Jimi and Monika fell asleep. Monika woke sometime between nine and eleven a.m. She gave different times in her various statements and interviews. She said Jimi was sleeping when she woke. So she went out to buy cigarettes. When she returned a few minutes later she said she noticed he had been sick and raised the alarm. This was almost certainly a lie. Based on the evidence of the ambulance crew, and the doctor who examined Jimi’s body, the more likely scenario is that Monika awoke to find Jimi dead, or dying, and panicked.
She rang friends to ask what to do, including Alvenia Bridges, who was spending the night with Eric Burdon. Monika spoke to Burdon, apparently telling him that she was having trouble waking Jimi. In his memoir, Burdon writes: ‘[I] told her to slap his face and give him some coffee.’ After Burdon put the phone down he realised this could be serious and rang Monika back to tell her sharply to call an ambulance. ‘She didn’t want to, as there were drugs in the apartment.’
Burdon lost his temper. He screamed: ‘Call a fucking ambulance.’
A call was made at eleven eighteen a.m. An ambulance arrived at the Samarkand within nine minutes. The emergency workers, Reginald Jones and John Sava, found the door to Monika’s room open and Jimi alone on the bed, lying on his back, fully dressed and covered with vomit. ‘There was tons of it all over the pillow, black and brown it was,’ Jones told Tony Brown, author of the authoritative book Hendrix: The Final Days. ‘His airway was completely blocked.’ His bowels had also opened. Jones and Sava wrapped Jimi in bedding and carried him up the area steps to the ambulance where Sava used an aspirator to try to revive him while Jones drove them to St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington. The crew were obliged to attempt resuscitation even though Sava could not find a pulse and Jimi was not breathing.
Eric Burdon’s part in what happened next is slightly mysterious. The singer writes in his book Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood that his girlfriend Alvenia went to the Samarkand Hotel after Monika’s call, and Burdon followed her by cab. When he arrived at the address he saw the flashing blue lights of an ambulance and heard, from outside the flat, Monika and Alvenia weeping and wailing. But the ambulance men – who had seemingly just removed the body – didn’t mention meeting the women, or Burdon, who goes on to describe in his book how he went into the hotel room and found a note in Jimi’s hand-writing. ‘Come on, let’s clean this place up,’ he told the women. ‘Let’s get rid of everything we don’t want the cops to take. They’ll be here any minute now.’ Having removed items from the flat, including the note, Burdon and the women left.
At St Mary Abbots Hospital, Dr John Bannister attempted to resuscitate Jimi, even though he could not find a pulse. The doctor was struck by the condition of the body. Hendrix was covered with vomit, most of which seemed to be red wine. His clothes and hair were matted with it, and his throat and lungs were congested, leading the doctor to conclude that Jimi had ‘drowned in red wine’. He certified him dead at twelve forty-five p.m., but he had been dead for hours. ‘He was completely cold. I personally think he probably died a long time before. He was cold and he was blue.’
A pathologist told the inquest that Jimi Hendrix had died due to inhalation of his vomit, after taking an overdose of sleeping tablets – eighteen times the normal dose. His blood alcohol level was estimated at 100 milligrams per decilitre when he had swallowed the pills, enough to make a person uncoordinated. ‘The question why he took so many sleeping tablets cannot be safely answered,’ concluded HM Coroner Gavin Thurston, who said there was no evidence that he had intended to commit suicide and recorded an open verdict. Jimi’s body was flown home to Seattle for the funeral.
4
When Janis Joplin’s publicist telephoned her to say that Jimi Hendrix had died, and to ask if she had a comment for the press, Janis said: ‘I wonder what they’ll say about me when I die.’
Janis was staying at the Landmark Hotel on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, parallel with the tourist stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. John Byrne Cooke booked her and her band into the Landmark when they were in Los Angeles to record because it was near Sunset Sound Studios, the rates were reasonable and the rooms had kitchens so the musicians could cook for themselves if they wanted to. The Landmark was a typical Californian courtyard motel, built around a swimming-pool, with a distinctive double-height glass lobby. Janis checked into Room 105, a suite near the lobby comprised of a double bedroom, kitchen, a corridor-like dressing room and a bathroom. The front windows overlooked Franklin Avenue and, on the other side of the street, a small park with palm trees. If she was using drugs, Janis could stand at her window and watch for her connection coming across the park. She could also leave her Porsche – decorated with a psychedelic mural – conveniently under her window on the drive if she couldn’t be bothered to put it in the underground garage.
