Dusty Baker once smoked a joint with Jimi Hendrix
Dusty Baker has been involved in several historic moments. The former Major League Baseball player and manager was on deck when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record, is credited by some as the inventor of the high five and guided the Chicago Cubs to within one win of the World Series. But perhaps Baker’s coolest moment was the time he smoked a joint with Jimi Hendrix.
Baker, 66, has written a memoir called “Kiss The Sky” about his experience attending the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, which featured Simon & Garfunkel, The Who, the Grateful Dead, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and other esteemed artists.
In an excerpt from the memoir in The New Yorker, Baker, who initially aspired to be a musician, writes that for his 18th birthday — a few weeks after he was drafted by the Atlanta Braves — he received “one of the great presents a mother could ever give a son: two tickets to the three-day Monterey Pop Festival that weekend, along with twenty bucks and use of the family car.”
The teenagers slept in the car and agreed on a rule to preserve their athletic futures: “No grass!” The last day, they watched Hendrix set his guitar on fire and Baker compared the look on the guitar god’s face to the feeling of hitting a home run, writing that “Hendrix had that exhilarated look of being as amazed as all of us at what was happening with his guitar.”
About a year later, after making his big-league debut with the Braves, Dusty baked with Hendrix.
From The New Yorker: “After his first stint in the bigs, Baker writes, he ran into Jimi Hendrix on the streets of San Francisco one night and, having abandoned the “no grass” rule, smoked a joint with him. (He’s mum about the words they exchanged, if he remembers them.) All of this by nineteen.”
Pretty impressive. Before he turned 20, Baker already had recorded two hits in the big leagues and four or five hits with Hendrix.
