27

by Howard Sounes

  When Janis went back on the road in early 1970 she did so with the Full Tilt Boogie Band, led by a Canadian guitarist named John Till. This was a better fit for her than the Kozmic Blues Band, and Janis seemed in better shape for having had some time off. She had quit heroin and managed to stay clean. John Byrne Cooke returned as her road manager and Janis gave impressive concerts throughout the South, Midwest and in New York before joining the Festival Express tour of Canada. This unusual event saw Janis, the Grateful Dead and other acts touring Canada by train. Despite the debauchery of the tour – several of the musicians were notorious drug-users and/or big drinkers, including Pigpen McKernan – Janis stayed away from heroin during the tour, writing proudly to David Niehaus that she was no longer a junkie.

  Like many addicts, Janis was quick to announce that she was clean. But in her case this was for a relatively short time, perhaps five months of 1970, not so much an end to addiction as part of a stop-start pattern. ‘You don’t have to worry about the junk. I’ll never do it again – not unless I do it deliberately to go out!’ she told her publicist Myra Friedman, who reports the remark in her book, Buried Alive, as an example of Janis’s ambivalent attitude to drugs and as one of several allusions the singer made to suicide during her last year.

  Friedman also quotes Janis saying, in reply to being asked what she would be doing at thirty, that she didn’t believe she would live that long. As we have seen, Kurt Cobain said the same thing. In fact, all of the principal 27s made similar remarks. Whether they believed what they were saying is unknowable. That none lived beyond 27 makes such comments seem prophetic, but many young people make similar prognostications only to live to old age. In Janis’s case her comments should be seen in context. At the turn of the 1960s many contemporaries were dying young, famous names and everyday friends, often because of drugs. Nancy Gurley – the wife of Big Brother guitarist James Gurley – died of a heroin overdose in 1969. More deaths followed in 1970. ‘I think twelve of our friends died that year,’ recalls Lyndall Erb. ‘The majority of it was related to drugs … At that point we were all [thinking], “Will any of us make it to thirty?”’

  Janis returned home to Texas in August to attend her tenth high-school reunion. She went on Dick Cavett’s TV show beforehand to say that she had been laughed out of Port Arthur by her contemporaries, so now she was going back as a celebrity to laugh at them. It didn’t turn out that way. ‘That was an awful experience for her,’ says Lyndall Erb. ‘She thought that being a big star her classmates would like her now, [but] they were still the [same] Texas good ol’ boys and, no, they didn’t like her. She was too strange for them, and especially for her family.’

  Bipolar Janis was on a high as she blew into Port Arthur from the West Coast, dressed in hippie regalia, with an entourage of hipster buddies, including her road manager John Byrne Cooke. Janis behaved as she typically did when she was high, talking loud and fast, cracking jokes, impersonating W. C. Fields, putting on a show for the people, including the local press, who met her at the airport and trailed her around town. They had so many questions that she held a press conference.

  ‘What do you think about Port Arthur now?’ she was asked.

  ‘Well, it seems to have loosened up a little bit since I left,’ Janis chuckled. ‘There seems to be a lot of long hair and rock, which also means drug use, you know. It looks like it’s doing just about what all the rest of the country is doing: getting loose, getting it together, getting down, having a good time.’ Janis said she was having a good time, though between the wisecracks she didn’t look entirely happy. She was sensitive to questions about her family, and thoughtful in answers to questions about her school days. She said she’d been a recluse at high school in Port Arthur and ‘felt apart’ from her fellow pupils. ‘I didn’t go to the high school prom.’

  ‘You were asked, weren’t you?’ asked a reporter.

  ‘No, I wasn’t. I don’t think they wanted to take me,’ said Janis, as if it still bothered her. Then she cackled: ‘And I’ve been suffering ever since!’

