“I’ll kick your ass!”: Jimi Hendrix’s whirlwind tour of Holland
When Jimi Hendrix landed in Holland for his first appearance in the country in March 1967 for two mimed performances on the TV show Fanclub, he was a much bigger deal in Europe than he was back home in America. By the time he returned to the country for his first proper show in front of a Dutch audience in November of the same year, he had blown up at home and become one of the biggest names in the world, thanks to his electrifying performance at the Monterey Pop Festival.
But recognition and success didn’t mean that the Jimi Hendrix Experience would now be a much more streamlined and simplified organisation. Upon arriving in Amsterdam, Hendrix and his band were driven to the Vitus Studio to tape an appearance on the television show Hoepla. Hendrix and his band, however, didn’t seem to be prepared for the occasion and arrived without any musical instruments to play with.
Once they had been supplied with the necessary equipment, the next obstacle arose. They hadn’t really come prepared with any songs, either. The group eventually improvised their way through a few loose takes, though, recording ‘Foxy Lady’, ‘Catfish Blues’ and a few attempts at ‘Purple Haze’.
And it wasn’t just the Experience who seemed a little unprepared, but the crew of Hoepla as well. Hendrix was notorious for playing loud and had been scaring audiences with his volume on the continent for a couple of years already, so the crew shouldn’t have been surprised when he pushed their recording equipment to the limits of its capability.
One of the show’s producers, Wim van der Linden, later remembered that “he gave a live performance, incredibly loud, but we told him to”.
Adding: “We already had trouble with the technicians [during previous Hoepla recordings] and this gave them even more reason to put us down”.
Van der Linden also had trouble with his camera crew and the direction they were receiving. Unhappy at the long distance shots they had been capturing of Hendrix and his group, the producer remembers a “terrible fight” with the programme director Gied Jaspers in the control room, which he ended by saying “Goddamn it, if you don’t take a close-up right away, I’ll kick your ass”.
From there, Hendrix travelled to Rotterdam, where he was booked to play at the Hippy Happy Fair. He shared the festival lineup with an unlikely combination of groups, including the Bee Gees, the Dutch band Golden Earring, Kent rockers Soft Machine, and Sunday night headliners Pink Floyd.
While Hendrix was booked to close the evening’s festivities on Friday, the bands booked to play before him knew they couldn’t compete with his raw, visceral and psychedelic sounds. Gerard Romein from The Motions, a Dutch band who were making such quaint music that it would made David Bowie’s earliest recordings sound like hardcore, remembered going on before Hendrix, “We had a silly act. We hired some farmers marching band. To do something different, you know. We couldn’t match that Hendrix anyway”.
Hendrix may have heard the charming and twee music being made during the day as he began his set by remarking that “I don’t know what you’re used to over here, but take care of your ears”, before launching into his opening number ‘Stone Free’, or he may have missed the other groups entirely, as it’s reported that he was late to the stage as he had taken himself back to the hotel for a nap. You could hardly blame him for feeling sleepy after listening to the music of The Motions.
Over the course of his eight-song set, Hendrix naturally wowed the crowd by alternately playing the guitar with his teeth or behind his head, but he stopped short of setting his – presumably borrowed – guitar on fire, as he worked through songs like ‘Hey Joe’, ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ and ‘Purple Haze’. No one among the almost 3,000-strong crowd at his only real live appearance in Holland could say they left without getting the full Jimi Hendrix Experience.
