Brian Jones introduced Jimi as “the most exciting performer I’ve ever heard” and the Experience attacked the stage with a frenzied combination of rock/blues/jazz/Dylan that completely totaled the agog audience. Jimi rode his guitar, had sex with it, prayed to it, and then “sacrificed” the newly hand-painted Strat by squirting it with lighter fluid, killing it with fire, and then raising it from the dead. Pity the poor Mamas and Papas, who had to step onto that charred stage to close the festival. The Los Angeles Times said that after the Monterey spectacle, Jimi had “graduated from rumor to legend.” As the Experience went on to stun American audiences, they found that nobody wanted to follow them or open for them. After one show at the Fillmore in San Francisco, the headliners, Jefferson Airplane, just hid out until the Experience left town.
The band ripped up the Whiskey-a-Go-Go in Los Angeles. I was there—the entire building was full of raging, unearthly sound. But as the Experience changed the frequency in L.A., Mike Jeffrey was booking them on a tour with the Monkees. What could he have been thinking? The screaming teenybops just didn’t get it, and Jimi played most of the gigs with his back to the audience. Jimi did get friendly with Peter Tork, but the Experience lasted only a few days with the TV pop stars. Jimi’s sense of humor surfaced when he told NME that he thought the Monkees were replacing him on the tour with Mickey Mouse.
When asked by Open City magazine about “sexual and violent” live shows, Jimi responded, “A lot of people think what I do with my guitar is vulgar. I don’t think it’s vulgar sex … . It’s a spontaneous act on my part, and a fluid thing. It’s not an act, but a state of being at the time I’m doing it. My music, my instrument, my sound, my body are all one action with my mind … .” Jimi was still tripping on psychedelics, his mind wide open to astrology, numerology, the I Ching. During sessions for the second Experience album, Axis: Bold as Love, he was even experimenting with the ancient meanings, dynamics, and energy patterns of colors, weaving reds, blues, and greens into his rainbow of pounding sound.
The band played 255 shows in 1967. There was almost too much road travel. After a short Christmas break they were back at it again, and Jimi got into some trouble in Sweden. He had had a few drinks and proceeded to destroy Mitch Mitchell’s room and everything in it, putting his hand through the window before Mitch finally had to sit down on Jimi to stop the devastation. The police were called and Jimi was charged with criminal damage and hustled off to the hospital. For such a gentle, spiritual soul, Jimi seemed to have had quite a temper, sometimes taking it out on the women in his life.
Axis went straight into the American Top Twenty, and another successful tour of the United States followed. When I’m asked what my favorite live show is, I always say the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Shrine Auditorium on February 10, 1968. I felt like part of a levitating congregation in an electric church, awash in colored holy lights, drowning in screaming guitar chords.
When the Experience hit Seattle, Jimi was met at the airport by his father, Al, his new stepmother, Ayako, and her daughter, Janie. Jimi must have been nervous about playing his hometown, because reviews for the show were mixed. But Al seemed to have had fun at the concert: “We were all going in the back door, and of course the security were all around, and a lot of fans around there saw Jimi.” Al laughs, wiping away tears. “And we were going in and the guy got this big, large door open, and some of the fans just surged forward and Jimi says, ‘You just go on in!’ and the security guy said, ‘Hey! No!’ He was having a hard time holding them back, and ol’ Jimi, he’s going to let them go on in!” After an uncomfortable appearance at his old high school, the band headed for Texas.
Nonstop life on the road was (and still can be) dangerous and confusing, with kiss-ass strangers offering musicians double doses of all kinds of drugs, which were usually gobbled up for escape, sleep, and to beat off boredom. I remember Mitch taking a handful of downers and then asking someone else for more, having completely forgotten that he had just ingested enough to knock him out cold. And there were internal squabbles. Sometimes Jimi was moody and irritable, taking it out on his constant companions, Mitch and Noel, though Noel seemed to get the brunt of Jimi’s outbursts. And there were too many women. Devon Wilson was always around, a wild, wiseass black beauty, always on the hustle, but Jimi had a hot spot for her. He had a problem saying no and regularly had several girls on his arms, in his lap, and under the covers. And they were constantly at each other’s throats. There were riots at every gig. Every night was full of chaos, and everybody wanted a piece of it.
