September 24th, 1966,
un unknown figure touches down in the streets of London
with only a Fender Stratocaster and a few dollars to his name.
Within days of his arrival,
Jimi Hendrix would turn the world of music upside down.
Jimi changed the sound of the guitar.
I think in many respects he changed
the sound of rock far more than The Beatles.
He called himself a 'voodoo child',
a virtuoso, who in just four short years,
will take the blues from the Mississippi delta
to the psychedelic limits of outer space.
He redefined what it meant to be a guitar player,
what it meant to be a musician,
I think he redefined what it meant to be an artist
and he redefined the whole period in which he existed.
All that stuff that was going on in the 60s
is channeled through Jimi Hendrix's music.
You can hear Martin Luther King being shot in his music,
you can hear bombs falling on Vietnam in his music,
you can hear bombs exploding in the heads of an entire generation on LSD
in the music of Jimi Hendrix.
In the end, he himself will become a victim
of the dark side of the era.
His tragic death bringing a symbolic end
to the tumultuous 60s.
This is a journey into the first Age of Rock
seen through the eyes of his most dazzling icon...
Jimi Hendrix.
When Jimi Hendrix, a left hander
who played a right handed guitar upside down,
made his first explosive appearance in London in 1966,
he sent shockwaves through the aristocracy of British music.
# Purple Haze all in my brain,
# lately things don't seem the same,
# actin' funny but I don't know why
# 'scuse me while I kiss the sky.
I saw him perform with everybody else.
With Eric Clapton, boy, you name it, they were there.
He came on the stage and it was just mindblowing.
And I think Eric's comment after Jimi played was,
"Well, I'm off home to practice."
I was just glad I wasn't a guitarist.
Like Eric Clapton, fellow guitarist Jeff Beck,
was also blown away by Hendrix's guitar pyrotechnics.
The fact that he was doing things so upfront and so wild, unchained.
That's what I wanted to do but being British and
the victim of the class system or whatever...
the poxy old schools I used to go to, I couldn't do what he did.
And I just went away from there thinking,
I'd better think of something else to do.
He was doing things that they couldn't do,
because he was picking out a baseline with his thumb,
a lead with his little finger and playing rhythm with the rest of it.
It was a kind of three-man group on one guitar.
The roots of rock lie deep in the blues of the Mississippi delta.
This music cast a powerful spell on Jimi Hendrix.
Growing up in Seattle in the 50s, he got his first guitar aged 12,
spending his teens learning the licks of the twelve-bar blues.
# Well I wait around the train station
# Waitin' for that train
The blues has always been there way before it was ever called the 'blues'.
It's a strand of music... it's a note that resonates throughout the human race.
In order to escape a jail term for riding in a stolen Cadillac,
Hendrix elected to join the 101st Airborne Division.
It was in the Army that Hendrix began experimenting
with the sounds of electric rhythm & blues.
Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and BB King were the godfathers of R&B,
and this electrically charged music would underpin
the early career of Jimi Hendrix.
Hendrix's time in the military was troubled and didn't last long.
The end came not long after he was discovered sleeping with his guitar.
Discharged from the Army in 1962, a pennyless Hendrix
found work as a guitar for hire on the black R&B network
known as the Chitlin' Circuit.
It was this alternate nether universe that happened
that most white people would never experience
or never even know it happened.
It happened when all the white people were asleep,
then in this little town, these bands would come out an put on
these incredible shows.
Hendrix spent almost 4 years on that circuit
playing with a variety of different bands.
All I remember is getting out of the Army
and then trying to get something together,
and then I was playing in different groups all around the States and Canada.
Playing behind people most of the time.
He toured alongside the likes of Ike and Tina Turner, BB King, James Brown...
If he wasn't actually on stage with these people
he would be in the wings watching and learning.
Hendrix did a stint as a sideman to Little Richard
whose flamboyance was an inspiration to the young guitarist.
Hendrix said, "I want to do with the guitar
what Little Richard does with his voice."
Jimi Hendrix's perseverance to go on... he didn't mind looking freaky,
like I don't mind it, 'cause I was doing it before he was.
And I know when he saw me gave him confidence,
and great recompense or reward. My Lord!
