John Hammond

John Hammond :


"I met Jimi Hendrix in 1966 when he was hanging out in New York without a gig and without literally anything. He was stranded in New York and I got to hang out with him, and he asked me if I could get him a gig," Hammond says, laughing. "So I put a band together with him as the lead guitar player, and we played a club called the Café Au Go Go, where he was discovered by [the Animals'] Chas Chandler and brought over to England to record. And about a year later, he returned to the U.S. with a hit recording ["Hey Joe"] in Europe. But no radio here would play the song, and he wound up on a tour with the Monkees, of all things."

That lasted three gigs and then Hendrix was back in New York, says Hammond, who at the time was playing a trio gig at the Gaslight, the Greenwich Village café where Bob Dylan premiered songs like "Masters of War" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."

Hendrix asked if he could sit in, and Hammond readily agreed. "And the next day Eric Clapton was in New York to do his tour with Cream," says Hammond, who'd shared bills with Clapton when the guitarist was in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. "He was off that week, so he came down to check me out. And there was him and Jimi, and they both wanted to sit in. And so for a week, they sat in with my little group at the Gaslight Café."

Source : http://www.csindy.com/colorado/tangled-up-in-blues/Content?oid=1591758

Is it really true that you once had Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton at the same time?

John Hammond Jr. : Yeah, that’s right.

That is amazing.

John Hammond Jr. : I had met Jimi in New York. He had been fired from the band he was with and he was kind of stranded in New York and hanging out in the Village in 1966. I was playing at a club across the street from where he was jamming at the Cafe across the street. My friend Ben came down and said that there was a guy across the street playing all your stuff from the So Many Roads album. He said this guy was unbelievable and I needed to hear him and meet him. I went over there between sets and introduced myself and at the time he called himself Jimmy James.

He said he was stranded in New York and asked me if I could get him a gig. I put a band together with him and put us into a place called the Cafe Au Go-Go. This place was packed out all week every night . Then he was discovered by Chas Chandler who gave him a ticket to England and a recording deal. He was gone for a year on a tour with the Monkees, and then he returned to New York. I had put a little trio together and was playing at the same club called The Gaslight. It was Charles Otis on drums and Lee Collins on bass, and I had met Eric Clapton in 1965 on tour in England when he was playing with John Mayall. Eric was in town with Cream and Jimi had just dropped out of this tour with The Monkees, so they came back to the Gaslight at the same time and they both came up on stage and played with me every night for a week. I had to pinch myself. This was a tiny club that held maybe 60 people at one time. So many people that were at that shows over the years has come up to me and said that they saw me doing that show with Eric and Jimi. (laughs) Yep, we were there. I tell this story and some people don’t even believe that it is true.

Source : http://www.swampland.com/articles/view/218