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Do you consider yourself a dropout from society?
Not necessarily, no.
Because we're making our own society
if you give us a chance.
Oh, I shouldn't say that.
- No... - I'm not a dropout, man.
I'm living and breathing like you.
We just look a little different, that's all.
We just have different ways of expressing ourselves
which should be the free point of view anyway.
- What are you doing in your music? - I'm trying to play...
crash, blam, clunk, smash.
He had the gift, he had the soul, he had the love.
He had his music. That's all he cared about.
What do you think your audience likes best about you?
Sex. Spank you. Oh!
Your lyrics seem to have quite a bit of sophistication.
Yeah, well, we're for anybody that's gonna get their selves together.
We're not for the whole lot of people sittin' in a big drug den,
sitting around complaining. If they're sitting around
and still trying to get their self together some way,
regardless of it's a dropout of society or whatever it might be,
or if it's the people in society, to get anybody's mind together,
because the idea now is communicate,
not to knock one another, you know, rebel and all this.
Quite naturally, you have to start somewhere,
so you go to the rebellious.
But the idea is to communicate, for everybody to be respected
regardless of what group scene you might be in, you know.
And all of a sudden, Jimi's going to Hawaii for a vacation,
and somehow he got locked into making this movie in Hawaii
with these knuckleheads.
Chuck was a showman, the sort of guy who dressed very carefully.
He put on a costume to go out for the day.
He was called The Wizard
because there's nothing that Chuck didn't know about.
He was totally turned in to the cosmic world.
Could you tell us once more what the space brothers say about LSD?
We're talking 1970, so things were pretty crazy anyway.
It was a psychedelic era, you know, rock'n'roll lifestyle.
We got involved in this crazy film, "Rainbow Bridge", in Maui.
Inhale.
And, I mean, that was just very strange.
Chuck went in to talk to Warner Bros.,
these two heads Of Warner Bros.,
explaining how he wants to take all of us to Maui
and rent this girls' school that's on summer vacation
and we're all gonna live there.
The one guy looks at the other guy and goes,
"I do not know what the fuck the guy is talking about.
Give him the money."
And off we went with all of our friends to Maui to make this movie.
Jimi did not want to be a part of "Rainbow Bridge".
It was asked of him many times, and many times he would say no.
There was no script, it was just a very loose idea.
And it shows.
I see through the form for I created the form.
I am beyond all time for I am before time.
Anybody know what's going on around here?
Hello?
Jimi Hendrix and I played in a lot of concerts.
A lot of them were strange, but this is the most unusual one,
on the cattle ranch, on the side of the volcano.
It wasn’t just a regular concert that you go to.
It was a colour, vibratory sound experience.
And it was insane.
The electricity went Off in Lahaina.
People swore a spaceship went by.
I mean, crazy, crazy things happened that day
from whatever Jimi pulled out Of that guitar.
Hendrix's music kind of was like...
I kept thinking a spaceship was landing.
People were going, "Oh, God, we're... Jimi Hendrix is On the island."
To see Jimi Hendrix in this setting,
it was like a gift from God to me.
Could you ask for anything more amazing?
Maui, free concert, Jimi Hendrix?
Jimi Hendrix was a very successful artist at the record company.
There is no question of that.
And he was such an innovative and captivating guitar player
that he was the artist that everyone was talking about.
He had a way to keep the crowd on the edge of absolute hysteria.
It seemed to be a dangerous situation
because if the crowd went in one direction,
the result would have been a riot.
It was very exciting.
Jimi was a new force in music.
He brought something new and fresh to the table.
And, yeah, he was the biggest noise.
There was really nothing that could touch him.
His guitar playing, it turned me upside down.
It was like his music got inside my brain.
It was almost like it was the soundtrack of my youth.
Thank you very much.
Frank Sinatra started Reprise Records
for his own records, initially.
And then started signing his friends,
like Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr.
And when Frank started Reprise, he needed somebody to run it,
and his lawyer, Mickey Rudin, suggested Mo Ostin.
And Frank's not so much into signing rock acts,
but Mo sees this as the future.
All right.
Hendrix's trajectory is straight up.
This isn't lost on Mo,
or the record distributors, or Warner Bros. corporate, I'm sure.
And I remember MO talking about how excited he was
about signing The Jimi Hendrix Experience,
these three guys who made enough noise for 150 guys.
Whoa!
The Jimi Hendrix Experience!
I felt 1969 was a critical year for Jimi.
He was just on his own just running around, going from studio to studio
to try to put stuff down
while we were in the process of building Electric Lady Studios.
And the more we got into the building of Electric Lady Studios,
the more there was demand on Jimi to go out on the road
to get the money to fund the whole operation.
Hendrix and Eddie Kramer and Jim Marron have decided
to build this incredible studio.
And Michael Jeffery, Hendrix's manager, finds out
it's a lot more expensive than he initially thought.
There were cost over-runs, things they didn't anticipate.
And they find themselves in a cash crunch.
And construction has stopped dead in its tracks.
Nothing's happening, we are out of money.
So, typically, someone going to try and borrow half a million dollars
for a recording studio seemed kind of crazy.
But in going to Warner Bros.,
Michael Jeffery realised that Hendrix's royalties
would easily pay Warner Bros. back for this loan.
Michael Jeffery was...
an operator.
Mike's was more the role of taking care of the financial side of things
and they all seemed to have a great deal of respect for Mike.
And, in a sense,
I think they were a bit frightened of him and a bit in awe of him.
Michael, like a lot of managers in the music business,
was kind of ruthless.
His background was MI6, I believe. He was a Secret Service guy.
But clearly he was savvy about the music business, about talent.
But without Mike, it would have gone nowhere.
Without the actual music experience that Mike had,
I don't think any of them would have gone any further than that time.
Good old Michael Jeffery, he was brilliant at figuring out,
"How can I squeeze some money out of somebody?"
He goes to Warner Bros. and figures out a deal
whereby he gets a loan against Jimi's forth Coming royalties.
So Michael Jeffery, being Michael Jeffery,
couldn't leave well enough alone.
And he said, in One of those "Oh, by the way..." asides,
"We're gonna go in the studio and do some more recording."
Fantastic.
That means we'll get our record that much quicker.
"Oh, no, he's not recording for you guys.
He's recording a soundtrack album to this movie I'm making,
"Rainbow Bridge". Do you guys want a soundtrack album?"