At the gig in Montreal a drunken Jim Morrison tried to get up onstage and help Jimi out, but Jimi wasn’t interested. “Hey, do you know who I am? I’m Jim Morrison of the Doors.” Jimi responded, “Yeah, I know who you are, and I’m Jimi Hendrix.” A friend of mine saw Jimi jamming at the Scene club and recalls Jim Morrison “slithering” across the dance floor to the stage, crawling up Jimi’s body, and attempting to unzip his pants. She says it was obvious Morrison wanted to give Jimi head, but that Jimi was into his playing and “brushed him off like an unwanted pest.”
Oddly enough, the Experience was booked into the black district of Newark the night Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot, and instead of the usual set, Jimi walked out onstage and said, “This is for a friend of mine,” and for a change the audience was silent and tearful. Not long before Jimi died, he was approached by the Black Panthers, who wanted him as a spokesperson, but according to Noel Redding in his book, Are You Experienced?, “Jimi was never heavy about being black, he was into beingjimi—human being, pop superstar. When his blackness became an issue, he dealt with it, but he never put it out front.”
Jimi Hendrix was dissatisfied. He wanted to stretch further than he thought the Experience could go. He was weary of the constant touring, bored with his “wild man” image. And there were problems with Chas Chandler. Jimi felt he was being held down creatively. The sessions at the Record Plant became big parties full of hangers-on looking for a buzz. Chas thought Jimi’s LSD taking had gotten out of hand, claiming that Mike Jeffrey and Jimi were spending too much time in the acid zone together. Mike, whose prime concern was making money, soon became Jimi’s solo manager. A whole lot of money was being made, but where was it going?
I spoke to a friend of Jimi’s, Alan Douglas, who now runs the nonprofit Jimi Hendrix Foundation, and he told me a story about Jimi’s first hundred-thousand-dollar offer. “It was all booked. He called me up one night and said, ‘I gotta talk to ya.’ I said, ‘Come on over,’ and he’s sitting there all night long telling me he’s getting a hundred thousand dollars in Cleveland and what are the kids gonna think? I said, ‘Just go play. It shows respect for your talent.’ After hours of conversation, he slept on the couch in the back room. Gerry Stickells [the road manager] calls at six and says, ‘I’m coming over with the limo at seven-thirty for an eight-thirty plane.’ I woke Jimi up, gave him a cup of coffee, and we’re walking downstairs and he was in front of me. There’s the limo driver, uniform on, standing there with the door open. Jimi takes three steps up the stairs, hesitates, turns right, and runs down the street, and nobody saw him for two days! He ran, he ran his ass off. I looked down the street and he was gone. Mike had the police out.”
More touring of Europe and the States, one tour running into the next, a stoned-out crazy blur. At JFK Airport Jimi was thrilled to see Jerry Lee Lewis and offered his hand to the Southern rock legend. Jerry Lee snubbed Jimi. It wasn’t the first time Jimi had had to face racial prejudice. Many hotels and restaurants had refused him entrance. In Mitch Mitchell’s book, Inside the Experience, he says, “Noel and I never really understood the pressures an American black person went through … . Hendrix wouldn’t go in certain restaurants or stores with us. We’d say, ‘Hey, why not?’ and he’d go, ‘No, I just do not want to go in there … .’ The potential racial problems were also magnified by people disliking not just Jimi for being black, per se, but because he was playing with two white boys.” Jimi seemed
to have no color at all, said Kathy Etchingham: “Even though he helped break down the barriers, he didn’t see color and neither did anybody else.”
By the time the third album, Electric Ladyland, was finished in November 1968, Jimi, Mitch, and Noel had decided to take a sabbatical from one another. Jimi spent some time in Los Angeles before returning to London and moving into Handel’s former home with Kathy Etchingham. Jimi was thrilled to be residing where Handel had composed his masterpieces and vowed to compose some of his own. To a reporter Jimi said, “This is where Handel used to live. He’s got a blue plaque outside the door. I swear I’ll never need a plaque to remember me by.”
The Experience reunited for another tour of Europe, and in Copenhagen a young ice-skating teacher, Monika Danneman, was about to take her place in rock-and-roll history.
It has taken me quite a while to find Ms. Danneman—who was with Jimi the night he died and claims to have been his fiancée—and even longer to convince her to give me an interview. It seems she’s been raked through the rock-and-roll coals recently and is hesitant to say another word about the day Jimi Hendrix died.
