From Guitar Player Magazine April When you left The Animals in were you already planning on getting into the business end of music? Well, I didn't see any future in being a solo bass player. I'd seen Hendrix before the last Animals tour started and I knew what I was going to do when the final tour ended. Did you and Jimi find the musicians for the Experience?
We checked out a lot of guys. As it happened, Noel Redding came up to the office looking for a gig as a lead guitar player with the New Animals. I said, "well that place is filled. You fancy playing bass? So he borrowed my bass and did a little audition with Jimi, and that's how he came to be in the band.
Then there was a toss-up between Aynsley Dunbar and Mitch Mitchell on drums. We couldn't make up our minds; we just flipped a coin on that. Linda Keith, who introduced you to Hendrix, has said that it took you a couple of visits before you decided to work with him. Not at all. I met him that afternoon. We went and had a cup of coffee and planned it all out there and then.
I was leaving the following day to go out on tour, my last Animals tour. And I arranged to come back to New York immediately and pick Jimi up and get things underway. That's exactly what I did. Was he just playing blues then, or did his music incorporate any of his electronic effects? Well, he was a monster guitar player.
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It'd been out for eight months or so and had never been a hit. I said, "Wow, I'm gonna find an act and record that song in England. That's going to be a hit. I had a lot of trouble with him on his singing, because he didn't think he could sing at all. We used to have big head-to-heads about how far forward his voice should be on records. Was Hendrix' first album, Are You Experienced? No, no. He had nothing to do with it. We did it in about six different studios, anywhere we could get in with cheap time.