4,000 miles away in Britain
the R&B Hendrix was playing on the Chitlin' Circuit
was finding a devoted following.
# I love the way you walk
White musicians were interpreting this music
in ways that would in turn prove a key influence on Jimi Hendrix.
# ... I got my eyes on you
It was playing blues that thawed out the emotional permafrost
of 1950s post-war English austerity.
Because of its emphasis on improvisation, it unlocked the creativity
of the young musicians who cut their teeth on it.
Everybody starting out just copied the records they listened to note for note.
I was trying to sing like Howlin' Wolf.
But from this copying we learnt the roads.
Tell us something about him, Brian.
When we first started playing together because we wanted to play R&B
and Howlin' Wolf was one of our greatest idols.
It's a great pleasure to find him booked in this show tonight.
- It really is a pleasure. - Thanks for Howlin's records.
So I think it's better that we shut up and we have Howlin' Wolf on stage.
# How many more years
# Have I got to let you dog me around
# How many more years
# Have I got to let you dog me around
We based everything we did from our knowledge of
starting as a blues band.
# If you see my little red rooster
# Please drive him home
Formed in 1962,
The Rolling Stones took their name from a classic Muddy Waters' song.
# If you see my little red rooster
The early shows, their sort of embryonic period,
they just played blues covers.
They had no real material of their own, so to speak, early on.
The key of course was when they began writing.
And when they did, they used these blues influences
and filtered it through their own experience.
'Satisfaction' is really one of the first great Stones' songs.
It's a song that Muddy Waters would have been happy to write.
I think it would rank as a great blues song
even if it had come from one of those guys on Chess Records.
# I can get no satisfaction
# I can't get no girl reaction
'Satisfaction' is basically a blues, you know, it's just a different form.
I was just that...
# I can get no satisfaction
# I can get me know satisfaction
# 'cause I try and I try, yeah I try
# I can get no...
The sexual swagger of 'Satisfaction'
pointed the way to a new direction in music.
Electric blues music was morphing into something distinctly British.
# And I'm tryin' to make some girl
They pretty much adapted pop-art ideas to their blues-based R&B
and, in a way, invented rock music
just by putting pop and R&B together in a cheeky funny way,
with a great backbeat and a blast off of a riff.
Now the blues was being reexported back to America
introducing the mainstream to a music they'd previously ignored.
We, the young kids in London and Newcastle and Liverpool,
were responsible for putting a hand inside America's garbage can
and pulling out culture which they were trying their best to crush.
All this was a revelation to Jimi Hendrix.
In 1965 he left the Chitlin' Circuit and moved to New York
where he discovered a new world of white music coming out of the UK.
Imagine Hendrix walking down somewhere where there's an import record store.
Somebody's just got all these weird records from England,
records by people like the Yardbirds...
where guitar players like Jeff Beck are pursuing many of the same things
that Hendrix himself was working on to do with feedback, distortion,
and in some cases maybe taking it further than Hendrix himself had at that time.
The guitarists that most impressed Hendrix
were Jeff Beck of the Yardbirds and Eric Clapton.
Clapton had gained a formidable reputation
playing with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers.
English guitar players showed us, not just how to play the guitar in a certain way,
but they showed us how it looked.
And how it could be sexy, how it could be forceful.
They were clearly taking influences from America
but they were showing us something
that we really didn't know that much about.
It wasn't only British guitar experimentation
that was to shape the music of Jimi Hendrix.
While living in Harlem he fell under the spell of an unlikely hero,
Bob Dylan.
Jimi took a copy of 'Blowin' in the wind' to a Harlem discotheque,
totally African-American experience at the time,
brought this in, went up to the DJ and said,
"I've got this great new track. Let's play it."
So the DJ puts the song and the immediate response,
everyone was dancing and then 'Blowin' in the wind', "How many...",
Everyone stops, they all look at Jimi,
and Jimi literally has to run from the club for his life.
