by Chris Adams
Obviously this could be crucial, though the actual text of the interview would have to be checked, and this highlighted a problem we would have to deal with going forward; for if we wanted to do justice to what Eric was now calling our “Quest,” then we’d have to start doing what real historians do and trace our sources back to what they term the “urtext.” The Oxford Dictionary defines this as the earliest-known version of any text, which basically meant that to separate the few genuine sheaves of wheat from the fields of Internet chaff, we needed to identify the horse, follow it back to its stable, prise open its mouth, and count its teeth. In other words, take nothing for granted!
To put this in context, while trawling through Hendrix biographies, Eric had come across a Telecaster reference in the index of ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky by David Henderson. Following it up, he found a passage that states that while playing with Curtis Knight and the Squires in New York, Hendrix had produced what he calls “metamusical rattlesnake subtone scratching sounds” from his Telecaster Duo Sonic. Now Henderson’s prose may be poetic, but sadly he’s way off beam on the guitar front, for the Duo Sonic is not a Telecaster; it’s actually an entry-level guitar that Fender aimed at people who couldn’t afford a Strat! In fact, the book has photos of Hendrix with this actual beast and anyone who knows anything about Teles could tell at a glance that this wasn’t one. But coming as it did from an otherwise well-researched biography, it showed us just what we were up against.
Checking the horse’s mouth in the Bobby Womack story proved much easier, for in 2006 he released a ghostwritten autobiography called Midnight Mover, and in it he tells how in ’64, Jimmy (as he then was) fell out with the Isley Brothers and was picked up by Gorgeous George Odell who was on a tour of black venues known as the chitlin’ circuit. On the bill with him was a lineup that Donald Trump’s millions couldn’t buy today. With Sam Cooke was Jackie Wilson, B. B. King, and Womack’s band the Valentinos, which included his brother Harry. At the time of the incident, they were in Atlanta, and according to Bobby, his seat on the bus was right behind Hendrix, “who had a white Telecaster with him all the while and the only time he put it down was when he had to go to the bathroom. Hendrix ate, drank—not that he did much of these—slept and shit with that goddam guitar in his hands.”
Then one night before going onstage, Harry hid a stash of two hundred dollars in one of his street shoes, but after the gig, the money was gone. Furious, he accused Hendrix of theft, but Jimmy denied it. The very next night on the bus, with everyone asleep, Bobby awoke to see his brother creeping down the aisle and then watched in horror as Harry pulled the white Telecaster from the luggage rack and threw it from the window of the speeding bus. Now Bobby was well aware of the special relationship that the young guitarist had had with that Tele, but filial loyalty demanded that he keep what he’d seen to himself, and just as Harry couldn’t prove who had taken his money, so Jimmy couldn’t prove what had happened to his guitar. In any event Gorgeous George bought him another axe at the next big town, though sadly Womack doesn’t say what make or model it was.
So here at last was definite proof that Hendrix had played a Tele, and indeed, had had a special relationship with it. As backup evidence, Eric then discovered that Hendrix was a big fan of the guitarist in Booker T. and the MGs, Steve Cropper, and had actually spent an afternoon with the archetypal Telecaster player after doorstepping him at the Stax studio in Memphis in late ’64. On this occasion he didn’t even bring his own guitar, so when Cropper invited him to play something, it was the big man’s Tele that Jimi used. Interestingly, Hendrix admitted later that he was surprised to find that Cropper was white, assuming that anyone who could make the guitar talk as he did would have to be black! That said, the MGs were that rarest of beasts in the South, a four-piece combo made up of two blacks and two whites.
So let’s just quickly recap on where our Quest had led us. Using the urtext method, we had established that Noel Redding had bought a white ’64 Telecaster in the Frankfurt PX in 1965, and around that time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Hendrix had also owned a Telecaster and had formed a special bond with it. Taking this as our starting point, we decided to focus on the incidents surrounding his move to London, and specifically on the guitar he was using in the period leading up to the “Purple Haze” sessions. But to do this, we must first take a look at the sequence of events that brought the unknown guitarist to these British shores.
Chapter 3
Ruby Tuesday
Strangely, I’d had another Jimi Hendrix connection much earlier in my life, but to explain how this came about, I must beg your indulgence and take you on a quick detour into my misspent youth.
My parents in their wisdom sent me to a Jesuit school, secure in the knowledge that these super educators usually turn out made-to-measure lawyers, doctors, and accountants but unaware that this infamous order of Catholic priests achieved their results largely by a system of control called the “ferula” (Latin for punishment), which was actually a whalebone covered in leather. Only one priest, known as the Headmaster of Discipline, could administer it, and he practiced his craft when lessons ended each day at four o’clock, at which point a queue of pupils would form outside his office, waiting patiently to have their palms turned into scalding slices of raw meat. In their grubby hands they each clutched a slip of paper, like a check, but known to us as a “bill,” which stated how many ferula we should receive: six, nine, or for real villains, twelve! These “bills” had been given to us by our teachers, who received them back after the punishment had been administered, to check against their counterfoil.