My trip to East Sussex is a pain in the butt. The trains have been rerouted due to pounding rains, and I find myself bouncing through the storm in a crowded bus. Monika is a slim, angular, soft-spoken platinum blonde, sort of ageless but I suppose in her late forties. As I enter her cottage, “Little Thatch,” I’m surrounded by many, many images of Jimi—beautiful, frighteningly realistic paintings done by Monika. I am taken by one in which Jimi is lying in a pool of water reaching out for a slim blonde who stands above him. Monika offers me a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of tea, and as her cat purrs at my feet, I ask how she and Jimi met. It’s a story of two different worlds colliding—the sheltered ice-skater and the scary rock god meeting at a hotel bar and seeing mutual stars. Monika went to a couple of Jimi’s gigs with him and, after spending time with Jimi, realized he was “a very gentle, kind, considerate person.” She went to London a few months later, and though Jimi was still living with Kathy, Monika says he was spending a lot of time with her also. Kathy begs to differ. “She knew him for only four days,” she insists. “It’s well documented, and nobody will argue that he was on Brook Street with me. There was no sign of this woman. In fact, I had never met her. She met him in January ’69 in Dusseldorf, and she didn’t meet him again until September 15, 1970, and he was dead by the morning of the eighteenth.”
In her clipped accent, Monika tells me Jimi was “deeply spiritual”: “The spiritual path came through in his music.” Jimi had started calling his music “electric church music,” and in April of 1969 he told the International Times, “Jesus shouldn’t have died so early and then he could have got twice as much across. They killed him and then twisted up so many of the best things he said. Human hands started messing it all up and now so much of religion is hogwash.” On the bedside table, according to the interviewer, Jimi had a massive array of drugs and alcohol that he kept dipping into during the course of the interview. He told another journalist, “I’ve wanted to go into the hills sometimes, but I stayed. Some people are meant to stay and carry messages.” Jimi didn’t have much time left.
In May 1969 Jimi was busted for possession of heroin and hash resin at the airport in Toronto, where he was charged and then released on ten thousand dollars’ bail. Jimi, who had no interest in heroin, swore that the drugs had been planted, and with the trial scheduled for December 8, a seven-year sentence loomed over Jimi’s head like an invisible curse.
At the end of a blistering Experience set at Mile High Stadium in Denver, Jimi told the awed audience, “This is the last gig we’ll ever be playing together.” It was news to Noel, and even though he had been working with his own band, Fat Mattress, he was deeply hurt by Jimi’s public announcement and flew straight back to London. Mitch would continue to play drums with Jimi off and on until Jimi’s death.
Jimi was weary of being a rock star, very much needing to recuperate from the constant stresses. He needed time to expand and explore, telling one journalist he was tired of “being a clown.” Mike Jeffrey rented Jimi a rambling ranch house in Woodstock (Mitch called the place an “obscene mansion”) and it was soon full of an ever-expanding assortment of musicians bearing cocaine and psychedelics. Jimi started painting, he cruised around in his new silver Corvette, he even attempted some horseback riding. Calling his new group “A Band of Gypsys,” Jimi delivered a loose, freewheeling set at the Woodstock festival, concluding with a searing version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at six A.M. Monday morning while the muddy groovers packed up to go home.
There were too many people at the Woodstock house, and Jimi was under pressure to deliver another record while everybody was living well and getting high on his largesse. All the drug taking was creating a tense paranoia, and despite making fortunes around the world, Jimi never seemed to have enough money. Mike Jeffrey was about to buy a Manhattan recording studio in Jimi’s name—Electric Lady–and Jimi began to suspect Mike of ripping him off and talked often about leaving him. As a favor for some of Mike’s mob pals, Jimi opened a club called Salvation, only to be kidnapped by supposed mobsters and taken to a hideout for a couple of days. It was all a big screwup and Mike Jeffrey rushed in to save the day, but the damage had been done to Jimi. Who could he trust? Monika says Jimi was living in fear. “After he was rescued he wondered how Mike knew where he was. Then it clicked with Jimi that it was a setup by Mike to scare him. Jimi was constantly trying to get away. There were various threatening things happening.” Monika says it was too dangerous for Jimi to bring her to New York. “Jimi thought Mike was capable of anything and might use me for blackmail,” she told me, adding that Jimi just couldn’t up and leave Jeffrey. “Besides the contract there was loads of unreleased material, and for Jimi, losing control of his music was the biggest crime—that’s why he was fighting, trying to find a way out, at the same time realizing there was nothing in his bank account. He wanted to investigate and was getting threats because of that. He even felt the drug planting in Toronto could have been Mike trying to teach him a lesson.”