Janis didn’t attend Jimi Hendrix’s funeral in Seattle on Thursday, 1 October 1970. She was in LA that day, signing her new will. By this document she left her estate in equal parts to her parents and two siblings, ordering that her body be cremated and that up to $2,500 (£1,572) set aside from her estate to pay for a ‘gathering’ for her friends. It is striking that Janis attended to her last will and testament three days before she died. People contemplating suicide often take the time to settle their affairs. Did Janis have suicide in mind? She had spoken of it. Yet friends do not believe she was suicidal. On the contrary, she seemed full of life. ‘My God, I had never seen her happier,’ says her lawyer Bob Gordon, who recalls that Janis had just been to the beauty parlour to have her hair tinted when she came to sign her will. ‘She literally skipped into my office, being very joyous.’
Maybe Janis was pretending; she was forever putting on a show. ‘I don’t think I ever saw the real Janis,’ says her friend Lyndall Erb. The main cause for Janis’s excitement at this time, perhaps her over-excitement, was that she had a new lover, a handsome college boy named Seth Morgan, who claimed to be related to the J. P. Morgan banking dynasty, which seemed to be part of the attraction. Janis was tired of being the one with all the money. Apart from his wealth, Seth Morgan had the sort of bad-boy attraction Amy Winehouse found in Blake Fielder-Civil, and both men affected not to care that they were dating a star. Janis’s friends distrusted Seth, as many of Amy’s friends distrusted Blake. ‘He was a nice guy, but not very nice to her,’ says Lyndall Erb. ‘Several of us tried to get her to see the real side of him. He was very insincere about what he was doing with her.’
Based on a brief relationship, Janis was engaged to marry Seth. He was staying at her house in Marin County and had been coming to LA at weekends while Janis was recording. He was due to fly down again on Saturday, 3 October. Janis had an idea that she and Seth might get married while he was in LA. When she spoke to Bob Gordon about this on the Thursday before the weekend, her lawyer suggested he draw up a prenuptial agreement, even though, like Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix, Janis was not rich. ‘[Janis] didn’t have a lot of money … She had bought a house by the time she died, so that probably had some value. But in terms of having available money to live a carefree kind of existence, she wasn’t there.’ Janis told her lawyer to draw up the papers.
Recording was going well. Janis had decided to call her new album Pearl, a nickname she’d recently adopted. Songs on the album included a cover of Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, which showed that she could sing a ballad effectively without yelling. It is the song she became best known for posthumously, a tender number that turns melancholy when Janis sings, ‘freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’. Janis had a good working relationship with her producer, Paul Rothchild, who found her more simpatico than his other big client, Jim Morrison, and the Full Tilt Boogie Band was the best band Janis had worked with. The young Canadians were all good musicians, organic yet professional. They liked Janis and she liked them. ‘We were near the end of the record. The record was going to be OK. She loved it,’ says Ken Pearson, whose organ break at the end
of ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ gives the song its final flourish.
Still, Janis was not entirely happy during the recording of Pearl. ‘The feeling is that she started fooling around with heroin again because recording was boring,’ says John Byrne Cooke. There was another user at the Landmark, a girlfriend of Janis’s named Peggy Caserta. When Janis recognised a dealer visiting the hotel to supply Caserta with heroin, she decided she wanted some, too. ‘She called the room and she said, “Bring me some.” And I said “No.” And she said, “Don’t think that if you don’t give me some, I can’t get it, because I can get it the same way you got it,”’ Caserta later said in a TV interview. ‘And she said, “I’m coming up to your room, and I want some.” And she did, and she came in, and [said] that she had gotten me high so many times, and how could I possibly not get her high? And, um, we did. And she started using again.’
