Jimi Hendrix - Live at Woodstock

Jimi said, "We've got this gig here."

And he just said it casually, like he did everything else.

I had no idea what Woodstock was.

It was the place to come to.

It was not just a rock 'n' roll show.

It was not just about the music. It was really about

that decade and that culture.

There were 200,000, 300,000 people

that had converged on this...

pasture.

I drove through it in a station wagon

and it was just endless people.

This was the greatest rock 'n' roll concert ever put on.

The Woodstock Festival was being planned

and I guess the guys who were in charge of the festival figured

"Let's get Jimi Hendrix to headline this festival."

Jimi was important...

as a cultural icon

and musically as one of the premier musicians of his day.

I thought that Jimi would likely be the most exciting act on the show.

And I thought he would be an amazing way to end it.

Actually, to be perfectly honest with you,

he was not my first choice for a closing act.

My first choice was Roy Rogers, and I tried to book him.

I wanted him to end the festival with "Happy Trails,"

because we had all grown up with Roy Rogers singing "Happy Trails."

It was when we were little kids at that time

and that, I thought, would be the perfect way to end it,

and I was going to have him follow Jimi.

But that aside, I thought that that would be the high point--

certainly of the day-- and a great way to finish the festival.

Jimi Hendrix was the Beatles in that year.

He was on the same level as the Rolling Stones.

He was rock royalty.

You have to say they were a large act.

Apart from the festivals,

where they obviously played a major part in the festivals,

they could tour arenas,

which there weren't that many acts touring arenas at the time.

Our biggest gig was in a place called Devonshire Downs

in Los Angeles in 1969,

and we played to 100,000 people.

It's a bit weird.

The one thing you have to know about an act

is that they have a direction that they're going musically.

And when they reach the summit of their life,

when they are creatively on the top of the mountain,

they don't know where to go next and start looking around,

and that's what I think happened to Jimi at that point.

The last gig I played at, we were playing in Denver

and we were on with Creedence or something,

and there was 35,000 people there.

We were doing our gig

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

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

And I said, "He didn't tell me." So that went to my head.

And then we played this gig-- 35,000 people.

They all tried to get onstage, which-- they wouldn't fit.

Then the police started firing tear gas,

except the wind was coming our way.

So basically we had to get off the stage

and then these 35,000 people are trying to chase these three blokes.

So then they put us in this Avis Rent-A-Truck

and locked the back door. There's no lights in it,

all these people start crawling over the truck

and the roof's buckling.

The guy gets in, drives us back to the hotel

and there's still people on top of the truck.

And we have to go in the back of the hotel--

'cause we couldn't go in the front-- through the kitchen.

So I mean, like-- next day, I got on a plane

and I just said I couldn't handle it any longer.

Jimi went through many struggles to put a new band together.

He was looking for a new sound. He was tired of playing

the same type of music

that he had played. He didn't want to play all the--

he had a whole plethora

of new music that he wanted to present.

He could see the point of having--

of expanding...

a situation outside of a three-piece band.

For heck's sake, there were so many opportunities.

And I think it was just like-- in his mind,

he grabbed hold of...

what he thought would be comfortable.

He knew it would take...

getting away, concentrating

and getting the right people together

in order to form this group that he had a desire in forming.

When Jimi Hendrix first came back from England

he fell in love with Woodstock and he was looking for a place to live,

to practice and to play music.

Woodstock had always been known from the early '20s

as a hotbed for artistic endeavors.

There were painters, sculptors, writers

and then, later on in the '50s and '60s,

entertainers who loved that peace and tranquility of Woodstock

as a place to go to to recharge their batteries.

I know Michael Jeffries had bought a house up there in Woodstock

and Jimi had a house that he had rented up there

to go and rehearse some material.

So Woodstock became a place to hang out.

When I ran into Jimi in Woodstock,

he said-- he invited me to come over and jam.

He was a prolific jammer.

He would love to play with so many different people.

He said, "Billy, your job is to find Larry Lee. Find him." And I found him!

Billy called me.

I guess Jimi had my mother's number,

and Billy called me.

I remember I just--

I think I had just come back from Vietnam.

I think I had been home

about maybe two weeks. I don't know.

I had just come from the unemployment office,

the phone rang

and it was Billy.

I said, "Wow, I hadn't heard from that old cat--"

I said, "Billy, what's going on?" He said, "Everything's fine."

I said, "Where are you?" He said, "I'm in New York."

I said, "What you doing up there?"

He said, "I'm up here with Jimi."

I said, "Wow!"

I said, "Where is Jimi?"

I figured he was in England somewhere,

'cause he was hot then, by the time I got out.

He said, "He's sitting right here," and it kind of scared me.

I said, "Yeah? Can I speak with him?"

And I spoke to Jimi and he was the same Jimi.

I didn't know if he would even remember me--

as much money as I heard he was making--

and he was the same Jimi. Just the same Jimi, no change.

He said, "Yeah, what you doing?

We're going to try a few things up here. We'd like for you to come and join us."

When I first went to Woodstock

to play before this festival,

they'd been playing together for about-- I don't know--

10 days maybe, something like that,

and they finally got that "gel."

And you can work off that conflict,

so there was not, you know,

and this was just not.

I knew the band that he was putting together,

because he was living in Woodstock at that time.

I knew a lot of the guys in the band.

I had spent some time with Jimi and I knew that he was trying

to figure out which direction to take his music

and he was experimenting with different players.

So we knew this wasn't going to be The Experience,

but it was going to be Jimi.

I remember arriving at Woodstock

at about 5:30, 6:00 in the morning, sun coming up over this hill,

and I saw the structure

that was hanging over what was supposedly a stage,

and I'm saying to myself, "Wait a minute.

We're going to be recording here in about four or five hours.

The stage is still being built.

There's a crane hanging up over the stage

and there are these pieces of wood that are just hanging out there."

It looked like fingers above the stage.

This was going to support a canvas top,

which was going to supposedly protect people--

the artists.

And I'm thinking to myself, "What kind of craziness am I into?"

We realized early on Friday that the shows were going to go late

because we were having big gaps in our performance schedule.

We had to wait for the rains to stop,

we had to wait for the bands to get in.

Everything was running late. Roads were obviously--

there were no roads. Roads were solid masses of people and humanity.

We started flying people in, but everything was sort of backing up

and it continued that way through the weekend,