Fact #157421
When:
Short story:
The Jimi Hendrix Experience play two shows at The Electric Factory, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, supported by Todd Rundgren.
Full article:
Hugh Hopper (Soft Machine) : Amplifiers came off the plane with their innards hanging out, drum cases crushed. It sometimes looked like the loading crews had held an Olympic meet with equipment destruction as the main event.
Neville Chesters (road crew) : We had to get another group to play instead of Soft Machine, due to Soft Machine's organ, which didn't arrive.
Hugh Hopper (Soft Machine) : In Philadelphia we rented a brand-new automatic Ford U-Haul truck. Poor thing. We told the guy that we'd drop it off in New York in about ten days' time. We were telling the truth as we then saw it ... the tour outline we had had no further details on it. Detroit, Toronto, Chicago, Columbus and then back to New York.
U-Haul finally got that truck back six or seven weeks later, completely knackered (like us), having been driven every day, God knows how many miles, up to Canada twice, out to the Midwest again, and up and down the New England coast like a yo-yo.
The trouble was, the management office in New York kept adding gigs, filling in all the white spaces on the tour outline, as the buzz about Jimi spread out from his last gig. It was an exciting time in the career of J. Hendrix, but for us two roadies it was like carrying a heavier and heavier load up a hill getting steeper and steeper. Just as we looked forward to the rest day promised in two days' time, tour manager Gerry Stickells would slip a revised itinerary under our motel door as we slept our troubled three hours. These days of course there would be a crew of dozens and several trucks.
It wasn't chiefly the physical work that was so mindbending ... we were young and fit and even with the inadequate sleep we were eating well enough to build up gear-humping muscles to cope with the ever-increasing load of amplifiers and PA systems that eager small manufacturing firms kept heaping upon Jimi's head. No, the worst thing was the disorientation. Finding yourself driving off again in the middle of the night to the next gig, having driven overnight to this one, and the one before, and the one before that ... Checking into the same Holiday Inn room that you'd checked into the afternoon before, except that that one was in a town 300 miles back down the road. Wasn't it?
That was if all went well on the road. Usually something happened to cause us to arrive at the gig with minus time to spare. The miracle about the Jimi Hendrix Tour of 68 was not that he brought wonderful music to people all over the States and became a music legend within two months: it was that any single one of the concerts happened at all.
(Source : Hugh Hopper, September 19, 1980, Melody Maker]
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Neville Chesters (road crew) : We had to get another group to play instead of Soft Machine, due to Soft Machine's organ, which didn't arrive.
Hugh Hopper (Soft Machine) : In Philadelphia we rented a brand-new automatic Ford U-Haul truck. Poor thing. We told the guy that we'd drop it off in New York in about ten days' time. We were telling the truth as we then saw it ... the tour outline we had had no further details on it. Detroit, Toronto, Chicago, Columbus and then back to New York.
U-Haul finally got that truck back six or seven weeks later, completely knackered (like us), having been driven every day, God knows how many miles, up to Canada twice, out to the Midwest again, and up and down the New England coast like a yo-yo.
The trouble was, the management office in New York kept adding gigs, filling in all the white spaces on the tour outline, as the buzz about Jimi spread out from his last gig. It was an exciting time in the career of J. Hendrix, but for us two roadies it was like carrying a heavier and heavier load up a hill getting steeper and steeper. Just as we looked forward to the rest day promised in two days' time, tour manager Gerry Stickells would slip a revised itinerary under our motel door as we slept our troubled three hours. These days of course there would be a crew of dozens and several trucks.
It wasn't chiefly the physical work that was so mindbending ... we were young and fit and even with the inadequate sleep we were eating well enough to build up gear-humping muscles to cope with the ever-increasing load of amplifiers and PA systems that eager small manufacturing firms kept heaping upon Jimi's head. No, the worst thing was the disorientation. Finding yourself driving off again in the middle of the night to the next gig, having driven overnight to this one, and the one before, and the one before that ... Checking into the same Holiday Inn room that you'd checked into the afternoon before, except that that one was in a town 300 miles back down the road. Wasn't it?
That was if all went well on the road. Usually something happened to cause us to arrive at the gig with minus time to spare. The miracle about the Jimi Hendrix Tour of 68 was not that he brought wonderful music to people all over the States and became a music legend within two months: it was that any single one of the concerts happened at all.
(Source : Hugh Hopper, September 19, 1980, Melody Maker]