Steve Jones talks about Buddy Miles (Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys)

“Got a fun B. Miles story for you… My band the stepmothers put together a series of concerts at California prisons in ’78 I believe and one of those shows was at Chino Men’s Prison.

We knew Charles Manson and Tex Watson were there, which was creepy, what we didn’t know was: so was Buddy Miles. He was in for forging checks, or some cons told us.

We had invited a few more bands to join us on the (unpaid) bill (hey this was punk rock in the days when it was still kinda scary to most clubs in LA, and getting gigs anywhere was difficult for a lot of us, and we all wanted to play!, so we went for the captive audience), one of those bands was a Texas new wave rock band, freshly relocated to LA, called the Textones, fronted by Karla Olsen and (soon to replace Margo and become the new Go-Gos bass player just before they exploded and became the first LA band borne of the LA punk/new wave thing to make it) Kathy Valentine.

I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten who the other bands were. But once we heard Buddy was there we were all atwitter as to whether he would come see us all play. I guess he kinda sidled in at some point, keeping a low profile. At the end of the show Buddy came on stage, joined the girls on stage, flipped a regular right-handed guitar upside down, and just wailed on “All Along the Watchtower” (I believe) and put all us punks in our place. It was something to see. Then we left, he stayed. “

Source: Bob Lefsetz