Those Whom The Gods Love Grow Young

Jimi Hendrix plays The Denver Pop Festival
June 29, 1969

ONE MILE HIGH
by Phil Carson


Now the uncertain fate of the Experience intersected with events unfolding in Denver. The capital of Colorado, located a dozen miles east of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, was dubbed the 'Mile High City' due to its official elevation of precisely 5,280 feet above sea level. Denver had a hip side, as jazz players from both coasts, as well as Kansas City, had always stopped through in the 1940s and '50s to play its clubs.


Neal Cassidy, the protagonist for Jack Kerouac's beat opus On The Road, had grown up there. Elvis Presley had wowed the town in April 1956 on his first national tour. The Beatles played the Red Rocks Amphitheater outside town in August 1965, though it was the only stop on their tour that didn't sellout. Judy Collins grew up in Denver before leaving for Greenwich Village (NYC) and international fame.


These developments hardly influenced Denver's essential character as a conservative "cow town," a city based largely on Colorado's cattle ranching industry. In the late 1960s, however, the same winds of change that blew in the coastal cities also reached Denver. The staid 'Mile High City' was not quite ready for change. And the city's police had a bad reputation.


When, in 1967, local promoter Barry Fey opened his Family Dog venue at 1601 West Evans Avenue in Denver with the help of San Francisco rock impresario Chet Helms, Fey had to get a court injunction to stop police from harassing his patrons and the bands, like the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, which played there. The "music press" in America consisted solely of Rolling Stone magazine, launched in the fall of that year. Locally, the Denver newspapers were slow to catch on to rock and roll, though short articles had appeared concerning the two Experience concerts given in Denver prior to June 1969. Fey had produced both shows.


"Word was around on Jimi and I booked him for Denver, Phoenix and Tucson in spring 1968," Barry Fey recalls today. A week later, after a number of gigs in California, Fey brought Hendrix to Denver to play the Regis College Fieldhouse on Valentine's Day, 14 February 1968. Admission to see "Jim Hendricks," as the tickets read, cost $3. That afternoon Jimi was interviewed by a local television station, but the film, if it survives, has not been located. Just one photograph is known to survive, a color shot of the JHE and Chet Helms in the ladies locker room taken by Bill Newell at the Fieldhouse prior to the gig.


Fey recalls selling out the Fieldhouse's 4,700 tickets and that Hendrix was "incredible." Afterwards, according to Fey's long-time assistant Leslie Gorham Haseman, Jimi moved on to the Family Dog venue to jam. 'It was kind of a private party, but anyone who wanted to play got up and played with him, including Tommy Bolin," she remembers.

DENVER POP FESTIVAL

The 'Denver Pop Festival' took place as a rising tide of discontent swept America. Waves set in motion by America's young people, the widespread use of LSD, the rise of rock music and a growing anti-war sentiment crashed over Denver as they did over the rest of the nation. On 29-30 May, a month before the festival, members of 'Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam' gathered on the steps of the Denver's Federal Customs House downtown and spent nineteen hours reading the names of the 33,000 Americans killed thus far in the war. The events that unfolded at the 'Denver Pop Festival' cannot be separated from their context, no matter how familiar the topics have become to latter-day readers. Denver officials actually cooperated to a remarkable degree with Fey in the latter's preparations for the upcoming three-day festival, which was anticipated to draw a large influx of young people from out-of-town. The city provided a campground at West Sixth Avenue and Federal Boulevard, where the Metro Denver Urban Coalition arranged for water trucks and portable toilets. The campground even ran shuttles to the downtown festival site at Mile High Stadium, home to the Denver Broncos football team. Sixteen bands were scheduled to play. The Jimi Hendrix Experience would top the bill on the festival's third and final day. More than 10,000 fans were expected each day. Bill Hanley of 'Monterey' and 'Miami Pop' festival fame would take charge of the sound system, while Chip Monck (later of Woodstock fame) would MC the Denver festival. Tickets were priced at $6 per night or $15 for all three nights. Fortunately, Denver's weather cooperated for the outdoor festival. Yet the unprecedented scale of the event, and forces loose in America's streets, seemed to conspire against a smooth operation. As Leslie Gorham Haseman recently put it: "It was peace, love, dove, until '69."