And Warner Bros. flipped out
and said, "Wait a minute, we have the rights to this." No, you don't.
Michael made a deal with Warner Bros.
that if they gave him the money to make the movie,
he would give them an album called "Rainbow Bridge".
As presented to Mo Ostin, "Rainbow Bridge" was a score
that Jimi Hendrix was providing for a film.
There was no notion that he was going to be seen in the film.
So it was a first for Jimi
insofar as he had never scored a movie before.
And that was enticing.
Michael Jeffery wanted to diversify
and was interested in being a filmmaker, an auteur.
Four or five years before that, it would have been ridiculous,
but "Easy Rider" had been a big success.
This year the judges of the Cannes Film Festival presented the award
'Best Film By a New Director' to "Easy Rider".
It's the story of a man who went looking for America
and couldn't find it anywhere.
I'd never seen a movie like that.
I'd never seen a movie that had people getting stoned
and riding on motorcycles, and didn't make linear sense.
But I loved it. And Jimi Hendrix's music was in it.
I think that "Easy Rider" had something to do
with the elevation of movie soundtracks.
I mean, the score of "Easy Rider"
was really remarkable and was an unforgettable part of the picture.
I don't think there's any doubt that "Easy Rider",
it was 'the' independent film.
I mean, if you look at independent,
it's normally people that don't have anything to do with studios.
Bert Schneider, who was one of the producers,
Bert's family ran Columbia Pictures.
So he had an in.
But still, if you think of it,
and how it was put together, and who directed it,
it's the most independent film ever.
You do your own thing in your own time. You should be proud.
The difference is the subject matter,
Hopper and the drugs that were involved.
I think he wanted to get into the movie business.
And so he started. You know,
why not get some people that maybe know the movie,
and have Jimi in it, because Jimi was gonna be the big draw?
It's hard to imagine a star at the level that Jimi Hendrix had attained
being caught up in a project along these lines.
It seemed so amorphous.
It wasn't really a solid bet, so to speak.
What really, I think, crossed my radar
was the presence of these very odd people
wandering around the studio offering "good vibes", quote, unquote.
They were a bit strange.
I think these were Michael's film partners in this venture.
I believe Chuck Wein was one of the individuals
who was floating around there.
And by floating I mean sort of levitating, possibly.
Chuck was one of the most amazing men I've ever met in my life.
Chuck graduated from Harvard when he was 18. Completely brilliant.
Spoke probably almost every language on the planet.
And besides that, he was totally turned in to the cosmic world,
the psychedelic world, and worlds beyond.
I don't know, man, it's like,
"LSD good", "LSD bad". Every minute, we hear something else.
Nobody comes out and says what really happened to them.
He was psychic, he was an astrologer,
because he could do all these wonderful magic things.
He was called The Wizard
because there's nothing that Chuck didn't know about.
Chuck knew about everything, in this planet or planets beyond.
He was a wizard. There were a lot of wizards around in those days.
But wizards like the Wizard of Oz, sometimes you just see
there's just a guy with a microphone behind a screen.
So I was making films in New York, underground, Andy Warhol.
Just... You don't have to do anything.
Just what you're doing.
Really, it was just taking people from the streets, mixing them
with the Jackie Kennedy crowd, and my girlfriend Edie Sedgwick.
We were partying one night in a disco called Ondine,
under the 59th Street Bridge. Everybody was kind of a little...
What's that actress who was like Marilyn Monroe?
Jayne Mansfield, the one who died in the horrible accident.
Jayne Mansfield was there with her muscle husband, Mickey Hargitay.
And she had a little ocelot that she had on a chain.
A guy comes in and says, "Party for Tennessee Williams' birthday,
my penthouse, a block away." Everybody streams out, we go there.
That's where we met Warhol.
Edie and I said, "We're filming the Empire State Building, 24 hours.
Why don't you guys come and make movies with us?"
The next day, I went down to look at his studio.
I said, "Let's go over to Edie's." We made a film. Three days later,
we're all over The New York Times, boom, boom, boom.
When Chuck first came to The Factory in March '65 with Edie,
he was involved the whole time.
Chuck brought to Andy Edie Sedgwick, the golden girl.
Edie Sedgwick went on to be one of Andy Warhol's favourite stars.
Andy loved Edie,
and that was before she was ravished by drugs or anything.
She was beautiful and delicate,
a bon-vivant girl.
She was really a society gal in every aspect Of her life.
Edie Sedgwick was born out of the Sedgwick family
who lived on the west coast in Santa Barbara.
She's like real aristocracy, she's American aristocracy.
She grew up rich.
When Andy met Edie,
she was in the thrall of her Harvard-grad puppetmaster
and confidant and nursemaid Chuck Wein.
Chuck was a '60s cosmic bullshitter
with a great rap about aliens and witchcraft.
His operation was to use Edie to get himself ahead with Warhol.
Warhol was a very, very powerful man.
"Beauty No. 2"
was the core of Warhol's relationship with Edie Sedgwick.
She sat on her bed in her underwear drinking vodka
with a hunk in jockey shorts called Gino.
He was her beauty number two.
Beauty number one, Chuck, sat several feet away,
just off camera, and interrogated her.
As Chuck took Edie apart,
Andy's camera recorded her twisting and turning in its grip.
By the end of the film,
Edie was reduced to the victim she always saw herself as.
It's very cruel what they're doing to her.
It's very obvious what they're doing to her, you know.
But Edie was a very weak person in reality.
It was good if you want to see somebody really...
you wanna see Edie Sedgwick fail.
He was the king of failure.
He wanted to document the failure, much like Andy.
Fabulous. So glamorous.
"My Hustler" was really totally Chuck's idea.
He was giving notes to Andy and setting it all up.
In the middle of the film,
Chuck went to Paul Morrissey, who's the assistant director.
He said, "Hey, let's you and me direct this film.
We don't need Andy, just get rid of Andy."
A crazy, crazy, crazy thing to do.
He probably wasn't allowed to come round after "My Hustler".
One, he tried to mutiny on the set. Second, he gave everyone acid.
I mean, it's just like...
He was brilliant,
but in the end, I think, turned out to be kind of a destructive force.
You was a model back in New York, huh?
Yeah, I was a model, the model.
The story of Edie Sedgwick, superstar of New York's silver '60s,
in "Ciao! Manhattan", the film that wrote itself.
