Emilovious
05-01-08, 07:52 PM
The Day Hendrix Came To Town (Part 1)
by Jay Allen Sanford, January 28th, 2006
May 1969: Two hundred years after Father Junípero Serra founded the first California mission on Presidio Hill, San Diego celebrated its bicentennial. The Ferry still shuttled passengers and cargo across the harbor, as it had for over eighty years, but the Coronado Bay Bridge was in the final phase of construction before its scheduled August 3rd opening. Also nearing completion was the Fashion Valley Mall, a fifty million dollar shopping center covering seventy-eight acres of land that had previously been home to The Padres' Westgate Park . Students at San Diego State University responded to headlines about the war in Vietnam by making headlines of their own with campus anti-war rallies, while academic strikes were held in symbolic protest of U.S. bombing raids.
It hadn't been dubbed "The Summer Of Love" yet, but the sounds of the sixties were blowin' in what little wind there was in San Diego . The Flying Burrito Brothers played two nights, May 9th and 10th, at the newly opened United Fruit club at 4009 Central Avenue in North Park, while SDSU's Aztec Bowl (now the site of Cox Arena) hosted the Grateful Dead on May 11th, along with Tijuana native son Carlos Santana, blues belters Canned Heat and forgotten pop wizard Lee Michaels.
On Saturday the 24th, Bob Dylan turned 28 years old. The Beatles' "Get Back" hit #1 on Billboard Magazine's list of top selling singles, knocking "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In" by the Fifth Dimension from the top slot. Local radio stations were spinning platters by Blood, Sweat And Tears ("You've Made Me So Very Happy"), the Zombies ("Time Of The Season") and the Doors ("Touch Me"). And guitarist Jimi Hendrix, who, with his band the Experience - bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell - had just played a hometown gig the previous day at the Seattle Center Coliseum, checked into his "deluxe" two-room suite at the Hilton Inn.
Hendrix and his band were nearing the end of a two month long concert tour and were due to play San Diego's International Sports Arena that evening. The Experience's spring tour of America had begun in Raleigh , North Carolina , during April 1969, sweeping through Philadelphia , Memphis , Houston , Dallas , Los Angeles , Oakland , Detroit and Toronto Canada . Scheduled to open the San Diego show at 8:30 pm was Fat Mattress, a group Noel Redding had formed - ostensibly as a "side project" but really, he'd later admit, created as a way to hedge his bets in case rumors about Hendrix's plan to disband the Experience proved to be true (the rumors were correct).
"Fat Mattress was me getting back to me roots," Redding told me during an interview he did for Rock 'N' Roll Comics, before he died in 2003. "I never played bass before I auditioned [for The Experience], and I missed playing guitar and singing. Fat Mattress was done with two members from an old band I'd been in called the Loving Kind. We put together the new group to open for Experience shows, sure, but also to record and tour on our own.this was my outlet for songwriting, and Jimi seemed to think the idea was great. We all planned on having our separate side projects, to keep everybody happy, but to keep the Experience going as well."
He says part of the motivation behind forming Fat Mattress was statements Hendrix had given in press interviews about "taking a year off," as well as behind-the-scenes vibes he'd picked up from the mercurial guitarist. "Around the time we went down to San Diego .there was talk of the group being 'expanded.' I hadn't been asked about it. At that point, I was asking a lot of questions about the finances, about where all the money was. I think they brought in Billy Cox [who replaced Redding in the Experience several months after the San Diego concert] 'cause I was asking so many questions."
Redding recalls an argument with the Experience's road manager when the group arrived in San Diego . "I think that was the first time Mitch [Mitchell, Experience drummer] and I were put on a 'daily dole' - an allowance, I guess you'd call it, that we had to use to pay for anything besides the hotel and room service. Everything used to be taken care of and paid for, but all of a sudden it was up to me to buy me own guitar strings if I needed another set! He [the Experience road manager] fobbed off paying the bill for [Fat Mattress] too...I believe they had to stay in a different hotel from the rest of us, and a none too nice one at that."
