Original subtitles

Jimi Hendrix!

Jimi Hendrix made every night a magical moment.

And the "Atlanta Pop Festival" had the greatest acts.

I mean, more than "Woodstock."

it was amazing, bigger than "Woodstock."

Three days of some of the most incredible music

from the Allman Brothers, B.B. King, Bob Seger, Grand Funk Railroad.

You never knew what was going to happen next.

This rock festival phenomenon was something really special.

I had to have Jimi Hendrix.

Somebody should shoot this thing, it's gonna be big.

Four hundred thousand people, you can't control it.

It was July the 4th and they were gonna hear The Star-Spangled Banner, by God.

The way he performed, the way he wrote songs,

the way he played his guitar...

Some people are bigger than the instrument they're playing.

Hendrix, he certainly falls in that category.

There weren't any boundaries with the way he played,

and in the way that his playing made me feel.

He was always pushing the envelope.

He was the real deal, and he had star power.

The 1970 "Atlanta Pop Festival" was the last of the great pop festivals.

A little pecan grove in Atlanta was one of the places

where he could have his concert.

All I heard about was people taking their clothes off

and jumping into each county creek.

We were all making it up as we went along.

And the film sat undeveloped in my barn for 30 years.

Jimi represented a new freedom.

The fact that Jimi was not afraid to be different,

put him out front, separate from his contemporaries.

He was one of a kind.

It was a most unique presentation

of anybody in contemporary music, black or white, at the time.

There was an air of mystery about him.

We didn't know where he came from, because no one else looked like that.

Part of Jimi's appeal was the fact that the way that he dressed,

and he did not do a lot of interviews.

He did a few, but not in depth, and that was a mystery about him,

because the way he carried himself,

the way he smoked his cigarettes, the way he played his guitar,

and his movements on stage, which...

He had the whole ball of wax

when it came to a unique guitar player.

If you think about the way he dressed, it was unique,

totally different than his contemporaries.

People in blues and R&B,

like Muddy Waters, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, etc.,

they all had these very shiny, sharp suits.

Jimi's look was totally his own, nobody had anything going like that at all.

He was more than familiar with what we call the norm,

having played with Little Richard, sat in with Wilson Pickett,

lsley Brothers and so on, he knew what the convention was.

To me, he almost seemed like a movie star.

He was very charming. He was very handsome, very good looking.

He had a confidence about him, a certain air. And you could tell he'd been through it.

He was finally coming in the front door.

I think his stint in England gave him the confidence.

We were all worshipping him. How could he not have confidence?

The first awareness that I had of how big Jimi was becoming,

was the fact that the audiences got larger.

And by the end of that '68 tour,

the places were packed and it was standing room.

The initial thing in America of the two shows a night,

49 cities in 52 days, was just complete burnout territory.

We went from doing the "Fillmore", or the small clubs, small theaters,

to getting on the kind of stadium thing,

and then the festivals really kind of started,

with loads and loads of acts on it.

It was really only myself, the two roadies, Jerry Stickies and a truck driver,

and one 19-foot rental van that carried everything.

Everything we did with Hendrix,

the musical instruments, the sound system, the guitars,

the merchandising, all fit in a 19-foot truck, which leads me to my corollary

that the amount of talent you have is inversely proportional

to the number of trucks it takes to put your show on the road.

We looked for the biggest buildings in the biggest cities,

because the demand for Jimi Hendrix, I guess, was that big.

We needed the biggest facilities.

Yeah, Jimi was the big star. He was the big kahuna.

He could command a $100,000,

which was a hell of a lot of money in those days.

Jimi felt each of his concerts was a milieu as well as a spiritual experience,

and I think he wanted people to feel that they were either in his living room,

or, later on, as he said, "in a church,"

and that we were experiencing this event together.

And when he was really on to that,

there was an exciting exchange between the audience and the trio on stage.

That's what the exciting part about a Hendrix concert was,

that it was a really give-and-take between him and the audience,

and I think the audience really felt that.

But I also think that's probably why the mystique of Hendrix is still here today,

was that those people who were fortunate enough to have seen him,

still remember the fact that

they were part of a concert, as well as being in the audience.

That exchange

is as potent as it gets.

I heard you use the expression "An electric church,"

as an ambition you had.

Was this speaking metaphorically or poetically, or do you really wanna...

Honestly, I don't know. It's this... It's just a belief that I have.

