Page 54 - Classic Rock (February 2020)

BAND OF GYPSYS

Jimi Hendrix and
Buddy Miles.

put on a big show.’ He obviously was brilliant at struggle to build his own studio, Electric Lady; Jimi,” Eddie Kramer said. “Jimi would show Billy
doing that, but now he just wanted to stand up and the suspicion that his manager Mike Jeffrey was a riff, and he would rehearse it until the bass and
play music.” embezzling money; and the unravelling of the guitar melded into one instrument.”
And music in the cosmic sense. Beyond Experience. The trio, assembled by former To complete the trio, Hendrix chose drummer
personal reinvention, Jimi was now out to reshape manager Chas Chandler, was never one built on Buddy Miles. They’d met on the chitlin circuit
the very nature of the rock concert. He hit the stage bonhomie, and bassist Redding had formed his years before, when Miles was playing with Wilson
without a set-list, spontaneously calling tunes to own competing group, Fat Mattress. Chandler Pickett and Jimi was with the Isley Brothers.
Miles and Cox, often making time and tempo observed that they’d devolved into “three guys The three rehearsed and experimented in New
changes on the fly, conducting them with a head soloing at the same time, their former unity gone”. York studios from October until December 1969.
nod or raising of his guitar neck. It was more like On his way toward Band Of Gypsys, Jimi briefly Jimi told the guys he wanted them to be the earth
a jazz gig at the Blue Note than a big rock show at tried a bigger group, the Gypsy Suns & Rainbows and water to his air and sky.
the Fillmore. By modern standards, this kind of ensemble that backed him at Woodstock that “They loved to jam,” Kramer said. “In the studio,
radical deconstruction would be career that’s all they did, just play for hours and
suicide. Today, stakes are too high, attention hours, experimenting. And running up
spans too short and concert tickets too huge bills. It would be unthinkable today.”
expensive for an artist three albums into “They loved to jam. In the This sense of exploration was inspired by
their career to suddenly walk such a public studio they’d just play for hours Jimi’s two biggest heroes: Bob Dylan and
tight rope. But for Hendrix it was the jazz great Miles Davis.
direction his artistic compass insisted he go. and hours, experimenting.” Dylan was a master skin shedder,
changing directions and leaving new genres
imi’s liberation began on a mutinous Engineer Eddie Kramer on Band Of Gypsys like folk rock in his wake. He was also
note months earlier, with the Jimi a Greenwich Village neighbour of Jimi’s, and
JHendrix Experience’s now infamous August. And all of this personal struggle unfolded one day the star-struck Jimi bumped into him on
appearance on Lulu’s TV live variety show on against an equally turbulent backdrop of civil 8th Street. “Bob, I’m a singer, you know, uh, called
January 4. Halfway through Hey Joe, they stopped, rights and the Vietnam War. It was also surely why Jimi Hendrix…” he stammered. Dylan said: “I don’t
and he said: “We’d like to stop playing this rubbish Jimi looked back for something familiar before know if anyone has done my songs better,” then
and dedicate a song to the Cream (who had just moving forward, tapping his old army buddy Billy hurried off. Jimi felt like he’d been blessed by the
announced that they had split),’ and they tore Cox to join him on bass. The two met in 1960 in Dalai Lama.
abruptly into Sunshine Of Your Love. As Lulu and her the 101st Airborne, in Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, Jimi met Miles Davis at a hair salon. Davis liked
producers panicked, Jimi said with a laugh: “We’re when Cox heard a guitarist who sounded “like Jimi’s ‘blowout’ Afro and wanted the same. The GEORGE RODRIGUEZ/CACHE AGENCY-DALLE/ICONICPIX
getting put off the air.” John Lee Hooker meets Beethoven”. They played two musicians occasionally double-dated with
That set the tone for a tumultuous 1969, marked together in a band called The Kasuals in the R&B their girlfriends. There was mutual admiration,
by a drug bust and trial that saw Jimi narrowly clubs of Nashville. but the older Davis was more of a father figure
escape a 20-year prison sentence; a disaster-laden “There was a tight integration between Billy and to Jimi, recommending records and dispensing

54 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM