The Grail Guitar

by Chris Adams

  After the session at Zoot’s, they headed for Bayswater, for Chas had booked his protostar into the grandly named Hyde Park Towers Hotel, where he would be nominally based for the next few months. This fine old hotel was showing all the signs of the gradual degentrification that the postwar period had ushered into many London inner-city areas, but it has lately been restored to something like its original upmarket glory, and in the process, the plaque that announced Jimi’s sixties tenancy has been removed. Not that Hendrix would have minded. Like Groucho Marx, he wouldn’t have wished to be a member of any club prepared to let him in!

  When Chandler and his fiancée Lotte took Jimi out that evening for his first taste of clubland, there was no shortage of venues to visit, for at this point the underground scene was booming and London was the hub of a movement pioneering a new brand of freestyle virtuosity. In the course of that night, there are sightings of him jamming on the white Strat with Hammond organist Brian Auger in the Cromwellian Club and then later with the house band, Formula 7, at Scotch of St. James in Mason’s Yard. The Scotch was the most fashionable club in London, with a table permanently reserved for the Beatles and a clientele that on any given evening could include personages as varied as Marlon Brando or Princess Margaret. The maître d’ that night was a young Welshman named Jonathan Rowlands, who remembers a lanky black guy in a long, tan coat arriving and asking to sit in with the band. “The thing that really got me was when he turned the guitar upside down!”

  Later Jimi was seen jamming at the cramped but fashionable Blaises club in Queensgate, a venue that will play a part in later proceedings, but what all of this butterfly flitting tells us is that within twelve hours of his arrival, Chandler had already inseminated the supercool London scene with the seeds of the Hendrix legend. In fact, it’s obvious that from the outset, Chas had a clear vision of how to “break” his unknown star, and this first frantic night was just the initial part of a carefully constructed strategy that would soon see the cream of Britain’s guitar gods lining up to pay homage to the unknown from Seattle.

  To grasp the influence that Chas Chandler had on what followed, it’s useful to note that Jimi had wanted to bring his young protégé, Randy California, with him. Chandler vetoed this, for one guitarist was more than enough in the kind of band he had in mind, especially if he happened to be Hendrix. But Randy was just the first of Jimi’s ideas that Chandler had to disabuse, for it seems Jimi wanted to front his own nine-piece band, which would suggest that what he had in mind was a classic soul outfit. Now this may seem bizarre, but having worked with acts such as Gorgeous George Odell and the Isley Brothers, that’s what Jimi knew best.

  The crucial thing is that at this juncture, Chas knew better. Jamming with these hip London house bands was really just a means to an end. It would get the buzz going, but it was also a way of acclimatizing Hendrix to the London rock scene where individual virtuosity was now the order of the day. Where soul was a team game, with each musician adding threads to the overall weave, this underground wave of rock was a format designed to indulge and foster the overburgeoning ego. Of course, in this kind of milieu, Hendrix was a total natural, but to change his way of thinking, Chandler would also have to show him a vision of what he could and should become, which meant exposing him to what was then the biggest happening band in the UK, the ultimate jamming outfit, Cream.

  As the name implies, these guys had risen to the top on sheer playing power. In Eric Clapton they had a virtuoso guitarist, steeped in the blues; and in Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, a rhythm section tempered by years of playing in fusion outfits such as the Graham Bond Organization that raided the improvisational territory once owned exclusively by jazz players. At that time, they were still virtually unknown in the States, and though Jimi had heard of Clapton, possibly from Robbie Robertson of the Band whom he’d known in the Village, the ultraheavy three piece was not a format he was familiar with. But with another of his keen insights, this was the template that Chandler had chosen for his undiscovered star. So the very next week, on October 1, with rumors of an incredible black guitarist spreading fast among the musical fraternity, he took Jimi to London’s Regent Polytechnic, where Cream was topping the bill.