And as we do use electric guitars, everything is electrified nowadays.

So, therefore, the belief comes through electricity to the people, whatever.

That's why we play so loud,

because it doesn't actually hit through the ear drums

like most groups do nowadays.

They say, "We're gonna play loud, too, 'cause they're playing loud."

And they got this real shrill sound and it's really hard.

We plan for our sound to go inside the soul of the person, actually,

and see if they can awaken some kind of thing in their minds,

because there's so many sleeping people. You can call it that, if you want to.

How're you doin'? You feelin' all right?

- Yeah! - Yeah, right. Here we go.

I think the most important thing he was concerned about

was people coming together and being a part of the music.

The sky church was the concept of,

maybe if you couldn't have the bleachers and etc.,

you can have them comfortably sitting under this humongous tent,

almost like the tent revival.

I think people connect so strongly with Jimi

because he really, truly loved what he did.

And when you really love something that much,

and you have a gift and it comes out, it touches people.

When Jimi Hendrix took the stage, there was a certain relationship that he had.

It was almost transcendent.

Not only was he a fantastic guitar player,

but it was almost like a spiritual experience going to one of his concerts.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.

The people loved him.

They really loved his persona, the music, the songs,

and he could do nothing wrong.

That purity of intention

that he seemed to use to approach his music,

his songwriting, his recording, I mean, everything,

I think that's what translated.

Just 'cause he was such a fine player.

You know, we all played guitar, we all knew a bit,

but he seemed to know more than us.

In the light of the day, the purity holds up.

The other stuff just does not. It doesn't last.

When something's real, it's gonna last.

It's gonna last as long as people are listening.

Music has a lot of influence on a lot of young people today.

Politics are getting... Well, I don't know. You know, how they're getting.

A cat that talk on TV, and a cat in Mississippi,

a farmer in Mississippi, you can't barely understand him,

except when he says, "America," so then he's gonna vote for him.

But through music, it's all true, either true or false.

And, like, such a large gathering of people with music,

it shows that music must mean something.

Before the times of King, Dr. Luther King, there's been a whole lot of changes.

But some people after the excitement, or the backwash of the change slows down,

they say, "Yeah, that was groovy. Let's see, what else can we feast upon now?"

One of them things. It's whole lot a changes happening,

but now it's time for all these changes to connect,

to showing that it's leading up to love, peace and harmony.

Matter of fact, what we're trying to stress also is, like,

music should be done outside, in a festival type of way.

Just like they do it anywhere else.

Because a lot of kids from the "ghetto," or whatever you want to call it,

don't have enough money to travel across the country,

to see these different festivals, what they call "festivals."

'Cause I'd like for everybody to see these type of festivals,

have everybody mix together.

You wouldn't believe it, you really wouldn't.

Atlanta was a very isolated city from the national music scene.

Not in terms of talent,

but in terms of having connections to the music business.

This festival culture was beginning to develop.

There was a sense in which,

"Wow, there's a lot of young kids who like this music."

Alex Cooley was the preeminent promoter in the southeast.

In Atlanta, he was the man.

We started hearing a radio station

talking about the second "Miami Pop Festival."

And it was all the groups I wanted to see, things that never came to Atlanta.

And I decided that's what I wanted to do with my life.

So, I came back to Atlanta

and I put together a partnership with 17 guys.

We pooled our money and did the first "Atlanta Pop Festival."

We didn't make money, but we did okay.

They all dropped away. That was enough.

And I kept doing it, and so, I did the second "Atlanta Pop Festival."

I think Alex knew that if he wanted to have a bigger success than the previous year,

he needed a headliner, not just a popular artist.

Not just an artist popular there in Atlanta, he needed an international headliner.

There was nobody bigger than Jimi Hendrix at that point.

Hendrix playing at a festival like that was a very significant event.

Part of the power and part of the originality that Jimi had,

had to do with his vision.

He took a very pedestrian type of guitar

that was primarily used by, like, surf bands and country musicians,

and he turned it into a lethal weapon,

a very, very lethal weapon.

When Alex Cooley put together the "Pop Festival" in late May and June,

our director of photography, John Butterworth, went to Alex and said,

"Somebody should shoot this thing. It's gonna be big."

And Alex said, "There's not much time."

And John said, "Well, we just happen to be in town,

"and we just happen to be in the business of shooting rock 'n' roll music, live."

And Alex said, "Okay. Do it."

Counterculture started in the late '60s.

