by Chris Adams
Given this, there are a number of problems with the Internet story. First, when musos buy a guitar, they usually trade in their present instrument (presumably this accounts for the red herring that the Duo Sonic belonged to Curtis Knight). And second, when I visited Manny’s in ’72, I was struck by the amount of left-handed guitars they had on sale. In the UK, they were rarer than hen’s teeth, and therefore more expensive, but not in New York. So being a leftie, why didn’t Hendrix just buy himself a left-handed guitar? Of course, there may be another reason for the spurious story, for after Linda left New York, Hendrix was now in possession of what might well be described as “stolen goods,” that is, a guitar “borrowed” from a hotel bedroom without its owner’s knowledge, let alone consent. Given all this, it might have been considered politic for the freewheeling gypsy muso to have an explanation for the sudden appearance of such an expensive white Strat.
Either way, Hendrix then had to endure one more painful knockback from another of Linda’s music business contacts, this time the entrepreneur Seymour Stein, who later founded Sire Records, which would number Talking Heads and the Ramones among their roster. Linda describes the evening thus:
On the night that Seymour came to the Cafe au Gogo, I can’t honestly remember whether Jimi had started to run the guitar on the corner of the amp or mic stand, but certainly there was enough violence to it to have me concerned about returning it. As it turned out this was another source of rancor between Jimi and me since I was really uptight about him starting to damage the guitar onstage as part of his show, and because we were arguing about it Seymour made a hasty retreat and passed on even considering signing Jimi.
It was shortly after this debacle that Linda bumped into Chandler at a club called Ondine’s while he was passing through New York on the Animals’ final US tour. Although they didn’t know each other well, they were both part of the exclusive London scene where people knew their stuff, so when she told him that she’d found something special, he took her seriously, and two days later at the Cafe Wha? he saw immediately what the pop moguls had singularly failed to. Where they saw only a wild-man guitarist with a box of clever tricks, Chas had the creative vision to imagine Hendrix operating in another setting, accompanied by the new breed of British blues musicians then expanding the boundaries of rock. In other words he saw him through a muso’s eyes.
Meanwhile, Linda was already hard at work trying to convince her artist that despite his reservations, he had real potential as a singer, and as part of that process she was turning him on to the music of the folk-genius-turned-rock-artist, Bob Dylan. By now, Hendrix was spending a fair amount of time at the “Red House,” as Linda’s friends’ apartment was called, and many an intimate evening was spent in a room with leopard-skin walls and red velvet couches listening to Blonde on Blonde, the brand-new double album featuring Bob’s scalding new love songs, delivered in his unorthodox but compelling vocal style.
From such unlikely wisps of serendipity are the cumulus clouds of history created. But back in the moment, before the past got crystallized into the reels of Joe Boyd’s film, Linda and Jimi were in love, big style! And if ever that were in doubt, then the evidence can be found toward the end of the movie, in his performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival and his heartfelt rendition of “Red House.” He’s playing a black Gibson Flying V, with no plectrum, just using his thumb, and all the theatrical circus stuff has gone out of the window. It’s just him, the axe, and the blues, as he tells us how the key won’t fit the door, because . . . “my Linda don’t live here no more.”
Chapter 4
Enter Svengali
It’s a Saturday evening in late September 1966, and darkness is falling on an autumnal New York City. Out at Kennedy Airport, the 707s are stacked up, waiting their turn, their landing lights like pinpricks in the gathering dusk. In the terminal, the first-class lounge is half full, as always; but tonight, among the rich and elite, two passengers stand out. One is a big man about six four, with a mop of brown hair, sporting a leather bomber jacket and faded blue jeans. His companion is slimmer and he’s black. He wears a long, tan raincoat and grotty crocodile-skin boots and his hair looks as if he slept last night in curlers. In his pocket he has a passport that declares him to be John Allen Hendrix, but until a few days ago, he was Jimmy James, sometime front man of a ramshackle outfit called the Blue Flames, one of a hundred nonentities that habitually grace the clubs of Greenwich Village. But all that changed on the night the big man beside him came sauntering into the Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street and heard him start to play.
