By As a young, naïve boy in his early 20s who was new to Cal State Long Beach, Lance Jost had no idea that pulling fire alarms in the dorms would later bring him to meet Jimi Hendrix.
Jost, who grew up in Banning, Calif., played sports throughout high school and dabbled in art while attending San Bernardino Valley College in the late 1950s.
He said he gravitated toward the arts when he had a hard time focusing in other classes.
“Being ADD as I was, not even understanding what that meant at the time … it was quite a job to control my mind to focus on what the teacher was saying without imagining what the picture looked like in my head,” Jost said.
For a change of pace, he decided to transfer to CSULB to focus more on his art.
Daze at The Beach
Jost said he became more interested in sculpture when he studied under former CSULB instructor Kenneth Glenn. Glenn was one of the professors who organized the 1965 Sculpture Symposium where nine “monumental pieces,” which still stand today, were constructed on campus.
The Long Beach Symposium was one of the first events of its kind to be held in the United States, according to the CSULB website.
During his time on campus, Jost also became involved in bringing something called the “acid tests” to one of the dining halls on campus.
The “acid tests,” started by author Ken Kesey, were a series of parties in the ‘60s San Francisco Bay Area that centered around the use of and experimentation with LSD.
Jost said, however, that the response of his peers was sort of a catch-22.
“I had thousands of students looking at me like I was a hero because I had brought the acid tests right onto campus,” Jost said, “and then others not knowing exactly what was going on and just thinking it was this great show with all these lights … and there was this great band, the Grateful Dead, so it seemed like a really good idea at the time. I didn’t understand the full implications of it.”
Jost said that even before the “acid tests,” people would always stare at him when he walked across campus to the dining hall to have lunch.
“I certainly was a social outcast … If I had cared,” he said.
He wasn’t kicked out of the dorms for the acid tests, though. Instead, Jost was kicked out for his prank with the fire alarms. A Resident Assistant was injured while chasing Jost down after the prank.
After he was kicked out of the dorms, Jost moved to Seal Beach. Once he moved in, he was introduced to Robert August, a well-known surfer in the ‘60s.
“He [August] was the most socially hooked-up guy I have ever known in my life,” Jost said. “He knew everybody up and down the coast. I had been adopted into this crowd that you couldn’t pay your way into.”
It also happened to be the time when the idea to create the surf documentary, “Endless Summer,” was starting to develop and he was becoming friends with the whole surf crowd in Seal Beach.
“Endless Summer,” which was about an around-the-world surf adventure starring surfers August and Mike Hynson, was filmed in the 1960s.
Jost said that Hynson had the idea of getting Hendrix to score the movie, and surprisingly, he succeeded.
Soaring into Greenwich Village
At 29 years old, Jost was introduced to Hendrix’s manager, Michael Jeffery, to help with the credits in the movie. But, when he showed Jeffery his portfolio, his path was quickly redirected.
Jeffery told Jost that Hendrix wanted to commission him to paint a mural in his recently acquired recording studio in New York City: the Electric Lady Studio.
Jost then met Hendrix for the first and only time at the San Diego Sports Arena on July 25, 1970, where they discussed ideas for the mural.
However, the day Jost was set to hop on the plane to begin his journey with Hendrix, he got word that Hendrix had died of a drug overdose in London.
Jost said he was devastated and unsure of his future at that point, but he ended up flying out to New York a few months later to work on the mural.
The 100-foot mural, which took Jost nine months to create, was painted in a loft he had rented in Greenwich Village and then transferred to the studio.
“Jimi [Hendrix] just said he wanted space, and I did the best I could understanding his music, the depth of his spiritual involvement and the message that he seemed to tell in his verbal imagery to do something I thought was fitting for that,” Jost said. “And I think that I succeeded in that it is still today, a central image to the studio and is a vibrant statement of Jimi [Hendrix].”
The iconic piece was completed in the spring of 1971, just after Jost’s 30th birthday, and still stands today in “one of the most famous recording studios in the world.”
Return to the West Coast
After his stint in New York City, Jost returned to the sunny shores of Southern California, where he has resided for the majority of his life.
Jost said he has been lucky to have picked up projects here and there to support himself financially throughout the years. He has been commissioned for a variety of pieces in both public and private galleries in California and Hawaii.
For the past year and a half, Jost has been working on a commissioned collection for Pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in Rancho Capistrano in San Juan Capistrano. The cast and fused glass mosaic artwork is a collection of the 15 Stations of the Cross.
He has completed nine pieces and is currently working on the 10th.
“It’s overwhelming,” Jost said. “The next piece will be the ‘Last Supper,’ and it’s going to be a really big one.”
Jost has lived in Dana Point, Calif., for more than 25 years and recently married his third wife, Donna Jost, who is also an artist.
Donna Jost is currently writing a book about her husband’s adventures from Long Beach to Greenwich Village and back again. The book will be released in the spring of 2014 and is titled “Through Jimi’s Eyes.”
Lance Jost said that one of his favorite pieces is the mural. He said one of his coolest experiences was when Carlos Santana showed up and spent several hours explaining to him the meaning behind his mural. He said it was so great to feel like “someone really got it.”
“If you could shoot your basketball from the moon and bounce it off the Empire State Building and make a basket — it was that incredible,” Lance Jost said.
