Especially for Jimi Hendrix Experience fans, Eric Barrett’s Experienced: On the Road with Jimi Hendrix and Beyond is an engrossing and entertaining read featuring new, first-hand information about rock music’s most acclaimed guitarist. With help from Lawrence Robinson, Mr. Barrett provides a well-written memoir of his years as Hendrix’s equipment roadie and rare friend who toured America and Europe with him to the very end.
But what could have been a completely compelling bird’s-eye account of a superstar’s tumultuous life at the height of his fame from 1968 through 1970 is marred by a distracting lack of focus. Instead of invaluable insights about a musical legend from his inner circle, Barrett offers intriguing anecdotes with few clear themes and far too little analysis.
Though the book is presented as being about the guitar great, Barrett continually interrupts the Hendrix narrative with jarring juxtapositions of his later adventures managing concert tours for James Taylor, David Bowie, Madonna, Lenny Kravitz, Billy Idol, and others that would have read much better after discussing Hendrix.
Experienced certainly confirms the consensus that Hendrix was a supremely gifted guitarist. As Barrett contends, “Jimi was easily the greatest musician I ever worked with,” noting that “he
could do things with an electric guitar that I’ve never seen anyone else do.” Enhancing Hendrix’s prodigious skills, the author asserts, was his unmatched showmanship and the fact that he was “the most charismatic person I’d ever met.”
Most endearing is how kind, generous, and “gracious” Hendrix was since Barrett’s boss was generally laid-back, witty (he dismissed the band Fat Mattress as “Thin Pillow”), and friendly to all. On the rare occasion he expressed anger at his roadie for faulty equipment during a show, afterwards he would “put his arm around my shoulders” and be “very apologetic.” Indeed, Barrett notes that, “Even when something made Jimi angry, he’d usually get over it very quickly; he was never one to hold a grudge.”
Further enriching the book’s impression of Hendrix is how remarkably unassuming and egalitarian he was. For instance, when Hendrix had a poor performance at a festival, he returned the next day to give a far better one, even though “Jimi wasn’t paid to go back. He did it purely as an apology to the fans.” Hendrix’s roadie holds that:
He saw himself as a musician, not a star. There was no pretence about him, no airs or entitled behaviour. He hated the attention that came with celebrity (unless it was from beautiful girls)…. On tour, he stayed at a Howard Johnson’s or a Holiday Inn, the same as the rest of us.
Hendrix’s humility was likely due to his acute shyness, for “There were always two Jimis: the wild artist onstage and the shy, charming man offstage.” In fact, “Out of the spotlight, he was a shy, insecure man, self-conscious about his bad skin and deeply uncomfortable with being the center of attention.” Even with his roadie, “The offstage Jimi was so softly spoken I often had to lean in to hear him clearly.” Experienced observes that, when Hendrix was “on stage with a guitar, he was completely at ease. At a party with no guitar to hide behind, though, he was … nervous and insecure.”
Unfortunately for a man who “hated conflict” and went out of his way to avoid it, Hendrix was besieged by predators eager to exploit him. Of his “very shady” manager, Barrett concludes that “In all my years in the business, I never encountered anyone quite as blatantly rogue as Mike Jeffery.” Along with his bandmates and roadie, Hendrix was sure his manager was stealing from them, and they were all sick of tour schedules that had them “bouncing from one corner of America to another again, night after night” so Jeffery could finance his investments. Not only did Jeffery make commitments for his cash cow without consulting him, but Hendrix was further humiliated “that when he wanted to buy something – a new guitar, a car, clothes – he had to ask Mike for the money.” Their growing arguments only taxed Hendrix’s fragile psyche all the more.
Further straining the sensitive artist were all the bigots targeting him. For example, a London Hilton Hotel security worker welcomed white couples into the elevator but made Hendrix show his room key and barred his white date from accompanying him upstairs. At a Houston hotel, white policemen refused to let female fans take the elevator or stairs to their idol’s room. The officers “joked that they weren’t going to let any white girls up to Jimi’s room, only they used language that I won’t repeat here.”
Yet Hendrix was harassed by black militants too. The drummer Buddy Miles, who performed with him on a few occasions, repeatedly told him, “You need to get rid of all these white devils.” More ominously, the Black Panthers also tried to intimidate the guitarist, prompting Barrett to point out “how trapped Jimi often felt. On one side, he had black people criticizing him for playing ‘white’ music in a white band run by white managers. On the other, he had to endure ignorant a**holes like the Hilton security guard.”
Refreshingly, Hendrix “spoke a lot about not caring about anyone’s skin color and just wanting everyone to get along… He hated the idea that there was ‘white music’ and ‘black music.’ He’d often say, ‘Music is universal.’” Still, though elated with all his white fans, he plaintively asked, “Why don’t the brothers come to see me play?”
Already moody and deeply insecure, Hendrix endured enormous pressure to keep producing hit records and lucrative tours, as well as meet all the other never-ending demands of stardom.