If there is a Svengali in this story, it’s the guy in the bomber jacket, for all who knew Chas Chandler are agreed that he was a big man with an even bigger presence. Back in the days when the Animals were crawling all over the pop charts, he was always the one who seemed to fill the TV screen. Later in the sixties, I remember seeing him regularly, sitting with a pint of Newcastle Brown on a barstool beside the public phone in a corner of De Hems, a famous watering hole in Macclesfield Street, off Shaftesbury Avenue. Back then, in those far-off premobile days, this was Chas’s office. It was where he did business. The pop-star-turned-impresario Adam Faith was known for doing the same thing in Fortnum and Mason’s tearoom, but big Chas wasn’t a tearoom kind of guy. De Hems suited him just fine.
Born in 1938 in the northeast city of Newcastle, Chas served his time as a turner in one of the many shipyards that lined the River Tyne; then like many of his generation, he experienced that life-changing moment when he first heard rock ’n’ roll. Originally a guitarist, his first paying gig was as a bassist with the Alan Price Set, and when they morphed into the Animals with the arrival of singer Eric Burdon, they were perfectly placed to jump on the beat boom bandwagon. The hit records they then began to turn out were produced by a failed South African pop singer called Mickie Most, who used the “performance capture” style of production in the studio. The essence of this was to get the band’s energy down on tape, rather than strive for some level of sonic perfection. In a sense you could compare it with the French Impressionists, who went out into the real world to capture the feeling of being alive and to hell with fusty scholarly tradition!
If you want an example of this, you don’t have to look further than the band’s biggest hit, their razor-sharp rendition of the old blues standard, “House of the Rising Sun.” Guitarist Hilton Valentine had brought along Bob Dylan’s version of the song to a rehearsal, having already come up with his own arrangement, which involved a picking technique known as an arpeggio. When they played it to Mickie Most, he didn’t see any mileage in recording a song that was far too long to get radio play, but at their next session, with twenty minutes left on the clock and a good day’s work already in the can, they asked him if they could record it. Most checked with the engineer to make sure there was enough tape left on the reel, and when the reply was yes, he shrugged and told the band do their thing while he went to the toilet, never dreaming that their one-take wonder would become one of the seminal recordings of the era. That said, he was happy enough to take the production credit when it did, and rightly so, because more than half the battle in the studio is getting the band to sound just right, and to do that, you have to make them feel so damned comfortable that they can perform at the highest level in what can be a really daunting setting. All of this Mickie Most did in spades, and all the while, the big ex-apprentice from Tyneside watched and learned, and in time this was exactly the same philosophy that Chandler would bring to the Jimi Hendrix sessions.
One other thing he learned is that the real money in the music business is in the song. The way songwriting royalties work is simple. The law states that a songwriter must receive at least half of the overall pie, so back in the early days, the music publisher took the other half. This is known as a fifty-fifty split, and in the era when Tin Pan Alley turned out thousands of copies of sheet music for any hit, this was probably a fair deal, because the price of publishing the sheets would have been hig
h. But by the midsixties, sheet music was a dying artifact, though having set the precedent, most publishers continued to take “their half.” This also went for traditional folk tunes, where the publisher would share the royalties with whoever “arranged” the piece. This is a genre known in the music business by the songwriting credit “trad arr” (traditional, arranged by).
So let’s go back to that Animals session, for after the guys had packed up and left, the engineer asked Most whom he should credit as arranger of “House of the Rising Sun.” Mickie shrugged and told him that Alan Price the keyboard player did all the band arrangements, so the engineer scrawled his name on the master tape box, and when this future world number one appeared on vinyl, the credit read “Trad Arr A. Price.” Within a year, Price had bought a house in St. John’s Wood and quit the band, seemingly because of musical differences with the others, though the disparity in their finances could well have played a part in the split. Either way, this was a salutary example of how friends can fall out when big royalty checks come into the equation and a lesson that Chas was to learn when it came to producing his own artists.