  The actual reunion was a bore. ‘There wasn’t anything to do,’ complains John Byrne Cooke. ‘We went to the dinner. We went to one sort of get-acquainted thing where everybody was walking around a room with a drink in their hand, and they have a name tag on.’ Janis and her buddies decided to find some better entertainment, driving to a roadhouse with Janis’s sister, Laura, to see Jerry Lee Lewis perform. But this proved a drag. Janis was told that she had to pay to get into the club, like everyone else, and the meeting with Lewis was a disaster. When the man they called the Killer made a crack about Laura’s appearance, Janis slapped him and Lewis slapped her back.

  There was also tension at home. Janis’s parents were not pleased when she rolled in late at night drunk with her buddies, one of whom crashed on the sofa. Still, Janis left Port Arthur with a kinder view of her family. Previously she’d made no secret of the fact that she didn’t get on with her parents or Laura. As a result, she had made a will that bequeathed her estate in trust to her kid brother, Michael. She revised this will after the reunion.

  ‘She had sort of a reconciliation with her family,’ says Janis’s lawyer, Bob Gordon. ‘I don’t know whether it was the parents or not, but when she came back [to California] she told me she felt a lot better about her family, and I suggested to her that she change her will. She shouldn’t leave everything just to her brother, and she agreed. And so the will turned out to leave it to her family in equal shares.’ Gordon drafted the change while Janis went to work on her new album.

  3

  The success of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival led to a series of larger music festivals across the United States and abroad, most notably Woodstock in 1969. The biggest British festivals were held on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, starting with a small event in 1968 and becoming a major festival in 1969 when Bob Dylan headlined. The following year a huge number of people travelled to the Isle of Wight – probably less than the 600,000 estimated, but still a vast number – to attend a five-day festival featuring the Doors, Jimi Hendrix and the Who.

  This was a bad time for the Doors. The band seemed bereft of new musical ideas and Jim Morrison’s lyrics were degenerating into self-parody. Yet they were contracted to deliver more albums to Elektra Records. In search of a fresh musical direction the band recorded their fourth studio album, The Soft Parade, with the accompaniment of strings and horns, which made them sound middle-of-the-road. There were disagreements about what they were doing. ‘The members of the band were not getting along,’ says Harvey Brooks, who played bass on The Soft Parade. ‘The band was in chaos.’ As ever Jim was part of the problem. He was drinking hard and using cocaine to get through the sessions. Then came Miami.

  The Doors concert at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami, on 1 March 1969, was meant to launch a US tour. Instead it was a catastrophe that practically destroyed the band. Jim showed up drunk and seemed less interested in singing than in stirring up the audience. Tired of his pretty-boy image, he had altered his appearance dramatically by growing a full beard, which made him look much older. He was also intent on shocking people. Partly inspired by an experimental theatre troupe, he began a fake strip-tease on stage in Miami. ‘There are no rules, there are no limits,’ he told the audience, as he made to undo his fly and flash his cock at the crowd, as if that was what they really wanted to see. Road manager Vince Treanor had to hold Jim’s trousers up so he didn’t expose himself. The police also came onstage, which was when the concert degenerated into anarchy, with Jim at the epicentre of a near riot as his band mates put down their instruments and fled.

  A few days later the sheriff of Dade County, Florida, issued an arrest warrant for Jim on charges of lewd and lascivious behaviour, indecent exposure, profanity and drunkenness. Although it is generally agreed that Jim Morrison didn’t expose himself in Miami, the case proved serious. The tour was cancelled, because no promoter would risk putting the band on for fear of what Jim w
ould do next. The Doors had also fallen out of fashion with the critics. The Soft Parade received negative reviews upon release, and disappointing sales. Jim had still bigger problems. He faced prison if found guilty at his trial in Miami.

  It was by arrangement with the judge that Jim was given leave to fly to Britain in August 1970 to perform with the Doors on the Isle of Wight. The band were joint headliners with the Who on Saturday, 29 August. Jim appeared onstage bearded and thicker-set than before, though he didn’t yet look unhealthy. He gave a subdued performance, which his band mates thought lacked energy, but which comes across as refreshingly restrained and thoughtful on Murray Lerner’s concert film, showing Jim to be a skilful frontman for a band that, despite its problems, was still distinctive, subtle and powerful. No doubt Jim was also trying to behave, with the court case hanging over him. He had to fly straight back to Miami after the show.