# Johnny's in the basement
# Mixing up the medicine
# I'm on the pavement
# Thinking about the government
# The man in the trench coat
# Badge out, laid off
# Says he's got a bad cough
# Wants to get it paid off
# Look out kid
# It's somethin' you did
# God knows when
# But you're doin' it again
# You better duck down the alley way
# Lookin' for a new friend
# The man in the coon-skin cap
# In the big pen
# Wants eleven dollar bills
# You only got ten
The song that would define Dylan in his prime
and be pivotal in the development of Jimi Hendrix
is 'Like a Rolling Stone',
a tour-de-force that revolutionized rock music.
One of the most exciting things about it
is that opening "bang" on the snare.
You know, it's like a gavel, a judge wackin' the gavel on his desk,
saying, "Ok, History is called to order."
# Once upon a time you dressed so fine
# You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
That's how special, I think the people involved in that song,
not just only Dylan but the producer, the musicians, everyone knew.
# You used to laugh about
They say it's the greatest record of all times.
It's amazing to have played on that.
I knew that this stuff would be regarded as something other than another record.
# Once upon a time you dressed so fine
# You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
# People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
The character of Dylan's voice struck a chord with Jimi,
encouraging Hendrix to believe that he too could make it as a singer.
Hendrix had always been very self-conscious about his singing.
He'd worked behind a lot of great singers,
and on the same bill as a lot of great singers,
and he barely considered himself a singer at all.
But when he heard Dylan, he thought, "Well, if this guy can sing, so can I."
# How does it feel
# To be on your own
# With no direction home
Hendrix heard Dylan and realised that if a voice has character
then it really doesn't matter if it's a conventional "good voice" or not.
If you sound like yourself and you sound like you mean it,
then you can sing rock 'n roll.
# Got a feeling inside
It was The Who,
an uncompromising, loud and aggressive London band,
that would feed most directly back into the act of Jimi Hendrix.
Their high octane performances gave rock a harder edge.
I think the first band that I ever truly believed
was and out-and-out rock band
that I saw was The Who.
When I saw The Who play at the Marquee
there was a unity about what they did with the base, guitar and drums...
and it said to me, this is different, this is not blues, it's something else.
I wouldn't have been able to categorise it as 'rock' at that time,
but that's really what it was.
We were doing feedback and all that stuff onstage,
which came out of putting all this stuff in a pot, stirring it up,
getting bored with this bit, doubling up the beat,
banging on a note, wanging on a chord
and turning the amp until it fed back and...
away you go.
# People try to put us d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
# Just because we get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
# Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
# I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
In 'My Generation' they had that incredible stutter, you know,
"Why don't you all f-f-f..."
# Why don't you all f-fade away (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
# And don't try to d-dig what we all say (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
The stuttering on that record, I thought was brilliant phrasing.
That was their debut in America, so you heard the record and you went,
"He's gotta be putting that on."
That couldn't be a guy that actually stuttered.
It was interesting.
# I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-generation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
The stutter on 'My Generation' reflects the frustration and the anger
in the attitude of the song.
It's a 'fuck you' moment.
This was a complete homage to the inarticulateness of rebellious youth,
who couldn't speak, they could hardly think.
It's like the old line, "What are you rebelling against?"
"Well, what have you got?"
The Who were actually pivotal in the development of the new rock.
Remember that rock performance was still more or less in its infancy
when the Stones started out in the clubs they were all sitting on stools.
But with The Who there was an element of real danger.
The Who completely altered notions of rock performance,
and also the way that a basic three instrument band
could look and sound.
The Who's total mastery of the stage and somewhat destructive tendencies
anticipated the wilder excesses of rock to come.
Jimi Hendrix, for one,
would borrow heavily from The Who's incendiary style of performance.
He certainly took an awful lot of what The Who were doing.
The feedback stuff from Townsend, he made it his own thing.
But it was kind of weird seeing a black guy come over from America
and look at what we were doing and take it into his own thing.
So the whole thing had gone a circle.
By mid 1966, Hendrix was going it alone,
playing the clubs in Greenwich Village.
He wasn't making much money but he was gathering a cult audience.
Whispers began to circulate about an extraordinary talent.
I once went to the 'Cafe Wha?' in the Village,
that's when I first saw Jimi Hendrix, and I went, Wow!
This guy is good!
