“Alice watched them all fall apart under the pressure of stardom.”
I’ve heard that Hendrix was really ripped up by having Buddy Miles and Billy Cox playing behind him because Mitchell and Redding were so much better. He got a lot of heat for that because they weren’t “keeping it real” enough for te militant black folks. He tried to get the Experience back together before he died, but it blew up. I think that it might be true. There was a lot of tension, for sure. I think it all revolved around his music getting pushed into places he might not have wanted it to go. Did he really want to funkify or go back to blues, try fusion, or what? We’ll never know, I guess.
At one point, he flat out told them not to use him for their “cause”.
He considered himself a musician and American.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtsIs3HHNys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juvw8RUKGxg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVkZYchiNYs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKwlhlIkQcM
Hendrix ended up reforming the Experience because his management pressured him to; it didn’t help that his management basically sabotaged the Band of Gypsys. And the reformed Experience didn’t include Noel Redding.
Based on the recordings that appeared on First Rays of the New Rising Sun, he seemed to be trying to move away from hard rock and towards R&B/funk. But of course since he died before the album was completed, we can only speculate on what he’d be doing now if he were still alive.