When young guitar hotshot Harvey Mandel was hanging out in Canned Heat’s dressing room at San Francisco’s Fillmore West in summer 1969, he had no clue he’d stumbled into an appointment with destiny. Guitarist Henry Vestine had quit the band that night, leaving them in the lurch with a show to play—Windy City shredder Mike Bloomfield filled in for the first Heat set, and fellow Chicagoan Mandel stepped in for the second. Both were offered the job, but Mandel took it—and three gigs later he was playing at a little festival called Woodstock.
Jewell uses the word “spontaneous” too when describing the sessions—and he adds the word “loose,” explaining that there were “like 45 seconds of rehearsal.” The first of the band’s two sessions with Mandel was supposed to be dedicated to getting everybody set up and maybe rehearsing a few tunes, but the engineer ended up hitting “record”—as Jewell says, “I didn’t realize we were even recording yet, or that these were going to be takes we used.”
