The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s First Performances

[Rabs]

Saw this on another forum where the poster was actually the writer of this and used to write for Guitar Player Magazine..   I thought it was pretty interesting,

The French Tour, October 12-18, 1966

An article detailing the Jimi Hendrix Experience's first-ever performances. These began in France just 19 days after Jimi's arrival in London and about a week after drummer Mitch Mitchell joined the lineup.

Included are Jimi's recollections, translations of French newspaper reviews, which were not universally positive, and the reminiscences of Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, who'd never seen Jimi's over-the-top performance style until their opening night in Évreux.  Written by Jas Obrecht.

https://jasobrecht.substack.com/p/the-jimi-hendrix-experiences-first

 

 

 

At 7:00 AM on October 12th, 1966, the newly formed Jimi Hendrix Experience and their acting manager, Chas Chandler, boarded a plane to Paris. The day before Chas had presented Jimi with a tailored two-piece blue mohair suit to wear for the trio’s first public appearances. “Jimi hated it,” his live-in girlfriend Kathy Etchingham remembered. As they awaited take-off, drummer Mitch Mitchell, who had joined the band about a week earlier, watched with dismay as the luggage handlers carelessly tossed their brand-new stage gear – three Marshall amps, two speakers, two PA cabinets, three Shure microphones, and mike stands – into the luggage hold.

After landing, Chandler helped the trio carry their equipment to an open-to-reporters rehearsal at the Paris Olympia. What a thrill it must have been for Jimi to step onto the stage of this grand theater from the 1880s. This was a world apart from the Southern dives and tiny Greenwich Village clubs he’d played in America just weeks earlier. It was also an unlikely venue for test-driving their new amplification for the first time.

The next morning Jimi and the other musicians rode in a beat-up bus to the tour’s opening performance, while headliner Johnny Hallyday drove himself in a sports car. As they crossed the French countryside on the ninety-minute journey from Paris to Évreux, Mitch overcame the language barrier with one of Hallyday’s French-speaking horn players by offering him an “illegal smoking substance.” To calm their nerves before their gig that night, Jimi, Mitch, and bassist Noel Redding shared a homemade joint made of tobacco and hashish. Jimi Hendrix, it turned out, had difficulty rolling joints. “Jimi wasn’t used to smoking in this way,” Redding wrote in his diary, “and he always asked, ‘Roll me one of those big English joints, Noel. I can’t do it.’ I don’t think he ever sussed rolling those joints.” Kathy Etchingham noted this as well, calling rock’s most dexterous guitarist “fumble-fingered” when it came to rolling joints.

On the evening of Thursday, October 13, 1966, the Jimi Hendrix Experience gave their debut performance at the Cinema Novelty in Évreux. Sharing the bill with the Blackbirds, Long Chris, and Johnny Hallyday, the trio were allotted fifteen minutes. Discovering a blown speaker, Noel had to play through the PA. They opened with “In the Midnight Hour,” followed by “Have Mercy Baby,” “Land of 1000 Dances,” and “Hey Joe.” Noel remembered that they were well-received, while Mitch found Jimi’s performance a revelation: “Jimi was a quiet bloke – at least until he got onstage,” Mitch wrote in his autobiographical Inside the Experience. “It was on this first gig that we saw the whole other person, completely different from anything I’d seen before, even during rehearsals. I knew he played really tasty guitar, had the chops, but I didn’t know about the showmanship that went with it. It was like, ‘Whoosh! This man is really out-front!’... The showmanship – playing behind his head, with his teeth, etc. – was amazing. But even then it was obviously not just flashiness. He really did have the musicianship to go with it.”

Their performance garnered a tepid review in the local newspaper, L’Eure Éclair, which identified neither the name of band nor Jimi himself. Described simply as “Hallyday’s latest discovery,” Jimi was described as a “chanteur guitariste à la chevelure broussailleuse, mauvais cocktail de James Brown et de Chuck Berry, qui se contorsionne pendant un bon quart d’heure sur la scène en jouant également de la guitare avec les dents.” This translates to “a singer-guitarist with bushy hair, a bad cocktail of James Brown and Chuck Berry who contorted onstage for a good quarter of an hour and sometimes played the guitar with his teeth.” Thirty years later, Évreux erected a plaque in the Chartraine shopping arcade commemorating the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first official concert.

The next morning the musicians embarked on the five-hour commute to Nancy, traveling through cold rain and congested traffic. After their arrival Noel introduced his bandmates to his drugs of choice, Captagon and Preludin. Normally prescribed to suppress the appetite and counter depression, nervousness, and narcolepsy, these drugs stimulated the central nervous system. Boosting the user’s concentration and physical performance, they provided an overall feeling of well-being. “I rationed everyone to half a tablet,” Noel wrote, “knowing that a whole one would keep us up all night. After that, before gigs it was ‘Hey, Noel, got any of those tablets?’”  

