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HISTORY
Taking the Number 8 bus into history
By Ed Adamczyk
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Jimi Hendrix at the Aud on March 23, 1968.
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Jimi Hendrix photos courtesy of Bruce Moser.
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They moaned and reminisced when the Aud finally collapsed this summer, as hockey-centric memories swirled, but no one brought up the night of March 23, 1968, when the Jimi Hendrix Experience played the pre-Sabres, pre-orange-upper-deck building to a half-capacity crowd of perhaps 6,000.
The cheap seats in the Aud were painted grey, and that’s where I was that night, thrilled to be in my first mixed-race audience, amid Buffalo’s idea of hippie psychedelia, all wandering around a structure more suited to wrestling matches or basketball games. What I remember was the reverb of the place, how one stroke on a guitar could fill the space with persistent echoes of the note, banging off the walls until it eventually disappeared. That, and the stage, so unlike rock extravaganzas of today; except for Hendrix’s massive collection of Marshall amplifiers, it was appropriate for a dance in a high school gym.
Bruce Eaton, currently impresario of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s “Art of Jazz” concert series and a frequent Spree contributor, was there with friend Tony Markellis, now a studio musician and amanuensis to Trey Anastasio and Phish.
“The stage was really low, about four feet high,” Eaton remembers, “with no barrier between the audience and the stage. Hendrix quickly ran through songs from his first album, ‘Fire’ and ‘Manic Depression’ and ‘Purple Haze,’ and the drums weren’t miked. Concerts back then were more like what I’d call ‘appearances.’”
After Hendrix’s perfunctory set and smash-the-equipment routine, Eaton and Markellis approached a British roadie with a polite, “Sir, could we have a piece of the amplifier?” Eaton still has the souvenir.
Jay Weisbeck, a sixteen-year-old Bennett High student at the time and guitarist in a local band called the Sinnermen, got off the Number 8 bus that day, walked into his house and was informed by his mother of a telephone call; the evening’s warmup act, Jesse’s First Carnival, was stranded in a Cleveland snowstorm, and his band would open for Hendrix. (It helped that concert promoter Jerry Nathan’s son Steve, now a prominent Nashville session player, was the keyboardist in Weisbeck’s band).
“Our band actually called an emergency afternoon practice, as if that would improve our quality,” recalls Weisbeck, now songwriting in Penfield after a career with National Grid, “but it was more a matter of extreme fright.”
So they opened for Jimi Hendrix in Buffalo, playing an assortment of rhythm and blues hits—“we were grateful to finish,” he remembers—then watched the show from the front row. It never occurred to them to go backstage, and the only interaction of the Sinnermen and the Jimi Hendrix Experience was between Nathan’s girlfriend, seated, and Hendrix, on stage. “Take off your hat,” she demanded. “Take off your shirt,” he replied. Neither did either.
Big, wet snowflakes, and the Number 8 bus up Main Street, awaited Weisbeck and his friends when they left the Aud.
“When you’re young, you don’t always realize history when you’re making it,” he says today.
Ed Adamczyk is a frequent contributor to Forever Young and the Tonawanda News.
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