It’s difficult to imagine, but if Jimi Hendrix were alive today, he'd be pushing 85. But like many other notables who have departed the stage early, the world's archetypal guitar hero is frozen in time in our collective consciousness: forever young, forever groovy.

After dissolving the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1969 amid a messy tangle of musical frustrations, legal issues, and a soured relationship with bassist Noel Redding, Jimi turned to former bandmate Billy Cox for low-end support.

The pair first met in the U.S. Army in 1961 while stationed in Kentucky; they struck up a musical friendship that continued after they left the service, in the form of a Nashville-based R&B outfit called the King Kasuals.

When Hendrix eventually left Nashville to seek his fortune elsewhere, Cox opted to stay put, concentrating on live, studio, and TV work.

In August 1969, Cox appeared with Hendrix at the Woodstock Festival and was part of the trio that cut the live album Band Of Gypsys, which showcased Hendrix's more bluesy, riff-driven R&B sound. Unlike guitarist-turned-bassist Noel Redding, Cox was steeped in the same R&B tradition as Hendrix and was fully hip to the bass styles and trends of the day.

Following the breakup of the Band Of Gypsys in early 1970, Hendrix and Cox drafted Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell to replace Buddy Miles and began recording a series of tracks intended for Hendrix's fourth studio album.

Though these songs were made available over the course of three posthumously released albums in the early ‘70s – Hendrix died in September 1970 at age 27 – it wasn't until 1997 that the Hendrix estate assembled the fruits of these final sessions into a single entity titled First Rays of the New Rising Sun.

Izabella, the second song on the album, was originally tracked in January 1970 with Cox on bass and Buddy Miles on drums. It was named after the 1968 Olympic White Stratocaster that Hendrix wielded during his iconic Woodstock set. However, Hendrix was dissatisfied with the recording, and later he added some extra guitar work and had Mitch Mitchell lay down a new drum part.

To record his bassline, Cox played fingerstyle and likely used a Fender Precision Bass. In a 2007 interview with Bass Player, he recalled the instruments he played: “I used my P-Bass in the studio and my Jazz Bass live, because it projected a little louder.”

Though Cox's bass playing on Izabella is bereft of needless flash – the track contains no extraneous fills – it's no walk in the park to play. Plucking-hand stamina and careful coordination between the hands are both necessary.

Structurally, the song is a 12-bar blues with one deviation: In the ninth bar of each 12-bar cycle, rather than landing on the dominant 7 chord (in this case, D7 in the home key of G), Hendrix unexpectedly sidesteps down a tone to F before returning in the tenth bar to the anticipated IV chord, or subdominant (C), which is clearly outlined by the syncopated bass/guitar unison line.

After an eight-bar intro, the band gets down to business, introducing the two-bar riff that shapes the song. Cox and Hendrix play this riff throughout the I-IV-I progression in bars 9-16; they subtly alter in bar 17 to suggest a 3-3-2 eighth-note grouping, briefly toss it aside in favor of the syncopated line in bar 18, and pick it up again for the last two bars of the 12-bar cycle.

Harmonically, Izabella is characterized by the sound of the dominant 7#9 chord. Although Hendrix never actually plays this chord per se, the interaction of the multiple guitar tracks and Cox's bassline clearly imply it, transforming the workaday chords of a standard blues into an extended harmony.

This 7#9 flavor is perhaps most apparent where the second guitar track parallels the unison riff over the G7 and C7 tonalities of bars 21-28 and 31-32, emphasizing the major 3rd of each chord, while the riff continues to insist on the sound of the minor 3rds, generating a ballsy harmonic mash in the process.

Also worthy of note is the way Hendrix and Cox tweak the second bar of the main riff throughout this B section, adding in a potent cross-rhythm by grouping the 16ths of beats two through four into units of three.

Coinciding with the guitar solo at 01:10, Cox and Hendrix introduce a new variant: a rising eighth-note arpeggio idea that helps provide contrast between the first part of the song and the return to the main riff at 01:37.

This next section sees the second bar of the main riff altered again to produce a series of offbeat chromatic ascents, which lead into the extended tonic pedal section. Here Cox and Hendrix drive the main riff to its logical conclusion, targeting ever-higher notes at the end of each two-beat phrase (Bb, C, and F, respectively), before spilling down the octave every second bar and repeating the whole idea through to the end of the song.

After 1968's Electric Ladyland, the last of the three seminal studio albums Hendrix completed during his lifetime, his music became more focused, and in many cases, funky. This was due in no small part to the authoritative groove laid down by Cox, who was inducted into the Musician's Hall of Fame in 2009.

And while Noel Redding may garner the lion's share of the low-end glory in the Hendrix annals, Cox nevertheless played a pivotal role in both the beginning and the end of Hendrix's story, neatly bookending the legendary guitarist's short but spectacular career.

A new Jimi Hendrix box set is coming, and it features 38 unreleased tracks recorded by the late electric guitar legend at his Electric Lady studio months before his death.

Since Hendrix’s untimely passing in September 1970, there have been many releases of B-Sides, rarities, re-masters, and other oddities, but very few offered new content.

Thankfully, the Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision box set, doesn’t fall for that trap – all but one of the set’s 39 tracks have never been released.

The songs were recorded by what was a new-look Jimi Hendrix Experience band. While Mitch Mitchell remained on the drum stool, bassist Billy Cox was settling into life in the Experience having replaced Noel Redding the previous year.

Interestingly, Cox had previously turned down a spot in the band earlier in his career, believing it would protect the guitarist from racism.

Angel [Take 7] is the first song from the new batch of lost gems to be unveiled. The song is a newly mixed and stripped-down version of the cut, featuring the original performances of Hendrix, Mitchell, and Cox that were committed to tape on July 23, 1970.

Unlike other versions that have come to light after Hendrix’s passing, this version is free of the additional drum and percussive layers Mitchell added after Hendrix had died.

During this period, Hendrix was tirelessly working on First Rays Of The New Rising Sun, the ambitious double album that was set to succeed his 1968 masterpiece, Electric Ladyland.

The environment of Hendrix’s freshly constructed studio proved a breeding ground for creativity, with the trio piecing Night Bird Flying, Freedom, and Dolly Dagger together in the space.

This new box set offers a new, unblemished insight into their jams, with four-track demos of Valleys Of Neptune and Heaven Has No Sorrow serving as particular highlights.

There are also some far more sprawling offerings, including a 26-minute spontaneous jam entitled The Long Medley, which includes Beginnings, Hey Baby (New Rising Sun), Keep On Groovin’, and Freedom.

In addition, mixes of tracks completed by Hendrix and producer Eddie Kramer before he left the studio to perform at the Isle of Wight festival in England are included.

The box set’s release coincides with a new documentary of the same name, which will be screened in cinemas. It tells the story of how a dilapidated Manhattan nightclub was transformed into Hendrix’s now-legendary, state-of-the-art studio.

“The construction of Electric Lady [Studios] was a nightmare,” Kramer says in the doc’s trailer. “We were always running out of money. Poor Jimi had to go back out on the road, make some money, come back, then we could pay the crew.

“Late in ’69 we just hit a wall financially and the place just shut down. He borrows against his future royalties, and we’re off to the races. We could make an atmosphere that he felt comfortable in.”

John Lennon, The Clash, AC/DC, Chic, David Bowie, and Stevie Wonder would all go on to record at the studio.

“My brother had a musical vision,” Janie Hendrix reflects. “With this project, it felt appropriate to shed light not only on his own music, but also on his lasting contribution of Electric Lady Studios.

“He was driven internally to build a home base where he could record everything he felt. While his life was cut short, so many other talented artists continue to express themselves within those magical walls on 52 West 8th Street.”

Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision is out September 13 via Legacy Recordings.

Greg Sover has given Guitar World an exclusive preview of his cover of Jimi Hendrix deep cut Remember, featuring legendary Band of Gypsys/Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Billy Cox, who produces and appears on the track.

It’s fair to say that covering Hendrix remains a challenge for any guitarist, but doing it on tape, alongside the icon’s last surviving band member, is another matter altogether.

Cox certainly does not make a habit of jumping on any old Hendrix cover, all of which makes Sover’s assured, dynamic performance – and their musical understanding – all the more impressive. 

“When I heard you play, I heard something very, very special,” Cox tells Sover in their interview clip, below. “I said, ‘Whoa!’ I had to sit and listen… [with Remember] You did a great job. You would make Jimi proud if he heard that solo. You aced that song.”

The track is one of the first to be taken from Sover’s forthcoming album HIS-STORY (out July 21) and Cox also features on the record’s second and final cover, a rollicking take on Hendrix’s Manic Depression.

“It was an honor working with Billy Cox,” Sover tells Guitar World. “We met up in Nashville, we introduced ourselves and then a Motown jam started. As we're jamming to this song, I remember thinking, ‘I’m here with someone who gave so much to music’ – from epic basslines to writing songs for others – but playing for Jimi Hendrix, who's my favorite, was the icing on the cake. That's when I said, ‘I made it.’”

Sover says he recorded the track on his ’69 Fender Strat reissue and points out that there’s another big name associated with the sessions – this time on the gear side. 

“I wanted a clean tone but with a little bit of bite, using my [Fender] Pugilist distortion pedal,” explains Sover. “I saw this beat-up Victoria 4/10 Bassman [in the studio and] I was told that David Bowie used it on his Young Americans album. I said, ‘Oh yeah I'm using that!’ The rest was history.”