Worsening this strain was his frenetic lifestyle, jumping from recording studios to concert stages, partying every day, and sleeping in a different place – and usually with a different female fan – seemingly every night. Despite desperately needing a responsible confidante to guide and help him create some stability, Hendrix had none. Instead, his only “friends” were his two bandmates and a pair of employees consumed by the same “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” lifestyle. As Barrett admits, “we bonded over three shared interests: music, girls, and drugs.” Hendrix’s passions were “to make music and love women. The drugs were to facilitate those things, to help overcome his natural shyness and to stimulate his creativity.” Whether or not drugs helped him compose music, they ruined ever more of his concerts. Barrett confesses that “drugs were plentiful and taken in vast quantities. From my first tour with him onward, I saw Jimi drop a lot of acid, smoke a lot of pot, snort lots of cocaine, and pop a lot of pills.” For Hendrix’s circle, the drug-taking and boozing “started from the moment they got out of bed and continued nonstop until they passed out sometime the following day.”
As obsessive-compulsive as Hendrix’s drug abuse was his promiscuity, for he readily welcomed the legions of foxy ladies besieging him. “Girls seemed to come and go at a dizzying pace” because, “as much as he may have liked a particular girl, there was always another who’d catch his attention the following night,” and he told Barrett which ones to give backstage passes. In fact, there were “dozens of girls throwing themselves at him after every show.”
But none stayed with the epic philanderer, and Barrett gives no evidence that any loved him. Instead, as documented elsewhere, by the end of his life Hendrix would be battling multiple paternity lawsuits. The year before he died, Hendrix blamed a “groupie” jealous of all his other women for planting hashish and heroin in his luggage and tipping off the Toronto airport, causing his arrest and further legal pressures darkening much of the remainder of his life.
Hendrix was a magnet for a mob of vampirish hangers-on who he was unwilling to turn away. Either plying him with drugs or using his, they constituted a growing cancer. With other stars for whom Barrett worked, such people were family and friends, but:
With Jimi, they were strangers, hippies he’d just met doing drugs or friends of whatever girl he’d hooked up with. They’d fawn over him, telling him whatever he wanted to hear to make him pass the joint or share his acid. They obviously fulfilled some need in him, whether it was to validate his worth or as a buffer against loneliness. Or maybe everyone needed to be told how brilliant they were from time to time… People sharing everything was a hippie ideal at the time, one that Jimi believed in. He just didn’t seem
to notice that he was the only one doing the sharing.
Typifying the mounting disarray of the late 1960s/early 1970s rock scene were the festivals Hendrix headlined at Woodstock, the British Isle of Wight, and the German Isle of Fehmarn where he gave his last concert 12 days before his death. With hundreds of thousands of fans, these massive spectacles produced marvellous music and fun films, but were often nightmarish for attendees and performers alike. By the end of his life, Hendrix was sick of them. As Barrett explains, “he was simply burned out. He’d seen all this, done it all before. He’d played a dozen of these festivals, endured the delays, the p***-poor sound quality, the amateur-hour organization.”
After a four-year roller-coaster ride of endless concerts, groupies, and drugs, rock’s premiere performer no longer wanted to go on stage at all, especially since his audience did not want to hear his exciting fresh tunes. As Barrett sees it, “He was tired of delivering the same show. He knew every audience expected to see his full array of tricks – playing the guitar with his teeth, between his legs, behind his neck,” and all his other flashy trademarks. Instead, “He wanted the musicianship to be enough. He was tired of being what he thought of as a performing seal.” When fans grew bored with his new sounds, “He’d often turn his back and play for himself.” Angry at folks yelling at him to play his early hits, he shouted into the microphone, “I’m not a
f****** jukebox!”
Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana wrote that “Depression is rage spread thin.” Feeling ever more impotent about his career and life, the normally sweet guitarist’s simmering resentments would occasionally explode, and his clean-up crew duly hid his bouts of physically wrecking hotel rooms, cars, and bedmates. What Hendrix most relished in his last months was recording many new songs. So “every break we had, he headed to the studio.” He was particularly thrilled with his own new Electric Lady Studio near his Greenwich Village apartment where, “away from a live audience, he could
really experiment.” Enthused about all his recent compositions, “Jimi talked about making the Experience a larger band with a brass section, strings, and percussionists. That had long been his dream. A big-band sound, more layers, more variation, more imaginative than anything he’d one before.”
Interrupting work on his next album for what would be his final European tour to cover his manager’s investment in the new studio held zero appeal for Hendrix. By turns drunk, high, and physically ill, he repeatedly tried to avoid getting on planes to meet concert commitments, telling Barrett, “I’m so f****** done with all this, man. Feeling like a puppet all the time, you know.” Many of his last shows were disasters due to Hendrix’s chemical intoxication. At a Denmark concert, he could not even hold the guitar pick and ended the performance after just a few numbers. Now a ghost of his former stage presence, and with bass player Billy Cox psychotic from a drink spiked with LSD, the tour was mercifully cancelled after just over a week.