That evening the Jimi Hendrix Experience played to an audience of 1,500 at Nancy’s Cinéma le Rio. The next morning’s edition of L'Est Républicain gave a rapturous description of Johnny Hallyday’s performance, describing him first throwing his white tie into his adoring audience. His fans roared as his shirt buttons popped open. “Within fifteen minutes,” continued the account, “his shirt is soaking wet. The next twenty minutes he finishes his set of songs bare-chested, using his muscles to mark the last bars. Johnny has the place turned upside down.” Jimi told author Sharon Lawrence, “Johnny was very professional, one of the best-rehearsed entertainers I had ever seen. Chas and I watched every move he made, all his stage tricks. When and why he slowed the pace down. How and why he moved closer to the audience. He was never sloppy – ever. Johnny was very alert to the audience and to his band.” In another review of the Nancy show, the Républicain Lorrain renamed Jimi “Tommy Hemdrix,” described him as “un noir,” and mentioned that the guitarist showed a fine style by playing with his teeth.

The tour moved north to Villerupt, where the Experience played a six-song set at the Salle Des Fêtes. Once again, L'Est Républicain sent a reporter to cover the event. Translated into English, the account read: “Long Chris, who sees himself as a redeemer, was hissed at during his folk songs. It was too soft. By contrast, the whole audience became ecstatic when a certain Jimmy, an American resembling a Papuan, discovered in a suburb of London by Johnny, gave a remarkable exhibition on guitar. Not satisfied with playing the instrument behind his back, the ‘virtuoso’ also played with his teeth. Without doubt he had too much appetite the day before, in Nancy, since a string broke at the beginning of this performance.” In the parlance of the day, “Papuan” referred to Jimi’s wild hair style rather than his skin color. The notion that Hallyday had “discovered” Jimi Hendrix shows up in other contemporary accounts, but that credit clearly belongs to Linda Keith and Chas Chandler.

Jimi, Mitch, Noel, and Chas celebrated the concert by getting drunk together. Soon after their midnight departure for Paris, the bus ran out of fuel. “Was it cold!” Redding remembered. “Mitch grabbed Chas’s raincoat for himself and went to sleep. Chas, Jimi, and I huddled together and tried to keep from freezing through the long, long night.” Luckily, they had the next day off. Feeling jittery about their Paris debut, they rehearsed at Olympia on the 17th. Afterward Jimi explored the sumptuous theater that had survived two world wars. He was delighted to learn that Bob Dylan had performed there five months earlier. After acclimating himself to the venue, he braved the chilly evening to roam Paris alone, taking in the grandeur of the Paris Opera and the Eiffel Tower, the non-stop hustle and bustle of people and cars, the scents and sounds. “Even me,” he confided to Sharon Lawrence, “with my big imagination, had never imagined any place so beautiful – a city with so much history I wanted to know every single thing about what had happened there, the kings and queens and rebellions and how they built the city and what kind of people had lived there in the past. I wished that I could stop time and explore all those fantastic buildings for weeks.... I loved every single thing about this city.”

On October 18th, a capacity crowd filled the 2,000-seat Olympia to see the show billed as “Musicorama.” The Brian Auger Trinity flew in to join the lineup. When it came time for the Experience’s opening set, Mitch and Noel came onstage first, to cheers and applause. As an emcee began his introduction, “Ladies and gentlemen, from Seattle, Washington,” Jimi, backstage in the blue mohair suit, played a bluesy guitar run. When the announcer spoke his name, Jimi played the opening chords to “Killing Floor” as he walked onstage. He punctuated the band’s energetic reading with two brief, perfectly placed solos and concluded the song with a beautiful trill. The crowd grew quiet as the trio segued into a slow version of “Hey Joe,” Hendrix coloring his guitar tone with light distortion. Sweet and emotive, his voice displayed no trace of nervousness. He began the solo with his teeth. As the song concluded, Jimi played “thank you” on his guitar to rapturous applause. With an off-hand “Yeah, dig this right here,” he plucked a dive-bomb sound on a single string, wavering the note with whammy. After a few seconds of guitar freak-out, he segued into the opening chords of "Wild Thing". His sexy vocals and solo, which he began with his teeth, caused another commotion. The audience roared their approval as the Experience left the stage.

“As it turned out,” Noel wrote in his diary, “our three numbers went down a bomb,” which in the lingo of the day meant “very well.” Auger concurred: “I watched Jimi play, and they absolutely loved him. I thought, ‘Wow, this guy’s going to be a huge star.’” At the concert’s end, Jimi, white Stratocaster in hand, joined the other acts for the encore. A French radio company made a direct-to-two-track recording of the Experience’s three-song set, and these are the earliest known recordings of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The Olympia versions of “Killing Floor” and “Hey Joe” came out decades later on MCA’s purple-covered The Jimi Hendrix Experience box set.

 

After the Olympia performance, the jubilant musicians celebrated backstage and then, as Noel wrote in his diary, “headed off to a big party in a posh downstairs nightclub and got drunker and more stoned, with uppers keeping us raving.” At 6:30 the next morning they realized they were running late and made a mad dash for the airport, grousing along the way about having to schlep their own gear. The group’s debut tour earned their management 3,375 francs – at the time, about $700 in U.S. currency. Upon their return to England, Chas Chandler set about arranging their first studio recording.