By August 1966, he was on that final US tour and had already decided to reinvent himself as a record producer when Linda Keith dropped her discovery into his empty lap. But while seeing an opportunity is one thing, taking advantage of it is another. At that first meeting in the Cafe Wha? Hendrix was extremely diffident about moving to the UK for it had taken him a long time to get to New York, and now here was this big white guy with the weird accent wanting to take him thousands of miles away to “swinging” London? For an ambitious young player, this must have sounded as smart as returning to Seattle. But Chas was not easily dissuaded. Although he was just four years older than his new artist, he had always exuded that indefinable air of authority that any aspiring rock manager needs, and he set about convincing the reluctant guitarist that making it on the other side of the pond would be just the first stepping-stone to much bigger things. The tipping point in this unlikely conversion came when Hendrix expressed a desire to meet the English guitarist Eric Clapton.
“No problem,” was Chas’s response, for he and Eric were good friends.
This was obviously the Damascene moment for Jimi, and it was agreed that after his last Animals stint was over, Chandler would come back to New York and set about raising the funds to take his discovery to England. But no sooner had Chas left for the final leg of the tour than Keith Richards returned from his, and finding that his girlfriend had taken up with an exotic black guitarist, he took it upon himself to inform her family that she was heading down a “dark path.” The first thing that Linda knew about this development was when her father suddenly appeared in the Cafe au Gogo, where Hendrix was playing that night.
“I was just about dragged out of the place and taken back to London where an uncomfortably louche Keith was stretched out on my bed waiting. I kicked him out and didn’t talk to him for twenty years.”
All of which meant that when Chandler got back to New York City in September, there was no sign of either her or the hotshot guitarist. For a moment he must have asked himself, was it all a dream? Did I really see that guy playing with his teeth, or have I been smoking too much wacky baccy? But as he was soon to discover, the explanation was much simpler, for his future megastar was in fact a gypsy who inhabited an underworld where wages were spent on the night, basics like apartments were considered luxuries, and when needs dictated, the guitar or the amp got pawned. In fact Hendrix was sleeping rough “between the tall tenements,” complaining about rats running over his chest and cockroaches eating his last candy bar, so even Chandler’s namesake Raymond would have been hard pressed to know where to start, for Harlem was not the safest place for a six-foot-four-inch Geordie to be wandering around trying to find a goofy guitar player called Jimmy Hendrix aka James.
In the end, it took all of five days to track Hendrix down, and even when he did, they couldn’t get him a passport because he had no birth certificate. Normally that would be an easy hurdle to jump; you simply get a duplicate, but a detailed search through the records elicited the unexpected fact that no one called James Marshall Hendrix had been born in Seattle in 1942! The mystery was eventually cleared up when it transpired that unbeknown to his soldier father, his mother had christened him John Allen Hendrix. But even before this latest hiccup, Chandler must have had his suspicions that his discovery was something of a loose cannon, because top of the items on the agenda that he had drawn up was to double-check that Hendrix wasn’t signed to anyone, for either management or recording.
When Chas finally caught up with him, Jimi fessed up to a couple of pony contracts that he had signed, and it was left to the big Geordie to sort these out, but when it came to the most recent of these agreements, Hendrix either had a memory loss or lied. The truth was, as a sideman for the aforementioned Curtis Knight, he had signed an exclusive three-year recording contract the previous summer with a company called PPX, run by a budget soul producer named Ed Chalpin. The royalty rate was 1 percent of sales; and the advance, one dollar, but a contract is a contract, and Hendrix had undoubtedly signed it. In fact, it seems he would sign any piece of paper put in front of him if it brought the possibility of career advancement or financial reward, but this particular contract was to cause much grief not only to Chandler and the two young English musos who would soon be on board, but also to the man who was by now bankrolling the whole star-making shooting match. This was the Animals’ manager, Mike Jeffery.