Alan Douglas, who was working with Miles Davis at this time and hooked Jimi up with jazz musicians like John McLaughlin, says that Mike was having a change of heart. “Somewhere along the way he took some acid or something, and he was changing his sense of values. Jimi was very intelligent, he knew when he was being conned in a second. The agents wouldn’t set up the tours in [geographical] sequence, everybody was taking it off the top, and Jimi wasn’t making any money. Mike wasn’t paying enough attention to that. And Mike didn’t give Jimi time to rest; he had no time to write, to record. Before he could finish overdubbing, he’d be pulled out of the studio, on the road. No time for contemplating. All these ideas kept popping in his head. He only had time to begin but never to finish. I think at the end Mike began to realize that it wasn’t right.”
Jimi may have told Judge Joseph Kelly at his December trial in Toronto that he had outgrown drugs, but as soon as the not guilty verdict came down, a very relieved Jimi went out and got bombed. He continued to hassle with Mike Jeffrey, who wanted him to re-form the Experience; he rehearsed the Band of Gypsys; he flew to England in May to try to talk Kathy Etchingham out of getting married. Monika says this was when Jimi called and proposed to her. “Naturally it made me happy because it meant he wanted not just a boy-girlfriend relationship, but even a step deeper than that.”
The Jimi Hendrix Experience with a couple of friends. (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/ VENICE, CALIF.)
The Band of Gypsys toured the United States, and when Jimi hit Seattle, he spent time with his family before heading off to Hawaii, where Mike had arranged for him to play and appear in a youth-oriented film called Rainbow Bridge. The film’s director, Chuck Wein, is an old friend of mine, and he recalled the night Jimi filmed the rambling, spontaneous monologue about seducing Cleopatra and making love to her in front of the Great Pyramid.
“The whole point
of Rainbow Bridge was to get Jimi’s inner process to reveal itself a bit,” Chuck enthuses. “He was so much more profound than anybody ever understood. Look at the lyrics—they’re initiatory. He challenged people. Instant in your face, and either you go for it and live to be a friend or you’re out. There was so much intensity. On the night we were going to do his scene, he was real solemn. He said, ‘Nobody gives a fuck what we do here anyway. Nobody has a clue about spirit, it’s worthless trying to do anything as part of “the message,” so why don’t we just kill ourselves?’ He proposed a triple suicide, which I was not about to start taking seriously.” I had always assumed Jimi had been high on acid for that scene, but Chuck assures me otherwise. “All he had was a bottle of rose wine.”
With Jimi’s million-dollar studio, Electric Lady, finally completed, he started recording “The First Rays of the New Rising Sun” and by August had completed several new tracks. The haunting ballad “Angel” was written about his mother, Lucille, after one of his many dreams about her. “Dolly Dagger” was for Devon Wilson. In fact, she was in the studio, and you can hear Jimi say, “Watch out, Devon, give me a little bit of that hell, eh?”
Right in the middle of the sessions, Mike booked Jimi a tour of Europe following an appearance at the Isle of Wight festival in England. Jimi was exhausted and staggered through Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, and when his bass player, Billy Cox, suffered a paranoid breakdown and went back home to his parents, Jimi decided to spend some time in England. Although he checked into the Cumberland Hotel, Monika says that Jimi asked her to rent a private flat so they could “have some peace.” She also insists that Jimi wanted to hold a “really big” press conference to announce their engagement, but because her father had just suffered a heart attack, she didn’t want to, as the shocking news might have killed him. “So I said, ‘I just can’t do it—on maybe the death of my father,’ and he understood that completely, but he was very upset, I was very upset. At the end Jimi talked to my mom, asking how long until he could do the press conference, and my mom said, ‘Wait till tomorrow, tomorrow might be better.’ And it went on for a few days—he never made it because he died.”
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 20