Remembering Jimi Hendrix's last ever live performance, 50 years on

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Jochan Embley16 September 2020

A little more than two weeks after his indelible set at the 1970 edition of the Isle of Wight Festival, Jimi Hendrix sat in the crowd at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho. He was there to watch his friend, the English vocalist Eric Burdon, performing alongside the Californian funk-rock group War. Towards the end, he was finally coaxed up onto the stage. Armed with a white Strat, he jammed through two songs and then departed.

No-one could have known at the time, but this would be Hendrix’s last ever public appearance — just two days later, he tragically succumbed to an overdose. And it certainly wasn’t known to Bill Baker, the 20-year-old fan who, sat among the crowd with his Sony TC-100A portable cassette recorder and handheld dynamic microphone, caught the whole thing on tape.

Listening back now, 50 years after it all went down, the scratchy relic of a recording makes for an enthralling listen. The crowd reaction when Hendrix did finally emerge is rather muted — after all, this was the greatest living guitarist making an unannounced appearance, and all it received was a smattering of applause — but there can’t have been a single person watching that night who wasn’t spellbound by Hendrix’s greatness.

On the first song they played, a rendition of Mother Earth by Memphis Slim, Hendrix’s guitar aches and wails. But on the follow-up, an amped-up version of Tobacco Road, he was incendiary, roaring through the jam with an exultant vigour. And like any great musician, he only enlivened the musicians around him. “Having Hendrix onstage made [War guitarist Howard Scott] play better than he ever had before,” Burdon later wrote in his autobiography, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.

Despite the magnitude of the occasion, the recording of Hendrix’s performance at Ronnie Scott’s was left to flounder in relative obscurity for decades afterwards. Its fortuitous chronicler Baker tried and failed to get it published by the BBC, and then later just through a Hammersmith record shop, before it finally appeared on a bootleg LP, Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window, sometime in the mid-70s. It then circulated on poor-quality cassette tapes, and to this day is yet to get an official release.

Still, now you can now listen to the recording on YouTube. The whole thing is great, but the Hendrix-inspired magic starts at around the 56-minute mark.

Half a century on, it makes for poignant listening — a snapshot of an artist in their prime, taken too soon.

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