The Grail Guitar

by Chris Adams

  The Grail Guitar

  The Grail Guitar

  The Search for Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” Telecaster

  Chris Adams

  ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield

  A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

  Copyright © 2016 by Chris Adams

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Adams, Chris, 1967–

  Title: The grail guitar : the search for Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple haze” Telecaster / Chris Adams.

  Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015045003 (print) | LCCN 2015045990 (ebook) | ISBN 9781442246799 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442246805 (electronic)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hendrix, Jimi. | Hendrix, Jimi. Purple haze. | Telecaster guitar.

  Classification: LCC ML410.H476 A32 2016 (print) | LCC ML410.H476 (ebook) | DDC 787.87166092–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045003

  TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Martin Vinson

  Acknowledgments

  First of all, I must say that without the input of my friend, Eric Barnett, this project would never have seen the light of day. It was he who initiated the Quest, and whenever the going got tough, his dogged, meticulous research kept it alive. For his constant help and support, through the good times and the bad, I owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

  Central to our researches into Jimi Hendrix’s time in New York and his last days in London was Linda Porter, to whom I send a special thank you; and ditto to Dempse for hooking us up.

  I must also highlight the role of the late Martin Vinson, to whom this book is dedicated, and that of John “Andy” Andrews who was kind enough to grasp the baton and run with it. Thanks to Trevor Williams for his unique contribution, along with Keith Bailey, Steve Joliffe, Jon Atkins, Ian Taylor, Mick Cork, Chris Ashman of Kentgigs, and Trevor Williams of Audience, without all of whom the jigsaw could not have been completed.

  For the German evidence and photos, a big thanks to Kevin Lang; and for crucial contacts and general advice, to Arnie Toshner. For the Munich photos and his reminiscences, I’m indebted to the late David Llewelyn, who even in his seventies seemed to have a greater lust for life than many half his age. For cover design and images, I thank my good friend Chester Studzinski, while others who kindly contributed key memories include Val Weedon, Jonathan Rowlands, Roger Mayer, Keith Jones, Pete Davies, and Ray Walton.

  Thanks are due to Brian Eastwood for his time and expertise; likewise to Chris Hewitt, Tom Henry, Jimmy Moon, Eric Barnett, Jonathan Cameron, and Pete Feenstra. Last but not least, let me register my gratitude to my agent, Charlie Viney, whose show of faith brought this project to fulfillment.

  Part I

  Sifting Fact from Fiction

  Chapter 1

  The Backup Guitar

  It’s January ’73 and I’m onstage at London’s famous Marquee Club with my band, String Driven Thing. At this point, we’re flying high. Newly signed to the uber-hip Charisma label, we recently opened for stablemates Genesis on their New York debut and we’re scheduled to support them on their upcoming UK Foxtrot tour. So tonight, we’re playing one of rock’s premiere venues, the habitat of various members of the music press who, if it takes their fancy, can kill your career at the stroke of a pen; but with a virtuoso violinist memorably described as “Paganini on acid,” we’re operating at the high end of the energy spectrum and audiences are responding in kind. There’s just one problem. We work with no drummer, so my rhythm guitar is basically the spine of the band, and just as we start climbing toward our incendiary climax, my low E string snaps, bringing the whole dynamic show juddering to a sudden halt.

  As I recall it, forty-odd years later, the blood still rushes to my face, but at the time, the Charisma brass were more concerned about the possibility of the same thing happening on a much larger stage, so the next day they sent me off to buy myself a suitable backup guitar. In those days, Shaftesbury Avenue was known as “Guitar Alley,” its shop windows full of gleaming axes, but choosing to ignore the first few displays, our roadie Arnie Toshner led me on down the street to a lower-profile outlet at the corner of Gerrard Place. This was Ivor Arbiter’s Sound City, the store frequented by the rock cognoscenti; in other words, where the pros went. There I started trying versions of my current model, an Epiphone Casino made by Gibson, essentially a slimmed-down version of the guitars used in the big band era, perfect for playing rhythm. But for some reason, my eyes kept being drawn to a white Fender Telecaster with a black scratchplate (or pickguard) hanging unobtrusively in the side window. Now common sense should have told me this wasn’t a good backup for the Epiphone, for Fender and Gibson are the chalk and cheese of the guitar world, but selection is all about trial and error, and as soon as I picked it up, I felt immediately there was something special about it. Maybe it was the grungy, spitting tone of the back pickup or the way the dark rosewood fretboard seemed to caress my fingertips, but either way, this old “Tele” felt just right, and when it comes to buying an instrument, that’s the ultimate acid test.

  Okay, so it was a bit beat up, with scratches and little dents on the white bodywork, but for me that just added to its character, as it obviously had “history,” which is another way of saying that it had been played a lot. I also noticed that the Fender logo was missing from the headstock, but hey, I didn’t need a transfer to tell me it was the genuine article. That’s the kind of thing that only puts off purists, and I’m not one to get hung up on nerdy details. The same was true for the machineheads, which weren’t the original neat Klusons that Fenders usually sported but a set of clumpier German Schallers. But though the aesthetics didn’t bother me, there was something weird about them, because when I went to tune up the strings, for some reason, they worked in reverse, so turning the peg away from me loosened the string rather than tightening it.

