I can remember that my brother and I sat up in the balcony, about five rows up. There were some people with about a pound of weed just rolling joints and throwing them off into the crowd or lighting them and passing them down. There were some hippies in the front row that had brought in gallon glass jugs of wine and were getting pretty wasted.

It is hard to relate how much of a straight suburban white kid I was at that point. I grew up in the City, my grand parents lived there, We knew how to get around, so when my parents moved to San Mateo, they could be easily talked into letting us go up there and hang out. We listened to the first FM stations like KMPX to find out what was going on.

I was kinda far away and the sensory overload of being in such an outrageous party. It was hard for me to figure out what was going on down on the stage. Jimmy seemed to have a running dialog with the crowd down in front. He seemed kinda agitated between a couple of songs. The wasted crowd kept chanting Foxy Lady or Purple Haze over and over again. He must have played Purple Haze twice and Foxy Lady three times.

I had only gone to a few live concerts at that point and so I was no critic, but I thought at the time that it was kinda unprofessional to repeat tunes in a set. At that point in my musical education, I wanted to "hear it like the record". I remember thinking that the improvised nature of his performance of Hey Joe, was unbelievable!

At some point the whole packed balcony was just shaking and the music was so loud that one of the hippie kids elbows a half empty glass gallon of wine off the edge of the balcony with out even knowing it. It seemed like after a second that I was the only person the even saw it happen. I couldn't help but bolt out of my seat into the isle and jump over all the people laying on the stairs. I leaned over the edge of the balcony and saw a girl, flat on her face, motionless, with broken glass, wine and blood all over the floor. The people around her started to push back but further away on the dark densly packed danse floor, people couldn't see what had happened and couldn't really go anywhere. It got really wierd, really fast. For the most part, the music as so loud and there were so many people, that it was mostly unnoticed.

I grabbed my brother and made it down to the main floor, where it was just grid lock. Somehow we made it inside the main floor back against the wall. Jimmy was messing with his amp and talking to Mitch Mtchell. He seemed to take his time and the crowd was still yelling Purple Haze. Finally, he came up to the mike and said something like, "I'm gonna play this one for myself", or some thing like that. He turned his back to the audience and started Red House. It was so slow that I remember not really being able to figure out where the beat was for a second. It was nasty, funky blues sound and screaming loud. The PA must have sucked because between Jimmy mumbling the words and the guitar, I couldn't tell what he was singing. My memory was that he had sixteen Sunn bottoms with two twelve inch speakers, set up in a semi circle with eight on top of eight.

I know that the solo he played made my whole musical sensibility change for life. It was like suddenly a genie with a goofy foot Strat was casting musical mojo over the whole place. It seemed like every one frozen and was hanging on every turn in every lick. Man, I know I was.

Music is a language. Louis Armstrong defined a dialect. Jimmy defined a dialect. I saw Miles Davis, he defined a dialect. I have bought a lot of tickets and stood in line to see a lot of music in 40 years. There are only a handful of performances in my life that had that kind of magic. I was so lucky to come up seeing all the great music at the Fillmore and the Family Dog.

I always wondered why nobody has tried to write a screenplay about the ballroom scene. The sound track would be great. In my travels, whenever I meet music fans and they ask what it was like to see Led Zepplin, Deep Purple, Ten Yeas After, Traffic, Cream, Who, Jeff Beck, etc. Man, it was the local bands, the Dead, Airplane, Moby Grape, Country Joe, Janis, Santana and the mighty Quick Silver Messenger Service, that were the back bone of the scene. How can I relate that experience. It would be a tall order to make a movie that did it justice. My favorite bands from the time were Tower Of Power, The Sons, Cold Blood and Electric Flag. I know that I saw history. One Winterland show was BB King, Albert King and Albert Collins. I saw Sonny Terry and Brownie Mc Ghee, James Cotton, Magic Sam, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, Big Momma Thornton... so much great stuff that informed my musical taste. It is hard to get very worked up over artists today. It is all so derivative.

But Jimmy set the bar as far as channeling energy right from the source.