It was all centered around a coffee house

at 14th and Peachtree called the "Catacombs."

And it was mostly artists and musicians at first,

and then it started attracting intellectuals and the hippies and everybody else.

The Great Speckled Bird was an underground newspaper,

run basically by what would be called hippies of the era,

and it was sold on street corners

on Peachtree Street, other places throughout town, by hippies,

who would make a little money selling this paper.

And, at the time, it was the way of spreading the word.

The Great Speckled Bird was not viewed fondly by the police departments.

It was not viewed fondly by the established media.

The editorials and the content of the Great Speckled Bird

pointed to the culture that was becoming more and stronger daily,

like a little army growing and growing.

The Great Speckled Bird was very important, politically and culturally.

Although they started off as a political paper, what happened was,

the cultural aspects of this paper, being tied in with these political aspects,

moved things forward a great degree.

And Atlanta in '68 and '69,

there were 20,000 people

in Piedmont Park and Peachtree Street,

and they mostly had long hair, or whatever.

The scene in Atlanta was highly charged.

And although civil rights and things had moved forward a great degree,

it really was a very segregated city.

Lester Maddox was governor, and there's no other character like him.

Three negroes showed up at The Pickrick but were not allowed in.

Instead, Maddox accused them

of trying to put him and his negro employees out of a job.

Do you want these 40 people to lose their jobs right now?

You're distorting the gospel, number one.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah... Shut your big mouth. - Number two...

Lester Maddox had an ax handle that he carried at his restaurant

to keep people that he didn't wanna serve from coming in.

And it wasn't being sold as a black and white issue,

although, coincidentally, these people that he didn't want to come in

just coincidentally all happened to be black.

It was being sold as "This is about states rights.

"This is about me being able to serve who I want to serve."

The government gave you a decision. What do you want to do?

- I'm not gonna integrate. - Are you gonna abide by the...

I'll use ax handles, I'll use guns, I'll use paint, I'll use my fists.

I'll use my customers. I'll use my employees. I'll use anything at my disposal.

This property belongs to me, my wife and my children.

It doesn't belong to anybody else.

I'll throw out a white one or a black one or a red-headed one or bald-headed one,

it doesn't make any difference.

No one's open to change, and it was a forced change.

And, certainly, Jimi, with his music,

there was nothing like that ever happening before.

When Hendrix first appeared in Atlanta in 1968,

it was still a very segregated city.

Jimi Hendrix became the performer that he was

due to the visionary aspects of his art,

sometimes overshadowed the visionary aspects of him

in moving race relationships forward,

because he was an instrumental figure, much like Elvis in the '50s.

In combining elements of culture

in a way that was very appealing and nonthreatening to people.

Hendrix had achieved a level of success that made him a target,

certainly in parts of the culture that was pretty much still seriously segregated,

regardless of what laws had passed.

He was interviewed by the Great Speckled Bird.

And they asked him, "Do you get much into what's happening with black people

"in regards to civil rights," they were asking him.

And he said, "I don't get a chance, man.

"I'm not thinking about black people or white people,

"I'm thinking about the obsolete and the new."

And that's what he was doing artistically.

And that carried over with his acceptance

in a very big way to moving forward race relationships.

Had Hendrix been a politically centric figure,

people would have seen that as threatening, but he wasn't.

He combined these elements.

He brought them to people in a way that moved race relations forward.

In 1969 and 1970,

Jimi Hendrix was the most important touring act in the world.

Keep in mind the Beatles had stopped touring,

Dylan was in the wake of his motorcycle accident,

and, really, if you were gonna put on a major event,

you really had to have Jimi Hendrix.

It was kind of expected, because he made the difference.

I had to have Jimi Hendrix.

To me, that was the whole premise of the whole thing.

That's why I was in South Georgia, for God's sakes.

Byron, back in 1970, was just a real small country town.

I'm not sure we even had a red light in town.

If we did, it was just one.

Byron is named for Lord Byron, the poet.

It's on I-75, 100 miles south of Atlanta.

There was a racetrack there.

Right next to the racetrack,

was one of the most incredible pecan orchards you've ever seen,

just beautiful.

I was appointed Chief of Police there.

And it was nobody but me.

Alex Cooley came down

a couple of, two or three weeks before the pop festival.

He was extremely nice.

He came down. It was explained to us that they were going to go out to the racetrack,

and that's where they were gonna hold it,

and it should not interfere with the town at all.