Edited September 25, 2022 by Rabs

[Whitefang]

I'll have to try to find out if any recordings are more easily available.   But it's incredible that someone with Jimi's skill went from cutting heads with Clapton to opening for The Monkees.

His is quite a compelling story.

Whitefang

[Rabs]

6 minutes ago, Whitefang said:

I'll have to try to find out if any recordings are more easily available.   But it's incredible that someone with Jimi's skill went from cutting heads with Clapton to opening for The Monkees.

His is quite a compelling story.

Whitefang

 

 

 

[Whitefang]

That first clip of Jimi playing "Wild Thing" was interesting.  I've heard other recordings of him doing that song live(Like Monterey) and it always struck me how he'd quote "Strangers In The Night" for the solo.

But that 2nd clip showing a few seconds of Jimi blowing a couple smoke rings and several minutes of some British pouf blowing smoke rings(for a change, I guess) I could have done without.

Whitefang

 

[sparquelito]

Really interesting stuff!!

Thank you for this, Rabs. 

🙂

[Whitefang]

More "humble beginnings".  

Interesting old photos in this clip too.

Whitefang

[Rabs]

Nice..  I think this has to be one of my fave clips of his..  The story is that the song was released just two days before Jimi played it live here. knowing that some of The Beatles were in the audience... 

 

And then there was that famous TV performence where he does a Cream song (who had just split that day) and in this case without telling anyone from the TV show that they were going to play it..  He had some huge balls that guy to do stuff like that.

 

[Whitefang]

Here's some early footage that Hendrix is in.  But you gotta try to catch him behind this ragged sounding duo.

Whitefang

[Rabs]

2 hours ago, Whitefang said:

Here's some early footage that Hendrix is in.  But you gotta try to catch him behind this ragged sounding duo.

Whitefang

Ohh yes.. Fully aware of this one  

[Whitefang]

I have a brother in law whose opinion is that Hendrix wasn't really all that great of a guitarist.

I suppose he's entitled to his own opinion, and Jimi certainly wasn't up to the panache of some who came after him.  Like Metheny, McLaughlin, Di Meola , Akkerman and such, but he and the Beatles share a similar legacy.

Each in their own way completely changed the scope, direction and color of both the modern music of their time and had a profound effect on popular culture. 

Until Hendrix feedback was something to be avoided as a nuisance.  Jimi made it an art form.  The Beatles' "I Feel Fine" opening doesn't count.  

I always have been, still am,  and always will be a huge Jimi Hendrix fan.  

Believe it or not, this is still a favorite of mine,  both in arrangement( drummer using brushes on a rock tune?  ) and that exit solo!  

Damn.  The only studio recording I could find on YT.  Everything else was fair sounding live recordings or pretentious hacks doing "covers".  

Whitefang

[Rabs]

4 hours ago, Whitefang said:

I have a brother in law whose opinion is that Hendrix wasn't really all that great of a guitarist.

I suppose he's entitled to his own opinion, and Jimi certainly wasn't up to the panache of some who came after him.  Like Metheny, McLaughlin, Di Meola , Akkerman and such, but he and the Beatles share a similar legacy.

Each in their own way completely changed the scope, direction and color of both the modern music of their time and had a profound effect on popular culture. 

Until Hendrix feedback was something to be avoided as a nuisance.  Jimi made it an art form.  The Beatles' "I Feel Fine" opening doesn't count.  

I always have been, still am,  and always will be a huge Jimi Hendrix fan.  

Believe it or not, this is still a favorite of mine,  both in arrangement( drummer using brushes on a rock tune?  ) and that exit solo!  

Damn.  The only studio recording I could find on YT.  Everything else was fair sounding live recordings or pretentious hacks doing "covers".  

Whitefang

Yes..  Axis is one of my favourite albums of all time too, if not my actual. Its one of those albums that builds and builds and the wham, Bold as Love and that phased drum bit at the end.. Its amazing. I have heard it said too about Hendrix, that he was just the first and it could have been anyone as such as rock music was going in that direction anyway.

But for me the reason I really like him was always more than just being about his guitar playing. It was the whole package.  His songs and his lyrics, the way he experimented with music and didnt just do the standard, and him himself. He just seemed like such a cool guy. The fact that he was such a great player just tops it off and makes him one of a kind.

And then when you realise he was only famous for three years and look at amount of material and work he left behind. Just incredible. The guy if nothing else loved music and did it as much as he could all the time. You gotta respect that if nothing else.

I think I have probably seen every Hendrix video there is on Youtube and I think of everything, one of the ones I find most fascinating is one of the last interviews he ever gave, I think it was a few months before he died and in it  he talks about what he wanted to do and the directions he wanted to go in. Which is interesting as we will now never know what would have happened. I do have a sad feeling though that like a lot of other 60s rock stars his 80s stuff would probably have been terrible  😄  But we will never know.