Check out the full track and Sover and Cox’s conversation clip above. We can say, having heard it, the rest of the album is going to be well worth your time, too...

HIS-STORY is released on July 21. Head to Greg Sover’s site to preorder the CD or pre-save on Spotify. 

The Woodstock festival of 1969 remains one of the biggest events in rock ’n’ roll history, with around 500,000 people flooding a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, to see the likes of Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead. The most enigmatic performance of the weekend came when Jimi Hendrix rolled out an unexpected rendition of the US national anthem. “If you listen to the recording you hear me playing the first five or six notes,” remembers bassist Billy Cox. “Then I thought, 'Wait a minute – we never practiced this.' So I immediately stepped back, and it was bang – such a great thing that Jimi did.”

Onstage with Hendrix during his first serious gigs and for his very last performances, Cox’s low-end support aptly complemented Hendrix’s guitar stratospherics. “A bloody marvellous bass player – has soul and feel for days,” noted Hendrix engineer Eddie Kramer. “Billy was Jimi’s confidante and buddy – and a wonderful human being.”

Cox had found his musical home in 1961 while serving with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which is where he first heard Private Jimmy Hendrix playing guitar inside a service club. “He was out of tune, but I heard something in there,” Billy told BP. “I thought, 'Man, that cat is going to be bad.'” The two were soon gigging in nearby Clarksville, Tennessee, with Cox playing an Army-issue Danelectro and later a Fender P-Bass. 

Leaving the service about the same time, the two headed down Highway 41 to Nashville, where their band, the King Kasuals, got work in clubs like Del Morocco and Jolly Rogers. It wasn’t long before Hendrix was touring nationally with acts such as the Isley Brothers, while the less-adventurous Cox stayed behind.

“Jimi joined Little Richard and decided to go to New York,” Billy says. “He called me and said, ‘Hey, man, this guy’s discovered me and is going to take me to Europe and make me a star.’ I said, ‘I can’t go anywhere.' So he said, 'Okay, I’ll make it, and I’ll send for you.’ And that’s what he did."

As promised, ‘this guy’ – Animals bassist Chas Chandler – took Hendrix to London, where they assembled the Jimi Hendrix Experience. For the bass spot they enlisted guitarist Noel Redding, with drummer Mitch Mitchell completing the trio that would record three albums that redefined rock music and rock guitar: Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland.

Back in Nashville, Cox was gigging and doing studio work, especially gospel sessions for the Excello label. He also played in the house bands for two legendary R&B; TV shows: Noble Blackwell’s Night Train and Hoss Allen’s Dallas-based The Beat. Finally, in April 1969 – with the original Experience falling apart – Hendrix called on his old friend to help him salvage foundering sessions at New York’s Record Plant. Cox joined Jimi in the studio, working on riff-based songs for which they’d laid the groundwork in their earliest jams.

By late 1969 drummer Buddy Miles had replaced Mitchell, working in the studio and joining Hendrix and Cox for a New Year’s Eve performance at the Fillmore East. The resulting live album, Band Of Gypsys, shows Hendrix in full creative command. Afterward the Gypsys disbanded, and with Mitch Mitchell back on drums, the trio (billed as the Experience) toured and recorded tracks that would be assembled a quarter-century later as First Rays of the New Rising Sun. Mixing Hendrix’s new groove-based style with tunes that recalled the earlier Experience, the album finds Cox leading from the bottom as he locks in with Mitchell’s freewheeling drum approach.

“I had the privilege to play bass guitar in Gypsy Sun & Rainbows at Woodstock, the Band Of Gypsys at the Fillmore, and with the Experience,” says Billy. “I played with all three of Jimi Hendrix’s groups. In fact, all four: I played with the King Kasuals when we were back in Nashville.”

What made you click musically with Jimi Hendrix?

"I think it was destiny – we all are destined to do whatever. He looked at me and I looked at him, and it was just like we had known each other for a lifetime. We were the same age, and our influences at that time came from here, in Nashville, out of a 50,000-watt clear-channel station called WLAC. Jimi was in Seattle listening to that, and I was in West Virginia and Pennsylvania listening to it."

Do you remember your first shows?

"Fort Campbell was about 60 miles from Nashville, so naturally we both eventually gravitated to that city. But when we came here we found out that it wasn’t what we thought it was. There were opportunities in a lot of small clubs to play blues, but actually it was a country-music town. We played in the black areas and then started going around in the chitlin circuit. These were the little clubs out in the country – on Friday night they had fish and chitlins. Those clubs afforded us the opportunity to have fun and try to make some music."

Did those audiences take to the music you were playing?

"Oh, yeah. At that time, we were just trying to get ourselves together. Every now and then we’d throw in one of our instrumentals, and they’d dance to it because they were in a dancing mood. But we didn’t stay out there too long. We stayed with the basics that people understood."

Who were your influences when you were starting out on bass?

"Wes Montgomery had a brother named Monk Montgomery. He was incredible for that time on electric bass; I bought everything that Monk Montgomery played on. Then I gravitated to Ray Brown, Charlie Mingus – those were the guys of my time on upright bass. There was also Carol Kaye who played on Mission: Impossible. I picked up all of her stuff; she was an excellent electric bass player."

What were you and Hendrix playing when you first started jamming together?

"Songs of that era – Green Onions, Soul Twist by King Curtis, Bill Doggett, Bobby Blue Bland – we enjoyed that. Then we would put some things together of our own, but he would look at me and I would look at him, and he’d say, 'Man, if we played that they would lock us up.' You can hear remnants of that in songs like Dolly Dagger and In From the Storm. They were riffs that we liked playing together, sometimes in unison, sometimes in harmony."

Why didn’t you get songwriting credits for any of those tunes?

"Jimi died before we put it all together. I did it for the love of the music; I wasn’t looking for any credits. Eventually we were supposed to do that, but it just didn’t happen. I lost my friend."

When you played the Fillmore show that became the Band Of Gypsys album, did you have any idea that the music would make such an impact?

"No, but I looked out on the audience during that first show – and when we hit our first note and got into those songs, people were standing there with their mouths wide open. It was funny, the expressions on people’s faces. I think all four of those sets went very, very well. We got enough material and didn’t have to edit anything. We made very few mistakes, and we were feeling it from the head to the toes."

Hendrix liked to tune his guitar down a half-step, and on the Band Of Gypsys material you’re tuned down as well?

"Jimi liked to sing in Eb, so we would tune down to give him room to sing a little better. And it sounds a little bigger. At the time I asked Jimi, 'Why do we tune down?' I remember he said, 'There’s only two us, so we can do what we want.' A lot times he would be out of tune, and I would say, 'Man, you’re out of tune. I guess I am too – I’ll just tune to you.' A lot times we were a whole-step down."

What was it like playing Woodstock?

"That was great; it was the first big gig I played with Jimi. We came around the back way and looked out on that crowd – it was the largest crowd I’d ever played in front of. Mitch said, 'Hell, I don’t know whether I want to go out there!' Jimi said, 'We’ll give to them and they’ll give back to us, and we’ll have a good time.' It was great, it was exhilarating."

In a little over a year Hendrix would be dead. Did you ever tell him to take it easy with the partying?

"I don’t think it was the partying. It was just … to be. If you look at geniuses like Mozart, they don’t live long. They come to do their thing, and then they’re gone.
I gave a speech at the University of Indiana, and I said, 'Every now and then a spirit slips through a portal of time into this reality, and blows our minds.' Jimi’s death devastated me, but then reality kicked in – we all have to do that. I’ll have to make my transition also."

A posthumous live album, Live at Woodstock, featuring Hendrix's iconic interpretation of The Star Spangled Banner, is out now on vinyl, CD and as a digital download.

In 2004, British television network Channel 4 established the UK Music Hall of Fame – a somewhat ill-fated experiment into rock ‘n’ roll awards shows that lasted only three years. 

Its mission of honoring “musicians, of any nationality, for their lifetime contributions to music in the United Kingdom” was a nice idea, but one that ultimately proved unsustainable, and no match for the juggernaut that is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

But despite its short runtime, the UK Music Hall of Fame still managed to induct 267 musicians and artists into its short history books – The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Ozzy Osbourne among them – and hosted one of the most memorable all-star tribute jams to ever grace an awards show stage.

Among the 2005 inductees was the late guitar great Jimi Hendrix, whose memory was celebrated by the UK Music Hall of Fame via a cover of his iconic track Hey Joe, which was lead by Slash.

Now, in terms of style, there’s a fairly significant difference between Hendrix and his Fender Stratocaster and Slash and his Gibson Les Paul, but the GNR rocker proved to be an excellent selection for the occasion, which gave him the opportunity to pay tribute to one of the greatest guitar players of all time.

Slash’s six-string performance wasn’t the only thing that stood out from the performance, though – for the cover, he was joined by two of Hendrix’s old bandmates.

With the help of Mitch Mitchell on drums and Billy Cox on bass – as well as Steve Winwood behind the mic – Slash navigated Hey Joe’s chord progression with lashings of humbucker grit and a suite of blues improvisations in the spirit of Hendrix himself.

Of course, Slash and Les Paul were only ever going to sound like one thing – Slash and a Les Paul – but the goal was never to sound like Hendrix, regardless of who was occupying the rhythm section.

Instead, Slash tipped his top hat to the Stratocaster master in his own style, serving up not one but two break-neck lead passages, the latter of which saw the GNR titan close out the cover with more than three straight minutes of untethered soloing.

That second solo continued straight through to the outro riff, which Cox and Mitchell held down with polished aplomb while Slash embellished proceedings with furious fretboard flurries aplenty. 