The name of the game then was fear, and it had done its job of keeping me on the straight and narrow path for almost four years, but there were two factors at work that were to stop me being transformed into the middle-class professional that my parents vicariously aspired of me. One was rock ’n’ roll, as embodied by Buddy Holly, and the other was the sight of a few exotic beatniks climbing the steps of the Glasgow School of Art, which sat diagonally across the road from our playground. Both of these factors spelled out rebellion, and each had lit a candle in my pubescent soul, so when one morning a few months before my sixteenth birthday I received two bills totaling fifteen ferula, instead of joining the queue that day, I stopped going to school; and to prevent the Jesuits contacting my parents to find out where I was, I removed the diaphragm from the receiver of the phone, meaning that when the bell rang, no sound came from the caller.
Naturally enough, after a few days of this, my mother reported a fault to the telephone company and an engineer duly arrived; after a quick perusal, he asked her if perchance any of her offspring played guitar. When the answer was in the affirmative, he shook his head and tutted, “The wee rascal’s stole the diaphragm for a plectrum!” I was happy to go along with this supposed misdemeanor on the basis that the much greater crime still remained undiscovered, but a few nights later, the phone rang, and an upper-class English accent asked to speak to “Pater.” Now Pater was a marine draughtsman, spending a goodly proportion of his hard-earned money on sending his kids to fee-paying schools, only it now transpired that one of them wasn’t actually going. Much angst flowed from this unfortunate revelation, but interceding on her son’s behalf, my mother persuaded my father to let the Jesuits mete out the punishment; after all, they were the professionals, and that’s what my dad was paying for. But it was decided that I needed a new blazer for the coming humiliation, and so on Saturday, we set off for the city in my father’s Ford Popular with me and my two younger siblings in the back. However, once there, they made the mistake of leaving me in the car while they went off to attend to some business, and I took the opportunity to do a runner.
Back home I raided the little cashbox beside the telephone, threw a few clothes into a bag, and beat it. My first port of call was a nearby phone box to ring two friends and arrange to meet them at the local cinema, but just as I exited, round the corner carrying a suitcase came Cary, an older buddy
of mine who just happened to be a merchant seaman. He asked where I was off to. I told him I was running away.
“How about you?” I asked.
“I’m bound for Galveston, Texas!”
We headed South by train, and that evening I was taken on as a cabin boy by the skipper of a merchant ship berthed in the Brown and Poulson wharf on the Manchester Ship Canal. It was bound on the morrow for Buddy Holly’s home state, which suited me just fine, as upon arrival, I fully intended to abscond and set out in search of Route 66. That night, I shared a cabin with Cary and another young sailor who had a collection of American teenage magazines about the dead movie star James Dean. In them were articles about his movies, his cars, and his girlfriends, and interviews with young women who claimed to have been visited at night by the ghost of the dead icon. Back then in the UK, there were no such magazines. Jimmy Dean had died and simply disappeared, and with no new films and no mention of him on our two TV channels or in the newspapers, he was quickly being forgotten. So that was life before the Internet. Information was only available if some publisher deemed it important enough to print, and if you happened to be a teenager back in 1960, their idea of what was important rarely coincided with yours.
When the ship’s destination was suddenly changed next day to Saudi Arabia, I headed for London and handed myself in to my uncle, knowing that my mother’s relief would overwhelm all thoughts of retribution. Back home, I promised never to repeat this foolish escapade, but this did not still my restless soul, infected as it was with the rock ’n’ roll bug. Over the next two rebellious years, I contrived to attend a total of five schools, finally fetching up in a large modern secondary called St. Augustine’s, and there I met a fellow spirit by the name of Brian Dempsey. Dempse, as he was known, was into modern writers, so after I introduced him to Kerouac, we became friends, and when I got married in ’65, he was my best man. But shortly thereafter, our paths diverged. As we began to get into music, Dempse moved to London and got into heroin. Back then, it was the pure variety, prescribed on a daily basis by a select group of doctors to registered addicts, for the small consideration of a guinea per consultation.
Like the writer Alec Trocchi and jazz trumpeter Chet Baker before him, Dempse was the patient of a legendary woman doctor called Lady Franco, and dark cloaked and cavalier locked, Dempse lived on the streets around Piccadilly, dealing to those unable or unwilling to become registered themselves. But in time, he sickened of the life and gained entry to the first British version of Phoenix House, where he met a young woman called Linda Keith. Phoenix House had started in the States, and it worked on the principle that it changed poachers into gamekeepers, for given suitable treatment, in time the addicts became the therapists. So by ’72, when our band signed to Charisma and my wife Pauline and I moved to London, Brian and Linda were running an addiction clinic on the grounds of a large psychiatric institution in The Hague soon to be opened by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands.
Dempse had always had a way with the ladies. Though not what you would call the typical alpha male, he had a Brandoesque air about him, which women seemed to fall for. But Linda was definitely in another league. She was a dark-haired, almond-eyed beauty, and she and Brian were now planning to get married and move into a house they had just bought overlooking a pond in the magical Wye Valley. Meeting for a drink one evening, he leaned across the table and asked confidentially if he’d mentioned that Linda had discovered Jimi Hendrix. Casually I said no and quickly changed the subject, aghast that such a cool dude as Dempse could ever dream of saying anything so patently uncool.