When I finished with the rough cut, there was a New York Times article
that it was gonna change the history of film.
The next day it was seized.
But it's very easy to get carried away and think, "I'm a big star now,"
when actually you're only there
'cause Andy Warhol said you could be there.
I had a falling Out with Warhol. Things didn't turn out.
Went my own way, made a Kennedy assassination film
that got seized by the CIA.
Went underground, left July 4th, '68, from Manhattan on a psychedelic...
At noon, July 4th, '68. July 5th at noon I was in Memphis.
July 6th at noon I was on the Hopi Indian Reservation,
didn't know how I got there.
Chuck Wein got a great deal of credibility from working with Warhol.
So when Chuck would talk to people after this
and say "I was at the Factory, I did this and that,"
no one would question him.
You meet Chuck,
he was dressed extravagantly even for the time.
He'd find the highest place to sit and he would sit there
and then sometimes his eyes would roll back in his head, and then...
he would come back to us, and he would say
that he had just teleported somewhere or something like that.
So at first I'm wondering, "Is this for real? What's going on here?"
But apparently that was his...
Do I dare call it his shtick? I don't know.
I don't know if he believed it, I never could figure that out.
He, as I later learned, liked to call the archangels,
the four archangels, what he called "out of the corners", right?
So he would call, "Michaelo," in this big booming voice,
"Gabrielo."
And we were at Michael Jeffery's house in New York
with the whole Experience, Michael Jeffery and Chuck.
And he stood up and said he was gonna do this,
he was gonna call all the angels out of the corners.
So most of us just sat there.
He said, "If you want, join me."
I didn't get up and follow Chuck, but Jimi did.
Jimi just stood up like he was being pulled,
and walked over there in all his splendour.
And he, luckily, sat in a chair right by the door, so I could watch.
And Chuck, I could hear his big booming voice calling the angels.
And Jimi was like...
Chuck would call the angels out and make a big event out of it.
Either you saw them or you didn't. He did, Chuck always saw them.
And if you didn't see them, "Oh, well, maybe next time."
Chuck Wein was working together
with a gentleman named Barry De Prendergast.
They came to Los Angeles together
and set up an organisation called Alcyone Distribution.
Barry was very eccentric.
Barry De Prendergast was very, very entrepreneurial
and got into the film business with Chuck Wein.
And there was some hint of aristocracy in there.
I'm not sure if that was real or not.
But he was quite the lad.
One time they were gonna go to a restaurant
which was like two and a half blocks away.
But they couldn't leave right away, they had to wait for a limo,
'cause Barry couldn't walk, he was on crutches,
'cause he had athlete's foot.
So...you had to kind of wonder a little bit
about priorities here and there.
Jimi did not wanna be a part of "Rainbow Bridge".
It was asked of him many times, and many times he would say no.
But Barry was relentless.
And Barry happened to call one day,
and Jimi was at Our apartment in New York,
and was telling me, "Do you know how I can get in touch with Jimi?"
I said, "Well, Jimi's right here, so why don't you say hello?"
And I put Jimi on the phone.
And that's how Barry and Chuck got together with Jimi.
We're meeting Michael Jeffery in LA,
and Michael Jeffery said, "Let's go ahead."
The first time that anybody had ever raised funds for a movie
by promising the soundtrack.
Michael Jeffery was smart, tough, ex-MI5,
he used to pack a. 38 on the ankle.
Nobody would mess with him, you would think.
He had been through the trenches with the gangs in London,
and the clubs, and knew how to run all of that,
run his little mini empire. A master negotiator.
But here's this guy who you would never think in a million years
could be turned by a bunch of whack jobs.
I mean, that's what they were, for crying out loud!
I don't know how they managed to convince Michael to part with money.
That's the mystery.
That's the ten-thousand-dollar question.
Did Michael just fall for this? Sometimes they say
the professionals can get fooled by amateurs, or something.
I think they slipped something in his tea.
I think that the reason why Jimi went for it...
and that's what you're asking me, right?
I think that the fact that Barry was a friend of mine.
Chuck Wein had sold this concept initially as "Wave", a surfing movie,
and it was going to be the next big thing after "Easy Rider".
The idea was kind of it to be a take-off on "Easy Rider", I think.
And the scene in "Easy Rider" that stole everything
was when Jack Nicholson smokes a joint and starts talking about UFOs
and space people that are already here on the planet amongst us.
That was a UFO beaming back at you.
They've been coming here ever since 1946
when the scientists first started bouncing radar beams Off of the moon.
And they have been living and working among us
in vast quantities ever since.
The government knows all about them.
Chuck's idea was to produce a programme
to relieve the mass paranoia against the arrival of the space brothers.
You are into extra-terrestrials?
Yes, there are many people here at Rainbow Bridge who have made contact.
But Earth is not aligned right now.
And that's why the space brothers are here, to get Earth all in line.
Maui in 1970 was like just after World War Two.
Front Street in Lahaina was all mom-and-pop stores.
There was only three hotels at Kaanapali.
It was, like, shocking, coming from Southern California.
And I was here to ride waves.
Mauiin 1970 was a sleepy island.
There was a Dairy Queen in Kahului.
And when I was a teenager, we hung out there.
Pretty quiet and sedate.
Undeveloped, no lines of hotels along the shore.
And the surfing was very uncrowded back in 1970.
And that was really nice.
There was just a lot of freedom over here.
It was just beautiful waves, and no people on them.
Yeah, it was just great, just the lifestyle.
Yeah, 1970, no rock concerts on Maui.
Well, I got involved by hearing
that there was a guy On the island recruiting, making a movie,
and Jimi Hendrix was gonna play.
That was like a big deal on Maui, that was like a gigantic deal.
So there was a juice stand called Charley's Juice Stand.
There was these people there one day,
Chuck Wein, long hair, kind Of like a Jesus.
Actually, how he was introduced was he was The Wizard.
Far out. Yeah, he was a far-out guy.
He was a good guy, a far-out guy.
He had the answers. He had all the answers.
Chuck said he was gonna come back
and do the surfing footage in May of '70.
When they actually showed up, we were like,
"Whoa, they actually showed up."
In those days, surfers were the epitome of everything.
They were the most handsome people, they were the most fit people.
They were doing yoga, they were eating organic.
They were riding waves,
they were riding off the edge of the earth.
And I married a surfer, one of the most famous surfers ever,
Michael Hynson, who made "The Endless Summer".
