It was a New York winter day, frozen and gray and violently blustery. Indoors, out of the fearful cold, people seemed somehow gentler toward one another — strange in New York City — as if it was enough to battle the elements, no need to battle each other.

Inside his manager's neo-turn-of-the-century apartment, on a sofa near the radiant fireplace, sat Jimi Hendrix, in a gentle, almost reticent frame of mind. The light snow had begun to fall. You could see that through the narrow slits where the curtain allowed the merest sliver of daylight and street scene to penetrate into the gloomy dark room.

On the same sofa, and on a richly upholstered chair next to it, sat the members of Jimi Hendrix' new band. He had broken up the old Experience (Noel Redding on bass, Mitch Mitchell, drums) at some indeterminate point during the fall. He had been living and jamming with an all-purpose crew of musicians — everything from older black gentlemen from the South who played blues guitar, to a band of avant-garde jazz/space musicians under the general leadership of a flute player named Juma — and talking about coming up with something new.

That avant-garde/blues/rock & roll experiment faltered at some point along the way, and Hendrix announced a new band with the same instrumentation as the old Experience: it would have Hendrix singing and guitaring, Buddy Miles on drums and vocals, and Billy Cox, an old Army buddy of Jimi's, on bass. The new band was called the Band of Gypsies.

By various accounts, they sounded pretty tough. The sound was not much different from the Experience; and, yes, they were still working up their repertoire; and there were early complaints about Buddy Miles' lengthy stretches of singing. But when they played Fillmore East, they dazzled everybody, including Bill Graham, who said he thought they had played perhaps the best set he had ever heard in his hall.

Off to a great start — and then, just like that, Hendrix dropped the Band of Gypsies. Or shelved them, anyway.

Now he had a new band to which he was going to devote his principal energies, as his number one thing. He had decided, through his publicity agent, that the time had come to rap about changes he was going through, about his new band, and about anything else that came up.

First, the news: the other two cats in his band are Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, from the original Experience. The Experience is back together again, and everybody's pals, and no hard feelings. Considering the attrition rate among rock and roll bands during the past year, this has approximately the news value of a trial separation between Dick & Liz. But this was the big news Hendrix' press agent was eager to get across, so this is what we started on, as Michael Jeffreys, Jimi's manager, brought on wine and booze.

The original plan (as described) was a rap with Hendrix. The actual circumstances brought together half a dozen people to rap in the flicker of a fireplace, on a day when Hendrix seemed just happy to listen to the others.

Then, too, there's the matter of Jimi's own personal terms of communication. To some question — precisely what it was cannot be recalled — Hendrix answered: "Start with a shovel, wind up with a spoon." A beautiful punch line. Does anybody know the joke?