portrait of this blog's author - by Stephen Blackman 2008

Tuesday, January 01, 2019

I have been reflecting of late about Jimi Hendrix's last days and am troubled by how sad and disappointed he seemed. Now it is well know he was exhausted towards the end after endless touring and his management pushing him to earn more and more and convincing him his project of Electric Ladyland Studio was haemorrhaging money (never entirely at home with looking after his money and notoriously generous and having hanger's on surrounding him at party time - one of the reasons given for Noel's leaving the 'Experience')
but the accounts of his last gigs are harrowing to say the least. Buddy Miles had been spiked with LSD and was rambling and incoherent hence Mitch Mitchell retiring to the fold but his last concert at the Isle of  . . . . .in Germany was little short of disastrous and whilst you can hear his sense of change and adjusting to such the Melody Maker last interview appears to be a somewhat more positive after Jimi began to rest up. 
On September 5, 1970, the day before he played his last ever gig, UK music paper Melody Maker published an interview with Jimi Hendrix. 
“It’s all turned full circle,” Jimi told interviewer Roy Hollingworth, “I’m back right now to where I started. I’ve given this era of music everything. I still sound the same, my music’s still the same, and I can’t think of anything new to add to it in its present state… When the last American tour finished earlier this year, I just wanted to go away a while and forget everything. I wanted to just do recording, and see if I could write something. Then I started thinking. Thinking about the future. Thinking that this era of music – sparked off by The Beatles – had come to an end…”


However certainly Hendrix had been optimistic just days before his death, telling the Melody Maker


“Something new has got to come and Jimi Hendrix will be there. I want a big band. I don’t mean three harps and 14 violins, I mean a big band full of competent musicians that I can conduct and write for. And with the music we will paint pictures of earth and space, so that the listener can be taken somewhere…They are getting their minds ready now. Like me, they are going back home, getting fat and making themselves ready for the next trip.”

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