Among the early Hendrix fan club was Chas Chandler,
the base player of The Animals, who in the early 60s
had been at the forefront of the British invasion of America.
When Chandler discovered Hendrix in New York
The Animals had already broken up.
Chas had gone into management
and was looking for an artist to cover a Tim Rose folk song,
called 'Hey Joe'.
# Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand
The night Chandler turned up at the Cafe Wha?
he was stunned, not only by Hendrix's virtuosity,
but also by his choice of song.
# Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand
The first song Jimi played was 'Hey Joe',
and I was like, you know,
I wasn't really conscious of the rest of the act.
I saw a master guitar player.
I saw the best guitar player I'd ever seen in my life.
It was that obvious, you know, I just sat there and went, "Puh!"
Let's come to England. Let me bring him to England.
Hendrix would come to London on one condition.
He actually said, "If I go to England with you,
"can you introduce me to Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton?"
And said, "They're pals of me. I've known them 2-3 years."
That was the only question he asked.
When Hendrix landed in England in September 1966,
this was ground central for not just music,
but for fashion, photography, film making, this was...
swinging London in its prime and Jimi showed up
at the single, most opportune moment he could have shown up in history.
# In the white room with black curtains near the station.
When Hendrix arrived in London, Cream were the biggest act in town.
A power trio comprised of blues jamming legends Eric Clapton,
bassist Jack Bruce,
and Ginger Baker on drums.
# Dawn-light smiles on you leaving, my contentment.
We considered ourselves to be 'the cream'.
We were the guys who could play.
Musically we were streets ahead of any of the others.
If we had played music written by Humpty Dumpty and Mickey Mouse,
it would still have been fantastic because of the musicians playing it.
# You said no strings could secure you at the station.
We were very competitive, at that age, we were like gunslingers or something.
I wanted to be the best, most frightening base player in the world,
and I think I was. I think I succeeded in that.
I was certainly the loudest.
We would take the language of the blues and apply it to modern music.
In other words, be very arrogant about it and nick it,
but not nick actual songs,
we just nicked the feeling and the language of the blues and used that.
Which is very much what we ended up doing.
What marked this band as the cream of London,
was their flair for improvisation, playing solos that never seemed to end.
We simply couldn't stop playing.
None of us was the band leader so no one would say "Stop. Enough!"
If one of us took off, let him go.
And we'd just go off that direction, or go off in that direction.
We were very much pioneers of that kind of music.
We built that audience from nothing really,
and the bands that followed us
reaped the benefits of the work that we had done.
Such was Clapton's prowess on the guitar,
fans proclaimed his divinity on the streets of London.
But the guitar god was soon to be challenged by one of his disciples.
Having been in London for just a week,
Jimi went along to a Cream gig,
and put in an audacious request to jam with Clapton.
Nobody gets up to jam with Cream.
Cream is Mount Olympus, Cream is the absolute pinnacle.
Ordinary mortals cannot breathe
that rarified air that exists in this hallowed space.
The very brave person who would do that...
As far as I remember, he plugged in to my base amp
and did a version of 'Killing floor'. A blues all the way of course.
Clapton always loved the song but always thought it was too difficult.
And Hendrix just rages through it,
and does all his tricks and stunts, the kind of things that people like
Little Richard and The Isley Brothers hated him doing.
He plays the guitar behind his head, between his legs, with his teeth...
Feedback, tremolo arm, dive bombs, the whole works.
He just played his arsehole basically.
The first time I saw Eric I thought, "Ah, there's a master guitar player."
But Eric was a guitar player, Jimi was some sort of force of nature.
Eric just stands there and plays and then we got this guy, you know,
on his knees and playing with his teeth and screwing the guitar onstage,
and I thought, "God! What is this?"
It was like, Wow!, that kind of thing.
I know it had a tremendous effect on Eric.
And Eric's hands were like this on the guitar
and they just dropped and he said...
He just stood there looking at Jimi. He walked off the stage
and I thought, "I knew this was gonna happen."
And everybody's just going, "My God!"
It's like word goes around, "This guy got up to jam with Cream
and he cut Clapton, he killed god, man!"
I ran backstage and Eric was standing trying to light a cigarette.
And his hands were shaking and he just says,
"Is he really that good?"