DAY ONE - Friday 27 June The festival got off to a rollicking start, as Big Mama Thornton, The Flock, Three Dog Night, Frank Zappa, and Iron Butterfly took the stage in succession. The stage had been set up on the turf, facing up into the horseshoe bend of a J-shaped stadium, about forty feet from the stadium seats where concert-goers sat. The lawn between the stage and the seats was kept open and free of people. The general grooviness of 'the scene' that day seemed to be contagious, judging by the next day's reports in the local papers. Alan Cunningham of the Rocky Mountain News wrote that "Denver's 'first annual' Pop Festival blasted off into a three-day orbit of screaming and wildly vibrating animal sounds Friday night before more than 8,000 outlandishly clad and thoroughly delighted young fans." Just how thoroughly delighted were the young fans? "A 19-year-old Denver youth sitting in the stands got so carried away with it all that he stripped to near-nothingness. As the crowd cheered his emancipation, two unsmiling police officers cut his evening short by escorting him outside. Police.. .said he was later charged with indecent exposure [and] said he told them he had 'just conquered the world' by taking his clothes off." James Pagliasotti of The Denver Post estimated the crowd at 14,000. He wrote that blues singer Big Mama Thornton "cuts some pretty mean moves around the stage," The Flock "took off with the freakiest sounds of the night," and Three Dog Night played their hits. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Pagliasotti wrote, were "nothing short of incredible. They clown, tease, fool around, and still play some of the most complex progressions in rock music today without missing a note." Iron Butterfly, "popular if not particularly inventive," closed the night's set. Earlier in the evening about a hundred gatecrashers had stormed a chain link fence and rushed past private security guards to join the throng in the stadium. Afterwards, however, the guards generally praised the crowd for its peaceful behavior. Reported Jim Fouratt in Rolling Stone: "Outside, however, the one petty incident needed to rile the protectors happened: A flying bottle hit a cop's helmet; a chase resulted in the arrest of a zonked-out black dressed in an orange jump suit; sirens blared while the P.A. system played 'Street Fighting Man' on stage, and the scene was set for Saturday."

DAY TWO - Saturday 28 June Jimi, Noel, Herbie Worthington and some others (including a young black guy known only as 'Vishwa') flew from Los Angeles into Denver sometime in the morning (their plane got delayed) for the festival. Upon arrival in the afternoon, they checked into their hotel in Denver, the Holiday Inn, located right next to Mile High Stadium at 1975 Bryant Street (today it's called the Ramada Inn). Later that evening they went as spectators to the Mile High Stadium for Creedence Clearwater Revival's performance and one other act. They returned to their hotel and retired for the night (Noel went to sleep at 1:30 AM). Of this day's performances, Thomas MacCluskey wrote in the Rocky Mountain News that Johnny Winter played "dark and gutsy blues" and Creedence Clearwater Revival "came on strong with their mixture of electric country and hard rock sounds." Tim Buckley's "thoughtfully touching songs brought near silence" to the large crowd, while guitarist Tommy Bolin's "maturing virtuosity" and singer Candy Owens' "deeply moving" vocals made local band Zephyr's set a highlight. During Zephyr's set, according to newspaper reports, eyewitness accounts, and 8mm film taken at the time, gatecrashers drew police retaliation. Police at the stadium's southwest gate tried to stop a sizeable crowd (estimated between 300-500) from climbing the chain-link fence that had been the source of trouble the previous day. Police Chief George Seaton soon arrived on the scene with extra officers, swelling police numbers to nearly 80. Outnumbered more than five-to-one, the police responded by lobbing tear-gas canisters at the crowd. The would-be fans simply lobbed the canisters back. In the exchange, clouds of tear gas wafted through the stadium, felling numerous concert-goers and choking thousands. At least two people, including a 2-year old toddler, were rushed to the hospital. A handful of arrests were made for gatecrashing and drug possession, perhaps the two most frequent charges at rock festivals during the '60s. Fey, Chip Monck, and Zephyr's music got fans back to their stadium seats after the gas attack nearly derailed the festival. Audience tapes of Zephyr's set reveal singer Candy Owens exhorting fans to lie down to avoid the gas and not to hassle with the police. Promoter Fey subsequently opened the gates and handed out free tickets so those outside could attend without causing further trouble. "It was like being in the middle of a war," Fey recalls. Haseman remembers the gatecrashers' demands: "People said it was 'their music' and they wanted in for free. I mean, Hendrix would play the next night for fifty minutes for $50,000. You tell him to play for free! I remember arguing with someone I said, 'You don't do this when you go to the movie theater; why do you think this music belongs to you?'" The Denver police's perspective is reflected in the statement Sergeant Wally Horan made later to reporters: "It would have resulted in a beauty of a riot if we hadn't knocked it out. I sure as hell wouldn't classify it as a minor disturbance."

