riff for "Sunshine of Your Love," inspired by Jimi.

THE EXPERIENCE FINISHED their debut album that spring and titled it Are You Experienced? The album had been recorded in several different studios, whenever the band could cobble together time. To speed up sessions, Chandler would trick the band into thinking it was rehearsing when he was actually recording. "Chas would always say, 'OK, lads, let's run chrough it,'" said Redding. "And we'd run through the track, and then Chas would say, 1DK, do it again.' But he'd actually already taken the first take without us knowing. And then after the second take, we'd walk out, have a smoke, and he'd say, We got it.' And we'd say, 'What do you mean? We haven't even started it yet.'" When the album finally came out, it would go as high as Number Two on the British charts, kept out of the top slot only by the Beatles.

Before the release of the alburn, the Experience went on a tour of English cinema houses with orchestral-pop act the Walker Brothers, future Vegas headliner Engelbert Humperdinck and a young Cat Stevens. The Experience were the opening act in this odd spectacle, and Jimi did everything he could to upstage the better-known bands. Backstage on the first date of the tour, he joked that "maybe 1 should smash an elephant. "Journalist Keith Altham had a better idea. "It is a pity," Altham said, "that you can't set your guitar on fire." Jimi immediately sent a roadie for lighter fluid. When showtime came around and the Experience ended their short five-song set with the song "Fire," Jimi poured lighter fluid on the instrument and threw a match at it. It took three attempts, but eventually the guitar burst into flames. Jimi twirled it around like a windmill before a stagehand rushed onstage and doused it with water. Acity fire marshal was backstage, and he lectured Jirni for several minutes. Only a couple of thousand people had witnessed the flaming guitar stunt, which lasted all of thirty seconds, but once it was in the papers, it became legend. By the middle of 1967, everything Jimi did in England drew a headline in the papers. On one date of the Walker Brothers tour, a erased fan chased Jimi with a pair of scissors and managed to cut a lock of his hair-even that made the papers. Advertisements for his shows now touted, "Don't miss this man who is Dylan, Clapton and James Brown all in one."

BY EARLY 1968, THE JIMl HENDRIX Experience were superstars all over the world, but the one audience Jimi had yet to face down was his family back in Seattle. He had not set foot in his hometown for nearly seven years, since he had left to join the Army to avoid a jail term foe riding in a stolen car.

The band's first 1968 U.S. tour took it to forty-nine cities in fifty-one days, but Seattle, on February nth, was the one show that made Jimi nervous. Since he had last been in Seattle, his father, Al, had remarried, and Jimi now had a stepmother along with five stepsiblings. Jimi's brother Leon had been a kid when Jimi left; Leon was twenty now and working out of a downtown pool hall as a hustler. It was not lost on Jimi that a similar fate had in all probability awaited him without music. To add to the pressure, the Seattle show - despite being a last-minute booking, advertised with just a week's notice — was sold out.

The week before the concert, Seattle promoter Pat O'Day phoned Jirni and asked if there was anything special he wanted to do in his hometown. Jimi said he wanted to play a free show for students at Garfield High School, his alma mater. Jimi came away from the conversation with the impression that he would be receiving the ceremonial key to the city, though O'Day didn't recall this being discussed. Nonetheless, when Jimi did an interview that week with the Sunday Mirror, he referred to what he thought was this upcoming honor, saying how surprised he was that his luck in Seattle had so drastically changed. "The only keys 1 expected to see in that town were of the jailhouse," Jimi remarked.

When the band's plane arrived in Seattle, Jimi was the last person off the jet, Leon, like the rest of the family, was surprised at his big brother's appearance: "He had on this giant hat and a red velvet shirt. He had all this hair and he looked just wild!" Before arriving in Seattle, Jimi had mentioned to one interviewer that he was fearful his father might grab him and cut off his hair. Instead, Al took Jimi's hand, put his other hand on his back and said, "Welcome home, son." It was a warm reunion, and the new marriage appeared to have softened Al. Jimi met his new stepmother, June, and took a liking to her.

While the rest of the band went to a hotel, Jimi was whisked to his father's house, where the new star held court for friends and neighbors. Some of the gathered throng began drinking Al's bourbon, but before Jimi took a sip, he asked Al for permission, a sign of how much, even at twenty-five, he still deferred to his father. Jimi's Aunt De-lores came by, and Jimi began telling stories of Swinging London. "He looked so grown up," Delores recalled. "He was likeahippie!" Jimi asked about his friends from the neighborhood and found that many were serving in Vietnam. African-Americans made up a disproportionate percentage of the soldiers in Vietnam, and it was never far from Jimi's mind that he might have been stationed there had he not left the service.

When it came time for Jimi to get ready for the night's concert, he asked an old neighborhood friend, Ernestine Benson, to curl his hair. The problem with my life today," he told her, "is that I have to take a pill to sleep, and a pill to perform." When he complained of touring, she feared he might start to weep. She helped curl his hair but also offered him advice: "You got to take some time off." Though Jimi was an adult now Benson came away feeling as though he wasn’t all that different than the latchkey child she had once baby-sat - he seemed just as lost.

At the show that night, Jimi's entire family was seated in the front row. One of Jimi’s new stepsisters held up a sign that read, "Welcome home Jimi, love, your sisters.” While the seating was arranged to honor the family, it put them directly in front of the speakers, and Jimi's father watched some of the deafening show with his fingers in his ears. As for the performance, the band played a standard nine-song set, with the greatest crowd reaction coming when Jimi named off the area's high schools.