"The Endless Summer" was a documentary.
It just stormed the surf world.
That's when I kind of met Chuck Wein.
Chuck knew about "The Endless Summer"
and the fact that I was making a movie.
So we just kind Of juggled our situations, you know.
Chuck had seen the success of "Easy Rider" and his feeling was
that it wasn't that the movie appealed to people so much
as the fact that on the opening scene
when they ride their bikes across the desert,
that they're riding past the Hopi Indian burial grounds,
which is a high-energy centre on the planet,
and that everybody that's watching the movie subconsciously goes,
"Oh, this is... I feel great."
So his philosophy was to shoot scenes in high-energy locations,
which he knew about, which was Maui,
and to put in elements of pop culture at that time:
surfing, drugs, music, and whatever.
That would pull it all together and you'd have a hit movie.
It wasn't intended to be a surf film.
I said, "Let's at least show that there's a little bit of yoga,
there's some pure food, some partying,
some good drugs," you know what I mean.
So I said, "I wanna give a little bit of reality
and humanise this whole thing and show there's some consciousness here
and the people can take it as it is."
Chuck's making a cosmic surfing movie.
Oh, you're gonna film the surfers?
Not just them, but I mean the cosmic surfers?
We talked about what would be the best music for the film.
And there was no doubt, we all said Jimi would be.
I always had Jimi Hendrix in mind,
because he used the guitar to sound like the music, you know,
that we could make the waves.
And we just wanted to have him just watch us film, and do his thing.
We weren't gonna bother him too much.
We were able to have this amazing, beautiful place
called Seabury Hall in Maui, where we could do this.
Seabury Hall started as a girls' school.
It was a boarding school.
It had charm classes, it had hand bells.
And it was not an alternative school by any means.
It was a religious school based on Episcopalian principles,
because Roger Melrose was an Episcopal minister.
Dad relays the story
that he gets called upon by two handsome gentlemen in suits
representing themselves as Warner Bros.
They come in with their cards and they ask to rent the campus
for a programme that they were gonna do that summer.
When the group finally did show up,
Antahkarana Productions showed up, not Warner Bros.
Antahkarana is called also the Rainbow Bridge.
And it's a bridge between our Higher Self and Spirit.
All the Rainbow Bridge is is a bridge between here, here and here,
between the Lower Self and the Higher Self.
The front page of The Maui News at the time was:
"The hippies have taken over Seabury Hall," you know.
My dad was incredibly stressed
by what happened from the instant that the people showed up.
All of the staff on campus are aghast at what's happening.
We had a chef
that came from a restaurant in Los Angeles called Help.
They would not cook with light, they had to cook with candles,
because the light put off the wrong kind of energy.
Warner Bros. wouldn't eat with us because they were afraid
that maybe we would be dosing the food with some kind of psychedelic.
They did not stay with us at night, they did not eat with us.
They all left, every single day.
Chuck's directorial approach was basically,
he'd keep his eyes and ears open
as he meandered through Seabury Hall, or wherever,
picking up on conversations that were happening.
Yeah, it was a general chaos thing.
The film crew are freaking out.
They’d just come off of some Burt Lancaster movie in Spain
to go there and film this thing.
They'd be in the middle of the night, sleeping,
and somebody'd rush in,
"Come! You have to get up now. The vibrations are right."
I'd be like, "What the fuck's going on? It's four in the morning."
Vibrations are right in the church.
They think you can just rush in and film it, know what I mean?
It was utter shambles.
Who are you anyway?
I'm the same thing that you are.
I see through the form for I created the form.
There really was no script.
But he would create incidents that could happen.
I am beyond all time for I am before time and I am beyond time.
When you take people,
even if you're shooting somewhat documentary-style,
you get people talking from their hearts passionately,
they thought I wrote it.
I mean, people were coming
trying to nail me saying, "You wrote these lines."
But these people are so convincing
because they're so interested in what they're doing,
which is the real reality technique.
I did not hear about any movie at all until we got here.
And I don't know how much Jimi knew about a movie at all.
Jimi went to Hawaii thinking he was going to do a concert.
He sort of knew in the background that people wanted to make a film.
When I first came to Maui,
they were gonna give us 30 days to just R&R.
So we could have a couple of weeks there
to cool out with the families or whatever else.
Jimi was tired.
When he came here,
he thought perhaps he'd have the chance to just relax and lay back.
But no way.
Jimi didn't really know what was going on, I don't think.
When he first showed up there, he was going,
"I don't know exactly what's going on around here."
Oh, boy, we knew there was some movie
we were gonna be doing something with.
And the movie, that was uncharted territory.
It was very bizarre.
Jimi was pretty much into all this stuff.
He wanted to take a stack of Marshalls
and put it in the Grand Canyon 'cause sound created matter.
He thought we could duplicate the experiment.
He thought surfing was just like musicians with their guitar.
That surfboard is their... you know, riff, what they do.
"Rainbow Bridge" was Michael Jeffery's production.
Jimi was required to be up here while they were making the movie.
Jimi felt Michael was really using him for "Rainbow Bridge".
That was not Jimi's idea, of doing "Rainbow Bridge", at all.
And he just didn't wanna be there.
There was a scheme 'cause Michael wasn't gonna be around for a while,
so he snuck away and had some more little off-times.
And we had a good time that time.
But then when Mike came back he had to come back here
and fulfill the obligations that Mike wanted him to do.
Every day, they'd try to get Jimi to talk on camera,
it was the main thing when he showed up.
So the thing was that he would always chicken out.
He just expected to play, basically.
Michael didn't understand the creativity of Jimi.
Jimi's brilliance was very simple because it was pure.
Jimi was very mysterious.
And he would see right through you.
He could smell the hustle.
Let's turn this army into an ecological army.
Let's re-plant the planet.
In that one scene where he shoots Baron...
You think they want you to know
that your car doesn't have to wear out?
You think the power elite wants you to know what you can do?
He goes, "All right, break's over.
Everybody get back on your goddamn heads,"
'cause he thought it was a yoga centre, you know what I mean?
Back on your goddamn heads.
He didn't really know, he wasn't really that into yoga and stuff.
Michael Jeffery was Jimi's manager.
Other than that, he just stepped aside.
There was really no part for him in the movie.
He was the producer, but he didn't have anything to say on set.
The whole concert idea was separate from the film.
That was Chuck's.
Chuck was always talking about energy and all that stuff.
