STUTTGARTER NACHRICHTEN (‘Stuttgart News’) - ‘Jungle-Nureyev’ by Hans Fröhlich:
“His clothes are high and hip; his bare chest flashes like a top sportsman. He stands there like the jungle version of Nureyev, Jimi Hendrix, 23 [sic, 25], guitar player and producer of an erotic spectacle from hell. Fifteen amplifier cabinets are stacked behind him. He only has to touch the strings lightly, and the instrument starts to talk and whine and moan and scream up to 100 decibels, dangerously near tearing your ear-drums.
He wouldn’t have drawn so many boys and girls of the Stuttgart Soul-Underground into the Beethovensaal, if he didn’t have the reputation of producing unmistakable special tricks. He fingers his instrument not only out of musical neccessity, he treats it like a very intimate object. Jimi pulls the strings, the guitar thanks him with a sobbing tone, he grabs it with his teeth to the point one thinks he will consume it, he drags the neck of the guitar sensually across the microphone stand, sending streams of ecstasy through the bodies of the teens by his sexual intercourse with the speaker cabinets and cuts crystal ‘step’ -rhythms from the boiling lava of sounds, to cool it off. Hendrix is surely impossible to
describe in words. His tonal orgasms resist any attempt to be categorized. Only the fact that the twelve to thirty-year olds had to remain seated like ordinary citizens, without any beer or dope, explains why the audience response stayed limited to a tiny frenzy in the back rows. A friend told me: ‘This music you have to listen to while stoned. Then you become each tone of the music yourself.’ The side-men of Jimi Hendrix were the bass player Noel Redding, of whom we didn’t hear particularly much (his strength lies mainly in his appearance), and Mitch Mitchell, the drummer, who beat and tossed and made a noise until he was soaking wet.
The program opened with an Irish band, who were very loud as well.”