Relatively new to superstardom, even Jimi Hendrix felt nervous when he made his Arizona debut almost 60 years ago.
Hendrix had exploded onto the scene at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, a month after The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first album, “Are You Experienced?,” was released. He’d spend that whole summer on his first U.S. tour, which never made it to Arizona, although a Tempe stop was within sight.
Out promoting the “Axis: Bold As Love” album, which had just come out in the U.S. in January 1968, the band’s first North American tour opened with a few shows in San Francisco before arriving at the Sun Devil Gym – known today as Physical Education Building West – on Feb. 5 on the ASU campus.
The bell-bottomed Hendrix was in the dressing room fretting backstage about trouble with his amplifiers, worried that someone had swiped his trademark black hat moments before going on stage (he found it), and still unsure how audiences – that Monday night before 3,000 fans in Tempe specifically – would take to his live show.
It was only a few months earlier when Hendrix had lasted just a handful of shows in a mismatched pairing where he opened for The Monkees.
“Those kids out there expect to hear the records we have cut and think we will sound exactly the same tonight,” Hendrix told Dave Gurzenski of the ASU State Press backstage that night. “Sometimes a three-minute record might stretch into 10. So much depends on the audience.”
It turned out, Arizona was ready for the experience.
“He came out and wailed away before a mass of screaming fans,” Rob Spindler, an archivist with the ASU library, told ASU Now in 2018.
Hendrix still had more time ahead in Arizona.
The group traveled the next day down Interstate 10 to play in Tucson at the V.I.P. Club. That day also saw Hendrix receive the World’s No. 1 Musician Award from the showbiz paper “Disc,” and while hanging out in Tucson he had a phone interview with the Sunday Mirror newspaper in London where he talked about, among other things, that while the Flower Power movement of the previous year was already fading, its ethos wasn’t.
“(It) was an experiment, but although it was all tied up with sensation stuff about drugs, the ‘love everybody’ basic idea helped one hell of a lot with the color problem in the States,” he told the Mirror, which published his interview from Arizona in its Feb. 11, 1968, edition. “Colored artists daren’t go near some Southern audiences in the past. But since the flower power craze, much of the violence has gone.”
After the Tucson gig, Hendrix still wasn’t done with his Arizona story.
Later that year, on Sept. 4, he performed a much-ballyhooed show at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix in which he and The Experience opened with “Are You Experienced?” and closed the 65-minute set – his last ever appearance in Arizona – with “Purple Haze.”
It was the same day the Experience would release the “All Along The Watchtower” single in the U.S., which would become Hendrix’s only Top 40 hit in his lifetime. One month later would see the iconic album “Electric Ladyland” come out to further cement his legend long after Hendrix died in 1970.
Whatever it was during his time in Arizona made it to the “Electric Ladyland” liner notes.
“We dedicate this album to acoustic and electric woman and man alike,” Jimi wrote, “and to the girl at or from or with the button store, and Arizona, and Bil of some English town in England, and well, EVERYBODY.”
Rob Spindler, archivist with the ASU library, in a screenshot from a 2018 video produced by Ken Fagan of ASU Now, stands inside the gym on the Tempe campus where The Jimi Hendrix Experience performed on Feb. 5, 1968. Hendrix and the band warmed up for the show in the men’s locker room, the entrance to which can be seen in the background.
(Used with permission from ASU)
Known today as Physical Education Building West, this building on the ASU campus in Tempe back then was called Sun Devil Gym and was the site where The Jimi Hendrix Experience performed a gig on Feb. 5, 1968.
(Photo provided by ASU)
Steve Stockmar
News Editor | Sun Life Magazine & Arts & Entertainment
YourValley.net
Meet Steve
Steve Stockmar joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2017, and has been an Arizona journalist for almost 30 years. He serves as editor of Sun Life Magazine and contributes to West Valley communities where he focuses mostly on arts & culture, education, and profiles of neighbors making a difference.
Community: Every season Steve serves as a “buddy” with the Miracle League of Arizona in Scottsdale, has volunteered his time with Family Promise in Glendale, and previously served on the Ghostlight Theatre board in Sun City West.
Education: Graduated from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff with a Journalism major and English minor.
Random Fact: Steve once won a 50-player live Texas Hold ’Em poker tournament.
Hobbies: Anguishing over his beloved Chicago Cubs and Bears; listening to Beatles and Grateful Dead music.