The Grail Guitar

by Chris Adams

  Thus it was that Mitchell got the call, and when he turned up for what was in all senses of the word, his audition, the chemistry was just right. At this point there was actually a keyboard player in the mix, from an outfit called Nero and the Gladiators, but next time Mitchell came back, they were stripped down to the classic three piece. On this occasion he quizzed Jimi on what kind of drumming style he wanted, and Hendrix seemingly shrugged and told him that he should just blow free.

  “Oh, so you want me to do a Ginger Baker, do you?”

  “Whatever,” replied Jimi.

  That tacit nod was as near to a wink as Mitchell ever got, and he duly obliged, reveling in the freedom that this allowed him; but that said, he had to come back for a third time to jam with the other two before a decision was made, and in the end he only got the job after Chandler tossed a coin to decide between him and another powerhouse drummer named Aynsley Dunbar, who would go on to work with King Crimson and Frank Zappa. Such are the vagaries of rock. Practice till your hands bleed, and you still lose out on the flip of an old two-bob bit!

  But though the band was now formed, the work permit had still not arrived, nor would it for another three months, but the guys had to eat, so Chandler arranged with Mike Jeffery to pay Noel and Mitch a weekly retainer of £15 through his company Yameta. As we shall see, in the years to come, this ad hoc arrangement would come back to haunt Redding and Mitchell big style, but back then, Noel was happy just to get what was now a paying gig. Meanwhile, following Chas’s master plan, Jimi had been back at the Scotch jamming with keyboard player Brian Auger, and in the club that night was Johnny Hallyday, then (and probably still) France’s biggest rock ’n’ roll star. Johnny was so blown away by Jimi that he immediately offered Chas four support slots on his forthcoming French tour. Chandler jumped at the chance, and so it was that the first-ever performance by the Jimi Hendrix Experience (JHE) was on Thursday, October 13, in the Novelty Cinema in the small town of Evreux. It seems the cinema was well named, considering the nature of the beast that was unleashed that evening, though typically a local critic described Jimi as a “lousy mixture of James Brown and Chuck Berry, who writhed around the stage for fifteen minutes.” Thirty years later, Noel would unveil a plaque at the spot where the cinema once stood, so not for the first time, the perennial critic got it wrong.

  But crits and plaques aside, the consensus was that the provincial French audience wasn’t quite ready for Jimi, for seemingly they sat through the set in stunned silence. But as to how the actual playing went, both Mitchell and Redding are quoted as saying that it was during this four-night stint, culminating in the Olympia in Paris, that it suddenly dawned on them just what they’d actually signed up for. While it was obvious in rehearsals that Jimi was a great guitarist, neither of them were prepared for his onstage persona, which was the exact opposite of his quiet, polite, private self. It seemed that lurking deep down was a Mr. Hyde who only emerged in the heat of the theatrical spotlight, and the sudden metamorphosis from introvert to extrovert was all the more startling in its unexpectedness.

  It also appeared that a key part of this transformation was the way Mr. Hyde treated his guitar onstage, but this was no new departure, for if you recall, Linda Keith had actually fallen out with Jimi back in New York when he began to abuse the “borrowed” white Strat at the Cafe au Gogo. But now, two months on, this was still his only instrument, and it was immediately apparent to Chandler that if this kind of theatrical violence was to be integral to the act, then he would need a backup guitar, and quick! The problem was, these four French dates were the first paying gigs that Jimi had done since leaving the United States, and even with Jeffery’s financial input, Chas was now being forced to sell off basses to refill his far-from-bottomless pockets.

  The obvious move was to get the band into the studio fast and then go after a recording contract, with the lucrative advance that would entail, but recording time in London didn’t come cheap, so for now he was on the horns of a dilemma. He knew that you can blow the minds of as many superstars as you can crowd into a fashionable London club, but in the end, what you need to launch a career in rock music is a hit single. But even here there was a dispute, for while Jimi felt that his version of “Killing Floor” was the best candidate, Chas had other ideas. He was convinced he had a killer track, and it involved another of those little coincidences that weave their way through this tale.

  Earlier in ’66 while on tour in the States, he had heard a moody version of “Hey Joe” by a young folk singer called Tim Rose, and with ambitions to become a producer, he marked it down as a track he’d like to record, given the right artist. Then when Linda Keith took him to the Cafe Wha? as he walked through the door, what should her discovery be playing, but that same song! You wouldn’t have to be a huge believer in fate to be swayed by such obvious synchronicity, so there was no way Chandler was going to be persuaded that this was not the song, and in the end, he got his way. As the old saying goes, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” Strangely, though, there was yet another echo here from Chandler’s musical past, and that was in the attribution of the song’s composition.

  If you remember, I covered the thorny “trad arr” question that had catapulted Alan Price into the exclusive St. John’s Wood while his erstwhile Animal buddies were still out slaving on the road. Well, as it happened, there was also a dispute about who had written “Hey Joe.” I worked with Tim Rose in the midseventies, and he insisted it was an old Appalachian folk song that he had heard as a child in Florida, but be that as it may, a songwriter called Billy Roberts had registered it as his own work in ’62 and then three years later was shocked to find that a version had been released by California rock band the Leaves, which credited his old Greenwich Village folk-singing buddy Dino Valente as writer.