We’ll come to Jeffery’s part in proceedings presently, but at this stage of the game Chandler was still very much in charge. From the moment he walked into the Cafe Wha? and heard Jimi play the white Strat, he knew the effect this man’s outrageous virtuosity would have on the London rock scene. But crucially, he also had a keen sense of what it takes to break an artist nationally in the UK. To manage someone, you must first believe in them, but the hardest trick is to bring your vision to the masses; it was here that Chandler’s genius emerged. Remember, Hendrix had thus far been billing himself as Jimmy James, and though Jimmy may have sounded fine on Mister Page, Chas obviously felt that it didn’t quite conjure up an image of this particular black American guitar slinger!
Now over the decades there has been a gradual attempt to downplay Chandler’s role in the Hendrix story, possibly on ethnic or cultural grounds. After all, this big white guy with the provincial English accent must have been seen as an interloper by the infamously cliquish New Yorkers, so it’s hardly surprising that some of the people whom Jimmy left behind in the Big Apple have felt the need to inflate their own part in this stage of his development, perhaps in an attempt to “reclaim” their lost hero. This has led to a subtle rewriting of history that conveniently ignores the fact that at this point, Hendrix was not yet the real deal. So just as we saw with the white Strat supposedly bought at Manny’s, we have to be aware that some aspects of his tale are now being projected through a revisionist prism.
Thus some biographers would have us believe that Hendrix had already changed the spelling of his first name whilst gigging with the Blue Flames in the Village, even though posters for his gigs say otherwise. This obviously keys into the notion that he was always in control of his own artistic destiny, and not some chess piece to be moved around at will. But on a postcard that he sent to his father just before leaving for London, he wrote, “We’re changing my name,” and for me, that collective description is conclusive. As far as I’m concerned, the respelling exercise was always Chas’s doing.
Not that Hendrix was some acquiescent trilby to Chandler’s Svengali. He was always too much his own man to ever be manipulated, but he was willing to go along with the name change because, as it happened, the big Geordie had come up with a variation that was as clever as it was elegant; he simply replaced the last two letters with one. So the name still sounded the same, but that internal Ji Mi rhyme would soon slip insidiously into the mass subconscious, suggesting a persona at once mercurial an
d mysterious. Thus, as we’ve seen, the young man who boarded the overnight Pan Am flight on Saturday, September 24, 1966, undoubtedly carried a passport that declared him to be John Allen Hendrix. But somewhere over the dark Atlantic, a metamorphosis took place, and when the plane touched down at Heathrow next morning, the exotic black dude who strolled down the aircraft steps onto British soil was unquestionably Jimi Hendrix.
Chapter 5
Jamming
Jimi Hendrix flew first class, but as always, he traveled light, with just an overnight bag and forty borrowed dollars in his pocket. We’re certain that the white “Richards” Strat arrived with him, because the Animals tour manager Terry McVey is on record as saying that he had to spirit the guitar away as Hendrix only had a visitor’s visa, and without a work permit, questions would have been asked about any instrument he had with him. Meanwhile the Animals’ publicist Tony Garland was busy filling in the customs forms, explaining that this striking arrival was a famous American star come to collect his royalties! (Ah, the irony in hindsight!) But Chas Chandler was well aware that you don’t need a work permit to jam, and knowing the incestuous nature of the capital’s progressive music scene, understandably he couldn’t wait to unleash his jamming genius on the trendiest clubs in town.
On the way to the hotel, they stopped off at the Fulham flat of the soul bandleader Zoot Money, who at Chas’s request had procured a guitar from one of his lodgers, the future Police axman Andy Summers. So sitting there waiting for him was another white Telecaster. Now though Jimi would normally restring his guitars so that the bass string was at the top end of the neck, he was equally comfortable playing what was essentially upside down, so the influential Zoot and a few friends were soon jamming away with the new guy in town and were perfectly poised to head out that evening like a bunch of enthused disciples, spreading the news about the coming of this black miracle worker.