An after-show party was held at Seattle’s ritzy Olympic Hotel. As the most posh hotel in town, it was a far cry from the fleabags Jimi had lived in as a child. Jimi ordered steak from room service and insisted his family do the same on his tab - it may have been the first time in Jimi's life he ever bought his father a meal, and that alone offered great personal satisfaction. Jimi gave Leon fifty dollars and told Al that if he needed anything to let him know. Around midnight Jimi's manager reminded him of his appearance scheduled at Garfield High School at 8 a.m. Disregarding the suggestion that he call it an early night, Jimi and Leon played Monopoly throughout the night and joyously drank their father's bourbon.

At 7:30 a.m., Jimi's ride arrived for the Garfield assembly. He had yet to sleep and was wearing the same clothes he'd had on at the previous night's concert. At Garfield, Jimi discovered that Redding and Mitchell could not be woken up, and his already cranky mood - furthered by still being intoxicated—turned sour. "He was not capable, or able, to play, or really to speak," said Garfield principal Frank Fidler, who had known Jimi since junior high. The idea of having Jimi perform was abandoned; promoter Pat O'Day suggested Jimi speak and answer questions from the students.

The assembly was held in the Garfield gymnasium. It began with ashort introduction from O'Day, who told the kids thatjimi had once been a Garfield Bulldog but had gone on to international fame, "Kids had already begun to heckle," said Peter Riches, who photographed the event. "Many obviously had no idea who Jimi was."

Jimi, who often found his music too white for black radio and too black for certain rock stations, encountered a more racially divisive atmosphere at the school than when he had attended. "At the time, Garfield was highly politicized, and the Black Power movement was blooming," recalled student Vickie Heater. 'To have this strange, hippie musician come along bothered kids." It also bothered the students when Jimi mumbled, "I've been here, and there, and everywhere, and it's all working." He then paused for a long time before stating that he'd written "Purple Haze" for Garfield - the school colors were purple and white. And with that, Jimi's short speech came to an end. The audience began to whistle and heckle.

O'Day grabbed the mike and entertained questions. One boy raised his hand and asked Jimi, "How long have you been gone from Garfield?" Jimi had been gone for exactly seven and a half years, but the question stymied him. He put his head down and mumbled, "Oh, about 1,000 years." Another student asked, "How do you write a song?" Jimi paused for a moment and looked at the floor. "Right now, I'm going to say goodbye to you, and go out the door, and get into my limousine, and go to the airport. And when 1 get out the door, the assembly will be over, and the bell will ring. And when I hear that bell ring, 111 write a song. Thank you very much." With that, he walked out. The entire assembly had taken less than five minutes.

by APRiL 1968, jimi was Living at the Warwick Hotel in midtown New York and working on his third album, Electric Ladyland, at the Record Plant, Though the album would later be remembered as Jimi's masterpiece, it was a Sisyphean recording effort that threatened to destroy the band and Jimi. Jimi would record at all hours, and then later use his hotel room for parties, like one particularly wild evening that included both guitarist Mike Bloomfield and writer Truman Capote.

Though the Experience's records were still selling well, they were burning through cash and spendinga fortune on studio time. Unhappy that his previous two albums had not captured his work as he intended, Jimi had begun to insist on multiple takes for every song. The strong work ethic that had carried the Experience through their early records was abandoned in favor of a laid-back, jam-heavy approach to recording, and sessions were filled with hangers-on. Even on days when Jimi completed a full eight hours of recording, he'd still go out to jam in local clubs, sometimes inviting the entire club audience to the studio.

Redding stormed out of a session in early May after such an occurrence - and increasing conflicts within the band — consequently missing the recording of the magical "Voodoo Chile." This session, typical of many in this period, sprang from a jam at the Scene club earlier in the night. When the club closed, Jimi's full entourage moved to the Record Plant. "Jimi invited everyone back to the studio," recalled Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Casady. "There were at least twenty people, and most of them didn't belong there." At around 7:30 a.m ., the formal recording for the day started with a lineup of Jimi on guitar, Mitch Mitchell on drums, Traffic's Steve Winwood on organ and Casady on bass. The song took only three takes, though they were lengthy: The released version would clock at fifteen minutes, the longest official Hendrix studio cut.

By mid-1968, Jimi's entire life revolved around music. If he wasn't in the studio, he was at a jam session. If he wasn't jamming, he had a concert to do. He was adrift without the guitar or without a concert stage. It was not unlike the period early in Jimi's career when a friend once observed him going into a movie theater with his guitar in hand, unable to put the instrument down long enough to even watch a film.

The Experience ended their U.S. tour with a planned show at the Miami Pop Festival. When that date was rained out, Jimi initiated a jam in the hotel bar that included Frank Zappa, Arthur Brown and John Lee Hooker. "It was probably the best music I've ever heard in my life," recalled Trixie Sullivan, an aide to manager Michael Jeffrey.

The rained-out show only added to the madness that was typical of the Experience on the road. Though the bandmates earned half a million dollars on that tour - making them one of the best-paid bands in rock -they were spending money at a faster rate than they could make it. When the organisers of Miami Pop were unable to pay the band that night, Jimi had to climb out of a hotel window since he couldn't pay his hotel bill. Much as he had arrived in London, just two short years before, he walked out with his guitar in his hand and little else.

charles R. cross is the author of the Kurt Cobain bio "Heavier Than Heaven."