  Now remember, these are the coolest of the supercool, the best of their era, so can you imagine the amount of chutzpah needed to walk up to them backstage and ask if you can jam with them? It’s like telling Francis Ford Coppola where he went wrong with the severed horse’s head scene or asking Rudolf Nureyev if you can have a go with Margot Fonteyn. But basically, that’s what Jimi did, and though Bruce and Baker were initially reluctant, the sheer gunslinger in Clapton could not refuse the challenge. Aptly, Jimi chose a Howlin’ Wolf song called “Killing Floor,” and he did so because the guitar part was a real killer to play, especially when taken at double speed! Like the rest of the crowd that night, Clapton stood back in awe as this unknown interloper went through his full repertoire of tricks, playing the white Strat with his teeth, behind his back, and between his legs, and naturally the crowd went wild, just as Chas must have known they would. Later, backstage, a very shaken Clapton asked Chandler, “Is he always this good?”

  The answer was yes, and that night, the two guitarists basically changed each other’s life. Clapton, hitherto a confirmed Gibson man with a cherry red ES 335, was from now on a Strat convert, while watching Cream launch into “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” Jimi suddenly got it. He got the pedals, he got the Marshall stack, and more than anything, he got the three-piece format. The way it worked was simple. The bass player was the anchor, the drummer was the driving force, and the guitarist, well, the guitarist just did his thing, which in Jimi’s case meant setting the place on fire. So Chandler had been right all along, and it seemed his sidekick Mike Jeffery even had a name for the still-to-be-formed trio. The stimulus for this may well have been an instruction manual cowritten by the psychologist Timothy Leary, intended for use in sessions involving mescaline and LSD. Already infamous among a well-informed elite, it was not the sort of reading material you would normally associate with someone regarded in the music world as a slightly dodgy “suit.” But as we shall see, Mike Jeffery was nothing if not complex, for the book from which he drew his singular piece of inspiration was called The Psychedelic Experience.

  Although he was a Londoner, born in the East End borough of Peckham, Jeffery had broken into the music biz as a club owner in Newcastle, where his first two ventures were closed due to breaches in fire regulations and then promptly burned down. It’s only natural to read between the lines of this aphorism, but it didn’t stop the Animals from making him their manager, and though in years to come they’d bleat loudly about how he’d worked them to death and pocketed the proceeds, he was still handling their affairs when Chandler met Hendrix. This then was the man that Chas chose to go into partnership with.

  Strange decision, one might say, but the bottom line is, he had no choice. First there was the cost of flying Jimi to London first class and installing him at the Hyde Park Towers; then there was the little matter of finding him a rhythm section and roadies, all of whom would need wages, not to mention paying for rehearsal rooms and recording sessions, plus feeding and remunerating him while he waited for a work permit. All of this was totally beyond the big man’s means, for his payoff after that final Animals tour had been just £1,000, so he badly needed a banker and understandably he opted for the devil he knew, the many-faceted Michael Jeffery.

  Mike didn’t look heavy, but he gave off the kind of vibe that suggested he was. As a Russian-speaking ex-military man, it was assumed by his artists that he had been in British intelligence, but this was pure spin, for like all young men of his era, he had done two years national service and got the chance to learn Russian as part of an ongoing Government Communications Headquarters scheme. Minus the moody shades, he was more Hiram Holliday (Google him) than Sean Connery, and in early photos he comes across as a teacher, or a coffee bar owner, which indeed he was, his first café havin
g been called the Marimba. When the Animals started rocking the crowd at his Newcastle Club a GoGo, he headed for London and pitched them to the impresario Don Arden, who had a reputation for being close to underworld figures, which may account for rumors that Mike was “connected.” Either way, they agreed to comanage the band, and when Arden got them a deal with Columbia, Jeffery set up a company called Anim with offices in Gerrard Street, just around the corner from Chas’s later unofficial base in De Hems in Macclesfield Street. Not long afterward, Arden decided to sell his share back to Jeffery, which left him as sole manager of what by this time was a big hit band.