Janis worked in the studio with her band on Saturday, 3 October. She had been expecting Seth to arrive to keep her company, maybe to make her his wife, but he hadn’t left San Francisco yet. Janis called the house and spoke to Lyndall Erb. ‘Seth was supposed to go down to LA that afternoon. He didn’t want to drive to the airport. He wanted me to drive him to the airport, but the only car I had there was his, which was really hard to drive, and I said, “No, I don’t want to drive your car.” And so he didn’t go. And he sort of blamed it on me. But he could have driven himself to the airport and parked his car. I think he just didn’t want to go,’ says Lyndall, adding that Seth was entertaining another woman at the house. Janis spoke to both her housemate and her lover on Saturday night. ‘She was a little down that Seth wasn’t coming down, and she was not really happy,’ says Lyndall, recalling their last conversation. ‘The recording session was going really well, but typical of recording sessions it was taking a long time, and I think she was feeling a little lonely.’ ‘Lonely’ is the adjective Janis’s friends use about her time and again. One of the last songs she recorded in LA was ‘A Woman Left Lonely’.
After work on Saturday night, Janis accompanied members of her band to Barney’s Beanery, a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. They had something to eat and drink together and Janis told the boys she loved them. Suicidal people often make a point of telling friends and family they love them just before they end their lives. Around eleven thirty p.m. Janis gave organist Ken Pearson a lift back to the Landmark in her Porsche, which she parked on the drive. The park opposite was in darkness. Those of an imaginative nature might picture the sepulchral figure of Death loitering in the shadows beneath the palm trees, waiting for Janis to come home.
It is certainly easy to imagine Janis feeling intensely lonely as she returned to Room 105 that night. Seth had said he would be there, but he had let her down. As Janis sang in ‘A Woman Left Lonely’, she surely knew that her boyfriend was taking her for granted, and marriage would be a mistake.
It is not known what Janis did in her room for the next hour and a half, but at around one a.m. she got her heroin works out and injected a vein in her left arm, which bore the marks of previous injections. Then she put away her works and went to the hotel lobby – a few strides down the corridor – to get change from the night clerk for the cigarette machine, returning to 105 with the pack. She closed the door and went to her bed, which was in the corner facing the window. She started to undress, stripping down to her blouse and underwear, and reached to put her cigarette packet on the nightstand. As she did so she keeled over, hitting her face on the table as she fell to the floor.
Although the following day was Sunday, Janis and her band were due back at Sunset Sound in the evening to complete one of the last tracks on Pearl. As the day wore on Lyndall Erb became concerned that she couldn’t raise Janis on the telephone, and made calls to find out where she was. Seth Morgan called John Byrne Cooke to say he was about to fly to LA, belatedly, but he couldn’t reach Janis to arrange to be picked up. In the early evening, Byrne Cooke called Paul Rothchild, who told him that Janis hadn’t arrived at the studio. Where was she?
John Byrne Cooke gathered together three members of the band at the motel and took them down to his car in the underground car park to drive them to the studio. As he pulled out of the car park onto the drive he glanced across and saw Janis’s Porsche parked under her window. ‘I thought, Wait a minute!’ he says, casting his mind back to that evening. ‘I just pulled the car back into the garage, so I wouldn’t block the entrance to the garage. I said, “Wait here. I’m just going to go check.” And there was a light on in Janis’s room. It was dusk. It was Los Angeles dusk, in early October, so you’ve passed the equinox, and it was just dark enough, I thought, that you might just turn on the lights … Maybe she’d just come in.’ Byrne Cooke went to the front desk to get a key for 105. He let himself in. Janis was on the floor, between the bed and the wall. She was dead to the touch, as she had been for hours, with the change from the cigarette machine still clasped in her cold hand.