DAY THREE - Sunday 29 June Herbie Worthington: "I don't remember what we did that afternoon; we'd just hang out and talk... I was down the hotel lobby and these girls walked up to me, out of nowhere, and they just said, 'Could you introduce us to Jimi Hendrix?' And I said, 'No. I don't know him.' I went back to Jimi's room and I said, 'Jimi, there's these girls down there that were asking about you.' And he said, 'Where are they?' And I said, 'I told them I don't know you.' Jimi went like: 'Oh man!'" In the meantime, far more serious matters were about to unfold. Noel Redding remembered in his book Are You Experienced? that someone asked him in Denver if he was still with the band -"It did my head in. I was uneasy enough about our future, but this rumour just blew me away". According to Mitch Mitchell, the Experience attended a press conference on Sunday afternoon (the festival's third day), but as Noel Redding's diary makes no mention of this and there wasn't any coverage in local papers, once can only assume this is incorrect. However, Mitch's memory of the event casts doubt on some of the stories which later circulated about the Experience's demise. Mitch wrote in his book: "Noel was approached essentially with the information that the band might be expanding. Well, this was no big news. I can't speak for Noel, but we'd often discussed the possibilities of bringing in a horn section or whatever. Just thinking about what might work. If anything didn't work, fine forget it. I really don't remember any animosity at the time, certainly not that afternoon". In any case, the Experience members had no time for arguments, for they rushed down to the festival site to catch Joe Cocker's act, leaving before the police again turned tear gas on would-be gatecrashers about 7 PM. Herbie Worthington: "At one point we were in my hotel room and I had one dose of acid, just one purple Owsley, and I gave it to him, and I said 'Here, I have this for you.' And he said, 'No, no, no, we have to split it.' After we took the acid... we walked over to where the show was. The show was right over from the hotel."

THE JHE SHOW

Herbie Worthington: "They had a little fenced area, with like a tent over it, for the musicians to wait until it was time for them to go on... And we were standing back there and those same girls walked by. And I said, 'Jimi, you know, those girls I told you about this afternoon? They just walked by!' And he said: "Go get them, go get them!" And so they came with me, and I introduced them.


"We went down to the stage area and Jimi went up on stage... And of course the acid was going on... Even if I hadn't taken even a half tablet I would have been high, just from the energy from this gentleman. I loved this man with my heart and my soul. Anyway, we walked down to the stage, with me and the girls sitting on the lawn on the grass. And Jimi started... I was so happy, probably one of the happiest times of my life (my whole life): being with an Angel Jimi and having a woman on each arm. And when Jimi came on I started laughing; I just went into an LSD laugh!"


The Experience took the stage in front of around 17,000 spectators about l0:30 PM. Jimi strolled out with a white Stratocaster, looking resplendent in a red silk shirt, a vest with floral designs, and matching blue bandanas on his head and left arm. Noel came out in a black leather suit with a red ascot and a red cap. The concert-goer who captured most of the festival on audio tape turned on his battery-operated machine and let the tape roll, switching it off between songs, but catching much of Jimi's banter with the crowd.


"It's going to take us about an hou...about a minute to get tuned up and everything," Jimi teases the crowd. "In the meantime, let's make up our minds and make our own world here tonight. We've seen some tear gas. That's the start of the third world war. Just pick your side now, that's all I say."

Click the play button to hear Jimi say what you just read...