The owner of that property, he was a real character.

He drank scotch and milk all day.

He would have done anything for the money. I mean, he was desperate at this point.

I mean, he was also a moonshiner.

There was a still under the racetrack

that produced gallons of moonshine a day.

So, he was on our side and he had some political influence.

And so, he paved the way, partially,

but we almost did it by stealth.

Some visitors from all over the United States come in here with the idea

that it's gonna be one of these nasty, filthy, illegal activities,

and to the best of our ability

and with all the adequate police power that we can man,

we're going to see that the law is enforced

in order to protect the lives and properties of the people,

knowing fully well that we'll have to pull in men

that otherwise would be saving lives on Georgia's highways.

Governor Maddox was not in favor of having a festival at all.

He didn't like the music, didn't like the hippies.

He didn't like much of anything.

He was from the old school.

And he didn't want that kind of clientele in his state.

We understand it could be two or three thousand people down in there.

We know for a fact there's been 500 Coca-Colas ordered.

Five hundred thousand Coca-Colas ordered for this meeting.

We don't think they'll all be drinking Coca-Colas.

I woke up one morning.

Cars were lined up on the interstate for miles,

trying to get off in Byron.

And I said, "Oh, my goodness, this is gonna be something else."

It turned out to be something else.

I guess it hit us all when everybody started showing up,

'cause we'd heard some things on the news.

It was coming, and nobody paid a lot of attention to it,

until you go up that way,

and it's just people everywhere walking down the interstate.

Cars parked on the side of the interstate.

Byron wasn't ready for what was coming to see us on that week.

The crowd, which probably swelled somewhere between 350 to 500,000,

in that neighborhood,

had to have come from all across the United States.

They were here from everywhere.

It wasn't like as if it was just a crowd from Atlanta came down here,

or a crowd from Alabama or Washington.

I saw people with car tags from all over the United States.

What makes you come all the way from Dallas to a pop festival?

'Cause I had a bunch of hassles in Dallas

and I knew that coming here, the type of people that would be here,

there wouldn't be any hassles.

You just kind of get away with it,

and be with friends and everything, have a really good time.

$14 ticket for three days. I mean, you can do the math.

That's a pretty good chunk of change to pay everybody for their efforts.

There was a fencing put around.

I think it encompassed around 20 acres all the way round the field.

The perimeter at where people couldn't see in,

from standing outside and get a free view.

At first, you would see some real hippies.

But I think the thing I noticed most of all would be a lot of college kids coming in.

And, I mean, when they'd get out of the cars,

they'd just be college kids, all preppy looking.

And then they would go through our bathrooms.

And when they came back out, you would not even recognize them.

A lot of them

would come in the store and go in the bathrooms,

strip down and put on next to nothing.

And we had never seen anything like that.

But they were there to have a good time.

You got the sense that, "Well, I think this is gonna be big."

And then, that Thursday and Friday, you just knew.

You knew it was just gonna be crazy big.

It was just a humongous traffic jam, but I couldn't do anything about it.

We had to let them go where they wanted to go.

You couldn't even depend on when the artist would arrive.

Not that they were late getting off the plane, there was no way to get them there.

All the roads were jammed.

Our transportation broke down.

And we could not get out of the grounds.

And we had one helicopter that we had begged for,

but it was not the kind of helicopter

you would go to the Atlanta Airport and pick up a performer and bring back.

So, there were some real adventures of people,

different people getting to the stage.

That stage was so disorganized.

Not disorganized, unorganized, because everything was out of control.

Not that there wasn't a plan, it just didn't happen,

because 500,000 people messed it up.

And remember, in those days,

the technology didn't exist for the wireless headphones

and the walkie-talkies and all of that. It didn't exist.

And if someone couldn't reach someone by shouting across the stage,

they didn't hear you.

Well, with 500,000 people next to you, nobody's gonna hear you 30 feet away.

The people that were walking were just piling onto the hoods of the cars,

the backs of the cars, and that was the way people rode out there.

I didn't have any other police officers, and I had to run the whole thing myself.

And the little jail that we used was only two cells.

That was the police department and also the court facilities at that time.

We didn't come in here and harass 'em.

We stayed on the perimeter

and watched them come and go as they pleased,

but we didn't just come out here

and harass one or catch one smoking dope and haul them off to jail.

So, we couldn't have done it. There was too many of 'em.

They were selling tickets at first.