One of Experienced’s biggest flaws is the dearth of insights concerning the controversial circumstances of Hendrix’s death. He spent his last days in London, the city where he became a star, with Monica Dannemann who, as better biographies agree, was hardly the “close girlfriend” Barrett calls her, having spent just two nights with him. Exhausted and likely depressed, a sleeping Hendrix suffocated on his vomit from an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol on the morning of September 18, 1970. Alas, there would be no Spanish castle magic to rescue him. As other books confirm, his clearly mentally ill “close girlfriend” panicked and delayed calling an ambulance, ensuring the world’s biggest rock star died in a groupie’s basement hotel room. Maybe Barrett is so forgiving of Monica because he later slept with her as well.
Experienced fails to analyze why Hendrix died, flippantly suggesting that Barrett’s time with him “was so wild because it was destined to be so short.” But, as Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling understands, “Destiny is a name often given in retrospect to choices that had dramatic consequences.” An admitted “habitual drug user” himself, Hendrix’s roadie happily indulged in Hendrix’s gargantuan drug intake, even after his own near-fatal overdose shortly before his employer’s. Indeed, Barrett continued “taking more and more amphetamines and coke to keep me awake” and snorted cocaine while driving Hendrix’s equipment between shows.
He still denies the deadly toll drugs and alcohol wreaked on Hendrix and his entire entourage, actually writing of the guitarist, “Drugs he could definitely handle.” Of all the artist’s “girlfriends,” the author writes, “I especially liked… Devon Wilson, a real princess who loved getting high with Jimi.” She was also the prostitute who was one of his drug dealers and a heroin addict who died five months after Hendrix while still in her twenties. Also left unsaid is how Hendrix’s original bandmates, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, graduated from drug abuse to alcoholism, dying at 57 and 61. Sometime Hendrix drummer Buddy Miles would serve multiple drug-related stints in prison, go into rehab, and die at 60. Meanwhile, as also well documented elsewhere, Hendrix’s “close girlfriend,” Miss Dannemann, would commit suicide at 50.
In fairness, Barrett had just turned 24 when Hendrix died and was part of a musical milieu rife with debauchery and no adult supervision. High school dropouts like Barrett and Hendrix proved all too vulnerable to the hedonistic hippie rock culture’s tempting but treacherous waters.
Hendrix’s case is achingly bittersweet, for it is remarkable how much amazingly innovative music he made in just four years, all the more so in the midst of such sustained disorder. Here was an incredibly talented visionary whose influence only grows. Despite all the pandemonium on the road, how all the more heartbreaking that he died during a period of sustained creative rejuvenation in the studio where he was expanding his sound from acid rock to include much more funk, soul, pop, jazz, and rhythm and blues. With his creative vision more ambitious than ever, his death at 27 remains rock’s most tragic.
Yet, personally, as this latest memoir confirms, Jimi Hendrix was 27 going on 17, exacerbated by endless enablers and no one daring to offer any tough love. For a couple of years, the ride was a blast, but the last two saw him ever more disillusioned, drug-dependent, and lonely. The world’s most popular touring act was ensconced in a never-ending, crowded tornado of chaos – and utterly alone. As Barrett confesses in one of his more reflective moments, “He could be so insular, so self-contained, that I wondered how well anyone in his life really knew him.” Hendrix had no real friends beyond a pair of tour employees, and no lasting romances.
Little in his very troubled youth prepared him for superstardom and, as many easy vices constantly came his way, how many young men could have resisted such siren songs, even more so during the anything-goes hippie era? But, ultimately, each of us must take responsibility for his life, and Hendrix freely chose to be enveloped by a plethora of destructive forces. Despite becoming steadily sadder by all the excess, he refused to change course and was still partying, still drugging to the very end. A pronounced self-destructive quality plagued Hendrix.
Experienced offers more proof that one of the most magnificent musical maestros of the late 20th century was a man of colossal contradictions: a tower of talent and idol of millions whose hyper hedonism only heightened his lonely disillusionment. His life screams of the dangers of overindulgence. Though there are many better Hendrix biographies, Barrett’s is a worthwhile
addition, however flawed.
I still celebrate Jimi Hendrix’s exhilarating music while lamenting the poor decisions that prevented him from blessing us with so much more. I also choose to be grateful for how much his art has enriched so many lives and hope his fans learn from his fatal misjudgements.
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Douglas Young is an author and professor emeritus whose essays, poems, and short stories have
run in a variety of publications in America, Canada, Europe, and Asia. His first novel, Deep in
the Forest, was published in 2021 and the second, Due South, came out in 2022. His first book of
essays, This Little Opinion Plus $1.50 Will Buy You a Coke, appeared in 2024, and the second,
Not Just Political, followed in 2025. His first book of short stories, The Double Date and Other
Stories, was released in 2026. All his books have received rave reviews.
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