Chas Chandler was quick to exploit Jimi's sensational appeal,
stealing the thunder of Cream, he put his own power trio together,
flanking Hendrix with two English musicians,
Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Reading on base,
to create 'The Jimi Hendrix Experience'.
# Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand
# Hey Joe, I said where you goin' with that gun in your hand
'Hey Joe', the song Chas Chandler had heard Hendrix perform
in obscurity in New York just six months earlier,
entered the UK top ten in December 1966.
It was to be the launchpad for a meteoric career.
The show he played in America before he went to England...
there were 12 people there.
England a month later, he's attracting crowds of several hundred.
Six months later, he's the biggest star in the world.
No artist, I would argue, in the history of rock
has become famous so quickly.
# One pill makes you larger
# And one pill makes you small
By the mid point of the summer of love in 1967,
Jimi Hendrix was the toast of London
and had become the psychedelic dandy of flower-power.
But in his home country he was little known.
All that was about to change
when Hendrix got the chance to play the Monterrey Pop Festival
sharing the bill with The Who.
There was a bit of jockeying between him and The Who
as to who was to go on when, because neither band...
Each band had a very healthy respect for the other's capabilities
and neither of them wanted to follow the other.
I said to Jimi, "Fuck it! We're not going to follow you on."
So he said, "I'm not going to follow you on."
So I said, "Listen. We are not going to follow you on and that's it."
So in the end they resolved the situation by tossing up a coin.
Townsend won and opted to go on first.
We didn't get all this 'peace and love' shit that was going on there.
That was just a load of rubbish.
But the birds were nice.
It was like something from outer space.
Because not only the music was totally different,
it was played with all the aggression of a war.
And I think as a piece of theater, it kind of woke them up.
Only Jimi Hendrix could have followed us, to be honest with you.
# You know you're a cute little heartbreaker
# Foxy
# You know you're a sweet little lovemaker
I think what was so dazzling about Hendrix
was the sounds he was creating and the charismatic spell
that he was casting over the audience was so extreme
that he made everybody else look as if they were almost trying too hard.
I'd like to bore you for about six to do a little a thing, you know...
Excuse me for a minute. Just let me play my guitar, all right?
It was at this point that Hendrix reached for Bob Dylan,
paying homage to his song writing hero
with an electrifying performance of 'Like a Rolling Stone'.
# Once upon a time you dressed so fine
# You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
In a way it was almost as audacious a thing to do
as burning Clapton on his own stage was.
Because people left that song alone.
It was one of the all time monuments of the counter culture.
Hendrix comes on playing this amazing guitar licks
sort of drawling the song out in his own inimitable way.
# Look at ya', a complete unknown
# Like a rolling stone
I was a Dylan fan
but 'Like a Rolling Stone' was one of these Dylan songs
that sort of escaped me at the time.
It didn't quite work for me... by Dylan.
But when Jimi played it I understood the song.
It clicked with me for the first time.
The Monterrey audience was stunned
by the sheer explosive power of Hendrix's performance.
But more was to follow.
As the cameras rolled, the voodoo magician
had one final trick up his sleeve.
There's another great moment that I remember.
It was a screening of the Monterey movie,
and happened to be Eric Clapton and myself
in a little room watching this.
When it came time for 'Wild Thing', which he closed with,
Jimi sneaks and listens to the guitar, and it's really not very much in tune,
and Clapton yelled, "Now what are you gonna do?"
And he just turned up the guitar
and showed Clapton what he was gonna do.
I thought it was an incredible moment.
# Wild thing, you make my heart sing
# You make a everything, groovy
He was such a showman,
and his show was so much the highlight of Monterrey,
that it got him in the headlines immediately,
and people were clamouring to see Jimi Hendrix after that point.
Sacrificing the guitar at Monterrey
was the defining moment of an artist who had reached his creative peak.
On that night Jimi Hendrix became a rock legend.
I was standing right next to Robbie Shankle,
and I looked around and his face was like...
in shock.
The audience was shocked too.
That was the whole idea of the act, to outdo The Who.
Robbie was shocked and disgusted, you know,
how can a musician take his instrument and smash it to smithereens.