But so many people came, that they just crashed

- the fence down, the gates. - What began to happen locally was,

word began to get out what was going on at the racetrack.

First it was the local kids, of course. They had to go and they had to see.

But then the word got out that there were hippies, real hippies,

that there were naked people running around out there,

that there was all kind of stuff going on that we knew nothing about.

The traffic became even worse,

because now intermingled with the ones trying to get to the festival,

were all the locals who had to go see what was going on.

They just could not believe that such a thing happened in this sleepy little town of Byron.

People were completely shocked that people were taking their clothes off,

that people were doing drugs out in the open.

And, of course, the music was something they had never heard before.

We were out there practicing Little League Baseball,

and the preacher lived right there beside the church,

and he came out and called everybody to the pitcher's mound,

and told us that we need to all go home to our families,

because the hippies had taken over Vinson Valley.

And just all this fear of what was to come there.

And course, at that time, I was 16 and just had my driver's license,

and a couple other guys loaded up with me,

and we went straight to Vinson Valley to see what all the excitement was about.

As long as they weren't outside breaking the law somewhere,

or breaking into stores or houses, we didn't bother them.

If you walked in there, you about got high from the smell of it.

It was very open. It was very open.

Nobody was trying to act like they weren't selling or using, you know.

And you could see anything in there, anything, if you catch what I'm saying.

When I was there Friday, I was separated from the other committee,

I stopped a few minutes and watched a couple in the full throes of intercourse,

right there on the path.

The girl was smoking a cigarette the whole time.

At one point,

I contacted one of the guys who was with the motorcycle gang.

They were called the Galloping Geese out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

And he agreed to help us patrol the city of Byron.

The hippies out here were very scared of them,

the bikers, at that time.

So they helped us patrol the city of Byron at night on their motorcycles.

We paid 'em with a case of beer and a meal a day.

And we did not have one break-in the whole time.

The crowd, remarkably, did very well

with the heat and the drugs that were consumed.

And you have to admit that they were there

'cause there were a lot of people walking around screwed up.

It scared the crap out of me.

I mean, I was really, truly frightened.

And I started thinking, "What the hell have I done here?"

After a day or two, they were hungry.

And they started going into Byron and going through Dempsey Dumpsters

getting scraps and begging folks for food.

And of course, a lot of the local folks in Byron

were cooking tubs of hot dog and stuff and bringing 'em up here and selling 'em,

you know, Coca-Colas and what have you.

Our local farmers took peaches and watermelons

and things like that out there and just gave 'em away,

because they were hungry, there were too many people out there,

they couldn't feed everybody.

We're deeply concerned because this comes on a holiday weekend,

probably the most popular holiday weekend of the entire year.

One hundred and four degrees on July the fourth.

That's how hot it was on the day of the festival.

It was so freaking hot.

I had everything I could do just to concentrate.

The sweat was pouring off my hands, the guitar was getting sticky in my hands.

The Byron Fire Department actually brought fire trucks up here.

They were spraying them down with the hoses to keep 'em cool.

A lot of them had heat strokes and fell out with the heat.

We were wetting them down with the fire trucks.

They were down there swimming in the nude, they were out here in the nude,

just trying to stay cool.

I'd never seen anything like it.

People don't just walk around naked up here.

And to see all of that, it was amazing.

And they didn't care. It didn't even bother them.

They'd wave at you, "How you doing?" They wouldn't care.

- People that were so against it... - ...were down there looking, okay?

My Lord, they were down there with binoculars and everything else.

They wanted to be on the site.

But they were the ones that, "Oh, it won't happen again."

"it can never happen again."

They wanted to be able to talk about it for the rest of their lives.

I like festivals and I like to have fun.

But we want the people visiting down there to know

that we expect them to abide by Georgia law.

Maddox flew over the area and declared it a disaster area.

He put out, I don't know, APBs, or whatever you call them,

to tell people, "Don't go to Byron."

"it's a total disaster area. Parents, keep your kids home."

He was extremely upset that this was going on.

July of 1970, we were just a couple of months past the murders at Kent State

where protesting college students were shot to death on campus,

and in Jackson State, in Mississippi as well.

People forget that there was a draft going on in 1970,

and so, people who were over 18, and were male,

they were pretty much sitting in the crosshairs.

I was 16 and getting to where I had started thinking about the draft,

and I do think that is part of the lifestyle we were going through,

that Vietnam was so deadly that this was part of the mindset of these young people.

