By Michael Swanger
In the musical equivalent of a UFO briefly touching down on a Mississippi River town before blasting off into the ether, the Jimi Hendrix Experience performed its only Iowa show 50 years ago at the Coliseum Ballroom in Davenport on Aug. 11, 1968.
The iconic rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix’s performance in Davenport during his meteoric ascent might have been lost to history were it not for a few Iowans who worked on the show. They include artist Leslie Bell, who created the concert’s official poster; and Night People, a Quad Cities rock band that opened the show before Soft Machine and Hendrix took the stage that Sunday night in front of about 1,500 people.
In a 2008 interview with the Quad City Times, Bell said he had less than three days’ notice to create the poster. A sophomore at what is now St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Bell had already made a poster for a Vanilla Fudge concert and liked Hendrix’s music.
“I seemed to be the resident psychedelic poster maker in the Quad-Cities all of a sudden in this new genre,” said Bell, who later became chairman of his alma mater’s art department.
Bell’s poster featured a pen drawing of Hendrix and his bandmates and the phrase “Death to Convention” in the lower left corner. It also incorporated smaller drawings, such as President Lyndon Johnson, as well as the names of friends and of girls who Bell wanted to date. In a sardonic nod to the turbulent events of 1968, Bell colored the poster red, white and blue.
“It was a quiet political commentary on the upheaval of America with the Vietnam War,” Bell told the Times. “The way the police were sort of positioned by higher-ups to keep the order against the counter-culture. I got plenty of that.”
Bell presented the poster to Hendrix before the show, but the Seattle-born musician was unimpressed.
“Hendrix commented to me on the lack of beauty in my portrayal of him,” Bell was quoted as saying with a laugh, adding that Hendrix said, “I’m not really that ugly, man.”
Bell wanted to depict Hendrix as more powerful and godlike. “What could I say but, ‘I know, but that wasn’t exactly the point.’”
Bell sold the original poster to a collector in 1993.
Before Hendrix left “The Col” that night, he signed his name on a backstage wall, contributing his own artwork to the affair.
Night People, which were inducted into the Iowa Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017 after gigging for more than 50 years, got their start playing local dances during the 1960s and built a following that earned them the opening slot for Hendrix. The band’s guitarist Robert Dahms recalled the experience in a 2016 interview with The Buzz, the student newspaper of St. Ambrose University.
“I’ll never forget that night,” he said. “We opened the show as usual, then an English group called the Soft Machine came on after us, and then Jimi went on with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell and completely blew the roof off the place.”
The newspaper reported that Dahms snuck a reel-to-reel tape recorder with a microphone to record the set. Low-fi, audio files of six songs from that night — “Are You Experienced?,” “Lover Man,” “Foxey Lady,” “Red House,” “I Don’t Live Today” and “Fire” — can be heard on the official Hendrix website jimihendrix.com.
“His performance was indescribable,” Dahms said. “We knew he was good from listening to his records, but we didn’t know he was that good until we saw him live. We thought he was just gonna be another act. Seeing Jimi play made you want to quit music because you knew you would never be that good.”
In September 1968, Hendrix released his third studio album, “Electric Ladyland.” Exactly one year after playing The Col, he played Woodstock. Hendrix died on Sept. 18, 1970, at the age of 27, but his legacy as one of the most creative and influential musicians of the 20th century remains, as does the memory of his only show in Iowa a half-century ago.
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