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Fact #170863

When:

Short story:

The Jimi Hendrix Experience play at Red Rocks, Colorado, USA, supported by Vanilla Fudge, Eire Apparent, and Soft Machine.

Full article:

Jimi Hendrix : I had a lot of fun at that Denver, Colorado, place. We played out there at Red Rocks. That was groovy. That was nice, 'cause people are on top of you there, or at least they can hear something. That's where it should be, natural-theatre type things.

John W. Shipman (fan) : Red Rocks is a fabulous place for concerts. The stage backdrop is a vertical cliff face, and the outdoor seating fits in a beautiful natural amphitheatre flanked by more cliffs. We arrived in late afternoon and somehow found a guy who was selling four tickets at cost.

Tim Bogert (Vanilla Fudge) : Mitch and Noel didn't like to do the soundchecks. Carmine and I did. We did hundreds of soundchecks with Jimi, literally. The best one would have been at Red Rocks. I walked into the dressing room and Jimi had some things there which we did, and we all went out on stage and we played for quite some time. It was incredible. I got to play through 11 Sunn cabinets that Noel had set up at the time. It was one of the loudest things I'd ever heard. I thought it was bitchin'.

John W. Shipman : I've never experienced music this intense anywhere else. It was hard just to track it, just to try to hear everything that was going on in the storm of music that came out of the big stacks of Marshall amps. Jimi didn't use a lot of special effects, just a wah-wah pedal - and a lot of feedback.

There were some technical problems with the show. Jimi started out with about nine Marshall amplifiers, and he destroyed at least three of them, although the roadies managed to rescuscitate one of them. Right at the beginning of Purple Haze, he broke his high string, but he didn't stop. With his knowledge of barre chords, all he had to do was move up the neck a bit; the song sounded just fine to me. At the end of the song, he asked for a roadie to bring out his spare guitar, then started changing the string. By the time the roadie brought the spare out, he not only had the string replaced but had it in tune as well. This is tricky on a Stratocaster, because the tremolo bar has a big spring in it so that when you tighten one string you loosen all the other ones.

At the end of the set he used his guitar to smash one of the amps.

Eric Barrett (roadie) : If a string would bust, I'd run out with another guitar,and we would change that in fractions of seconds. I would hold it up, he would take it off his neck, and he would play this enormous chord. All of a sudden, I would pull out one jack and go right in with another, and his hands would change down onto the same chord he was on. People very rarely heard a slump.