You know, "I'm not part of the establishment.

"I'm gonna make up my own rules and do what I wanna do."

it was a very trying time, with us being in the war.

Jimi and I went into the military just prior to Vietnam,

and that war was the real deal.

Larry Lee was our friend and Larry Lee was wounded.

He had a plate in his head, he got shot, right on the verge of going into his brain,

and they mended that up. So, he got wounded there.

And so, he was very fortunate that he didn't die, but it was a reality for us,

and it affected him, and it affected us because he was our friend.

The "Atlanta Pop Festival" was the largest US audience he ever played to.

The backstage scene was very confused.

You didn't know who was gonna actually be there at what time.

"Hendrix is here. Thank God.

"You know, it's July fourth, there's gotta be Hendrix."

Jimi Hendrix landed at the "Pop Festival" at 10:00 in a helicopter,

and there were no lights there to see.

And I think he got on stage about 12:30.

When Jimi came on stage,

only the people immediately in front of the stage could see him.

Power was the big issue

because Georgia Rural Power only had a certain amount of generating capability

in middle Georgia,

and they couldn't provide enough lights

to light the stage, the audience, and provide the backstage facilities as well.

So, we had to pick and choose.

Someone made the choice in the lighting crew,

that they didn't want the audience to watch the bands set up.

They wanted to have a visual entrance.

In the dark, you really couldn't tell how many there were,

but you could see the cigarette lighters going to the horizon.

We knew that there were a lot of people. There was no way to count them.

Jimi Hendrix!

This is Billy Cox on bass.

And Mitch Mitchell on drums.

And yours truly, covering the saxophone.

Jimi would pretty much walk out on stage,

tune their guitar,

they'd chat among themselves and then, "Okay, hit the chords for the first tune."

And that was how the show started.

It was very primitive. But everything was very personal.

You just had a guy with a guitar

and he had to get people going.

And Jimi was one of the guys who could do it.

The cheers, the claps, the noise that they made was incredible.

And it kind of gave us an edge.

Thank you.

I really hope it isn't too loud for you.

Let's see if you know this tune now.

Okay, we'd like to slow it down a little bit and quiet it down

and do a slow blues for the evening, a thing called Red House.

Thank you very much for the last four years.

And also thank you to the girl over there with the purple underwear on.

All right, everybody stand up and give up your thing and stand on your feet.

We'd like to do a Happy Birthday song to America.

The thing they used to brainwash us into singing at school.

Let's all, everybody stand up and sing it together.

With feeling.

Thank you very much.

Honestly, thank you very much for staying.

All right, next time, I'd like to see you again soon.

I hope everyone has many more of these kind of birthdays.

And concerts and so forth, and everyone,

thank you very much and goodnight.

Thank you very much for staying with us. Thank you.

Thank you very much, all of you.

You know, if I could see you, it'd be good, but that light is blinding, man.

It's hard to play when you can't see nobody, you know.

Now, I can see you, yeah, all right.

I'd like to do a thing called Stone Free for you.

Thank you very much and good night.

At the end of Jimi's performance, the audience started cheering, of course,

and chanting, "We want Jimi, we want Jimi," and then, they wouldn't stop.

They had endured a long, hot day on July fourth,

and it was the most uplifting thing I've seen in show business in many, many years.

They were there and the love was there for Jimi Hendrix.

I mean, there's no doubt about it.

Jimi got a lot of energy from that particular gig.

He played All Along The Watchtower, it was in the wrong key.

And so, he started out...

Then in the middle, he said...

Well, not in the middle, maybe about, two bars, he says, "As I was saying..."

And when I heard, "As I was saying,"

I said, "I know he's in the wrong key, so he's got to be going to the right key."

Then he went... Then we were all...

So, after the gig was over, he says, "Man, you were on me like white on rice."

I said, "No, I was on you like a rat on cheese."

So, he laughed at that. That was very funny.

He actually put on a real show,

and the people that were here, they loved it, you know.

After the gig, he came up to me and said, "You know, these songs are gonna be okay

"because these people never heard them. Man, they clapping and jumping around."

I said, "Yeah, that's great," you know.

Maybe, we're producing...

Trying to produce some good stuff, you know.

So, that was incredible.

Jimi Hendrix played what he felt.

And right before he went on,

there were 10 people interviewing him for the Great Speckled Bird.