As far as Hendrix tributes go, it’s certainly up there. Cox, one of Hendrix's bandmates during the Band of Gypsys era, was commanding in the low-end, while Mitchell – a veteran from the Experience and Woodstock days – brought energy and finesse to the rhythm section, and yet ensured the spotlight remained on Slash.

Hall of Fame awards shows seemingly have a monopoly on all-star jams, regularly hosting numerous musical heroes for blockbuster performances. One that immediately springs to mind occurred at the 2009 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, which saw Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Joe Perry join Metallica for a cover of Train Kept A-Rollin’.

A one-off Experience Hendrix concert – inspired by the annual all-star concert tours of the same name – will be held on December 4 in Austin, Texas.

Staged in honor of what would have been Jimi Hendrix's 80th birthday (November 27), the concert will be held at Austin City Limits Live’s Moody Theater, and will feature a jaw-loosening lineup.

Joining bass guitar legend Billy Cox – who played with Hendrix himself in both the Band of Gypsys and Jimi Hendrix Experience – are a host of A-tier electric guitar players, such as Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Zakk Wylde, Dweezil Zappa, Eric Johnson, Doyle Bramhall II, and Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas.

Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble drummer Chris Layton, Indigenous's Mato Nanji, and The Slide Brothers will also be on hand, with even more special guests set to be announced in the coming weeks.

The concert will also come shortly after the release of Los Angeles Forum: April 26, 1969, a new live album featuring the original Jimi Hendrix Experience lineup.

Recorded, as you might expect, at the Los Angeles Forum on April 26, 1969, the album will be released on November 18 via Legacy Recordings, and features a number of classics (Foxey Lady, Purple Haze and Voodoo Child (Slight Return), among them) and some more obscure tunes, such as a cover of Tax Free, a 1967 instrumental by the Swedish duo Hansson & Karlsson. 

Also of note on the LP is a cover of Cream's Sunshine of Your Love, and a pre-Woodstock version of the Star-Spangled Banner. It can be preordered via Hendrix's website.

“The music of Jimi Hendrix has always been a large influence on my life and music – in no small part due to his blues roots," said Shepherd of the upcoming concert in a press release. "He showed a lot of his influences and the foundation from which he built his music. 

“Jimi Hendrix was one of the greatest performers, entertainers and songwriters of all time, but as far as the guitar goes, he made a statement with his instrument that has yet to be matched.”

For tickets and more info about the Experience Hendrix concert in Austin, visit Ticketmaster.

Billy Cox, who played with Jimi Hendrix in Band of Gypsies, as well as, prior to that, his short-lived group Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, recently revealed the fiery fate of Hendrix’s long-lost single-lipstick-pickup Danelectro Shorthorn “Betty Jean” electric guitar.

Now, in that same interview, presented on NAMM’s Remembering Jimi Hendrix podcast, the bass guitar player also explained why he turned down Hendrix’s offer to join him earlier in his career.

According to Cox, who knew Jimi from their time stationed together in Kentucky while serving in the US Army, Hendrix phoned him in the summer of 1966 to ask him to come to England and join him in a new band being assembled by his manager Chas Chandler – the band that would become the Experience.

But the bassist turned down Hendrix’s offer, explaining that his bass only had three strings and that he couldn’t afford to purchase an amp.

As Cox admits in the new interview, this was an excuse he came up with to protect Jimi from being the target of racism.

“I got a phone call from him, and he said, ‘This man is going to take me to Europe and make me a star, and I told him about you…and I want you to go,’ ” Cox recalled.

“I’ve told so many lies about this… well, it wasn’t a lie, I just didn’t tell the whole story… I said, ‘Jimi, I’m renting an amp, and I’ve still got my bass but it’s got three strings on… you go ahead and you make it.’ Because I knew that, possibly, with this segregated thing that was going on, I figured if I went, there’s a possibility, with me being black, he might not make it. But he did… he did real well, and I went on with my life.”

The full interview with Cox is available on the NAMM Music History Project podcast, which also features contributions from Hendrix producer Eddie Kramer. 

When it came to electric guitars, Jimi Hendrix, as we all know, played more than just Strats and Flying Vs. Particularly early on in his career he used a host of other models, including a Fender Duo-Sonic when he backed up the Isley Brothers and a Jazzmaster with Little Richard.

Among the most mythical, and unusual, of his early instruments, however, is the single-lipstick-pickup Danelectro Shorthorn “Betty Jean” seen in the image above.

The guitar, commonly thought of a U-1, but also identified as a 1958 Danelectro Shorthorn 3012, was purchased by Hendrix while he was dating a woman named Betty Jean Morgan, which led him to name the Dano after her and emblazon it with her name.

The guitar was Hendrix’s main axe during his time in the US Army, and he also used it for his first jams with Billy Cox and earliest post-service gigs.

He eventually traded the Danelectro for an Ibanez Rhythm Maker at Collins Music store in Clarksville, Tennessee. After that, Betty Jean never reappeared. It has never come up for sale or auction, and seemed to vanish for good.

Hendrix’s old bandmate Billy Cox, however, has an idea of what became of Billy Jean. In an interview recently presented on NAMM’s Remembering Jimi Hendrix podcast, Cox recounted the last days of the famous guitar:

“He had a Danelectro that had ‘Betty Jean’ on it,” Cox said. “And I was told, ‘If you ever found that guitar in Nashville it’d be worth five millions dollars.’ I found it where it was. He had pawned it to the guy who owned the Del Morocco [a Nashville club that Hendrix had played in the early ‘60s] for about $150, something like that. And he kept it because Jimi didn’t pay him back. He kept it at his house, and about four years later that house burnt down.

Cox went on to say that at one point he went looking for Betty Jean. “I sometimes thought it was at Collins Music store where we sometimes did our business in Clarksville. We looked up in the attic, we looked down in the garage, in the basement, for a whole Saturday. I had bib overalls on, never found it.”

Then, he continued, “it dawned on me. It was possible…I had talked to some people and they said, ‘Yeah, it was at Uncle Teddy’s house and that house burned down.’”

This week, it was announced that Hendrix’s infamous 1970 Maui concerts are to be documented in a new film and live album, Music, Money, Madness... Jimi Hendrix In Maui.

When you’ve played bass with the finest guitarist who ever lived, at the biggest and most important gig there ever was, you’re in a select crowd - and Billy Cox is at the top of the list.

Jimi Hendrix was the man: Woodstock was the event. From all these years’ distance, the impact of those frantic, disorganized three days on Max Yasgur’s farm in New York State still looms large - but Cox is stoic about it.

As he should be: a former army man, he prides himself on being the musician who took Jimi Hendrix in hand and guided him through the last recordings he would ever make before his tragically early death.

Billy first met Jimi by accident in 1961, ducking into Service Club 1 at the military base in Fort Campbell, Kentucky to get out of a sudden rainstorm. He was impressed with the guitar sounds he heard coming out of the club and introduced himself to his fellow private Hendrix, telling him that he played bass.

The two became fast friends and bandmates, leaving the army at about the same time and playing the club circuit in the area. Their early work together peaked in a band called The King Kasuals, which played the chitlin’ circuit’ around Nashville and around the southeast USA.

When destiny came calling for Jimi in the shape of manager Chas Chandler, who met Hendrix in New York and suggested a move to the UK, Jimi asked Billy if he wanted to come along. Cox was broke, however, and passed on the opportunity, spending the next couple of years backing American R&B artists and watching as his friend’s career went stratospheric on the other side of the Atlantic.

When the Jimi Hendrix Experience (Jimi plus bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell) broke up in 1969, Hendrix called Cox again - and this time the bassist didn’t need to be asked twice. Cox joined Hendrix in England and formed The Band Of Gypsys, also playing Woodstock as Gypsys Suns And Rainbows and recording until Hendrix’s sudden death in September 1970.

After this pivotal event, Cox went on to become a respected session man and has carved out a long career in the Charlie Daniels Band and other outfits.

Following the release of The Band Of Gypsys’ performance at Woodstock on DVD, Billy was on hand to recall some of those far-off moments of glory…

How do you remember Woodstock?

"You cannot separate the music from the Woodstock festival itself. I consider myself blessed to have played at the party of the millennium and to have been the only man to have played in The Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Band Of Gypsys and with Jimi in Gypsys Suns And Rainbows at Woodstock. Woodstock was an accident and won’t happen again."

How does your bass-playing at the gig sound to you after all these years?

"My bass playing still holds up after 35 years. It still sounds pretty good to me! I still sound the same. My influences were Ray Brown, Ron Carter, Charlie Mingus: the bass players of that era, you know?"

What about contemporaries such as Jack Bruce?

"I liked Jack, he was okay. Also Jack Casady. When someone plays the same instrument as you, you kinda listen to those people. Paul McCartney was also an excellent bass player, I admired his style. I liked his uniqueness. I see playing an instrument as keeping a conversation going, and he’s great at doing that."

Did you rate Jaco Pastorius?

"Jaco was great. I came to know him, he was a genius. A complete innovator with a lot of things he did with the bass. I have some fretless basses myself, but I use them mostly on jazz gigs and so on, mostly because then I can get the same effect as an upright."

Do you play five-string bass too?

"I have a five-string, I find the extra B does a lot for the presence of the bass. When I play gospel music, the B string comes more into play. I don’t have a six-string bass though."

What’s your current bass setup?

"I’ve designed a bass for Cort Guitars. It’s called the Billy Cox Freedom Bass. When you look at the bass itself, you’re looking at an expanded P-J configuration: it has a reversed split pickup and two single-coils. 