  Jimi Hendrix closed the Isle of Wight Festival the following night, actually performing in the early hours of Monday because the festival ran over schedule, as such events usually did. This was his first appearance in Britain for eighteen months. Like the Doors, he crossed the Atlantic for the money, Michael Jeffrey having convinced him that they needed revenue to pay for Electric Lady Studios, Jimi’s new recording facility in New York. He was performing as a trio again, with Mitch Mitchell on drums and Billy Cox on bass. This was not the last time Jimi would stand on a stage, but as he died three weeks later, and the Isle of Wight performance was filmed, the show retains special interest.

  There were times during the last weeks of his life that Jimi was strung out on drugs, but that was not the case at the Isle of Wight. ‘He had come to do a professional job,’ says Ray Foulk, one of the promoters. ‘He certainly didn’t give the outward sign of being particularly depressed, or on drugs. He wasn’t high or anything, as far as one could see.’ Foulk’s impression is borne out by Lerner’s concert film, including backstage footage of Jimi in which he looks healthy and speaks coherently. Even though he performed very late at night, with an under-rehearsed band, and had sound problems, Jimi delivered a compelling show. The audience’s lack of engagement with his new music was the biggest problem, as it was wherever he went these days. ‘If you want the same old songs, we can do that,’ he sighed during the show, before playing a crowd-pleasing ‘Foxy Lady’.

  After the Isle of Wight Jimi took his band to the continent for a short European tour. Once again, Gothenburg in Sweden proved unlucky. Jimi had freaked out there in 1968 when he was high, and he got high as a kite in 1970, giving a shambolic concert as a result. ‘He was so wrecked he’d start a song, get into the solo section, and then he wouldn’t even remember what song they were playing,’ says his former manager Chas Chandler, who attended the concert. More bad fortune followed when Billy Cox fell ill the next day, having apparently had his drink spiked with drugs, which seriously disrupted the tour. Jimi’s mood darkened. Before a show in Aarhus, Denmark, he gave an interview in which he said he sacrificed ‘part of my soul’ each night onstage, adding a comment that seems prophetic: ‘I’m not sure I will live to be 28 years old. I mean, at the moment I feel I have got nothing more to give musically …’

  Jimi was wrecked onstage in Aarhus, so out of it that he staggered off after two numbers. He seemed better in Copenhagen. German shows followed: Berlin and the Isle of Fehmarn festival. Although it was billed as a festival of ‘love and peace’, the event was marred by poor weather and crowd trouble. Jimi was booed. ‘I don’t give a fuck if you boo, long as you boo in key, you mothers,’ he told the audience angrily.

  He returned to London where the decision was made to cancel the rest of the tour, primarily because Billy Cox was unwell. Jimi checked into the Cumberland Hotel at Marble Arch, his London address during the last ten days of his life. He spent relatively little time there, however, choosing instead to hang out with friends, including Alan Douglas, who happened to be in town, staying at a house in Kensington.

  Over the next few days Jimi discussed his career and future plans with Douglas. ‘He was getting older. He didn’t want to go on the road. He wanted to write his music [and] he wanted to read and write [music],’ says the producer. ‘So when he got to London we made a plan.’ The plan was that Jimi would play a cluster of shows four times a year, similar to the series he had given at the Fillmore over New Year, freeing up time for recording and taking music lessons. Jimi had decided that educated musicians like Miles Davis – a mutual friend of himself and Douglas – had a broader musical palette. There was a tentative plan for Hendrix and Davis to work together. ‘Jimi absolutely fascinated Miles Davis,’ says Douglas, ‘that here was a guy who never took a lesson in his life and could play like this.’ Plans to go back to school and make a jazz-rock album would have brought Jimi into conflict with Michael Jeffrey, but here is evidence that Jimi was thinking ahead. That is not to say he was entirely happy. His relationship with Jeffrey was increasingly difficult. His last few concerts had been uneven, partly due to problems with audiences and the band, while Jimi was unable to carry on at times because he was stoned. To some extent drugs were now getting the better of him and he seemed to have lost his sparkle. Mitch Mitchell: ‘I have to say that Jimi was not too bright at this time, for whatever reason, and he did seem depressed.’