He said, "it's great to play for these people. They want to hear me."

it was something. When you really get next to it like that, it was something.

And I've been next to a lot of 'em, you know.

I mean, I saw Coltrane play before he died, you know, all kinds of things.

I mean, Jimi was...

Hey, man, come on, he was Jimi Hendrix.

I mean, there is...

There is this stage show, there is this persona that's coming out,

but there's really no smoke and mirrors.

I mean, nobody is BS-ing anybody.

Like, this is people that know what they're doing

at the highest level and getting it done.

And the music was incredibly emotive, and also drew emotion from people.

For me, there really hasn't been anyone since

that's had the impact that Jimi Hendrix has had on music.

It was honest music. He wasn't trying to fool anyone.

It was from the heart and it was what he believed.

Fourth of July, Jimi Hendrix's Star-Spangled Banner,

"it knocked people's socks off," as they say.

They're shooting out fireworks,

and he's playing to the fireworks.

It was gorgeous, man. It was unbelievable.

It was beautiful. You know, it was Jimi.

Until the Olympics happened, this was the largest crowd

for anything that had ever happened in the state of Georgia.

It's noteworthy that the "Atlanta Pop Festival" was in the deep South

at a time when it was thought that the south was hostile

to rock 'n' roll, to hippies, people who looked like that.

But the reality was, that the world had changed by that time.

The long hair ethos was embraced by kids in the south

as much, or if not more so than kids in the north.

When the festival was over,

we all knew that we had something important on film.

We didn't know whether or not it would be accepted as important.

You have to remember, in 1970,

the authorities were really cracking down on festivals in general and us hippies,

and it was becoming a difficult thing to sustain.

We all knew instinctively that this innocence was over.

We didn't know what was to come, but we knew that it was over.

And I guess we all felt that, "This is probably the last one."

Turned out it really was.

When the festival was over,

it was the worst trashed-out place you've ever seen in your life.

I mean, there was trash all the way from Vinson Valley lake,

down where they were swimming, all the way to Byron.

All this field out here was just solid trash.

The race track itself, that whole area,

it was totally, totally just the biggest mess you've ever seen in your life.

Even though, at some points in time during the festival,

they had tried to clean up, you know, it still, by the time everybody left...

it was such a mess.

Just too many people, not enough restrooms,

not enough places for them to eat.

So, yeah, that area was totally trashed.

I remember the trash 'cause everywhere, when we'd go up through there,

everywhere there was people, it seems like now there was

trash bags and clothes, and just stuff that they had discarded and left.

And it took several weeks to get all that cleaned up.

I was disappointed in the disregard that the counterculture had for the environment.

I mean, I thought that that was part of

what the counterculture would've done a better job at.

And it showed me that when you get into certain situations,

you don't always act responsibly.

But it wasn't the first time I had seen that.

I mean, "Woodstock" wasn't left a sea of green grass

when they left there, either.

I will say that I had a feeling about...

That this might be, sort of, the beginning of the end.

Things were getting a little darker in terms of drug use,

prevalence of drug use, harder drugs.

You could see things were going in another direction.

And of course, all of this has been documented,

what happened at "Altamont" and all these things.

So, you could see the culture changing a little bit.

So, in terms of Atlanta and this gigantic festival, this was...

And certainly, in retrospect, sort of, the end of an era. And a great end to an era.

I mean, it was a powerful moment,

and I felt really lucky to be there and be taking part in it.

And as they grew and became bigger and bigger,

it became inevitable that they would become more and more regulated,

and that did change them.

"Atlanta Pop" was a moment in time.

These giant festivals became so unwieldy, they could never happen again.

I think pop festivals in general took on

a risk factor far greater

than investors or backers or organizers who wanted to move forward with

after the "Atlanta Pop Festival."

Maybe the time had come and gone, and maybe it was frozen, if you will,

or not meant to happen again.

In 1970, there were no other ancillary markets.

Video tape, video cassette, DVDs, none of that had been invented.

If you didn't make that first summer's marketing window, you were dead.

So, no one was interested in releasing the film the next year.

So, the film sat for 30 some odd years

in my barn, undeveloped.

If you think about the time at which Jimi performed at the "Atlanta Pop Festival,"

it was the apogee of his professional career.

He was working on a new album, just finishing it.

He had opened his studio in New York, Electric Lady.

And he was on top of the world,

in terms of being the most dominant force in popular music.

And who would ever have imagined

that the world would lose him a short time after that?