"It’s user-friendly: there’s a volume and tone for each one and there’s both active and passive circuitry. Twenty-four frets. I actually designed one 15 or 20 years ago and put the design away into a filing cabinet before I was asked to design one for Cort."

What about amps?

"I use Ampeg SVTs for the larger gigs and a 250-watter for smaller shows. I used Marshalls with the Band Of Gypsys, but I don’t have any of those now. Matter of fact, I used to have one of Jimi’s old amps too. 

"With him I played Fender Jazzes or Precisions, it just depended on how I felt that day. We’d go into the studio and I’d use a Jazz for the first few days, then I’d pick up a Precision because I wanted a different sound, then I’d go back to a Jazz."

How did you and Jimi write together?

"The bass parts were written across a riff, which we used to call a pattern back then. We’d just jam a 24-bar riff and intertwine the parts until it was all written. We’d do three or four of those and that was enough to make a complete song. Then it was just a case of putting them all together.

"How did we come up with them in the first place? Just talent, I think. The Creator gives some people a natural talent, and if they dig hard they can utilize that. Jimi and I were always jamming, and he knew that I knew what we had done, so that’s how it came together."

Jimi played bass too, didn’t he?

"Jimi was a good bass player; in fact, that’s him playing on Foxy Lady, Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary. In Mitch Mitchell’s book he talks about how Jimi would lay down the bass parts so they could get out of the studio faster. But his most incredible bass playing was on All Along the Watchtower."

When you played Noel Redding’s basslines, did you copy them or adapt them to your own style?

"I always brought my own style to everything. I didn’t change anything, but I did improvise a little. Noel was good, but I think I brought a little more rhythm and a little more edge to the band."

It must have been a blast jamming with a guitarist of the caliber of Jimi.

"Oh, it was! I used to love jamming on classic songs like Johnny B Goode. I loved all the songs we did together. We were locked together spiritually, and I think that doesn’t happen so much nowadays: musicians can’t lock in so well together because there’s a lot of egos around. That wasn’t a problem for us because I knew I was there to support Jimi and I enjoyed the role."

What kind of man was Jimi?

"He was decent, respectable, kind, generous, naive at times - that’s the kind of person he was."

Did he struggle with drugs, as is popularly supposed?

"As far as I know he never struggled with drugs. He wasn’t the kind of guy who sat around high all the time and wanted people to go out and get more drugs: he wasn’t a 'druggie'.

"We weren’t angels, but regardless of what some people have said, you can’t go into the studio and create songs like Voodoo Chile and In From The Storm and be a druggie. Those songs require 100 percent of your attention.

"I was a stickler for this, too: my attitude was that going into the studio was about taking care of business, because every hour costs money."

What would Jimi have gone on to do, had he lived?

"People ask me that all the time. I’m not a prophet, nor am I a soothsayer! I’m not trying to be smart, but I just don’t know. He had so many areas that he could have gone into: the music was good and it was light years ahead of its time, so he probably would have produced music that was even lighter years ahead of its time."

The 2019 Experience Hendrix tour kicked off on March 3, and among the many artists aboard for the run this year is Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine, who is making his tour debut alongside Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Zakk Wylde, Dweezil Zappa, Jonny Lang and others.

You can check out footage of Mustaine playing the Are You Experienced classic, “Fire,” with Johnny Lang above, and “Stone Free,” with Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys band mate Billy Cox, below. Both clips are taken from the March 4 show at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida.

Back when the tour was first announced, Mustaine said: “Jimi Hendrix. The name that comes to my mind as one the ‘Premiere American Guitarists of All Time.’ An Innovator, and legendary musician, I am beyond honored to do my part in this tribute to the immortal Jimi Hendrix, and want to thank [EH Tour producer] John McDermott for inviting me to play along such mind-blowing guitarists as Joe Satriani, and a personal favorite of mine, Eric Johnson.”

For the full itinerary, head over to ExperienceHendrixTour.com.

Back in December, it was announced that Both Sides of the Sky, a new album of mostly unreleased Jimi Hendrix studio tracks, would be released in March. Now, you can hear another preview of the album, a previously unreleased recording of "Lover Man" made by Hendrix with the Band of Gypsys—bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles. You can check it out above.

"Lover Man" is the second track we've heard thus far from Both Sides of the Sky, following "Mannish Boy," which was premiered last month. The recording of "Mannish Boy" was significant in that it was made on April 22, 1969, during the Band of Gypsys' first ever recording session. "Lover Man," however, was recorded in December 1969, just a month before the trio recorded their legendary, self-titled live album. Though just seven months separate the two recordings, you can already feel how much the Band of Gypsys had gelled as a trio in that time.

Both Sides of the Sky also features recordings of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, plus guest appearances from Stephen Stills—in a remarkable, pres-CSNY version of Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" and an original called "$20 Fine"—and Johnny Winter, on a version of Guitar Slim's "Things I Used To Do." It is set for a March 9 release via Legacy Recordings.

You can preorder Both Sides of the Sky here.

Zakk Wylde, Buddy Guy, Dweezil Zappa, Eric Johnson, Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and former Band of Gypsys/Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Billy Cox are onboard for the 2017 Experience Hendrix Tour.

The artists will pay homage to Jimi Hendrix with 28 performances in February and March, stopping in more than two dozen cities along the east coast, Midwest and southern states.

Now in its second decade, the tour celebrates Hendrix by bringing together an array of musicians. The tour begins February 17 at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon, and runs through March 26, with a finale at the Mystic Showroom at Mystic Lake Casino Hotel in Prior Lake, MN.

Head here for tour dates and ticket information.

The eighth edition of the Experience Hendrix Tour will launch in March 2014.

The month-long tour, which is presented by BandFuse: Rock Legends, will bring together a diverse group of artists paying homage to the genius of Jimi Hendrix.

This year’s lineup ranges from Zakk Wylde to Buddy Guy, Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Dweezil Zappa, Los Lobos’ stalwarts Cesar Rosas and David Hidalgo, left-handed blues rocker Eric Gales, Texas guitar gods Doyle Bramhall II and Eric Johnson, Bootsy Collins, Mato Nanji and, from Serbia by way of Memphis, Ana Popovic.

The rhythm section, as always, includes bassist Billy Cox, the only player, apart from Jimi Hendrix, who was part of both the Band of Gypsys and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Chris Layton, the drummer who, along with the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, was a founder of Double Trouble.

Below, you can check out GuitarWorld.com's exclusive videos of Kenny Wayne Shepherd (top) and Billy Cox (bottom) discussing the tour.

The tour officially begins in Dallas at the Verizon Theater March 11 and then roars through the Midwest and mid-Atlantic regions with stops in St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Washington and Detroit with more than 20 dates. For all the dates and ticket information, head here.

This year's Experience Hendrix Tour is the focus of the Jimi Hendrix Guitar Competition, which was announced last week. The competition, backed by Sony Music's Legacy Recordings, IK Multimedia, Talenthouse along with Experience Hendrix, LLC offers entrants a chance to win a performing slot on one of the tour dates next year as well as a cash prize plus gear.

Contestants are invited to submit a video of their performance of a Hendrix track with the winner selected by a team of judges including Janie Hendrix, producer/engineer Eddie Kramer, Guitar World editor Brad Tolinski and musician Dave Stewart.

For more about the contest, and to find out how to enter, visit talenthouse.com.

For more about the tour, visit experiencehendrixtour.com.

Was Jimi Hendrix spinning out of control during his final days in the studio, or on the verge of a new breakthrough? New evidence emerges on People, Hell and Angels, a new album of previously unreleased studio recordings.

Bassist Billy Cox has fond memories of his final days in the studio with Jimi Hendrix, recording at New York’s famed Record Plant in 1969.

But trips to and from the studio with Hendrix were another matter entirely. Cox recalls that the legendary guitarist was something of a reckless driver. A jaunt across Manhattan in Jimi’s silver Corvette could be a hair-raising experience.

“We’d go into the studio around eight o’clock in the evening,” Cox remembers, “and a lot of times we didn’t come out until noon the next day. When we came out of the studio, he’d have his guitar, I’d have my bass…and the Corvette was a two-seater. So we take off, and my face is hangin’ out the window, along with one of my legs, and Jimi’s got his guitar in the back. We’re goin’ through traffic, and I’m sayin, ‘Oh, lord, you gon’ run into somebody!’ He scared me. I’d get out at the hotel and say, ‘Whew, man! I made it safe and sound.’ ”

As fate would have it, it was drug-and-alcohol-related asphyxiation, not reckless driving, that claimed Hendrix’s life not long after the scene Cox relates. But by then, Jimi had already vastly enriched rock guitar’s lexicon of licks, tricks and aesthetics. He raised the bar for rock guitar heroism. Or as Cox puts it, “Here we are 42 years later, and we’re still celebrating his genius.”

Hendrix never got to finish the album he was working on at the time, leaving fans, rock historians and pop culture geeks perpetually wondering what he was up to in the studio during the final year and a half of his life. Back at the tail end of the Sixties, some said he’d lost the plot, that the glory days of Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland were behind him, and never to return.

Then again, there were those who said that he was on the verge of creating some new progressive form of music exponentially more revolutionary than what had come before. There was talk of a collaboration with Miles Davis arranger Gil Evans, although there’s not even a hint of that among the mountain of unfinished tapes Hendrix left behind.