  Jimi’s female companion during these last days in London was a 25-year-old German named Monika Dannemann whom he had met on tour. Jimi and Monika were together on the evening of Tuesday, 15 September, when Jimi went to Ronnie Scott’s club in Soho to jam with Eric Burdon’s band, War, but he was unable to play. He was high, and he didn’t have his guitar, which was uncharacteristic. ‘Jimi was a mess – dirty, out of control like I’d never seen him and, for the first time, without his guitar,’ Burdon wrote in his autobiography. ‘He had a head full of something – heroin, [Quaa]ludes …’ Burdon asked him to come back the following night when he was straight, and to remember to bring his guitar.

  Wandering through Soho, Jimi bumped into John Altman, a young saxophonist he’d jammed with when he’d first come to London, and who later came to know Amy Winehouse at the Ten Room club. ‘We only talked for a couple of minutes, [because] he was sort of zoning out,’ says Altman, but he remembers Jimi saying he’d been booed in Germany. ‘Hendrix was absolutely mortified that he’d got booed … People were throwing things at the stage.’ As Altman points out, Amy was also booed offstage in Europe at the last. It is a melancholy coincidence that two great careers ended in the same shabby way.

  Jimi spent Tuesday night with Monika Dannemann at the Samarkand Hotel, a self-catering establishment on Lansdowne Crescent in Notting Hill, just off Ladbroke Grove. The hotel was part of a handsome Victorian crescent of four-storey houses smothered in white stucco. Monika rented a little room in the basement. The entrance was via steps down from the street into the area at the front of the house, with access to a communal garden at the back. The Samarkand was anonymous and unprepossessing, one of countless small hotels in west London, named incongruously for a city on the ancient Silk Road. It was an unlikely place for Jimi Hendrix to end his days.

  On Wednesday, Jimi returned to Ronnie Scott’s. This time he sat in with Eric Burdon. Again he spent the night with Monika at the Samarkand Hotel.

  The following day, Thursday, 17 September, Jimi and Monika rose late at the Samarkand. After they had dressed, Monika took photographs of Jimi in the garden. Jimi spoke to Mitch Mitchell on the telephone. Then he and Monika went out, calling at the Cumberland Hotel to collect his messages, and doing some shopping.

  During the day the couple met a well-off young man named Philip Harvey, who invited them to dinner at his home. Monika became jealous of the women present at the dinner party. ‘It was a lovely evening until nine thirty when the woman introduced as Monika got fed up with the other girls,’ Harvey said. ‘She stormed out and Jimi followed her. They had the most terrible row for about half an hour.’ Nevertheless, the couple returned to the Samarkand where it seems they had more
to eat and drink.

  In the early hours of Friday, 18 September, Jimi left the hotel to attend a party at the apartment of a friend. After a while, Monika turned up at the address, ringing the door bell and honking her car horn to get Jimi’s attention. Although Jimi seemed irritated by her presence, he returned to the Samarkand with her.

  Monika Dannemann gave so many differing accounts of what happened during the remaining hours of that night, when she and Jimi were alone at her hotel, that it is hard to know what really happened. But at some point Jimi took some of her sleeping tablets and lay down on her bed. Nobody knows for sure how many pills he swallowed, or whether he understood what he was taking. The drug was a strong barbiturate called Vesparax. Half a tablet was enough to put a man to sleep for eight hours. Jimi may have swallowed as many as nine, the number Monika counted as missing the next day. He had also been drinking. This was as foolish and reckless as Brian Jones drinking and taking pills, then going for a swim. But it was in character. During his years on the road Jimi had got into the habit of using drugs indiscriminately and immoderately. ‘Jimi would take a handful of shit, not even knowing what it was,’ says his friend Deering Howe. ‘It was not uncommon for him to do something like that.’