This is bad karma, man.
To the wide rock audience that saw Jimi at Monterrey pop
this was the most brilliant show anybody had ever put on.
When he lit that guitar on fire,
that became one of the seminal moments of the 60s.
# It was 20 years ago today
# Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
Hendrix was always looking for a new direction
and when 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' was released in 1967,
he was among the first to hear its significance.
Having stopped touring in '66, The Beatles had taken refuge in the studio
to transform themselves from a pop band into pioneers of psychedelic rock.
What Hendrix saw with 'Sgt. Pepper's'
was a band taking control of its own musical destiny.
EMI ageing studios at Abbey Road played a key role in the process.
# We hope you did enjoy the show
The studio at EMI was basically totally obsolete,
and yet the EMI staff knew everything about it.
Knew how to push it to its limits and how to exploit it.
So it's a very English album.
It's like inventing radar in the potting shed at the end of the garden.
It's very amateurish
and yet they were able to produce something of genius level from it.
# I read the news today, oh boy
# About a lucky man who made the grade
It was like a Heath Robinson sort of situation.
We were tying things together with bits of string,
and bashing things with hammers and taping microphones to this,
and putting microphones in water, you name it, we tried it.
It was always this thing about guitars not sounding like guitars,
and pianos not sounding like pianos and so on.
There's more fun in the record if there's a few sounds
that you don't really know what they are.
Really they're just instruments, only something happens on here,
I couldn't tell you what 'cause we have a special man who sits here
and goes like this...
And the guitar turns into a piano or something, you know.
And then you always say, why don't you use a piano?
Because the piano sounds like a guitar.
# Woke up, got out of bed
# Dragged a comb across my head
They changed everything.
The Beatles were the ones who changed everything.
'Sgt. Pepper', you could argue is the most important album of the 60s.
# Found my coat and grabbed my hat
# Made the bus in seconds flat
There was no question that at the moment it was made,
it was the absolute summation of everything that had come before
in say, the previous 4 or 5 years.
'Sgt. Pepper' is an entire reflection of the society at that time.
# Lucy in the sky with diamonds
They were able to... essentially take drugs without too much censure,
and they could write what they wanted.
The Beatles were tripping out of their heads.
# Lucy in the sky with diamonds
I think that knocks down a lot of barriers in your mind.
You say, "Well, you can't play a C sharp in a C Chord."
But... after you do that, you can play a C sharp in a C chord.
'Sgt. Pepper' is arguably their greatest record.
Certainly their most influential record.
It stunned Jimi Hendrix more than almost anyone else.
He did, what I think, is the most risky move he ever did in his entire career.
It was the day after 'Sgt. Pepper's' had come out,
and Jimi had gotten a copy of it and learned it.
He came backstage at this concert and announced to 'The Experience',
we're gonna start our show with a cover of 'Sgt. Pepper's', the title track.
And Noel Reading told me, "I just was stunned.
"What do you mean? This album just came out.
"We're gonna cover someone else's song?"
And that's what they started that concert with.
And, to add to it, several of The Beatles were in the audience.
# It was twenty years ago today,
# Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
# They've been going in and out of style
# But they're guaranteed to raise a smile.
The nerve to do that.
Can you imagine anyone having the guts to,
The Beatles' album has just come out,
universally acclaimed the biggest rock band in the world that there ever would be,
and for Jimi then to go, "Ok, the day after it comes out,
"I'm gonna play their song and do it better."
# Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Hendrix obviously saw that power.
A band that was actually producing itself now, pretty much.
And said, "Yeah, yeah. That's for me too."
The Beatles had caught Jimi's imagination
just as powerfully as Dylan and The Who.
Through the sonic revolution of 'Sgt. Pepper',
Hendrix saw the potential of the recording studio,
believing it could help take his guitar to a higher level.
# I love your gypsy eyes
In 1968, he started recording 'Electric Ladyland'.
# Way up in my tree I'm sitting by my fire
'Electric Ladyland' is Hendrix the producer,
Hendrix fully embracing the capabilities of the recording studio
and exploring the kind of soundscapes he could create in the studio
to try to realise on tape the extraordinary sonic visions he was hearing in his head.