“Jimi was frustrated before he died, because I think the public didn’t understand him,” says Eddie Kramer, the recording engineer who worked most extensively with Hendrix throughout his years of fame. “He was so confused as to which way to go.”

So was Hendrix on a crash course with musical disaster, wasted on dope and wasting tape while the studio clock ticked off dollars? Or was there some grand, redeeming vision that would have turned the whole thing into another Sgt. Pepper’s, Bitches Brew or Exile on Main Street?

Elucidating the musical truth of Hendrix’s final recordings has been the almost 20-year mission of Kramer, archivist/producer/historian John McDermott, and Janie Hendrix, who is Jimi’s half sister and the head of Experience Hendrix, the company that manages the late guitarist’s estate.

In 1997, they released their best educated guess as to what that final album might have been. It was called First Rays of the New Rising Sun, the name that they conjecture was at the top of Hendrix’s list of tentative titles for his work-in-progress.

They followed it up in 2010 with Valleys of Neptune, another scoop from Hendrix’s deep barrel of end-game demos, work tapes, jam tapes, party tapes, unfinished masters and so on. McDermott, Kramer and Experience Hendrix recently dropped another glimpse of Hendrix’s final days at work in the studio, People, Hell & Angels.

“We’re filling in the library with the last missing piece, from a thematic point of view,” McDermott says. “On Valleys of Neptune, we looked at the final recordings of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and then Jimi’s first steps with [bassist] Billy Cox. ‘Here,’ we said. ‘This is Jimi outside the Experience.’ So it includes the very first recordings the Band of Gypsys made in the studio, Jimi with the band he had at Woodstock and him playing and guesting with friends like [R&B sax man] Lonnie Youngblood and [vocal duo] the Allen twins. The idea for us was to say, ‘This is all the stuff that was among his portfolio of music that was cut after Electric Ladyland.’ Hopefully it shows some of the avenues that this guy was traveling down as he was trying to decide what the future held.”

The tracks span the period from March 13, 1968, through August 1970, although the main focus is on an extended run of sessions held at the New York Record Plant in mid 1969. It was a time of profound change for rock music and for Hendrix himself. He’d just moved back from London, where he’d first risen to fame and where he recorded the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s game-changing first three albums. He was back in his home country, but all was not well.

Hendrix had parted company with Chas Chandler, his co-manager and the producer who had given shape and substance to the first three Experience albums. Experience bass player Noel Redding would soon leave the fold as well. Redding and Chandler were both exasperated by the guitarist’s newfound fondness for tinkering endlessly with musical ideas in the studio and only occasionally coming away with a master take.

But that too was a sign of the changing times. The business and aesthetics of rock music were in the midst of a revolutionary transition. Where the music industry had once viewed rock music as a passing, cash-in-quick teenage fad, more-enlightened entrepreneurs were starting to realize that rock held enormous long-range business potential, not to mention all the excitement that comes with the forging of a bold new art form.

So in a sense, Hendrix had landed in the right place at the right time when he got off the plane in New York. Two gentlemen named Chris Stone and Gary Kellgren had joined forces to create a new kind of recording studio on West 44th Street. Stone was an MBA marketing wiz connected with the Revlon cosmetics empire at the time. Kellgren was one of the best engineers in New York, noted for his pioneering work with eight-track recording and tape-based effects like flanging and phasing.

While the best recording studios had historically been cold, antiseptic, lab-like environments attached to record labels like EMI or Columbia, Stone and Kellgren hit on the idea of building an independent state-of-the-art recording studio situated in a comfortable, hip living room–style environment. Along with Frank Zappa, Hendrix was one of their first and best clients, paying a handsome hourly rate to hang out, jam and party with friends, experiment with musical ideas, strive for master recordings and generally make the Record Plant his midtown pied–à–terre.

“Oh, Chris and Gary loved Jimi,” McDermott says with a laugh. “At the end of the day it was like, ‘Just keep stacking those tapes up, fellas. Let him be in there as long as he wants to.’ Because they’d be able to say, ‘Hey, we got the top guy at our facility.’ And the bills always got paid. It wasn’t like they had to chase someone to get paid. Jimi paid his bills.”

This is the somewhat amazing part. The recording funds weren’t coming from Hendrix’s record label, Reprise, recoupable against future album sales in the usual music manner. Instead, Jimi was footing the bill himself.

“It never went through the record company,” McDermott confirms. “It drove his management and his accountant crazy, but the bills went to his management company, and they paid for all those sessions.”

For Hendrix, the investment seemed well worth it. Before he hit it big, he toiled for years as a studio guitarist, playing budget, nail-it-in-one-take R&B sessions. Hendrix relished the idea of having the hippest new studio in America as his atelier and all-around bachelor pad. He’d also started to assemble his New York team. Kramer was shipped over from England, where he’d distinguished himself as an engineer at London’s celebrated Olympic Studios. Stone has vivid memories of Kramer alighting from the car sent to pick him up at the airport, decked out in a cape. And when Kramer wasn’t around, Kellgren’s world-class studio engineering chops were at Jimi’s disposal.

Even before setting up shop at the Record Plant, Hendrix had shown a marked tendency to view recording studios as party spaces, and the guest list was pretty wide open. “The hangers-on became a problem,” Kramer says. “They became a problem for Chas, and certainly for me. Sessions would be tough, because Jimi couldn’t say no to his buddies. He’d have invited the street sweeper and the cleaning lady and the record company president with him.”

But now, with Chandler out of the picture and the Experience on the skids, some of Jimi’s buddies started to make it out of the party room and into the band. Some of them earned their keep in that capacity better than others. With Redding’s imminent departure from the scene, Hendrix called on Billy Cox, an old friend from the guitarist’s days in the Army and a musical colleague who’d played many a chitlin circuit gig with the guitarist in the early Sixties. Cox had deep experience backing greats like Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, Slim Harpo, Freddie King, Gatemouth Brown, Rufus and Carla Thomas and many others on stages, recording and TV studios. He was also solid as both a musician and a personality.

“Jimi Hendrix and I were musical confidants when he began his musical career,” the bassist says. “And I was his musical confidant till the end.”

Cox began by recording with Hendrix and Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, but soon another drummer entered the picture. Buddy Miles came from the same R&B roots as Hendrix and Cox, and had gone on to be a larger-than-life figure in rock music, a voluble, volatile veteran of the Electric Flag with guitar hero Mike Bloomfield and his own Buddy Miles Express. The Hendrix, Cox and Miles trio would soon be known to history as the Band of Gypsys.

“We were all the same age, and we had all come up under the R&B influence,” Cox says. “I mean Buddy was with Wilson Pickett, and I played behind Pickett when he came to Nashville. So we all played the same kind of music and had a lot in common.”

One of Cox’s many musical virtues was his ability to mesh equally well with both Mitch Mitchell and Buddy Miles. “Mitch was more soul influenced from a jazz perspective,” Cox explains. “And Buddy was a hard-hitting rock and roller. But both of them were good, and I had no problem playing with either one. I came out of the Pittsburgh/Philadelphia scene, and I was familiar with a lot of the jazz artists from there. I tried to play a little jazz years before, and I liked Mitch’s influence. And then with Buddy, you had the R&B, blues, gutbucket hard rock thing, and I liked that also. That was part of my DNA.”

In that light, it’s interesting to compare one of People, Hell and Angels’ standout tracks—the Hendrix standard “Hear My Train a Comin’ ” laid down with the Cox/Miles rhythm section in May 1969—with a version by the Experience just a month earlier. While the two recordings are very close in arrangement and tempo, Hendrix clearly sounds more relaxed with Cox and Miles and tears off a blindingly brilliant guitar solo. He’s one of the few guitarists on earth who’s amazing even when he’s noodling in the studio at four in the morning. The People, Hell and Angels set packs quite a few solo guitar epiphanies, albeit cast as diamonds in the rough among unfinished tracks.

“What’s so cool about Jimi is you can hear how excited he gets when there’s a dialed-in player or players on the track,” McDermott says. “It lifts him to a different place. You can hear it when you listen to ‘Voodoo Child’ on Ladyland, and you can hear it with Billy and Buddy on ‘Hear My Train.’ Whenever he feels like the people with him are locked in, he can soar.”

Fans of the Band of Gypsys’ one official recording, the highly regarded, self-titled live album from Fillmore East, will be especially interested in People, Hell & Angels, which contains no fewer than four studio recordings by the short-lived trio.

“When Jimi went to Billy, he didn’t say, ‘You’re gonna replace Noel,’ ” McDermott recounts. “He said, ‘Come up and help me.’ And when Billy first came in April of ’69, it was really about making good on some of these songs that Jimi had struggled on with Noel. Noel was a tremendous musician and deserves a lot of credit, but I think there was something with Billy. In all the turbulence of Hendrix’s life, it was important for him to have a steadying friend, who would understand his desire to work on demos over and over again until he felt he had it, whereas Noel was hoping to get it in one or two takes and move on. I think that kind of philosophical difference really was critically important.

“And as for Mitch Mitchell versus Buddy Miles,” McDermott continues, “I think Mitch was Jimi’s guy, but he did realize that Buddy brought something special for certain songs that was almost part of his personality. That thump and that excitement was different from Mitch, but it certainly fits a song like ‘Earth Blues’ [another frequently recorded Hendrix composition, performed with the Cox/Miles rhythm section on People, Hell and Angels]. You hear it. When you compare that with the version that has Mitch on drums, it’s markedly different. The R&B funk vibe is there. It becomes a different song.”

