Experienced

Jimi Hendrix’s road manager and confidant Eric Barrett breaks fifty-five years of silence

As Jimi Hendrix’s road manager, Eric Barrett was there when the amps blew in Milan, when Hendrix set Woodstock ablaze, when paranoia crackled through the Toronto airport, when his music electrified a sea of 600,000 at the Isle of Wight, and in the quiet hours backstage when Hendrix revealed the insecurities behind his genius. Hendrix confided in few people. Barrett was one of them.

No one was closer to Hendrix’s supernatural talent—or his demons.

Experienced is Barrett’s long-awaited, unflinching memoir: the definitive inside account of Hendrix as friend, bandleader, and phenomenon. It strips away the mythology to reveal the man in all his musical wizardry and human contradictions. It reveals Hendrix as volatile, generous, insecure, incandescently creative, and always in pursuit of the next sound.

While his journey with Hendrix provides the book’s spine, Barrett’s decades on tour with David Bowie, Madonna, George Michael, and others add depth, parallels, and a sweeping sense of how Hendrix’s short life set the template for rock ’n’ roll excess—and survival—through the decades. The result is not just another rock memoir but a oncein-a-lifetime backstage history of music’s most transformative years, told through the prism of Barrett’s ride on Hendrix’s feedback-fueled rise and tragic fall.