"The whole New York thing was kind of like the Bowie outer space thing – you’d see it on films. And when I first went out to New York I thought how right the music was for the place. It was the antithesis of the California thing. I bought a Velvets compilation with ‘I'm Waiting For The Man’ on, and every title fascinated me. When I got Banana everything about it was cool, a different kind of cool to Bowie, just this disrespective, narky cunt, with the greatest rock & roll band in the history of time. Technically it doesn’t matter, the chemistry between them was incredible. Every rhythm guitar part I’ve ever played I’ve just nicked from Lou Reed, even some of the punkier stuff. There were all these punky little rhythms. Not as important as Bowie in what he decided to do, but up there because it was a band with a definite front man. When I met the right people later in life I would use the Velvets model."

"Take great care with this documentary film of an all-day concert staged by John Phillips in small-town Monterey, California, for it holds within it the greatest single performance by any electric-music instrumentalist you have ever seen, or are likely to: the U.S. debut of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Known as the man who revolutionized the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix appears onstage in this film a man possessed. As David Bowie sang in “Ziggy Stardust”: “He could lick ’em by smiling/ He could leave ’em to hang/ They came on so loaded, man/ Well hung and snow-white tan/ . . . He was the nazz/ With God-given ass/ He took it all too far/ But boy could he play guitar.” Never will you see a performance so sensual. There are many great films to be found of Jimi playing, but none to rival this. In Monterey Pop, there are many performances worth watching, seminal, even—Janis Joplin, Otis Redding among them—but they are all just warm-up acts to Jimi, the greatest rock-and-roll star to ever tread the boards."