  This obviously meant that they’d come from a left-handed guitar, so I called the salesman across to ask why. I say salesman, but over the years, I’ve found that guys who work in music stores are another breed entirely. They’re invariably guitar freaks who can play frightening licks faster than Albert Lee and usually have the kind of encyclopedic knowledge of pickups and fretboards that would give Eric Clapton an inferiority complex. So with a degree of trepidation I asked him why this nicely beat-up, old Tele had left-handed tuners, at which point he glanced around the shop and said, sotto voce, “One of Hendrix’s roadies brought the guitar in.”

  Now by this point, Jimi had been dead for over two years, so why someone would still qualify as a “Hendrix roadie” was an open question. But to be honest, that didn’t really register with me at the time, for sitting with the guitar in my lap, I knew instinctively that I was meant to buy it. So I gave the guy the asking price of £150 and waited
as he put it in a crocodile-skin case; then Arnie picked it up, and we headed back out onto the busy Soho street.

  From the get-go I knew I’d got myself a great guitar. I found the rosewood fretboard really suited me, and when I plugged it to my Hiwatt head, it sounded even better. Halfway through that Foxtrot tour I switched permanently from the Epiphone, and afterward, I never looked back. I used it on our next album, which for reasons I will later disclose was a rather doomy affair, and in all the years since, despite occasional financial woes, I’ve resisted the temptation to sell it. When my younger sons came of age to play, they both used it in their band, and as I write, it’s sitting next door in the corner of the music studio in our terraced house on the south side of Glasgow, maybe a little more battered with the decades of use but essentially still the same beast that I picked up in Sound City all those years ago.

  So that’s basically it. Over the next forty years I would occasionally trot out the story of the salesman’s offhand remark about the Hendrix roadie, and my muso (music-obsessed) friends would smile and, like me, wonder out loud whether the Great Man had really ever played it. But one day a couple of years ago, I happened to mention it to my old friend, Eric Barnett, a recently retired insurance inspector. Finding himself with lots of time on his hands, Eric had used his PC to indulge his passion for medieval Scottish history, and in the process, he had become something of an expert Internet researcher. So recounting my story was a bit like waving an exotic fly at an inquisitive brown trout; he quickly took the line and returned a few days later with news of a whole series of Internet forum threads about the rumored existence of a missing Hendrix Telecaster, which had supposedly been used on some of his early London recordings.

  Now I had always been open to the possibility that I owned one of Hendrix’s axes. After all, he had been a unique gypsy spirit who had gone through scores of guitars in his short career and had reportedly given many of them away to friends and fellow musos; but the idea that I had this specific Hendrix Telecaster was a bridge too far. I told Eric that for a start, there wasn’t a scintilla of proof for this kite he was attempting to fly, and it was very unlikely that any could be found, forty odd years after the event. But he was not to be fobbed off so easily.

  “Just let me do a wee bit more digging,” he said, and if only for the sake of peace and quiet I reluctantly acquiesced.

  A week later he was back with more info that suggested the Telecaster in question had originally belonged to Jimi’s bass player Noel Redding and included the nugget that one of the tracks it had been used on was none other than “Purple Haze.” For me, this was getting really ridiculous. I pointed out that there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of old Telecasters out there, so the chances of it being mine were literally thousands to one. Besides, like Hendrix and Mitch Mitchell, Noel Redding had been dead for many years, so there was no chance of getting information on the guitar from that source. But Eric was no longer a simple trout. He was by now a terrier, and he had his teeth into this, big style.

  “If it is the guitar, it should be worth a few bob.”

  I couldn’t help but agree that this would indeed be the case.

  “Ok, so if I can prove it, will you give me a finder’s fee?”

  And again, for the sake of peace and quiet, I agreed.

  So off he went to resume his digital digging, and I heard nothing for a couple of weeks. But behind the veil of silence, Eric had made the first real breakthrough when he went in search of Noel Redding’s musical roots. Born in Folkestone, he had come up through the thriving Kent beat scene, firstly in a band called the Lonely Ones and then with an outfit called Neil Landon and the Burnettes that had gone off to Germany in the midsixties. On a website called Kentgigs, Eric came across blurbs about both bands, together with details of their lineups and grainy photos of the would-be stars, taken at the height of the sixties’ beat boom. These bygone snippets led him to posts on a German fansite by the bass player from the Burnettes, Kevin Lang, who was seemingly intent on correcting the kind of mistakes that grow on the Internet like weeds on a lawn. Immediately Eric knew he was onto someone with a penchant for detail and enough time on his hands to be bothered about this kind of trivia.

  So following up this lead, he managed to find an e-mail address and fired off the first of what would prove to be hundreds of e-mails in our lengthy quest for the missing guitar. His enquiry was simple and straight to the point: did Kevin have any recollection of Noel Redding owning a Fender Telecaster during their stint together in the Burnettes? Back came the reply to the effect that not only did Kevin remember the guitar but also he had actually been with Noel on the day in 1965 when he purchased it brand new in the US Army PX in Frankfurt. It had been a white ’64 Telecaster with a rosewood fretboard.

