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We got Hendrix because he was too radical for The Monkees tour. They dropped him from that and Warner Brothers called us to book him.
The cops really destroyed us. They didn't want us there. I can just see LBJ cringing that there was an anti-war establishment right there in DC. We took an open and public stand against the Vietnam War.
We used to have SOO Many of those concert posters. I had so much of that stuff over at this house in was living at on Blair Road in 1971. I had hundreds of these Moby Grape posters, I went and got some wheat paste and we spent two days getting stoned and pasting the entire staircase and ceiling with Moby Grape posters.
Joel Mednick, Co-Owner
We did light shows and events all across town. We had a freshman class party at GWU, and strung a parachute across the quad and had a light show. The entire police precinct just stood there flummoxed with their arms crossed.
It was quite a scene. A lot of jamming. Typically, the musicians had a party afterwards at the Ambassador that would go all night.
Jerry Marmelstein
The Psychedelic Power and Light Company
Note: Click here for a chronology of lightshows by the Psychedelic Power and Light Co. and Light By US.
We were a bit ahead of our time. We thought there were 50,000 hippies in DC, but it was the same 5000 hippies we kept seeing over and over again. We overestimated the demand. On a good night if we had 1500 people, the place was so big that it still felt like a failure.
We paid Hendrix $1700 for a week, plus a suite at The Shoreham. We took them all to breakfast at the Shoreham for $300; we were surrounded by all these diplomats and business people and eveyone at our table sat there nodding out.
It was a fun and scary time, we had a lot of perserverance. We said ''f**k you, we're opening!'
We lied to Strom Thurmond, we told them we were opening a Performing Arts Center for the Disadvantaged.
Court Rodgers, Co-Owner
I had a head shop inside Ambassador, on the mezzanine level on the stairs on the way to the balcony. It was a couple of showcases with pipes and papers, posters on the wall, gift items, lava lamps, etc. Whatever you saw on album covers you'd try to sell it. There was no special regulation in DC for our kind of shop, other than typical ordinary retail regulation. My shops and I never got hassled by the police or the government. I even got interviewed by Business Week and TIME Magazine about the emerging sub culture in '67.
Jim Morrison's mom came into my shop on Wisconsin Avenue to buy tickets to the Doors when they were in Alexandria. He was estranged from his parents at the time. His Mom wanted to get tickets. We didn't sell any tickets to shows. And the Ambassador Theater tickets were sold at the door.
Walter Hart,
Bleeker Street Head Shop
Natty Bumpo were a regular band at The Ambassador Theater. I remember vividly the week we opened for Jimi Hendrix. We knew all their songs because we watched from the wings when they performed. Mitch Mitchell took ill on the afternoon of the free community show, so Jimi asked me to fill in as drummer for just a three song short set. It was our belief at the time that Mitch Mitchell sat it out because it wasn't a 'paid gig,' but I did learn recently that Mitch Mitchell was indeed sick with appendicitis.
Bill Havu, drummer for Natty Bumppo
Washington’s scruffy Ambassador Theater, normally a pad for psychedelic frolics, was the scene of an unscheduled scatological solo in support of the peace demonstrations. Its antistar was author Norman Mailer, who proved even less prepared to explain Why Are We In Vietnam? than his current novel bearing that title.
Slurping liquor from a coffee mug, Mailer faced an audience of 600, most of them students, who had kicked in $1,900 for a bail fund against Saturday’s capers. “I don’t want to grandstand unduly,” he said, grandly but barely standing.
It was one of his few coherent sentences. Mumbling and spewing obscenities as he staggered about the stage which he had commandeered by threatening to beat up the previous M.C. Mailer described his search for a usable privy on the premises. Excretion, in fact, was his preoccupation of the night. I’m here because I’m like LBJ, was one of Mailer’s milder observations. He’s as full of crap as I am.
Time magazine, October 27, 1967.
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The room was humming, not only with the expectation of seeing the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but that Pete Townshend was in the audience, and it was just an extraordinary pivotal night for me. Hendrix came out and said he was going to dedicate the first song to Pete Townshend and he was going to do a rendition of 'Sgt. Pepper.' Now being naive, and being a huge Beatles lover, a lot of us thought 'well, you're only a three piece band, how can you play 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,' there's all these other guitars and strings.' We just didn't have a clue of what Hendrix was really about. He counted off the song and I remember he kind of disappeared, he just did one of those things where he fell to the floor, sitting on the floor rocking with the guitar between his legs kind of doing a 'Purple Haze/ Sgt. Peppers' riff, then he sort of bounces back up and does an insane version of 'Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.' And when he dropped to the floor everyone just jumped up to try to see him, and from that moment on everyone was standing and mesmerized by obviously the greatest rock and roll guitar player that ever lived... There were just a lot of inspired moments like that at the Ambassador; it was this dark, beautiful, haunted, inspired room that you could go to and get lost in the light show and friends and the camradarie and the excitement of being in the audience discovering all this great new music; it was this real pivotal place in Washington, DC for all of the music scene, young and old.
Nils Lofgren, Guitarist
Crystal Mesh
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
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