I don't know if Michael tried to tap into that, what his motivations were.
But it was a business venture.
And at a certain point,
he knew that there was something very wrong with this film.
Barry De Prendergast went to talk to Ben Baldwin
who was the owner of Haleakala dairy.
The one thing that Ben Baldwin asked us was not to disturb the cows.
So Barry De Prendergast, he's up on the top of the hill,
and he runs down the hill chasing the cows
and goes, "Aagh, Aagh," chasing the cows.
Immediately, the first thing that happens,
a whole herd of cows ran right through a barbed-wire fence
and just mixed in with these other cows.
Chuck's whole idea was going to be this colour-sound experience.
It was going to be free, and it was for everybody to come.
The place that they chose was directly up the hill
from school, in the pasture. And it was a natural bowl.
Behind us is a volcano, Haleakala, here in Maui.
So Haleakala crater is, by some people, considered
the heart chakra of this planet.
It has a very, very high vibration.
The energy there is amazing, really, truly amazing.
It is a place of energy when you're in the crater,
there's no question.
When you see the sun rise out of the clouds of the horizon,
it feels like
it's all boiling right out of the middle of the volcano itself.
It's a beautiful spot.
On the side of that volcano is where the concert took place.
The area behind the trees is where they built the stage.
There's a natural bowl behind there.
All of what you see here has changed.
There was nothing here, no buildings, no nothing.
I was used to playing on stages, on fields,
but never on the side of a volcano.
Jimi goes...
We were in the back and fixing to go on stage.
He said, "Man, this used to be a volcano,
but it's no longer erupting anymore."
And I turned to him and I said,
"I sure damn hope it doesn't erupt today."
So he cracked up.
The Wizard did not want the rest of the world to know
that Jimi Hendrix was gonna perform a concert on Maui.
So it was not advertised.
But what he did have done was he had a carload of us,
at strategic spots and parks, spread the word
and leave the signs that Jimi Hendrix was going to play.
Well, there was something called the Coconut Wireless,
which we have in Hawaii. It's the Coconut Wireless,
and it's just you tell two or three people,
and before you know it, it's all over the island.
Mike Jeffery and a few other people from the film came up with this idea
of going through the streets with a kind of truck
and a few placards saying, like, "Anyone who wants to come,
come up to the crater of the sun and the moon, to the volcanoes,
and we're gonna have a concert, okay?"
The morning of July 30th, I was going by myself,
I wanted to be there for the sunrise at the top of the Haleakala crater
because that's the only word I had of where it was going to be.
I didn't realise
it was gonna be On the lower slopes of the Haleakala crater.
I got up there, and it was freezing.
I waited up there all night long.
Nobody showed up.
On the day of the concert, they had rented a large bus.
And we drove to Lahaina
to get people that had no way to get to Olinda, to the concert.
And I had them stop at one point
and then go to the shopping centre at the other end of Front Street.
And myself and whoever I was with went,
"Jimi Hendrix is playing today.
Jimi Hendrix is playing in Olinda. You wanna come? I got a bus.
Get your stuff. Let's go.
Meet us at the post office. We're gonna leave in a half hour."
We went up the street.
Everybody I saw that looked cool, looked young,
looked like they'd be hip, we filled that bus.
And I see two young guys, obviously had just hit the island.
You can always tell them
'cause they haven't got long hair and beards yet.
And I go, "You wanna see Jimi Hendrix?"
And they're like...
They don't say a word and I go, "Get in the bus.
We'll take you to see Jimi. We're all going to see Jimi Hendrix."
They got in the bus.
When I woke up, I continued down the hill.
And I saw like a piece of plywood nailed to a palm tree.
Somebody had painted Rainbow Bridge
with rainbow colOurs with an arrow.
And I got there, and I rolled down the window of that panel truck,
and I looked at the guy. He looked at me. I said, "Rainbow Bridge?"
He said, "Yes."
And I went, "Oh, my God, this is it. I have found it."
People started walking from everywhere,
parking on the side of roads and walking in, crossing,
people walking through people's backyards off Olinda Road.
All over the place, people started walking in
to the absolute horror of most of the community up here.
And this was like, if memory serves me right,
it's like a four-mile hike.
Even if you drive to where it is, you've got one heck of a walk.
And all these people turn up.
This was the gate.
The band and the crew, we went up that way.
We were taken up in a Jeep, and waited to go on in the tent
right behind where those trees are.
You see these electric poles? None of these were here.
We had to use a generator to do the concert.
Welcome, cosmic brothers and sisters of Maui,
to the Rainbow Bridge vibratory colour-sound experiment.
If we just turn on our energy so Jimi can pick into that
and lead us across that bridge
and everybody all over the world is going to pick up on that.
So we're all counting on you, and here's your chance.
Jimi should be here in a few minutes.
I remember we took a trip to Hawaii, supposedly to clear his head.
I guess nowadays, you'd call me the tour manager.
But it was road manager, tour manager, whatever you wanna call it.
We had a couple of guys who took care of equipment,
I took care of the band, and generally got the operation around
and convinced them they should go on stage, which wasn't always easy.
We were filming on top of the mountain.
We hauled everything up there,
four-wheel drives to get all the shit up there.
Chuck what's-his-name, who was the director,
"Roll all the cameras."
You can't take a multi-track recording machine,
put it on the back of a Jeep and take it up the top of a volcano.
They've got trouble with the recording machine.
I say, "Hey, let's stop everything, 'cause the machine ain't working."
He said, "Oh, you can't stop him now, "
because he's standing there going "Om".
He says, "He's stirred the vibrations to make it good."
And it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars rolling on film here,
guys working, and he's standing there going "Om, "making it good!
Know what I mean?
It was a beautiful day.
The stage with the colourful buntings
and the flags that were flying on bamboo poles,
it was like a fantasy world.
It was like, "Where did this come from? And how did I find it?"
I mean, I was the luckiest man in the world that day.
As was the movie, the concert was very much unscripted,
except that everyone was asked to sit by their sun sign.
It was something kind of strange,
I couldn't really quite put my finger on it,
everyone sitting in astrological order.
We wanted people to sit according to their sign,
'cause Jimi wanted to dip into the energies,
he had a feeling for what those energies were.
Then maybe Jimi could tap off that energy,
like if you were aggressive he could get aggressive,
if you were laid back he could be laid back.
People were reluctant.