Hendrix was clearly searching for the right rhythm section sound for the material he was developing. A lot of the 1969 recordings seem like an effort to arrive at a definitive basic track over which Jimi could record vocals and the filigreed layers of guitar overdubs that were essential to the Hendrix magic.

But was the material really worth that much effort? Most of it is blues-based stuff or blues covers, which was not unusual for the time. Blues records were extremely popular in 1969, and blues-based artists like John Mayall, Canned Heat, Johnny Winter, and the Al Kooper–Mike Bloomfield tandem were enjoying major success. Traditional blues artists like B.B. King, Albert King and John Lee Hooker were also crossing over to the rock audience in a big way.

But the preponderance of blues-based material among Hendrix’s final recordings seems to disprove theories that he was onto some bold, new progressive jazz-rock direction. And if the folks at Reprise were expecting another Hendrix hit on the order of “Foxey Lady,” Purple Haze” or the guitarist’s popular cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” they would have been disappointed; there is certainly nothing of the sort to be found among the tracks on People, Hell and Angels. If anything, at the end of his life Hendrix seemed to be heading back to his bluesy roots. And few people had more of a right to go back there than him.

“By the time I got onboard, I’d say his direction had kind of changed,” Cox confirms. “Some of his songs from that time, like ‘Freedom,’ ‘Up from the Storm’ and ‘Dolly Dagger,’ were based on little riffs that we’d come up with together back in the early Sixties. Some of them were insane at the time. Jimi would say, ‘Man, if they heard us play some of this stuff, they’d lock us up.’ We didn’t write any of that stuff down. We remembered it. Jimmy called them ‘patterns.’ I call them ‘musical riffs.’ We had a lot of them in our heads.”

Another virtue of the Record Plant, complementing its great gear and a penthouse vibe, was the fact that it was right around the corner from the Steve Paul Scene, at the time one of New York’s hottest rock and roll clubs. Hendrix would drop by to jam with artists on the bill, including one notable run sitting in with the Jeff Beck Group. He’d also round up musicians from the club and bring them over to the Record Plant to hang out and cut some tracks, perhaps most famously tapping Steve Winwood (Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Blind Faith) and Jack Casady (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna) to play on “Voodoo Child” from Electric Ladyland. But that kind of thing went on all the time, according to Cox.

“We’d start at eight P.M. but maybe stop at around 12 or one in the morning and go out. And at that time, the Scene, Ungano’s and a lot of clubs like that had a lot of the big artists playing there. Jimi would say, ‘I’m recording over at the Record Plant, come on by.’ And we’d go into studio B at four A.M. or so and just have fun for a couple of hours. I was the new kid on the block. Didn’t know a lot of people. And all of sudden I’m jamming with Stephen Stills, Johnny Winter, whoever.”

Or even some lesser lights of the rock fraternity. On the evening of April 21, 1969, Hendrix and Cox stopped by the Scene and ran into members of the Cherry People, a group that had got to Number 45 on the 1968 pop charts with the psychedelic bubblegum track “And Suddenly.” They were in town to get out of their deal with Heritage Records and had dropped by the Scene to console themselves, having failed to secure a meeting with the head of the label. Their road manager, Al Marks, himself a guitarist, had met Hendrix backstage on a few prior occasions. On the strength of this, Marks made bold to approach Hendrix’s table. Marks has vivid recollections of the evening.

“Jimi said, ‘Sorry I don’t remember you. But hey, you play in a band? You got a drummer?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he’s right here.’ He goes, ‘You wanna do a session with us tonight?’ I looked at him: ‘You gotta be kidding. You serious?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, man, meet me at four o’clock at the Record Plant.’ He meant four A.M.”

Marks, Cherry People drummer Rocky Issac and guitarist Chris Grimes couldn’t believe their luck when they were buzzed into the Record Plant building and shown into the studio. Gary Kellgren was already in the control room setting up for the session. The three Cherry People were even more amazed when Hendrix himself turned up at around 4:20. He sent Marks out to park his Corvette while he set up the recording room to suit his requirements. Marks recalls Hendrix using a pair of Acoustic amps and cabinets for the session, which may have belonged to the Record Plant.

Once everything was ready to go, Jimi asked, “Okay, who’s the drummer?” Issac was duly installed behind the studio’s kit; Marks and Grimes were assigned to play percussion. Both Marks and Issac recall working through versions of “Roomful of Mirrors,” the Elmore James song “Bleeding Heart,” “Stone Free,” a freeform jam called “Drone Blues” and “Crash Landing.” But things didn’t go particularly well. Issac was extremely nervous and not at all used to Hendrix’s practice of just kicking into a song and expecting all the players to follow him.

“I went over to Billy Cox and said, ‘Billy, I’m used to learning a song first,’ ” the drummer recalls. “I don’t know what’s going on here, and I’m scared.’ And Billy said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on either, but I’ve got the advantage of having played with Jimi quite a bit and I’m able to follow him.’ I said, ‘Well, he’s not cueing me in or anything, and I keep messing up.’ He said, ‘Do the best you can.’ ”

The evening went downhill from there. “I think it was around 10 or 11 in the morning when we got done with ‘Roomful of Mirrors,’ ” Marks says. “Meanwhile, we’d gone back into the control room after every take while Jimi stayed in the studio. He wouldn’t come out into the control room. And Gary Kellgren had a bowl full of rolled joints and an ashtray filled with cocaine. After every take, we’d light up a joint and pass it around.”

“Anything you wanted to take was available,” Issac adds. “Alcohol, coke, speed, pot everywhere. There was plenty of everything. The whole time I’m having an anxiety attack. I couldn’t drink enough. I couldn’t take enough speed. I was falling apart. But Jimi was so generous and gracious. I felt he was disappointed. But he took me in the control room where he was mixing down ‘Stone Free.’ He sat me down at the controls and showed me how to pan the drums from left to right. Pretty soon I’m sitting there with him doing a mix.”

Also in the control room that evening was Devon Wilson, Jimi’s main lady at the time and the subject to the song “Crash Landing,” a forerunner to “Dolly Dagger” that finds Hendrix excoriating Wilson’s hard-drug use and the toll he saw it taking on their relationship. One of the famed late-Sixties’ supergroupies, Wilson was also involved with Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Eric Clapton and Duane Allman at various times. She passed away under mysterious circumstances at New York’s Chelsea Hotel just six months after Hendrix’s death. Marks remembers her as, “very tall, very thin, very beautiful. She sat in the corner and just smoked. Didn’t talk. She was as high as the rest of us.”

So it is perhaps no surprise that the evening didn’t amount to much in terms of viable master recordings. “It was funny to watch Gary Kellgren as the night progressed,” Marks says. “He started messing up a little bit, and that’s when he called the session that night. He couldn’t make it sound right anymore, so it was like, ‘Okay, we’re done. We’re wasting time and tape.’ That’s exactly what he said. When the faders started looking like double faders, that was it.”

What is surprising, given the evening’s unrewarding musical trajectory, is that Hendrix asked Issac, Marks and Gaines to return for another session a few nights later. Jimi gave the drummer $400 for the night’s work and $100 each to Marks and Grimes, with the promise of the same again when they returned. When Issac got back to New York from the Cherry People’s D.C. home base for the second session, he garnered some further insights into his Hendrix’s life at the time.

He met Jimi at the office of his manager, Mike Jeffrey. A hard-bitten, old-school rock-and-roll business sharpie with a reputation as a gangster—some even say that he arranged Hendrix’s death—Jeffrey didn’t welcome Jimi’s latest protégé with open arms. He clearly wasn’t pleased to fork over cash to cover hotel, meal and incidental expenses for Issac and another member of the Cherry People, guitarist Punky Meadows, who hadn’t been engaged to play on the session but had tagged along to meet Hendrix.

“I felt like Mike Jeffrey would have rather just taken a gun and shot me than given me two dollars,” Issac says. “Jimi knew he was getting robbed, moneywise, but I don’t think that was the big thing for him. He wanted some freedom, it seemed to me. Jimi and I were talking, and he told me, ‘I’m so fucking unhappy. All the guy [Jeffrey] wants me to play is ‘Foxey Lady’ and ‘Purple Haze’ over and over and over. Everything I write he wants to sound like that.’ I think he was at a point where he had to do something. He was so unhappy with management. He didn’t say anything about being unhappy with Mitch or Noel Redding. And of course he didn’t say anything unkind about Billy Cox. But he did say that Mike Jeffrey was just about to kill him.”

Fortunately, everybody stayed away from the control room ashtrays during Hendrix’s second session with the Cherry People, on April 24, 1969, which yielded the take of “Crash Landing” heard on People, Hell & Angels. “Jimi came in very businesslike and knew what he wanted to do,” Marks recalls. “It wasn’t the same social atmosphere as the first night. He was very direct and to the point. Apparently he had listened to the roughs. He came in and said to me, ‘Okay, if you’re going to play maracas, you need to do this, this and this. He directed each musician. He had like a bandstand thing to hold sheet music. There were blank sheets of paper on it and he was writing lyrics for ‘Crash Landing’ as he was playing. He’d tell us to keep going and he’d be writing down lyrics and starting to sing them. Then he’d say, ‘Okay, from the top…let’s go.’ ”

“He was magical,” an awestruck Issac recalls of Hendrix’s studio performances. “Seeing him in the studio was like seeing him onstage. Maybe not quite as much theatrics as he displayed onstage, but he didn’t make mistakes. There was genius there. That’s the feeling I got.”

“His fingers were the size of rulers,” Marks marvels. “They were huge!”

