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seemed a complete re-creation of his person: His pants were now al-
ways velvet tights or blue jeans; his witch hat had given way to head-
bands; and the antique military jacket had been replaced by kimono-like
shirts and brightly colored scarves.
Emily Touraine was primarily a painter and her Los Angeles home
was a working artist s studio. Jimi occasionally stayed at her house to es-
cape the increasing chaos that followed him. It was a zoo around him,
she observed. When he visited, Jimi frequently used her supplies to cre-
ate his own art, making hundreds of drawings and paintings. He was
very, very good, she said. Jimi told Touraine that if he hadn t made it
in music, he would have tried to become a commercial artist.
mn
THE BERKELEY SHOWS were examples of what the band called fly-
outs, weekend concerts that required them to fly out at the last minute.
Jimi spent most of the spring and summer of 1970 in the studio in what
had become a Sisyphean effort to complete a new album. Back in De-
cember 1969, he was already telling reporters he had enough songs for
another two albums, though he couldn t decide what to release and
298 C H A R L E S R . C R O S S
when. By the next summer, he had enough material for four albums,
but still wasn t ready to let anything out, and given his obsessive nature,
he spent entire days working on one overdub. It was an expensive way
of doing it, observed engineer Eddie Kramer, but considering all the
stuff that was happening, it seemed to be the only way. Few of Jimi s
sessions began with any set plan, and he d make use of players he d met
in a club earlier in the evening. In one case, he invited a cabdriver in for
a session after the driver mentioned he played congas.
Things became slightly easier when his studio, Electric Lady, was
near completion. Since Jimi and Michael Jeffrey owned the facility,
costs were reduced. He was very proud of that studio, Eddie Kramer
recalled. Being a black man of his stature, making a lot of money, and
owning your own studio in New York City, that was the pinnacle of
success for him. He had suffered a lot of slings and arrows, but here he
was on top. There had been a time when Jimi was willing to sign away
his rights simply to get inside a studio; now he owned the best facility
in New York City. The studio became his home away from home, but it
was also a contributing factor in his perfectionism. In a July 1 session,
he cut nineteen different takes of Dolly Dagger before achieving a
master. He loved that studio, and he spent night after night there, re-
called Deering Howe. But he d get hung up on a song, and one eight-
bar thing would take three days to fuck with.
By the middle of June, Jimi had begun to whittle down the
dozens of songs into a rough form for his next album. He considered
several titles, including First Rays of the New Rising Sun, but he never
settled on a final title or track list. He and Jeffrey were at odds over
what length the release should be; Jeffrey said a single album would sell
better than a double, while Jimi suggested it be a triple set titled People,
Hell, and Angels. The closest Jimi came to a finished album was a list
he wrote in June called Songs for LP, Strate Ahead, which included
Room Full of Mirrors, Ezy Ryder, Angel, Cherokee Mist, Dolly
Dagger, and twenty others.
That summer the tour-that-never-seemed-to-end took Jimi to
Dallas, Houston, Boston, and a few other stops. The only show that
R OOM F UL L OF MI R R OR S 299
didn t require a fly-out was a July 17 date at Randalls Island in New
York City, part of the New York Pop Festival. A number of radical
groups including the Yippies, the Young Lords, the Black Panthers,
and the White Panthers demanded that all proceeds be turned over or
they would riot. Promoters made a donation to those groups, but thou-
sands of protesters snuck in without paying anyway. Jimi didn t go on
until 4 AM, and as he played, the public address system kept picking up
radio transmissions. The malfunctions put Jimi in a foul mood, and he
snapped at the crowd several times. When he dedicated Voodoo
Child to Devon, Colette, Deering, and a few others, the crowd booed.
Fuck off, Jimi replied. These are my friends.
The Randalls Island concert would be the last time Jimi ever ap-
peared on a stage in New York City. He had starved in New York, he
had struggled for acceptance uptown, and he had ultimately been dis-
covered in the Village. In time, he had become one of the most success-
ful musicians ever identified with the city. The concert was hardly a
fitting farewell, and as the final song ended, the radio station interfer-
ence drowned out Jimi s guitar. His last words to a New York crowd
were ones of anger: Fuck you, and good night.
mn
TEN DAYS LATER, Jimi was flying west again for a show in Seattle.
The tour had originally skipped the Northwest, but Jeffrey had
arranged a last-minute booking, which Jimi agreed to, thinking it would
help them keep up with their staggering bills. Jimi was a superstar
worldwide, but his strongest markets remained New York, Los Angeles,
London, Europe, and his hometown Seattle. The show was scheduled
for Sick s Stadium, a twenty-six-thousand-seat ballpark in the Rainier
Valley that had been the home of the Seattle Pilots before Bud Selig
moved the team to Milwaukee in the spring of 1970. It was the first and
only time that Jimi, as a star, performed in his old neighborhood. He
had walked by Sick s Stadium countless times in his youth, perhaps fan-
tasizing that one day he d be the attraction inside nowhe was.
300 C H A R L E S R . C R O S S
Jimi took a morning flight to Seattle on Sunday, July 26. Though
his stadium concert was scheduled to start at 2:30 PM, he wouldn t go
on until the evening because of two opening acts and extraordinarily
long set breaks. He had hoped to get a few hours of sleep in the after-
noon, but that proved impossible when his family converged. He was
tied up from minute one, recalled promoter Dan Fiala. Jimi had ini-
tially asked that his family not be told his arrival time. They d be calling
our office ten times a day saying they were going to pick him up, ob-
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