"We're very sorry for the long tune-up but everything's going to be all right in a few seconds; hold on," Jimi says. "We haven't played in a long time, so we're going to start out with an instrumental, see if we all can get our heads together on the same level. It's a thing called 'Tax Free.' At least we can pretend, can't we?" A heavily amplified Strat sends shock waves of sound across the audience. Jimi gets right down with a fierce introduction, then kicks in his wah-wah pedal to articulate the melody. After the band takes a moment to sort out the beat, Jimi plays subdued wah-wah guitar before plunging into a free-form jam.


After a drum solo from Mitch, Jimi taps out the beat on dampened strings as the audience grows quiet. He quotes the melody to the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" song before bringing this thirteen minute-long opener to a close. A two-minute video in circulation includes a segment from "Tax Free," and a recently circulated upgrade of that film shows the players in quite recognizable form (not the blobs of light they were formerly), though without the up-close-and-personal element of Lance Romance's recently discovered 8mm film, discussed a bit later in this article.


Jimi by this time had largely dispensed with his stage acrobatics, though he could certainly engage in soulful histrionics. Kent Lawyer, 17 years old at the time, had never seen Hendrix before but he had heard stories. "I remember thinking it seemed toned down from what I'd heard of him," he recalls today. "He didn't set the guitar on fire or do any somersaults."


From the stage, Jimi provides a familiar rap: "This song is about a cat, his old lady put him down, 'cause she don't want him around, and his family put him across town; now he's just layin' around."


"Well, I hear my train a-comin'" Jimi sings, his guitar providing an echo. "Lord, I hear my train a-comin' down the tracks..." A slow blues unfolds, the pace pregnant with anticipation. The blues licks that follow are sure-handed, powerful, fuzz-toned. The band finds its groove. Jimi crescendos, performing ferocious solos. More than eleven minutes later the song concludes.


From the audience, stage left, someone (not Romance) shoots 1:45 of silent 8mm color footage of the set's first two songs, revealing that Jimi began the show with a white Stratocaster.


"Yeah, we'd like to do this other one for the girl with the yellow underwear, sittin' over there in the seventh row," Jimi jokes. "I'd like to do a thing called 'Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire,' which you got going over there. Also dedicated to the plainclothesmen and other goofballs. Here we go, 'Let Me Stand Next to Your Old Lady.' One, two, one two three..."


The band delivers a rather sloppy version of this crowd pleaser, though Jimi still manages to get off a few licks.


"I keep forgettin' what we're playin'" Jimi says in an off-hand manner, perhaps lending credence to Herbie Worthington's story that the guitarist had dropped acid before the show. "Hmm, I wish I was out there with you all. We'll try a different thing, for a while. Besides all that tear gas in the air it smells close in here. Mmmm... No one knows where the nose goes when the doors are closed. Dig, we'd like to do this anyway, regardless of what's happening back there in the' Amen section.' Regardless of all that. Oh, let's see, what are we going to do again? 'Spanish Castle Magic,' right!"


The JHE takes a high-powered if familiar approach to this concert favorite which includes some interesting interplay between Noel and Mitch. The band seems to lose steam, then Mitch and Noel drop out, allowing Jimi to take an unaccompanied solo in which he deconstructs melody, slamming the strings at tremendous volume until feedback rises. He plays against it. On a thread of sustain Mitch re-enters and solos, giving Jimi a break from the spotlight. Finally Mitch taps out the beat and Jimi re-enters with the melody line and sings the chorus, ending an eleven-minute version on an abstract note that draws appreciative moans from the audience.


Bob Wyman says, "I also remember one of the guys from Three Dog Night walked out from the backstage area and passing in front of one of the big speakers on the field stage-left. He plugged his ears and made a face, jokingly letting everyone know that it was LOUD!"

Three Dog Night at The Denver Pop Festival 6/29/1969. Despite seeing a handful of people with what appeared to be 16mm movie cameras at the show, film and photos of Jimi from that night, strangely, are almost non-existant. A poor-to-fair bootleg recording of Jimi's performance does exist on the Internet though. The bootleg recording could never capture what it was really like that night but the first time I listened to a copy I sprayed a little pepper spray in the air! My eyes and lungs burning really took me back...