The evening also yielded a version of the aforementioned “Bleeding Heart” posthumously released on the Valleys of Neptune set and arguably more adventurous than the Cox and Miles version of the same tune heard on People, Hell & Angels. The more up-tempo feel and funk-jazzy chord substitutions of the Cherry People version certainly offer a more radical recontextualization of the Elmore James original than the straight-ahead slow-blues reading that Hendrix, Cox and Miles gave the tune. With all due deference to the “anything Hendrix ever did was sheer genius” crowd, it’s possible that the law of diminishing returns had begun to set in as 1969 wore on.

Certainly, the Cherry People’s eyewitness account of their two evenings at the Record Plant with Jimi Hendrix puncture the myth of Hendrix’s infallibility. It’s clear that many of Hendrix’s Record Plant evenings were more like a party than a serious attempt to capture master recordings. Cox takes credit for reining a lot of that in.

“By the time I got on board, all that kind of stuff changed,” he says. “It had to change if we were going to get any quality work out there. Jimi and I talked about it, and he knew what he had to do. He had to buckle down and get it together.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, Cox says that Devon Wilson’s visits to the studio became less frequent once the bassist was firmly ensconced. “It tapered off and she didn’t come in as often,” he says. “It changed. Prior to me getting onboard they’d say, ‘Oh happy day, let’s go out and just have some fun.’ But we kind of got to the point where we had to get down to brass tacks and get serious about the thing. The studio no longer became a place of play; it became a place of work. A sacred place. I told Jimi, ‘We’re lucky to be here. We have to make the most of it.’ ”

As one of the world’s biggest rock stars, and one notorious for his sexual prowess, Hendrix certainly didn’t lack for female companionship. The ladies were more legion than the joints in Kellgren’s “hospitality bowl.” But Hendrix’s relationship with Wilson cut deeper than that. It was a dysfunctional pas de deux of drugs, music and love.

“There were certainly other women in his life, but I think Devon was the one,” McDermott says. “She was the one who was fascinating to him, in terms of personality, obviously her beauty and also her outlook. It was a very passionate relationship between her and Jimi, but it wasn’t always steady. She was fiercely protective of him, in a certain way. I’m told by friends that she always thought she was advocating for Jimi and his best interest. Although, when Jimi built his own studio, Electric Lady, one of the things they did—and something she was very much in favor of—was put a closed-circuit camera on the door so they could see who was trying to buzz their way in. And there were many nights when Jimi would see Devon at the door and not let her in. He didn’t want the drama. But what person doesn’t go through that in that kind of relationship?”

Adding to the romantic turbulence in his life, Hendrix was in the midst of a full-scale business and legal crisis. When Chas Chandler walked, Hendrix lost not only the creative partner who had helped shape his most successful songs and recordings but also the “good cop” on his management team. As a former bassist with the highly successful British Invasion group the Animals, Chandler was a musician and could empathize with Hendrix’s musical aspirations and relate them to his business concerns far more harmoniously than the more mercenary Jeffrey. Hence, Hendrix’s remarks to Issac about Jeffrey’s just wanting him to play “Purple Haze” over and over again.

Legally, Hendrix was battling drug charges at the time, as well as a lawsuit filed by Ed Chalpin of music publishing company PPX Industries. Chalpin claimed that the guitarist had a contractual obligation to PPX dating from 1965 and thus superseding Hendrix’s management agreement with Jeffrey and Chandler. Chalpin stood to gain a sizable chunk of all revenue earned by the Experience and their three top-selling albums, if not all of it.

The compromise was to give Chalpin the proceeds from a Jimi Hendrix album, the live Band of Gypsys recorded on New Year’s Eve 1970 at the Fillmore East, plus a piece of any and all future Hendrix profits. While revisionist critical zeal has placed the Fillmore disc on an artistic par with Hamlet and the Mona Lisa, it was nothing more than a quickie live album banged out fast and cheap in order to chill out Chalpin. According to Eddie Kramer, Hendrix himself was less than pleased with the album.

“I don't know that it was something Jimi liked 100 percent,” Kramer says. “I think he was disappointed in some of the excessive [vocal] warbling of Buddy Miles. There was a tremendous amount of editing done on it. There was a huge amount of jamming and stuff that didn’t quite fit on the record. The editing was a little untidy at points. But having said that, I think it’s a wonderful example of Jimi being able to play with a reasonable amount of freedom.”

“Mitch had gone to England when Jimi got into the problems,” Cox recalls. “[Jimi] was threatened with a lawsuit. So it was decided that we’d do a concert album, and I said ‘Well, I’m in.’ That’s what friends do. And Buddy was around at the time.”

But the Band of Gypsys didn’t always fare as well onstage as they did at the Fillmore shows. A subsequent concert, at Madison Square Garden, was a notable disaster, the band retreating from the stage halfway through its second number, offering apologies to the crowd. This proved to be the group’s final live performance. Events like these gave rise to turn-of-the-decade feeling that Hendrix had perhaps lost it. This impression was compounded by the uneven, somewhat shambolic performance that he turned in at Woodstock with his ill-advised, under-rehearsed and unfortunately named six-piece ensemble, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows. With Chandler gone, there was no one to tell Hendrix when he had a bad idea.

“I think the core band of Jimi, Mitch and Billy, were great at Woodstock,” McDermott says in defense of the guitarist and his ramshackle backing. “I think the other guys [guitarist Larry Lee, percussionists Jerry Velez and Juma Sultan] were trying, but they’d just never played something that big before, or with something that powerful. They were used to playing clubs and things like that.”

Larry Lee was another old buddy of Jimi’s who’d just come out of the Army, where he’d seen service in the Vietnam War. Lee would go on to many years of success as Al Green’s musical director and songwriter. But in 1969, he’d just begun making the uneasy transition from the killing fields to a society that had been radically remade in the wake of civil rights, the hippie scene, psychedelia, the sexual revolution and other sociocultural phenomena of the late Sixties. It was all a bit too much.

“Larry, God bless him, had just come back from Vietnam and wasn’t quite ready for the hurricane that was Hendrix’s popularity and all that went with it,” McDermott says. “Had Jimi employed him on select songs, you would have seen real value come out of his contributions.”

The two tracks on People, Hell & Angels that feature the Gypsy Sun and Rainbows lineup show them in a much better light than their Woodstock performance. Their studio recording of the ubiquitous “Izabella” is certainly tighter than the Woodstock rendition, with Lee effectively doubling Cox’s bass line much of the time and playing a supportive role overall. And those who mainly think of Larry Lee as the guy with the out-of-tune guitar and ridiculous headgear at Woodstock might be surprised to hear his artful jazzy comping on “Easy Blues,” a 12-bar jam from another one of Hendrix’s long nights at the Record Plant.

“I came up with this little riff,” Cox recalls of that impromptu recording. “I just kept playing it. I didn’t know the tape was going. Jimi looked at me and started laughing—jumped in and started jamming. We just did that to loosen up the fingers. We laughed because it was just a riff.”

“I think Jimi was really intrigued by the idea of having that second guitar, that rhythm guitar, in there,” McDermott says. “And Larry was a sympathetic figure. He wasn’t trying to out-duel Jimi or anything like that. He understood rhythm comping and things like that. And that’s one of his real benefits.”

“Larry was part of that same R&B thing as me and Jimi,” Cox adds. “He came from that time period. Jimi, at one point, felt like he needed assistance. Because a lot of times we were playing these riffs, the bass and the guitar together, but he wanted a guitar to keep doing that when he was playing solos. But he didn’t really need that. When the deal went down, he didn’t need any help.”

But what really brought an end to Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, in Cox’s view, was not musical considerations but the dictates of “the office,” by which he presumably means management. “That group had problems because the office didn’t want it to be,” Cox says. “And so it no longer was. [Management’s thinking was] ‘We started with this [three-piece power trio] formula. Stick with the formula.’ ”

In the midst of his own troubles and the search for a new, post-Experience musical direction, the legendarily generous Hendrix still had time to help out his friends. That side of him is reflected on People, Hell & Angels by two tracks where he happily played sideman to some of his old cronies. One of these recordings is a high-energy, old-school R&B track “Let Me Move You,” led by vocalist and sax player Lonnie Youngblood, with whom Hendrix had worked in the mid Sixties. Youngblood and Hendrix’s Record Plant recording of “Let Me Move You” is arguably the most outstanding track on People, Hell & Angels, an absolute scorcher.

“Just listen to what Jimi’s doing, comping under Lonnie,” McDermott says enthusiastically. “Crazy!”

The rhythm section of Hank Anderson on bass and Jimmy Mayes on drums is so unquenchably on fire that one wonders why Hendrix didn’t just draft them to be his new backing band. He’d worked with Mayes around 1966 when they were both in the touring lineup of Joey Dee and the Starlighters, a group that had scored a big hit back in 1961 with “The Peppermint Twist.”

“Yes, you could have seen Hendrix in a little club with Joey Dee in ’66,” McDermott says. “And then, six months later, he’s doing ‘Hey Joe’ and he’s a star in England. The time frame is amazing.”

And once Hendrix shifted operations from the Record Plant to his own brand new studio, Electric Lady, in mid 1970, one of the first projects he undertook was to overdub some hot guitar on “Mojo Man,” a track by the singing duo of Arthur and Albert Allen, a.k.a. the Allen twins. The two were old friends of Jimi’s and were recording at the time as the Ghetto Fighters. Like “Let Me Move You,” the tune offers eloquent testimony that Hendrix’s abilities as an accompanist and supporting player had been by no means diminished by his massive stardom.