  Now given the string of Animals hits and their place in the pantheon of sixties stars, you might think that Jimi would have asked Chas why he wasn’t rich. There are two answers he might have got, neither of which would have been very reassuring. Either Mike was a crook or he was inept, or a combination of both. But pointing toward the first of these possibilities was the fact that he had set up a limited company called Yameta, registered in Nassau, capital of the Bahamas, then a British Crown colony that was infamous as a “tax haven.” On its board of directors were an anonymous London lawyer and the former governor-general of the colony, but it seems Mike and Chas were just “employees,” though if Yameta failed, control would pass to Jeffery for the sum of 50p! All of which leaves one with the feeling that the financial ground beneath Jimi’s feet was not quite as solid as it may have seemed.

  Although Chandler must have known the dangers of getting into bed with this Nassau shark, in the end there were two more compelling reasons he did. First, as an ex-member of the Animals, he was still signed to Jeffery as an artist; and second, the shark made him an offer he found hard to refuse. Mike would put up his two biggest acts, Eric Burdon and the Animals and the Alan Price Set, if Chas would reciprocate with Hendrix, and they would then share this simmering pot fifty-fifty. So Chandler took the offer he couldn’t afford to turn down, thereby setting up a situation where his “contractually free” artist was soon to become the meat in a classic music-biz sandwich, with the razor-sharp Jeffery “taking care of business” on one side of the Atlantic while lurking over the horizon on the other was the voracious soul producer, Ed Chalpin, with Jimi’s signature on a legally binding contract. The result was to be much misery all round, though less so for Messrs. Jeffery and Chalpin. Sad to say, that’s a regular music-biz motif.

  This then was the man who would soon come to control all aspects of Jimi’s career, and the financial setup he used to do it was complex to say the least; so for the sake of sanity, I won’t get into tedious detail. If we focus on the basics, we find that in late ’66, Hendrix signed an exclusive four-year management contract with Yameta that entitled it to 30 percent of his earnings. This contract applied only to him, though later all three of the Experience also signed a seven-year production deal that gave them collectively 2.5 percent of record sales, split 50 percent to Jimi and 50 percent between the other two. Add to this a publishing contract entitling Yameta to 50 percent of song royalties, and you have what these days would be highly illegal, as it falls neatly under a category defined as “conflict of interest.”

  Simply put, the law states that managers must be totally free of any other interests that might prejudice their actions on behalf of their artists. Their job is to get the best possible deal for their clients, but as we shall presently see, this principle went right out the window when Jeffery and Chandler negotiated a production contract that favored them and not the guys in the Experience. But this conflict-of-interest issue is not confined to production companies. It means that your manager cannot be your agent, your music publisher, or for that matter, your record label. As it happens, I have personal knowledge of this syndrome, but suffice it to say that within weeks of arriving in London, Hendrix was hog-tied.

  Chapter 6

  Experience Counts

  So let’s just look at where we are. Jimi Hendrix is now in London, and with him he has the white Richards Strat, with which he’s taken the underground scene by storm. That said, there’s still no sign of the dreaded work permit, and Chas Chandler urgently needs to build a band round him while the buzz is still growing. Oh, and by the way, the guy who has just come up with the trendy band name and who has told first-class Chas that he’ll bankroll the whole Experience project is someone for whom the term “shady” could easily have been coined.

  This then is the bigger picture behind Hendrix’s triumphant storming of the London club scene. Sad thing is, surrounded as they are by adulation and the trappings of stardom, creative musicians are rarely privy to the machinations of the men who construct the stage on which they perform. Indeed, no better example of this can be found than with the third member of the power trio who would soon change the face of rock music, for on the very same night that Jimi dropped in so memorably on Cream at the London Poly, across in Amsterdam, the teenage drummer with the British R&B star Georgie Fame was playing his last date with the band, only at the time, he didn’t know it.

  As often happens when a singer hits the pop charts, the trusty backing musicians suddenly become surplus to requirements, and so it was with Georgie’s lot, the Blue Flames (another coincidence, for if you recall, Jimi’s band in New York was also the Blue Flames). But to rub more salt into the musical wound, it wasn’t till Monday morning when nineteen-year-old Mitch Mitchell turned up as usual at Fame’s management office off Charing Cross Road to collect his wages that he was told the whole band had been fired! Now this would have come as a bolt from the blue for Mitchell, because Fame’s jazz-tinged band seemed integral to his success on the mod soul scene, but as the old adage states, when one door slams, you better check your fingers; and that’s how it was to prove for the newly redundant drummer, as the very next day he got a call from Chandler, whom he knew vaguely from the Animals. As always, the big Geordie came straight to the point. “How would you like to come and have a play with this guitarist that I’ve just brought over from America?”