They didn't even think there'd be a concert.
They were coming with surfboards and they're up at 5, 000 feet.
So they obviously didn't trust that there was a concert.
Some people went to us, "God, you guys are crazy."
And I went, "Bona fide. We are so crazy.
And you are gonna have the best time of your life.
So just sit down and do it."
That does have a little energy, evidently, because I felt it
as soon as we got into that immediate area.
The thing is, from the sound point of view,
from the recording point of view, from the equipment point of view,
only certain electrical appliances worked at any one given time
because I think there's some kind of magnetic force there.
There was enough power. The power was not the issue.
The wind was the issue.
The wind was at the audience's back,
but it was blowing straight at us on the stage.
No sane person would try and do a recording
in an environment like that.
It was 30-mile-an-hour wind.
There was wind blowing over mic stands.
The wind was blowing so strong
until the microphones had to be covered over.
They didn't seem to care if the mics had big wads of foam around them.
And even that didn't keep the wind noise completely down.
Some of the things were blowing around on stage.
It was very challenging.
But however, with all of that,
Jimi just took charge of everything and it worked out very, very well.
Well, it was intimate. It was so organic.
People were just there, just happy to be there.
I took some photographs, I wasn't sure if that was cool,
and I could walk up right next to him.
But it was expansive.
It was the heavens, and the earth, and no walls, no nothing.
This was just Maui style.
It was awesome. The crowd was inspired.
Many people here. If you were here, you were there.
It was spectacular.
And I think Jimi enjoyed it, as you can see Jimi at his best.
It was really living in the moment,
learning how to be completely aware of what's going On in the moment,
and taking that moment and just making the most of it.
Yeah! Everybody stand up! Stand up! Let's do it together, man!
Are you still out there? We'll give you something else if you want!
If you look at that footage in that concert Of Jimi in Maui,
you have never seen Jimi happier in his life.
He loved being there.
People were just going, "Oh, my God, what is going on?"
People were crying.
Apparently, in town in Lahaina, all the electricity went off.
People saw a saucer go by.
Some guy fell off the movie tower that was filming.
I mean, it was crazy.
There was something that happened.
One thing about Jimi Hendrix, he never had a set list.
And he didn't need a set list because we got our cues from him.
That was an intentional thing,
to get away from what the public, say, wanted or expected to hear.
There would be a lot more things thrown out.
The show was in two parts.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
There was a break in the middle of the concert.
And they went into a little tent, the band did.
Jimi was pissed off after the first set
because nobody wanted to get up and dance.
Everybody was loaded on acid and just hanging out.
The Wizard was going,
"You guys, do you want Hendrix to come back out and play some more?"
"Yeah."
"Well, say something!"
He wanted people to get up and start boogying around,
if we could just kind of move around a little bit,
you know, act like we're living.
"Make some noise!"
"Oh, is that what we've gotta do?"
"Okay. Jimi!"
Then they talked him into go back and play.
So he took up his black Flying Wedge.
And he played no holds barred, rock'n'roll and blues,
no teeth, no behind-the-back, just letting it flow.
I was shaking my head
and Jimi was yelling at me, "Get up and dance, man!"
Everybody was smiling and everybody was moving.
I mean, you can't stay still when he gets going.
I asked him, I said, "What's your next thing?
What do you wanna do with music?
You got this wild concept, right?"
And he just says, "I want it louder."
Jimi was doing his thing.
No one dictated any particular songs.
He did it the way he wanted to do it.
And we enjoyed that also. As you can see, we were free.
Well, it was a great concert.
In fact, one of the greatest concerts he ever did.
I didn't realise till it was pointed out to me
how long we played for there.
That was the band. And that was relaxing, you know?
The band was doing things we just enjoyed playing.
And that was the main thing.
Mitch Mitchell looked like he was levitating on his little stool.
Everything was going, arms and legs, head and hair.
I was amazed.
I think he was stretching himself in areas he hadn't been to before.
And that's the one thing, obviously with Jimi, that I just loved him for.
Because you throw something at him,
he'll throw it straight back in your face.
And good, bad or indifferent, that's what re-creates Or creates new music.
At the end of the concert I see these same two guys from the tour bus.
They literally say, "We're dreaming this.
We've just come to Maui, we're going to Maui tomorrow,
and we're dreaming that we're at a Jimi Hendrix concert."
And I go, "You've made it. You guys have made it."
They were in heaven. They couldn't believe their luck.
Can you imagine? The concert's over,
and hundreds of people coming down this way after the concert.
An incredible sight.
People were just talking,
walking down the hill just in amazement.
It was the talk Of the town for days and days
and days and days and days.
The next night right after over here on Maui, we played in Honolulu.
What a great gig.
The film crew was here on Maui, but they didn't film.
They never took it over to Honolulu
where they could have had probably one of the greatest concerts
that's ever been.
Jimi was up on it.
This is kind of remarkable, that in a one-week span
to be able to see Jimi Hendrix in performance twice:
once outdoors, which is a venue that probably is absolutely unmatched,
but his show in Honolulu at the H.I. C. was a very spectacular show.
It was energetic.
He did H.I.C., which was one of my most memorable Hendrix moments.
Jimi comes back from Hawaii
and we start to get back into mixing again and going through tapes,
and then actually recording some new stuff, which was wonderful.
I asked Jimi, "Hey, so how was Hawaii?"
And he goes, "Yeah, sure."
And we hear from the roadies, from Eric Barrett and Gerry Stickells,
"Oh, don't get me started, mate. It was bloody horrible."
And he would just be going off like, "Oh...
Bunch of bloody wankers," you know.
When he came back to New York, Maui was left behind.
With the film, he had nothing to do with it anymore.
After we get back to New York, we were back doing our thing,
recording and gigging.
They were back over here
still to continue working on the "Rainbow Bridge".
Thank you very much. Good night. Good night.
They're editing in the chapel.
One, it's all dark, there was a lot Of imported herbs.
And you couldn't tell what they were trying to get at.
There was nobody saying, "That's it. Cut, use that."
It didn't seem that way to me.
It seemed pretty haphazard.
Each day, more and more people were leaving.
Like, "You're done, here's your money.
You're done, here's your money."
They didn't think they had it in the can.
The Warner Bros. production crew, I remember them saying,
"Oh, they're out of money. We're out of here."
And so that was it. He was just like, "We're gone," you know.
