4/27/69 JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE Oakland Coliseum Concert Ticket Stub 3rd US Tour

  

This ticket stub was from a single night performance by the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, taking place Sunday night, April 27th, 1969. This was part of Jimi Hendrix's third U. Tour, sometimes referred to as the North American Tour, 1969, which began April 11th in Raleigh, North Carolina, and wound slowly westward through Philadelphia, Memphis [two shows], Houston, Dallas, and the Los Angeles Forum, prior to Oakland.

The tour doubled back to Detroit on May 2nd, then up to Toronto the next day where the entourage was subjected to the phony Canadian drug bust. With momentary inconvenience and major stress, the were allowed to go on to Syracuse New York on the May the 4th, and later Alabama, North Carolina, West Virginia, Indiana, Maryland, Rhode Island, and MSG in New York. After some days off, they resumed out West again in Seattle, San Diego, San Jose, and then three nights in a row in Honolulu [although the first one was cut short by amp trouble after a half hour], followed by three weeks off before the big show in Devonshire Downs in L. And then the last ever show by The Jimi Hendrix Experience as part of the Denver Pop Festival. The supporting acts for our show in Oakland were Fat Mattress, which consisted of friends of bass player Noel Redding, Chicago [yes, those guys], apparently also Jefferson Airplane, but I do not remember that at all. Still, Jack Casady was right there to play on at least one song with Jimi, [as he did in the recording studio]. I must have tuned them out, or else we were roaming the building looking for "friends indeed".

Dozens of times we knew what time-wasters they could be, and unfortunately it had repercussions this time. The last song of the night was Voodoo Child [Slight Return], which is very operatic in scope, and the'Slight Return' part has built-in melodic waterfalls that keeps cycling back into and out of the song until its destiny is fulfilled and it can end. The problem was something like the Alameda County Board of Supervisors of a similar group of civic screwballs has enacted a curfew ordinance and things were supposed to finish before midnight. Shades of the Monterey Pop Festival, where showboating and stage-hogging by earlier bands wound up leaving Otis Redding with only 19 minutes to perform on Saturday night before the sheriffs invoked curfew and cut power to the stage.

Jimi was playing as hard as he could, on Voodoo, but he could not make the song go any faster - it had to proceed along an already-composed path before it could come naturally back home and be over. They did everything they could to encourage him to stop - they turned on all the house lights, the cops and Bill Graham and maybe a mayor or two were on the stage, pleading with Jimi to end the song. Nobody wanted to take the blame for cutting the power, but they had [stupid] jobs to do. It ended in a fourth-dimensional standoff, as far as I can recall 57 years later. Time stood still, Jimi added some astonishingly pure magnificence to the music that mesmerized the opposition, who were then immobilized and could do nothing.

And then the song was truly finished, the disaster averted, and we all went home, filled with happiness and awe. All of that and more resides within this small, torn piece of colorful card stock.

How can I sell it, you may well ask. The answer to that would be a far longer story, but for another day. Our friends all called this one the "Electric Landlady Tour", just to be silly.