  “And what’s yours?” asked Eric.

  I looked up from the hard copy of Kevin’s e-mail into his smug smile.

  “You know exactly what it is. A white ’64 Telecaster with a rosewood fretboard!”

  Chapter 2

  “Purple Haze” Rumors

  Let me say at the outset that I’d always believed the guy in Sound City, with his throwaway Jimi Hendrix line, because back in those days, music store salesmen and professional roadies had a symbiotic relationship that involved much mutual scratching of backs. Over the years, Hendrix’s road crews would have spent thousands of pounds in Sound City, on both gear and accessories such as leads, pedals, and amp repairs, so when it came to selling a guitar back, no questions would have been asked. It’s called the Ways and Means Act, and let’s just say it allowed some of the riches from the fat music-biz cats to trickle down to street level.

  But that said, and despite this intriguing nexus of coincidences, I told Eric Barnett bluntly that only a serial number could confirm that both guitars were one and the same. Undeterred, he said he’d like to keep digging, and on that basis I decided to check for myself these Internet rumors about “Jimi’s lost Tele.” I started with the forums where this mystical instrument had been a hot topic and soon found that opinions were polarized as follows. The orthodox view was, there’s no known photo of Hendrix playing a Tele, ergo he never played one, while the response was a series of stories about him using a Telecaster while on the road with Bobby Womack, after he came out of the US Army. There was even a twist to this tale that had Bobby throwing the Tele out of the tour bus window while Jimi was asleep. But to me this just didn’t ring true, for journeymen do not throw the tools of their trade away, and Womack had come up the hard way, so surely he would know the value of things.

  Added to all this idle chatter was talk of a “Hendrix ad,” which had become a central thread in the fabric of these discussions. The naysayers claimed that all these rumors of Jimi philandering with a Tele came from this one ad, while the converted claimed the ad makers must have based it on something. When I finally tracked down a YouTube clip, it turned out to be an eighties TV Cola advert in which a child actor, complete with Afro, is found walking down a street in early fifties’ Seattle. On both sides of the road is a pawn shop, each with a sidewalk drinks dispenser—one for Coke, one for Pepsi—while in one window is an accordion and in the other a white Telecaster with a black scratchplate, looking very much like mine. So the boy is faced with a choice. Will he plump for the accordion, become a black Flaco Jiménez and get into Coke, or will he gravitate to the Tele and stick to Pepsi? Well, there’s a double irony here, as I’m sure the Madison Avenue execs were well aware, for in the real world, it seems Hendrix got a mixture of both, which would be fine if one of them wasn’t God’s way of telling you that you’re earning too much money.

  However, beneath the heat generated by these disputes lay a significant subtext, for most of the naysayers were Stratocaster players, and it’s a fact of life that proponents of the Strat tend to look down their noses at the humble Tele. To them it’s a failed Neanderthal experiment on the way to Homo sapiens, so the very idea that the Einstein of the Strat would have deigned to pick up th
is raw slab of wood, let alone coax music from it, was basically anathema to these musical snobs. But snobbery aside, I could see that they had a valid point, for Hendrix was the quintessential Strat player, so why would he ever have chosen to use a Telecaster on his early recordings? As far as I could see, there were two possibilities. If you recall, the rumors had him borrowing the Tele from his bass player, Noel Redding, which suggested that either his current Strat was out of action or the Tele gave him a particular sound that a Strat couldn’t. Eric had actually come up with a quote from Jimi saying that in his opinion, the Telecaster had only two tones, “one good, one bad,” and although this did indicate that he’d played one earlier in his career, it didn’t exactly endorse the notion that he would use a Tele in the studio as a matter of choice. But there was another puzzling element to the rumors, namely, that Hendrix had used the Tele to record overdubs variously on “Hey Joe,” “Fire,” or “Purple Haze.” I found this last idea unthinkable, but more to the point, I knew enough about his recording career to say for certain that “Purple Haze” had not been laid down at the same time as “Hey Joe”; so either Jimi had been without his Strat on a serial basis or he had indeed used the Tele by choice. Either way, Eric was now busy getting dates for all the relevant sessions and would try to find out if any of the studio participants were still aboveground, though whether they’d be willing to talk to a couple of nonentities from Glasgow was doubtful.

  One other clue we pulled from the rumor mill was a quote ascribed to a member of his road crew, a Glaswegian called Eric Barrett. Now leaving aside the geographical coincidence and the near identical name, the reason the quote caught our eye was because it referred to him as Jimi’s “guitar tech.” As we’ll see, the typical late sixties roadie had to be a Jack of all trades, but as gigs got bigger and the budget larger, some did specialize in specific duties, so Barrett had obviously been responsible for keeping his axes in order. This lent greater weight to the quote, which seemingly came from an interview he’d given to a special guitar issue of Hit Parader magazine in July 1969 on the subject of Jimi’s techniques in the studio. According to Barrett, any time he was overdubbing, “there was always an old Tele lying around, which he’d use occasionally to get a certain effect.”