Photo from Experience Hendrix magazine Vol. 3 Issue 2 May/June 1999

Jimi at The Denver Pop Festival. This rare photo is by acclaimed rock photographer Carl Dunn. Carl's photo's are available in his book "This Is Rock and Roll".

The Experience play "Red House" next, with Jimi laying down a nearly five minute solo until Mitch and Noel pick up the tempo behind him, as at San Diego a month earlier.


"Yeah, this is the last time we're playing in the States," Jimi tells his audience. "Like I say, it's been really a lot of fun and so forth and so on. Noel Redding has his thing together called the Fat Mattress; be looking for them. Mitch Mitchell has a thing together called Mind Octopus. And, uh, yeah. We'd like to dedicate this one to the girls who brought their -what do they call it? birthday suits, and the other one in the pink underwear in the fourth row" Soaring feedback signals "Foxy Lady," another crowd pleaser from the band's early days, guaranteed to rouse a festival audience. The feedback intro and the signature riff are both extended before the first verse -vocals enter only at 1:25; the first chorus includes the added line "Not too much"; and Jimi's solo is extended to more than three times the length of the studio version.


And Jimi's stage banter is getting spacey. "One reason, I'd like to say, here's for all Americans to really feel proud to be Americans, uh, you know, blah-blah, woof-woof; but we're talking about the new Americans, okay? Let's start out with that." Jimi hits the opening notes to the "Star Spangled Banner."


"It was electric," recalls Leslie Gorham Haseman, who can still thrill to the memory. "It was the first time I'd heard Jimi play the 'Star Spangled Banner.' You could see the bombs bursting! It was a visual, cosmic experience that ran all through your body. You could feel it!"


The "Star Spangled Banner" had been a staple of Experience sets since the previous summer. As Jimi segues into "Purple Haze" the tape recorder out in the audience that had faithfully captured much of the 'Denver Pop Festival' begins to run low on battery power and the tape of "Purple Haze" wobbles and phases in and out before crumpling altogether.


At that point, according to several eyewitness accounts, the audience broke loose and jumped down on the open field between the stadium seats and the stage. Jimi takes the band into "Voodoo Child (slight return)" and, predictably, all hell breaks loose.


"Toward the end of Hendrix's set people jumped the retainer fence and got out on the field," recalls Bob Wyman. "I jumped down too. There was a big crowd already gathered in front of the stage; I couldn't get near it. So I walked behind the stage area to the other side. There was a sheet serving as a screen or wall on stage-right and there was an opening where two sheets met so I ducked through it. No one had tried to stop me at all. Passing through the screen, I turned and looked up and Jimi Hendrix is standing right there, up on the stage. You couldn't get any closer unless you were on the stage. There was a large iron tweeter horn on the ground right next to my feet and each note he played pierced right through me."


Lance Romance: "There was a moment when we all left our seats and swarmed to the stage. I remember very clearly being pushed into the' scaffolding and hitting my head, just before I started squeezing off those close-up pictures with the movie camera."


With a few squeezes of the Bell & Howell 8mm camera, Romance managed to capture the only clear, enduring images of Jimi Hendrix and Noel Redding at their final concert together, published here for the first time. It's clear from the footage that Romance began shooting from some distance away, probably in the stadium seats. But suddenly he is in position directly at Jimi's feet, looking up as Jimi belts out: "I'll meet you on the next one, and don't be late. Don't be late!" The camera pans right to Noel in his red cap, thumping his bass.

Still photo of Jimi Hendrix at The Denver Pop Festival taken from Lance Romance's 8mm film. Hey Lance! Send me an email when you see this!

Somehow (he cannot recall precisely) Romance ended up on the left side of the stage, for he squeezed off one more shot looking across at Jimi, who appears, in the fleeting 8mm footage, to be looking behind him. Noel and Mitch are barely apparent among the shadows.


"Sometime during that song, Noel Redding put his bass guitar down and left," recalls Wyman. "Mitch Mitchell kept playing for awhile; then he quit. And Jimi kept playing his guitar, solo. Three guys came out and one guy took his guitar and the other two picked him up by the arms and legs and carried him off the back of the stage.