  Not the kind of guy to hang around, Chas had already found a bass player, in the unlikely shape of Noel Redding, an out-of-work guitarist who had turned up for an audition with Eric Burdon’s New Animals at the Birdland Discotheque on Duke of York Street, only to find the post already filled. Always alive to the main chance, Chas asked this affable young man with the fashionable Afro hairdo if he could play bass, and keen to get a paying gig, Noel replied that given a suitable instrument, he’d be happy to give it a go. Whereupon Chas produced his own bass, a hollow-bodied Epiphone Rivoli, and Noel and Jimi proceeded to jam.

  Now if you think back to Chas’s prototype, Cream’s bassist Jack Bruce was not your typical rock player who anchored melodic lines with one or two root notes per bar. He was the son of a music teacher who could follow Eric Clapton’s lead with fast-moving harmonic structures more akin to Bach than the blues. So this would have been central to Chandler’s decision to try Redding out, because as a guitarist turned bass player himself, he would have known that a plodding, two-in-the-bar bassman would have spelled death to Jimi’s soaring lead. No, what he needed was someone who could follow Hendrix in flight, and as soon as he heard Noel and Jimi start to jam at the Birdland, he knew that was exactly what he’d found.

  David Noel Redding was born in the seaport of Folkestone on Christmas Day 1945 (hence the Noel), and he had paid his musical dues coming up through the thriving sixties Kent music scene. That said, he had hitherto only ever played bass whilst working in Germany with an outfit called Neil Landon and the Burnettes, and even then it had just been a case of swapping instruments with bassist Kevin Lang in the wee small hours to alleviate boredom on gigs. If you remember, Eric Barnett had found one of Kevin’s posts on a fan site for a venue called the Club E in the German city of Marburg and had managed to get in touch with him by e-mail. Kevin had responded to say he was happy to give us chapter and verse on this period in early ’65, when the band was on a residency at the Storeyville Club in Frankfurt.

  Anyone w
ho’s done the 1960’s German club scene knows just how hard and sometimes tedious playing for six or seven hours a night was. To overcome the midweek boredom Noel and I used to swap guitars; I used his Gibson ES-355 stereo or his Fender Telecaster, and he used my Hofner Senator. He liked playing it, because he was a skinny little bloke then and he said it was much lighter and easier to play than my main bass, which was a Fender Precision.

  There are photographs of the two of them with the guitars from this period, which we will return to in more detail later, for in the context of our Quest, this subject will definitely bear much closer examination.

  It seems that Noel was the archetypal cheeky chappy, diminutive but with what might be termed a compensating ego. As a player, he was never going to be on the same planet as Hendrix, but he did have a quick musical brain and an excellent feel. In the early days of the Experience, this was what counted, because their ad hoc nature demanded a free-blowing, improvisational approach. But from the start of his career, it was Noel’s ego that was always the determining factor. To illustrate this, it’s important to note that he was usually the fixer in the band, the one who hired and liaised with the road crew. This would have given him a degree of control in any setup, and as we’ll see, this one aspect of his personality would turn out to be central to our story.

  True to form, once aboard the Experience, he immediately recommended a young drummer to Chas. The man he had in mind was Keith Bailey, a teenager from Swindon who was playing with his old band the Lonely Ones, and when Chandler accompanied him to a London gig, he was impressed with the seventeen-year-old. Problem was, Keith had just brought a fellow Swindonian called Rick Davies into the Lonely Ones as keyboard player, and he explained that there was no way he was going to jump ship at this sensitive stage. Plus his band was gigging regularly, so unlike Noel, he was not in need of money, and though Noel and Chas continued to pester him, he just kept turning them down.