Tickets for the Sports Arena show cost patrons from $2.75 to $5.50. The concert was sold out, and a few hundred fans were milling about in the Arena parking lot as Fat Mattress hit the stage, just before 9 o'clock. Several people had been caught trying to gain entrance with counterfeit tickets, apparently purchased from a parking lot scalper. The bogus tickets were confiscated and those bearing them weren't arrested but weren't granted admittance either. Some of these agitated individuals loitered near the entrances well into the concert, alongside other ticketless youths determined to get an earful of the music being played on the other side of the Arena's glass doors. At one point, a few dozen of them decided to join forces and rush the gate by surging en mass past security guards. A scuffle and several short chases ensued and most of the gate crashers were turned away or arrested, prompting local headlines the next day to read "Police Arrest Gate Crashers At Arena Show" and "'Music Lovers' Mar Hendrix Concert in Arena."
After Fat Mattress' set, Hendrix sat in a small backstage dressing room, strumming an unplugged electric guitar while several others milled about. Present were his bandmates Redding and Mitchell, as well as an out-of-place looking man wearing a suit (possibly working for the promoter or a local radio station) who was roundly ignored as he tried to talk Hendrix into taping a radio interview with a DJ waiting outside the room.
In the arena, technical engineers were setting up a stereo tape deck intended to record the concert direct from the soundboard mix. The man in charge of recording the show was Wally Heider, owner of a Northern California recording facility frequented by the Jefferson Airplane and many others (Heider would also serve as sound engineer on the recording "Hendrix Live At Fillmore East"). Running the mix from the soundboard was Abe Jacob. Jacob had started as a sound engineer in San Francisco , mixing for The Mamas and the Papas and Peter Paul and Mary, as well as designing the sound system for the Monterey Pop Festival, where the Jimi Hendrix Experience first wowed America in 1967. Until Jacob gave the go-ahead that the equipment was primed and ready, Hendrix would remain in the dressing room, as it was important to the guitarist that this date be perfectly preserved on tape, both for his own personal archives and for a possible live album.
by Jay Allen Sanford, January 28th, 2006
May 1969: Two hundred years after Father Junípero Serra founded the first California mission on Presidio Hill, San Diego celebrated its bicentennial. The Ferry still shuttled passengers and cargo across the harbor, as it had for over eighty years, but the Coronado Bay Bridge was in the final phase of construction before its scheduled August 3rd opening. Also nearing completion was the Fashion Valley Mall, a fifty million dollar shopping center covering seventy-eight acres of land that had previously been home to The Padres' Westgate Park . Students at San Diego State University responded to headlines about the war in Vietnam by making headlines of their own with campus anti-war rallies, while academic strikes were held in symbolic protest of U.S. bombing raids.
It hadn't been dubbed "The Summer Of Love" yet, but the sounds of the sixties were blowin' in what little wind there was in San Diego . The Flying Burrito Brothers played two nights, May 9th and 10th, at the newly opened United Fruit club at 4009 Central Avenue in North Park, while SDSU's Aztec Bowl (now the site of Cox Arena) hosted the Grateful Dead on May 11th, along with Tijuana native son Carlos Santana, blues belters Canned Heat and forgotten pop wizard Lee Michaels.
On Saturday the 24th, Bob Dylan turned 28 years old. The Beatles' "Get Back" hit #1 on Billboard Magazine's list of top selling singles, knocking "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In" by the Fifth Dimension from the top slot. Local radio stations were spinning platters by Blood, Sweat And Tears ("You've Made Me So Very Happy"), the Zombies ("Time Of The Season") and the Doors ("Touch Me"). And guitarist Jimi Hendrix, who, with his band the Experience - bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell - had just played a hometown gig the previous day at the Seattle Center Coliseum, checked into his "deluxe" two-room suite at the Hilton Inn.