The coroner asked members of the band about Janis’s state of mind. ‘I remember he said to me, “Did she ever feel down?”’ says Ken Pearson. ‘Now isn’t that a naïve question to ask me? I said, “The title of her [third] album was I Got Them Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!” “Oh,” he said. “Well, what’s Kozmic Blues?” I said, “I think it’s more than you can’t pay the rent.” And so he said, “So, she was suicidal?” “No, I’m not saying that …”’ In fact, Janis had seemed fine to Pearson that last night in Barney’s Beanery. Nobody knows for sure what was in her mind, but her death certificate records that she died by accident, caused by acute heroin-morphine intoxication – that is, an overdose. John Byrne Cooke and Laura Joplin believe Janis accidentally injected an unusually strong batch of heroin. Maybe. But the decision to shoot up was hers, and Janis knew the risk.
Janis’s friends honoured her will by having a raucous party at her expense after the cremation. ‘We really enjoyed it. It was kind of over the top, to tell you the truth,’ says Sam Andrew. ‘There was a lot of drugs, you know, a lot of very happy people.’ Pearl was completed posthumously and released to acclaim. The album and the single ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ went to number one.
The members of the Full Tilt Boogie Band found themselves out of a job at the point of their greatest success. ‘It’s like the guy who pulls the tablecloth out, and everything is still standing … Now what do we do?’ says bass guitarist Brad Campbell. ‘[Janis] was great. She wasn’t always wild, what people thought … She was an intelligent person. A lot of intelligent people can get thrown off by something, and there is no path back. I think that’s what happened to her … I think that was probably [the case] with Amy [Winehouse], too.’
* See the Appendix, page 303, for the 27 long-list.
Ten
THE CRACK-UP
Die at the right time: thus teaches Zarathustra.
Nietzsche
1
‘You’re drinking with number three,’ Jim Morrison supposedly told friends in Barney’s Beanery after Janis Joplin died. The quote is apocryphal but irresistible, suggesting that, following the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, Jim foresaw his own end.
With hindsight we know that Jim had nine months to live. Unless he was clairvoyant, or determined to commit suicide, he cannot have known that death was so close. And, like Hendrix and Joplin, he had reasons to be optimistic about the future at this stage in his life. The Doors recorded some of their best work during these last months, and Jim fulfilled an ambition to set aside his pop career and go to France, where he pursued his interests in poetry and film. Some of his friends point to these factors as evidence that Jim was not in terminal decline in 1970–71, dismissing the image of a fat, drink-sodden, depressed and washed-up rock star as a misleading cliché. It is a simplification, but at the same time all was far from well.
Jim was a young man of 26, soon to turn 27, experiencing the nervous breakdown he’d warned his band mates about. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, another American drunkard who enjoyed phenomenal success
in his twenties and then went into self-destructive decline, Jim had reached the point of crack-up, which Fitzgerald wrote about in an autobiographical story of that title. The crack-up broke both men, resulting in them dying young: Fitzgerald as a recovering alcoholic in Los Angeles in 1940, Morrison as a drunk and drug-abuser in Paris in 1971. Both seemed tired of life at the end, which was equally true of Jones, Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain and Winehouse.
A significant factor in Jim Morrison’s decline was his conviction, in September 1970, for indecent exposure and profanity in Miami. He was acquitted on the other charges. The sentence was six months’ hard labour, plus a fine. Jim was freed on bail, pending an appeal, which could go all the way to the Supreme Court and take a long time to resolve, but his lawyer, Max Fink, seemed to think that Jim might have to serve time. ‘Max Fink was making it very clear that Jim could go to jail, and he was a very, very scared fellow at that point, and I firmly believe that a lot of his actions in Paris were the result of the pressure of the outcome of the trial,’ says Vince Treanor, the Doors’ road manager. ‘That’s going to weigh on anybody.’
In the meantime Jim returned to Hollywood where, despite his fame and money, he lived the life of a barfly. The nexus of this existence was the crossroads of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard. Barney’s Beanery is on the north-east corner of the intersection. Diagonally opposite was the building the Doors used as their rehearsal space and office; they called it their workshop. On the other side of the street was a strip bar Jim frequented, next to which was the Alta Cienega Motel where he sometimes crashed when drunk. Unlike rock-star contemporaries who were buying big houses, and living expansively, Jim lived like a bum. When he got tired of the Alta Cienega Motel, which was a dump, he would check into the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, which was more comfortable, but his was still a surprisingly low-rent lifestyle.
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