Electric Lady was to have been Hendrix’s salvation—artistically, financially and otherwise. “The idea was, ‘Hey we’re going to stop paying the Record Plant a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year. Now we’re gonna have our own place,’” McDermott says.

“For almost a year and a half prior, Jimi had had no supervision. So a lot of time went into experimentation," Kramer says. “But as soon as Electric Lady was finished, he came in and it was like, ‘Wow, this is my place!’ The amount of work we accomplished in just four months—from May through August—was amazing.”

Today an institution on 8th Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, Electric Lady had previously been a venue called the Generation Club, which Hendrix had planned to purchase and turn into another hip Manhattan nightspot. “But Eddie Kramer was the guy who came in and said, ‘Hey, don’t just have a little night club with a recording studio. We’ll make this the best recording studio in the world!’ ” McDermott says. “Eddie explained it to Jimi, and Jimi said, ‘Okay, I trust this guy. We’ll do it.’ ”

While Hendrix had paid for the Record Plant sessions out of his own pocket, had had to take a loan from his record label to float Electric Lady, deepening his obligation to Warner/Reprise and giving the company additional leverage when it came to his forthcoming, vexatious and long overdue album. One reason why Gary Kellgren, rather than Eddie Kramer, had engineered many of the Record Plant sessions in 1969 is that Kramer was downtown getting Electric Lady together much of the time. And while Hendrix’s Record Plant sessions may have seemed like one long party out of bounds, the guitarist allegedly knew exactly where the gold lay among the mountains of tapes he’d piled up there in mid 1969.

“Eddie Kramer told me that one of the first things they did when Electric Lady opened in May of ’70, even before they actually recorded anything, was that he and Jimi went through all the tapes that they had pulled over from the Record Plant,” McDermott says. “And that Jimi knew exactly which ones he wanted to play. He was like, ‘Hey, listen to this one. I want you to hear this song.’ And it would be ‘Roomful of Mirrors’ from November 1969. ‘Ezy Ryder’ was another one. And they started to figure, ‘Okay, we’ll put a fuzz bass on this, and I’ll overdub some guitar…’ And then there were other songs where they said, ‘Our new studio sounds so good, let’s just recut this one.’ ”

Of course Hendrix never got a chance to do any of that. By July he was back on the road, playing a troubled tour of Europe with Cox and Mitchell. Cox flipped out on acid; not everybody shared Hendrix’s legendary ability to eat loads of LSD and still be more or less functional. The group was booed in Germany. “I’ve been dead a long time,” Hendrix said, all too prophetically, at the end of a bad night onstage in Denmark. A few days later, on September 18, he died in London.

There is clear evidence that Hendrix knew he was in trouble musically. “When he went to England, he looked up Chas Chandler about three days before he died,” Kramer says. “And he talked to Chas about getting the old team together. I could see why he was frustrated. I’ve always maintained that what he needed was a year off—a time away from touring and the pressures of the record company and management, a time to think about where he wanted to go.”

But had he lived and even been able to take some time off, would Hendrix, producing himself for the first time, have been able to pull a coherent album from the sprawling mass of variant takes and alternate lineups he’d accumulated during the year and a half prior?

“At one point, he made notes about making it a three-album set,” McDermott says, “which was pretty ambitious. It was around the time when Electric Lady opened. People, Hell & Angels was one of the tentative titles he’d written down, so it comes out of that period. He knew he had this bounty of material and he said, ‘Okay, we’ll make a three-album set,’ when he had Reprise banging on his door for just a single album.”

McDermott is certain that, had Hendrix lived, he would have finished the sprawling album, if only because of his financial obligations. “He had to pay back Warner Bros. for the loan he’d taken to build Electric Lady, and had made his first payment in August prior to his death,” he says. “And with the pressure of having to deliver the Band of Gypsys album to settle that litigation, I think you would have seen Jimi pull the record together. Now would he have been able to keep it a double, much less a triple? Who knows? Management and the record label might have said, ‘Hey, we need 10 songs and we need them now.’ Or Jimi may have said, ‘Give me a month and we’ll have the rest done.’ He made a lot of progress prior to his leaving for Europe. It’s certainly possible that they could have had something, if not for the fourth quarter of 1970, then the first quarter of the following year.”

So what we’re left with on posthumous releases like

People, Hell & Angels

and

Valleys of Neptune

are essentially basic tracks—or attempted basic tracks—waiting for overdubs. But so much of the beauty of Hendrix’s music lies in his gift for weaving gossamer webs of guitar overdubs and lyrics that combine hallucinogenic, Dylan-esque imagery with the wry wit of a soul shaman. Without those things, we’re left with something that feels, at times, painfully incomplete.

“I think the basic work tracks were there and solid,” Cox says. “The problem was words. A lot of times Jimi was lost for words, trying to put words together and make them right. And then his overdubs—that was his way of talking to you. The man was incredible with backward tapes.”

So newcomers to Hendrix are heartily encouraged to start with Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland, the finished masterpieces. Releases like People, Hell & Angels will mainly be of interest to completists, the “any Hendrix is good Hendrix” demographic, and the kind of trainspotter market that has sprung up in the wake of the Deadhead board tape-trading phenomenon.

As for the rest of us, rather than force ourselves into another semi-sincere rapture about another set of marginal Hendrix outtakes, it would be more meaningful and respectful to view them for what they are: the sound of a great artist trying to jam himself out of a jam, not at all sure of where he was going and not entirely in control of the steering wheel. These rough-hewn and half-hatched tracks actually become more poignant in that light.

At the end of the Sixties, who really knew where he or she was going? At the time, Clapton, Page, Beck and Townshend were also in the midst of major artistic transitions and career reinventions. Hendrix was certainly determined to get there with them. Two days before his death, he said as much in his final conversation with Billy Cox.

“He said, ‘Hey man, we gotta get back in the studio Friday and change a few little things and get it right,’ ” Cox recalls. “ ‘They’re raising hell about getting it out.’ And I said okay. We had maybe 15 songs he wanted to work on.”

Cox seems to have mixed feelings about the fact that—for himself and Hendrix, unlike most other musicians—“even our practice tapes have been exposed to the public. And all of my wrong, bad notes have been exposed. But, hey, people can’t get enough of Hendrix.”

Does he think Hendrix would have been comfortable with all of us hearing his works in progress?

“I don’t think so,” Cox says. “With the perfectionist he was, I think he would like to have something completed. That’s what he was all about. He was a perfectionist when it came to the music. One wrong note and he was upset. ‘Oh man, I messed this up.’ That’s how he was. That’s what made him Jimi Hendrix.”

Photo: Getty Images

Billy Cox, the bassist who worked with Jimi Hendrix as part of the Band of Gypsys and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, will hit the road with his own band on a multi-city tour.

The tour, which is billed as Billy Cox/Band of Gypsys Experience, kicks off June 19 in Northampton, Massachusetts. In addition to Hendrix classics such as "Machine Gun" and "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)," Cox will showcase his blues roots, drawing upon the trove of performances and recording sessions he made with Slim Harpo, Little Milton, Gatemouth Brown and Freddie King.

"It was Jimi's dream to use a second guitarist," Cox said. "He was getting into a new phase of his music and he felt that one guitar limited the band and limited the new music that he was creating. There were glimpses of what he was trying to do at Woodstock with Larry Lee as the second guitarist. But that idea was not able to continue. Now, almost 43 years later, I am grateful I have the opportunity to continue the dream with two dynamic guitarists, Dani Robinson and Byron Bordeaux.”

“Our show could be described as triangular in context, we perform not only Hendrix, but some originals and some old school,” Cox adds. “We are most especially committed to giving the audience an evening of good listening and fun. Dani and Byron embody the spirit of guitar showmanship."

Dates for the Band of Gypsys Experience:

• June 19 - Northampton, MA - Iron Horse
• June 20 - Norfolk, CT - Infinity Hall
• June 21- Stanhope, NJ - Stanhope House
• June 23 - New York, NY - City Winery
• June 24 - Washington, DC - Hamilton
• June 25 - Wilmington, DE - World Café
• June 26 - Sellersville, PA - Sellersville Theatre

On the morning of August 18, 1969, Jimi Hendrix stepped onto the stage at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair (better known as the Woodstock Festival) for what was to become a defining moment in rock history.

Hendrix, who was debuting a new band that weekend, ripped through powerful renditions of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” “Fire,” “Purple Haze” and “Foxey Lady,” not to mention his dramatic interpretation of “The Star Spangled Banner."

In celebration of what would have been Hendrix's 70th birthday (November 27), Hendrix 70: Live at Woodstock, a 2005 film originally released on DVD, is hitting movie theaters across the country on two specific dates: November 29 and December 4.

This theatrical presentation of the film features Hendrix's entire Woodstock performance plus a documentary featuring never-before-seen footage and interviews with bassist Billy Cox and drummer Mitch Mitchell, plus engineer Eddie Kramer and Woodstock Festival promoter Michael Lang.

The concert portion of the film features the original 16mm concert footage digitally restored with a new 5.1 audio surround mix by Kramer, who recorded the original Woodstock Festival.

Check out a trailer of the film below (plus a photo gallery), followed by a widget you can use to find out where and when the film is playing near you.

For more information and links to buy tickets to Hendrix 70: Live at Woodstock, visit jimihendrix.com or click here.

[[ Enter now to win a Fender Custom Shop 1969 Stratocaster in celebration of the theatrical release of 'Hendrix 70: Live at Woodstock'! ]]