Hendrix and his band were nearing the end of a two month long concert tour and were due to play San Diego's International Sports Arena that evening. The Experience's spring tour of America had begun in Raleigh , North Carolina , during April 1969, sweeping through Philadelphia , Memphis , Houston , Dallas , Los Angeles , Oakland , Detroit and Toronto Canada . Scheduled to open the San Diego show at 8:30 pm was Fat Mattress, a group Noel Redding had formed - ostensibly as a "side project" but really, he'd later admit, created as a way to hedge his bets in case rumors about Hendrix's plan to disband the Experience proved to be true (the rumors were correct).
"Fat Mattress was me getting back to me roots," Redding told me during an interview he did for Rock 'N' Roll Comics, before he died in 2003. "I never played bass before I auditioned [for The Experience], and I missed playing guitar and singing. Fat Mattress was done with two members from an old band I'd been in called the Loving Kind. We put together the new group to open for Experience shows, sure, but also to record and tour on our own.this was my outlet for songwriting, and Jimi seemed to think the idea was great. We all planned on having our separate side projects, to keep everybody happy, but to keep the Experience going as well."
He says part of the motivation behind forming Fat Mattress was statements Hendrix had given in press interviews about "taking a year off," as well as behind-the-scenes vibes he'd picked up from the mercurial guitarist. "Around the time we went down to San Diego .there was talk of the group being 'expanded.' I hadn't been asked about it. At that point, I was asking a lot of questions about the finances, about where all the money was. I think they brought in Billy Cox [who replaced Redding in the Experience several months after the San Diego concert] 'cause I was asking so many questions."
Redding recalls an argument with the Experience's road manager when the group arrived in San Diego . "I think that was the first time Mitch [Mitchell, Experience drummer] and I were put on a 'daily dole' - an allowance, I guess you'd call it, that we had to use to pay for anything besides the hotel and room service. Everything used to be taken care of and paid for, but all of a sudden it was up to me to buy me own guitar strings if I needed another set! He [the Experience road manager] fobbed off paying the bill for [Fat Mattress] too...I believe they had to stay in a different hotel from the rest of us, and a none too nice one at that."
Tickets for the Sports Arena show cost patrons from $2.75 to $5.50. The concert was sold out, and a few hundred fans were milling about in the Arena parking lot as Fat Mattress hit the stage, just before 9 o'clock. Several people had been caught trying to gain entrance with counterfeit tickets, apparently purchased from a parking lot scalper. The bogus tickets were confiscated and those bearing them weren't arrested but weren't granted admittance either. Some of these agitated individuals loitered near the entrances well into the concert, alongside other ticketless youths determined to get an earful of the music being played on the other side of the Arena's glass doors. At one point, a few dozen of them decided to join forces and rush the gate by surging en mass past security guards. A scuffle and several short chases ensued and most of the gate crashers were turned away or arrested, prompting local headlines the next day to read "Police Arrest Gate Crashers At Arena Show" and "'Music Lovers' Mar Hendrix Concert in Arena."
After Fat Mattress' set, Hendrix sat in a small backstage dressing room, strumming an unplugged electric guitar while several others milled about. Present were his bandmates Redding and Mitchell, as well as an out-of-place looking man wearing a suit (possibly working for the promoter or a local radio station) who was roundly ignored as he tried to talk Hendrix into taping a radio interview with a DJ waiting outside the room.
In the arena, technical engineers were setting up a stereo tape deck intended to record the concert direct from the soundboard mix. The man in charge of recording the show was Wally Heider, owner of a Northern California recording facility frequented by the Jefferson Airplane and many others (Heider would also serve as sound engineer on the recording "Hendrix Live At Fillmore East"). Running the mix from the soundboard was Abe Jacob. Jacob had started as a sound engineer in San Francisco , mixing for The Mamas and the Papas and Peter Paul and Mary, as well as designing the sound system for the Monterey Pop Festival, where the Jimi Hendrix Experience first wowed America in 1967. Until Jacob gave the go-ahead that the equipment was primed and ready, Hendrix would remain in the dressing room, as it was important to the guitarist that this date be perfectly preserved on tape, both for his own personal archives and for a possible live album.