But a month or so later, he rang to ask if we’d like tickets for the premiere of Joe Boyd’s new film about Hendrix. Naturally I accepted his kind offer, and so it was that in due course, I found myself sitting next to Linda in the Odeon in Leicester Square, watching her on-screen image explain how she had met the Animals’ bass player Chas Chandler in New York in the summer of ’66 and taken him to watch her boyfriend Jimmy playing in the Cafe Wha? . . . and the rest, as they are prone to say, is history.
I’ve set out our urtext policy, and when it comes to Hendrix’s early days in New York, it’s hard to think of a better source than Linda, but for reasons I won’t go into, I hadn’t seen her since the late seventies. However, I was still in touch with Dempse, who now lives in Holland, and through him, I was eventually able to reach her. For many years she’s been happily married to the record producer, John Porter, and at the point I made contact, they were living in New Orleans. But as I had suspected, she was initially reticent about revisiting those far-off days, and when she did finally agree to give me her version of the story, it was with the following proviso: “Chris—you have to run everything by me that you write about me or quote me before you can publish. I have been so upset by some of the editing that has been done on projects that I have lent my name to, that I am very stringent about okaying everything first.” I was delighted to do so, because our mission statement was to speak to the participants in the story wherever possible and tell their version of the events. What follows, then, is as factually correct as it’s possible to get, given the passage of time.
At the time she met Chas, Linda was in New York courtesy of her boyfriend Keith Richards, who was later to immortalize her as Ruby Tuesday. But immortalized or not, the Stones had an unwritten rule that girlfriends were never allowed on the road with the band, so Keith headed off to Boston on the first leg of their latest tour, leaving Linda behind in New York with two friends, who proceeded to take her out on the town. One of the spots they visited was the Cheetah Club, on Broadway at Fifty-Third, where Hendrix just happened to be playing with Curtis Knight and the Squires. The Cheetah had been a ballroom that held over a thousand people, though that night the audience totaled about forty; but even in this unpromising setting, for Linda, their lanky guitarist stood out. “He kind of shone out as a lean, loose guy in total control of his guitar. He played beautifully nuanced, subtle, single-note backup with the band to steaming shining solos—he had an absolute aura about him—nothing else existed in that club for me that night.”
So, intrigued by his playing and his onstage presence, Linda contrived an introduction, and when they’d struck up a conversation, he told her that he was using the stage name “Jimmy James” but that this gig with the Squires was his last, as he was in the process of forming his own band, the Blue Flames, which would soon be gigging around the Village. When she eventually got to see them, this turned out to be an outfit comprising mostly white kids, among whom was a fifteen-year-old guitarist called Randolph Wolfe, whom Hendrix had dubbed Randy California, in which guise and state he would later find fame with his own band, Spirit.
Over the next weeks Linda became Hendrix’s de facto manager, trying unsuccessfully to record a live demo of the band and then cutting to the chase by setting up a number of showcases for him with contacts of hers in the music business. The first of the movers and shakers to have the privilege of seeing him perform up close was Andrew Loog Oldham, then the Stones’ manager, famed for his star-seeking suss. But just before the gig, a nervous Hendrix confessed that for pecuniary reasons, he was temporarily guitarless, so Linda came to the rescue by supplying her budding artist with a white Fender Stratocaster, “borrowed” from an unknowing Keith Richards. “I remember giving him the guitar in the room at the Americana Hotel I shared with Keith. The idea was that I would get the guitar back to the room when Jimi got his out of pawn and it wouldn’t have even been missed.”
What then followed was a classic case of “good news, bad news” syndrome, for while Oldham was totally unimpressed with Hendrix, the white Strat was destined never to return to its artist, and on balance, it has to be said that our rock musical heritage is definitely much richer for this outcome. But another little-known fact that we have unearthed is that despite numerous reports to the contrary, this guitar would appear to have been Hendrix’s first long-term Strat.
According to various sources on the Internet, th
at summer of ’66, Jimi bought a white Strat with a rosewood fretboard from Manny’s, the famous New York guitar store on West Forty-Eighth Street, with money borrowed from his girlfriend, Carol Shiroky. Seemingly it cost $289, and the salesman was none other than Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, later of Steely Dan, who reportedly remembered the incident clearly. Supposedly, however, this guitar was then stolen. So far, so good, only we know that when Linda Keith first saw Hendrix in the Cheetah in June of ’66, he was playing a Fender Duo Sonic, the same guitar mistakenly described as a Telecaster by David Henderson in ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, which I referred to earlier.
Now if we believe the Internet tale, this entry-level Fender actually belonged to Curtis Knight, who was kindly lending it out to his sideman, but as it happens, there are a number of contemporaneous photographs of Hendrix playing it in various lineups before he joined the Squires. Add this to the fact that Linda has stated quite categorically that she gave Jimi the Richards Strat (which just like the Manny’s example was white with a rosewood fretboard) because he’d told her that “his” guitar was in the pawn. As she said, “The idea was that I would get the guitar back to the room when Jimi got his out of pawn, and it wouldn’t have even been missed.”