"I ducked through the screen again to get back behind the stage the same as the guys who were now carrying Jimi quickly down the steps. There was a U-Haul truck parked there with a couch in the back of it," Wyman continues. "Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding were sitting on the couch; a couple of other guys were in there too. They physically tossed Hendrix to those other guys in the truck and quickly shut the back door of the van, latched it, padlocked it, and immediately the van was swarmed with people like bees on a hive. And the truck drove off. That was the end of the show."


It proved to be the end of the Experience as well. Inside the truck things were anything but pleasant.


As Mitch recalled in his book, "Suddenly we were very scared... People started climbing on the roof, which started to cave in, and we thought it was just a matter of moments before we were going to be crushed. It took us nearly an hour to get back and we all linked arms and shook hands, feeling that if we were going to go, we'd go together. We really still felt like a band, absolutely no animosity. Either way Noel did fly back to England the next day and announced that he'd left the band".


"We went down fantastically well- too well," recalled Noel in his book. "The crowd went berserk. Thirty thousand fans wanted to be on stage with us. The police panicked, and I don't blame them, when the crowd started to move en masse towards us. We didn't feel too calm about it either, but kept playing, hoping it would ease up... I fled for England the next day. It was the end of the world as I'd known it for three hectic years. For the first time in ten years I stopped keeping up my diary. That was the last show The Jimi Hendrix Experience ever played".


Herbie Worthington: "I really don't remember what he played... When the concert was over there was a lot of chaos. ..I remember the police chasing kids, and kids throwing things and a lot of animosity; not a very good vibe... I went right away to the back. They started jumping over the fence, they started running towards Jimi, and being high it just intensified the fact that he was [maybe] gonna get hurt... All these kids started running and I just started saying, 'Don't hurt him, don't hurt him, be careful, be careful.' And I looked over to my right and there was a truck that backed up and I saw that Mitch and Noel were already in there, and Jimi was just getting in there. And he said, 'Come on, come on.' And I ran and got into this truck, and they closed down the back of it, and Vishwa was in there, too... And we drove off... All these kids were on top, climbing on top of the vehicle, and yelling, 'We love you, we love you!' We couldn't see inside the truck, it was concealed completely... I just remember Jimi talking in the dark."

THE DAY AFTER

Although unconfirmed, the story goes that Jimi mailed a cable message to the Denver police stating "Make love, not war -Jimi Hendrix."


Herbie Worthington: "The next thing I really remember was Jimi coming into our room the next morning and saying, 'I gotta go back to New York. Something has come up; I'll see you back in LA.' And I found out later what it was -Noel had quit. I didn't know it at the time, but I could tell Jimi was very concerned... He was nervous about it. And he left. I don't think I saw him for a couple of months."

AFTERMATH

For Lance Romance the summer still promised Woodstock and another festival at California's Altamont Speedway. To this day he grows thoughtful at conjuring up the old days. "For me. those days, when I lived in my bus, going from concert to concert, it was like a rite of passage. It was a magical time. It's painful to know that that will never happen quite like that again.


"There was a spirit back in those days that we may never see again. That was my generation. People like Jimi came through for us. They truly affected our lives. There was a spirit and an energy that you could reach out and touch. And I wanted to touch it."


The same might very well be said for Jimi Hendrix. He had worked his way to the pinnacle of pop stardom and helped create the spirit and energy of his times. Now he wanted off the merry-go-round of fame for a much needed respite. Jimi sought an opportunity to experiment, to seek a more spiritual level, to achieve a funkier sound -he was ready to unfold his wings.


Released from the confines of the pop-oriented Jimi Hendrix Experience trio, Jimi would continue to evolve through the final year of his brief life. The process of musical growth unleashed at the 'Denver Pop Festival' was not meant to end, but should have been merely the first ray of a new musical phase in which this amazing artist called on past and future allies to achieve his musical visions. In hindsight, perhaps the only surprise is that it didn't happen sooner.

Interviews:
Mick Cox, conducted by Douglas J. Noble. August 1995; Barry Fey, conducted by Phil Carson, 23 May 1997; Leslie Gorham Haseman, conducted by Phil Carson, 23 May 1997; Kent Lawyer, conducted 0