I think they probably had to do a fair amount of time cleaning up
and making sure all that was gone,
certainly before they brought the new freshman class in
to stay in the dorms!
I don't recall my father returning the security deposit,
let's put it that way.
I came to work. I walked down the stairs.
You went into the reception area and you knew something was wrong.
I was down at Lahaina Harbor at the time.
I remember somebody saying, "Jimi's dead."
And I'm like, "What?" You know? I couldn't believe it.
There was a sense of something really important having been ended.
There was a sense almost of music history being jarred at that point.
That was one of the thoughts going on. "Oh, fuck."
After Jimi died, it was pretty chaotic for me.
I do remember hearing one thing in my head,
"The show goes on."
Jimi Hendrix's death was the precipitating event
that was almost like a typhoon, it was a cataclysmic event.
And it was cataclysmic for the world, for our people, for our culture
and all the things we believed in.
But for the movie, man, it was like the death knell.
The Grim Reaper hadn't just removed
one of our most respected, angelic messengers,
but it put everyone in a very difficult situation.
The idea was that Jimi was gonna do the music for this movie.
I think that was part of the reason that Warner Bros. financed it.
Then, of course, Jimi had passed and he hadn't written any music for it,
which is kind of awkward, clearly.
The pressure was on from Warner Bros. to deliver.
"Where's the bloody album?" you know.
Which put Michael Jeffery into a bind.
Got the call from Michael,
"We need a soundtrack for this movie we shot."
And I'm going, "Yeah, all right, how do you want us to do this?"
And we listened to the 8-track tape
that was recorded on the side of a bloody volcano
with 100-mile-an-hour winds.
Maybe it wasn't 100 miles, maybe it was 40 miles an hour.
But when we look at the footage of Jimi's mic...
...and this microphone has got foam and all kinds of stuff
just crammed round it, like layers this thick,
to try and stop the wind noise.
We're looking at this footage going, "What the..."
Our work was cut out trying to make the soundtrack
actually sound like something.
John was there with these tapes from the top of the hill in Hawaii,
trying to rescue adequate sound from them.
The multi-tracks come back from the concert
and there's no useful drums.
So that's when the decision was made to overdub the drums in the studio.
We had to take what a normal film editor would use,
which was this contraption called a Moviola.
We had the film and then there would be this screen,
which is not very big, but it was good enough for editing.
And it was due to Mitch. He was able to memorise,
after looking at the little Moviola,
"Oh, that's what I was doing. Oh, okay, I'm doing this and that."
And - bam! - he would do it.
He would be playing and watching this tiny little screen,
this little screen of him playing,
trying to get something that's gonna work with the song
and kind of maybe work with the visual.
So that was quite a challenge.
By a process of building blocks,
we managed to replace all the badly-recorded drum tracks
from that event in Hawaii.
They were editing the movie I think in a house
that Chuck had rented in Hollywood Hills.
I go up there, I knock on the door.
And this man answers, who turned out to be the editor.
Chuck was hiding behind the door.
I don't know who he was hiding from,
but he was definitely hiding behind the door.
Then he came out and went, "Oh, yes, it's you, John. It's okay."
There might have been some directions
he was getting from Warner Bros. that weren't being followed.
I'm not sure what he was hiding from.
They were up at what we all called the Orange Grove House.
It was a struggle to maintain its authenticity
and the context and the genuineness of it
in the sensible effort to create a commercial version of it.
There was a massive amount, a massive amount of film.
The editing was laborious.
Imagine 42 hours of footage.
Chuck's putting it all together, masterminding,
"We're gonna do this, we're gonna have this,
and we'll take this from here, and do this."
Chuck Wein came in a handful of times.
And John, afterwards, would just roll his eyes
all the way around in his head, a 360-degree eye roll,
and just suffered, because these guys were playing in Hollywood.
Chuck Wein, the director, would occasionally burst in.
Chuck would say, "There's gonna be a special effect here
where everybody goes to Mars."
And then there would be another place where people are smoking pot.
"This is where the smell of pot will fill the theatre."
And now I remember, when we were mixing the movie,
there was this sound effects guy.
And Chuck would go on about,
"There is an explosion here, then the sound of this there."
And he was going, "Yeah, I got it, I got it."
"Then there was an explosion here,"
he would go, "I ain't got it, I ain't got it "
There was all these special effects he had earmarked.
And the movie was very, very long. It's four hours long.
That was the one that made the most sense
because it had the most stuff in it.
But then they cut it down to an hour and a half.
There was angst, there were discussions.
And Barry De Prendergast, I think, was the person who ended up, I think,
representing most forcefully the commercialization aspect of it.
And Chuck was defending, to some extent admirably,
but unsuccessfully in the end, his artistic control.
He believed he was doing something important for the world
by introducing them to these various... Dr. Bronner,
and aliens, and all the things he had in there.
But he wasn't happy with the outcome of it.
I went to the premiere with him.
He was happy and excited about it, but he wasn't content with it.
I went to the premiere. It was awful.
It was awful.
I was so embarrassed. It was terrible.
The Aquarius Theatre was still the original.
I was tasked at that point
with removing all of the soda pop and candy bars and junk food
that's ordinarily found at movie theatres.
We brought in sparkling grape juice and sparkling apple juice.
We had all the new array of Natural Foods candies
that when children ate it, it was actually healthy for them.
The film "Rainbow Bridge", which you are about to see,
was not made from a script.
We had special music being played
that would raise the vibratory frequency
of all of the people that were attending.
The whole intent was to help
change the vibratory frequency of the planet.
And as we face the Sun,
we see coming from this light a more distinct and brighter light...
This theatre lit up like a fire.
Smoke just started going up.
You could hardly see the goddamn movie, there was so much smoke.
People with hookahs, smoking joints, doing hash.
It was just absolutely incredible.
It was a mixed response!
Some people left.
But, hey, the people who stayed got it.
They wanted more, they wanted to know more about it.
"What's he talking about?" basically!
But they were curious and wanted to know.
He'd been through hell with it, so it was not as glorious as he hoped.
And I remember going to see "Rainbow Bridge"
thinking it was a Jimi Hendrix film, and it really wasn't.
...this is dedicated to that little girl over there called Hartley.
A thing called "Foxy Lady". Look at her.
It had this attractive girl, Pat Hartley.
It had a nonsensical non-story.
But people were getting high, and there was talk about vibrations.
And it too was of a piece
with what was happening in youth culture at that time.