One of the high points of 'Electric Ladyland'
found Jimi once again acknowledging a musical debt
with an apocalyptic version of Dylan's 'All Along The Watch Tower'.
# "There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
# "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Hendrix had actually created the scenario itself.
Dylan had written the scenario, Hendrix filled in all the colours.
Even Dylan admitted at one point that 'All Along The Watch Tower'
as Hendrix envisioned it was beyond the song he had written and recorded.
That song, it's as if Jimi wrote it. You just get the sense.
It's like the song he was made to play.
Although 'Electric Ladyland' would be acclaimed a masterpiece,
the studio where it was recorded became a curse.
Hendrix's heavy intake of drugs began to take its tall.
Some tracks took over 50 takes,
and the album hundreds of hours of recording time.
Things were getting quite freaky.
This was peculiar times.
There was an awful lot of...
unauthorised substances flying around with different people and all the rest of it.
You were turning up in the studio and try to mix tracks
and there was 30 and 40 people turned up as hangers-on.
It was very difficult to be able to talk about the next step of your life because
most of the people were out of their minds at the time, you know.
I just thought, "This is crazy. I'm spending half my time in the day
"trying to talk common sense to people and...
"all they want to do is get out of their minds."
I said, "Well. I'm off back to England.
"When you come to your senses give us a ring."
Minus his manager, Jimi was left to face the future
without the guiding light that had led him to stardom.
By 1968, the idealism and promise of 'flower-power' had begun to fade.
America was bogged down in Vietnam and at war with itself.
Torn apart by assassinations and the civil rights struggle.
Europe also saw rioting on the streets.
The drugs got heavier and so did the music,
reflecting the paranoia and tension in the air.
You could just feel it. It was very, very different.
The whole atmosphere changed. Became much more politicised, I think.
No longer could you just be a happy flower child skipping through Hyde Park
with your daisy chain and your joss stick
because some cop would come along and bang you on the head.
Whereas in '67 it was all ok, you know.
They'd even light your joint for you.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richard of course have great instincts
for trends and what's going on.
And by 1968 they could see the trend was for this endarkenment.
The music had to turn darker in response
to the darkness of the times, 1968 and '69.
So, to their great credit, The Rolling Stones perfectly synched into that.
# Oh, a storm is threatning
# My very life today
# If I don't get some shelter
# Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away
# War, children, it's just a shot away
# It's just a shot away
The Stones are one of the few bands that
that darkness kind of gives them a new creative zenith.
There was a different world going on there,
but the Stones were not afraid to embrace,
and somewhat make that their mistress.
When you listen to 'Sympathy for the Devil'
it's not like this is a hidden meaning.
You have some people are taking records and playing them backwards
to look for satanic messages. With the Stones it's right there.
They're not afraid to touch on that darkness.
# Please allow me to introduce myself
# I'm a man of wealth and taste
# I've been around for a long, long year
# Stole many a man's soul and faith
They're the band, strangely, that survives and actually feeds off
the dark drug elements that came in and destroyed the rest of the scene.
# Please allow me to introduce myself
# I'm a man of wealth and taste
By the time The Rolling Stones came to play Altamont Festival
in December 1969, heavy drugs and bad trips
were destroying the hippy dream.
And now Hell's Angels touting knives and guns were on the scene.
Hired as security, they turned what was meant to be a peace loving event
into one of the most violent days in rock history.
A Stones fan was stabbed to death by a Hell's Angel.
Never had 'Sympathy for the Devil' seemed a more appropriate song.
We're splitting man if those cats don't stop beating everybody up inside.
I want them out of the way, man!
I don't like you!
I think the closing of that era was probably Altamont.
And that really sort of tied it up with a black bow,
and that's it.
Things got very business-like after that.
That free spirit died at Altamont.
Altamont had been planned to replicate
the utopian spirit of the Woodstock Festival
that had taken place in New York St. just four months before.
It was here that Jimi Hendrix would make history
unleashing a searing rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner.
Hendrix climaxed the festival
with this performance of the Star-Spangled Banner
which, I would say, is the greatest American work of art
to deal with the Vietnam War
and the titanic struggles of the civil rights movement,
in any art form by any artist.
