structural:summarization, linguistic:voice_change
Break-up of the Experience

In January 1969, after an absence of more than six months, Hendrix briefly moved back into his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham's apartment in Brook Street, London, next door to the home of the composer Handel. After a performance of " Voodoo Child ", on BBC's Happening for Lulu show in January 1969, the band stopped midway through an attempt at their first hit "Hey Joe" and then launched into an instrumental version of " Sunshine of Your Love ", as a tribute to the recently disbanded band Cream, until director and producer Stanley Dorfman was forced to bring the song to a premature end. The Experience bass player Noel Redding describes in his autobiography, "as the minutes ticked by on his live show, short of running onto the set to stop us or pulling the plug, there was nothing he could do. We played past the point where Lulu might have joined us, played through the time for talking at the end, played through Stanley tearing his hair, pointing to his watch and silently screaming at us. We played out the show...Afterwards, Dorfman refused to speak to us, but the result is one of the most widely used bits of film we ever did. Certainly, it’s the most relaxed." Dorfman recalls at the BBC club after the show, he found Hendrix to be "a very sweet man, very quiet, he didn’t know he’d done anything wrong at all." However, according to rock and roll legend, Hendrix was banned from working at the BBC again. During this time, the Experience toured Scandinavia, West Germany, and gave their final two performances in France. On February 18 and 24, they played sold-out concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall, which were the last European appearances of this lineup.

By February 1969, Redding had grown weary of Hendrix's unpredictable work ethic and his creative control over the Experience's music. During the previous month's European tour, interpersonal relations within the group had deteriorated, particularly between Hendrix and Redding. In his diary, Redding documented the building frustration during early 1969 recording sessions: "On the first day, as I nearly expected, there was nothing doing... On the second it was no show at all. I went to the pub for three hours, came back, and it was still ages before Jimi ambled in. Then we argued... On the last day, I just watched it happen for a while, and then went back to my flat." The last Experience sessions that included Redding—a re-recording of "Stone Free" for use as a possible single release—took place on April 14 at Olmstead and the Record Plant in New York. Hendrix then flew bassist Billy Cox to New York; they started recording and rehearsing together on April 21.

The last performance of the original Experience lineup took place on June 29, 1969, at Barry Fey's Denver Pop Festival, a three-day event held at Denver 's Mile High Stadium that was marked by police using tear gas to control the audience. The band narrowly escaped from the venue in the back of a rental truck, which was partly crushed by fans who had climbed on top of the vehicle. Before the show, a journalist angered Redding by asking why he was there; the reporter then informed him that two weeks earlier Hendrix announced that he had been replaced with Billy Cox. The next day, Redding quit the Experience and returned to London. He announced that he had left the band and intended to pursue a solo career, blaming Hendrix's plans to expand the group without allowing for his input as a primary reason for leaving. Redding later said: "Mitch and I hung out a lot together, but we're English. If we'd go out, Jimi would stay in his room. But any bad feelings came from us being three guys who were traveling too hard, getting too tired, and taking too many drugs... I liked Hendrix. I don't like Mitchell."

Soon after Redding's departure, Hendrix began lodging at the eight-bedroom Ashokan House, in the hamlet of Boiceville near Woodstock in upstate New York, where he had spent some time vacationing in mid-1969. Manager Michael Jeffery arranged the accommodations in the hope that the respite might encourage Hendrix to write material for a new album. During this time, Mitchell was unavailable for commitments made by Jeffery, which included Hendrix's first appearance on US TV—on The Dick Cavett Show —where he was backed by the studio orchestra, and an appearance on The Tonight Show where he appeared with Cox and session drummer Ed Shaughnessy.