It was not intended to be a blockbuster.
Of course, there were niches for it.
And it would have grown, had it been given the chance, I believe,
if it hadn't been cut and sort of crushed by that moment.
So people who had been sort of keyed up
because they'd seen him in Woodstock,
and many millions of people had seen him in the Woodstock film,
were keen to see what he did in Hawaii.
It certainly was not a Jimi Hendrix film
as much as anybody might have tried to market it as one.
It was Michael Jeffery's attempt to be an impresario
of the underground, something I don't think he understood,
through the vehicle of a director and producer
who had seduced him with their underground credentials.
And we're gonna shoehorn Jimi Hendrix into this
because that's the way we can get this thing made
and get it booked into theatres,
and that's the way we can get unsuspecting kids, like me,
to go see it.
It was a counterculture film, it was a documentary.
And we were living it, we were living it at the time.
It was a documentary of our lives and our lifestyles.
And most importantly, it was about our dreams.
So it encapsulated the things we were hoping for and dreaming for.
What you're seeing now on all the TVs is so boring.
You watch all the horrible stuff,
but you're not getting people to speak deeply
from their spirit beings and all, which is what you can do.
So, it's not hard.
There's a little thing that clicks on when they go from the personality
they're usually trying to project for approval into their core being.
That's what you gotta do to do a real reality film.
Those people were doing it and the reason I know it succeeded.
I started it back at Warhol, but I never got much of a chance to do it.
I used real people,
but these people really had something they wanted to say.
I got credit for all their lines.
That might be the beginning of reality television
or really spacey stuff.
But looking at it through the eyes of a 15 or 16-year-Old stoned teenager,
which I was when I saw it, it made sense.
I thought it was great.
What was I gonna think?
It's quite a movie, right?
We've seen that movie and it comes with some question marks.
But even without a cohesive unit except for Jimi's concert,
it was a little bit crazy.
I think the people that were watching had no idea what "Rainbow Bridge" is.
They knew Jimi Hendrix,
they watched the movie. "What in the world is this?"
"Rainbow Bridge", the ultimate American destination.
"The film that shows what the hippest people actually did
when they were at their hippest", quote, unquote.
New York's Village Voice.
Filmed on Maui, Hawaii, "Rainbow Bridge".
Now showing at a Rainbow showcase theatre near you.
It's from Transvue Films, rated R.
Under 17 not admitted without parents.
Barry De Prendergast, in an attempt to make it more commercial,
'cause he had to continue to be the man, right?
He was supposed to be the producer.
He said, "The only way we'll get money out of this thing
is if we chop it up."
That's when he went to the extreme, and I'm so sad to say it,
but he and this Other gentleman, on many bottles of tequila,
cut the negative and threw the remnants away
so it couldn't be brought back together.
I think everyone was surprised at it.
Some people thought it was gonna be like a regular movie,
but it was a counterculture presentation.
Thank God for the concert footage,
thank God.
When the movie came out,
and we had it over to my left at the ridge,
Chuck brought it over and we watched it.
We watched it on a brick wall over there.
It was Maui's first showing, on a brick wall.
When the film played around the country, people would picket it.
In Houston, there was somebody who thought it was the anti-Christ.
And one place in California, they thought it was a Jesus-freak movie.
'Cause you had both of those things there.
In fact, it was considered by the L.A. Times to be a pro-acid movie,
but the Laguna Mystic Arts Brotherhood thought we betrayed them
and that it was an anti-acid movie!
Then after that, the Warner Bros. held onto the film.
They didn't like the film.
They were gonna shelve the whole thing, and the $500,000,
forget it, they just would shelve it.
And then plus they gave Chuck and Barry a bill for $300,000 more.
Then Chuck and Barry had to go out and hustle it up.
They got Buzzy Bent, I think it was, from Chart House restaurant,
to put up the 300 grand to give them back the film.
Then they were walking out of Warner Bros.
and right outside was the IRS going, "You owe us 40 grand,"
and they took it away from them again!
"The Cry of Love" was pretty much finished
and was put out as an album.
I think "Dolly Dagger" was pulled from that.
I think Michael had thought about pulling that song
just 'cause he was seeing what was coming up with "Rainbow Bridge".
I think because I knew the music, he said,
"Well, you need to find music that's gonna fit in the movie
and that will turn into an album."
Fortunately, Jimi Hendrix was recording constantly
throughout his lifetime
and there was plenty of unreleased stuff
he could repurpose into a soundtrack for "Rainbow Bridge".
When he died and we went back to Electric Lady in New York
to his studio, it was already there.
He'd already done it. He'd done it before the film.
And it fit.
And we just started to pull tracks from various places
and assemble something that could be called "Rainbow Bridge".
The record was completely different from the movie, I would say,
in that it was all stuff that Jimi loved and worked on,
and was really high-quality stuff.
It was called "Rainbow Bridge", you know, because of the movie,
and then on the back cover... Chuck would "Om" occasionally.
If you're familiar with 'Omming', something the Buddhists do.
So that was gonna be on the back of the album.
That was gonna be, not boldly, but behind the print there.
But the people that did the album cover got it wrong so it says "Mo".
That to me was kind of like, "Yeah, that makes sense."
Attention to detail is what we're talking about here.
So the original version that Chuck was still working with,
where the Shri Yantra and the Om sign was not reversed,
as in all the vast majority of film went out,
the original film wasn't like that.
The original film was a beautiful, pristine snapshot
of a unique moment in history
that was so beautiful it was indescribable.
Nothing has matched the "Rainbow Bridge" concert for me.
It was just calm
and it was almost like I was meditating while I was watching it.
Had Hendrix lived,
this movie would have just been a counterculture youth movie,
with a soundtrack of new music by Jimi Hendrix,
and people maybe wouldn't have scrutinised this as carefully,
and I think people probably would have had a better idea
of what it was when it was released.
"Rainbow Bridge" was not his artistic vision.
It was sort of disconcerting after his passing
that his legacy was kind of put under something of a cloud
by this posthumous project,
which he really had nothing personally to do with.
Hendrix dying left Michael Jeffery and the producers scrambling.
Who knows what it would have been, though, if Hendrix had lived?
When I see that even today, it's as though time stood still.
And it was an incredible time, a great time, a youthful time,
a time of freedom, no responsibilities,
and we were young.
Thank you. Thank you. Peace with you, man. Thank you.