Jimi's tortured take on the American National anthem
was seen by many to be a political statement
about the horror the US was inflicting on Vietnam.
His howling guitar echoing the sounds of helicopters,
bombs and machine-guns.
This man was in the 101st Airborne so when you write your nasty letters in...
Nasty letters? Why...?
Well, when you mention the National Anthem
and talk about playing it in any unorthodox way,
immediately get a guaranteed percentage of hate mail from people to say
- how dare...? - But listen, that's not unorthodox.
- It isn't unorthodox? - No, no.
I thought it was beautiful, but then, there you go...
To some critics, the sound of Hendrix's distorted guitar
was also symbolic of the muddy reality of Woodstock.
Drenched by torrential rain,
the event hyped as three days of peace and love
had more the look of a war zone.
We think of this moment as being the great moment of the 60s.
Everyone coming together. Oh here's Jimi Hendrix playing.
Well, while he was playing the Star-Spangled Banner
people are streaming out of the venue.
It's a muddy field. There are only a handful of people left.
That's the difference between, of course,
the reality of what it would have been like to be there,
and the reality of now looking back at the footage and what we remembered as.
But we as pundits and writers and film makers go back
and it's hard not to think of that, in retrospect,
as being the end of a decade.
To Jimi, he left the stage exhausted and collapsed,
and maybe that's a good metaphor
for what the 60s had become for everybody at that point.
Jimi Hendrix would never again match the emotional high of Woodstock.
Burnt out on drugs and exhaustion,
he'd become tired of the attention-grabbing stage tricks
that audiences constantly demanded of him.
I don't care, man. I don't care what they say any more.
It's up to them. If they want to mess up the evening by looking at one thing...
Because all that is included, man, when I feel like with my teeth
I do it. because I feel like it.
When I'm onstage, I'm a complete natural, more so than
talking to a group of people or something.
By August 1970, the sparkle had gone.
Hendrix returned to England to play the Isle of Wight Festival.
Dosed heavily on LSD, he gave a lacklustre performance.
It would be the his last appearance in the country that had made him a star.
I was actually at that show
and I'd been waiting, like everybody else,
for Hendrix to come on and lift our spirits,
set light to the whole event.
But when he came on. it seemed like everything was going wrong.
He seemed exhausted, he was having sort of to drag out all his old songs,
his gear was malfunctioning.
He couldn't get the sound he wanted out of his amps.
You could almost see the life ebbing out of him the longer he's onstage.
There was an awful finale, see, to the whole thing.
Remember Jim Morrison was dead, Janis Joplin was dead,
The Beatles had broke up,
it seemed like all the furniture of the 60s
was being put out on the pavement outside.
On the morning of September 18th, 1970,
almost exactly 4 years to the day he'd first arrived in London,
Jimi Hendrix was found dead
in the basement of the Samarkand Hotel in Notting Hill.
# And the clowns have all gone to bed
His death was undignified, drowned in vomit,
unconscious from a combination of red wine
and an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.
He was 27 years old.
Jimi Hendrix was a weak man, that was his problem.
And the weakness made him vulnerable.
And vulnerable people in rock music don't last long.
There might be good people, there might be nice people,
but they don't last... You've gotta be tough
in the rock music business to survive.
The night that he died,
I was supposed to meet him at the Lyceum to see Sly Stone play,
and I 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 gonna give it to him.
And he was in a box over there and I was in a box over here
and I could see him but we never got together.
The next day he was gone and I was left with that left handed Stratocaster.
The death of Jimi Hendrix was the final curtain.
Drawing to a close an unprecedented period of creativity.
The 60s had given birth to the First Age of Rock.
Presiding over it all, was the genius and showmanship of Jimi Hendrix.
Jimi Hendrix would prove a hard act to follow.
# Well, I stand up next to a mountain
# And I chop it down with the edge of my hand
Next week on Seven Ages of Rock,
rock reinvents itself with Pink Floyd and David Bowie.
To find out more about 'The Seven Ages of Rock'
and see some extra stories featuring artists in the series,
go to "bbc.co.uk/sevenages".
Transcription and synchronization by Fry.