  Now any folksinger who changes his name from Chester Powers to Dino Valente is obviously marching to a different drum, but as his career was interrupted by regular drug busts, there is reason to suspect that mind-altering substances were involved in this unusual move. Faced with accusations of plagiarism, Valente claimed that Roberts had assigned the rights of the song to him while Valente was serving a prison sentence, so that he would have something to come out to! Happily, Roberts got his rights back, and Jimi’s version credits him, so either way, he got the royalties, if not always the kudos. Strangely though, Tim Rose was involved in the same kind of controversy with another of his best-known songs, “Morning Dew.” In this case the credited author was Bonnie Dobson, and again Tim insisted it was just a folk song that should rightly have belonged in the public domain. This time, though, he credited himself as cowriter, and no lawsuits ensued.

  So back in London in ’66, with the choice of single agreed, Chandler and the band headed into De Lane Lea Studios on their return from France, to start the “Hey Joe” sessions. The trendy-sounding De Lane Lea had originally been called Kingsway Studios, and this is where the Animals had cut their historic tracks, but it was now named after its new owner, a French intelligence officer who had originally opened a studio in Soho back in 1947 to dub English soundtracks onto French films. Given the acoustically innocuous nature of dubbing, his latest branch was situated quite happily in the basement under the Midland Bank, but by the midsixties, a state-of-the-art Sound Techniques desk had been installed, and this facility had attracted both the Beatles and the Stones, so it was one of the most fashionable studios in London.

  By now, the standard recording format had become a one-inch, four-track, multitrack tape machine. Drums took two of these, bass and guitar one each, and the resultant take was bounced, or “ping-ponged” down onto two tracks on a second four-track machine, leaving two free tracks for overdubs. But like many “heavy” bands that came after them, the Experience discovered that capturing their stage sound was not an easy process. Turn the decibels down and you lose the energy levels; turn it back up and you get distortion. The latter being the lesser of two evils, they opted to blast it out, only for the
studio to receive complaints from the Midland Bank above them that the level of vibration was so extreme that it was affecting their computers. (The fact that banks had computers in 1966 is news to me, so the story may be apocryphal.) Either way, by November 2, both “Hey Joe” and the B-side, “Stone Free,” were in the can, though if Jimi had had his way, they would have been “Killing Floor,” covered with “Land of 1,000 Dances.” But once again Chandler had vetoed Jimi’s flipside choice because he was determined that it should be a Hendrix original, not just another cover.

  As Jimi’s first-ever credited composition, “Stone Free” was a big artistic breakthrough, for it launched him into that exclusive band of artists who were masters of all three of rock’s holy trinity: singer, lead guitarist, and songwriter. However, it’s worth remembering that it owes its existence as much to commercial considerations as to a sudden well of inspiration, for aware that the real money in music is in songwriting and publishing rights, Chandler and Jeffery had by now signed Jimi to a long-term publishing deal, meaning they had a 50 percent stake in any subsequent songwriting royalties. But with no songs, there would be no revenue. So by focusing his artist’s attention on this vital process, Chandler was feathering both creative and financial nests, and to give him his due, without his urging, there would be no “Stone Free,” no “Fire,” and in next to no time, no wind crying Mary.

  But one thing we can say definitively is that on these particular De Lane Lea sessions, guitar wise, Jimi only used the white Richards Strat he’d brought with him from the States, and though Eric had by now gone over the reminiscences of those involved in the recording with his digital toothcomb, nowhere could he find any mention of a Telecaster being used on either the backtrack or the overdubs. So we knew for certain that one aspect of the mysterious missing Tele myth was wrong, though it still left open the possibility of the unthinkable, namely, that he had chosen to use it on the next set of recording sessions that would give birth to “Purple Haze.”

  However, a vital contextual clue had emerged during our trawl of Hendrix photos, for shortly after the “Hey Joe” sessions, in the second week of November ’66, the JHE were booked to do a short residency at the Big Apple Club in Munich, and Eric noticed that in one shot of the gigs, Jimi was now playing a black Strat. On the others, though, he was still using the white New Yorker, and on closer inspection, the black one could be seen sitting on a guitar stand beside his Marshall stack. So obviously, what we had here was that much-needed backup guitar; but unlike most musicians, who would need a replacement in case of a broken string, Jimi could happily play through any set with only five, so this one had obviously been bought for another reason.

  Crucially, it seemed that we had actually stumbled upon the first-known instance of what became Jimi’s default stage MO. We know from Linda Keith of his predilection for running his guitar neck along mic stands or amp speakers, and indeed, the white Strat was beginning to show distinct signs of wear. So as a logical extension of this, it appears that Hendrix came up with a system where he would use his favorite guitar for the bulk of the set and then switch to a backup “Dog Strat” toward the end, abusing it to whip the crowd into a frenzy. So the shot of the black Strat was obviously from the finale, and when we researched these gigs, we discovered that it was during this Big Apple stint that Chandler clocked the audience reaction when Jimi first of all upped the ante by damaging the neck of the black Strat and then went berserk, beating it on the stage. There and then Chas decided that, finances allowing, this show of violence had to become a feature of the Experience’s show.

  However, from the point of view of our Quest, there was a another side to this discovery, for the fact that Hendrix had two Strats as he approached the “Purple Haze” session suggested that if he had actually used a Telecaster on it, this must surely have been done as a matter of choice, to get a certain sound. And again, I had to ask myself what it was that the Strat could not deliver that a Tele could, and why he would have seen the need to use it on this of all tracks. But before we examine the next sessions in detail, let’s backtrack slightly to find out exactly how Jimi’s new bass player acquired his white Tele and whether he had it with him when he fetched up for that famed audition at the Birdland Discotheque in September of ’66.

  Chapter 7

  A Kentish Lad

  Noel Redding was three years younger than Jimi Hendrix, and he grew up in the postwar years in the Channel ferry port of Folkestone, one of two gateways to the Continent. In many ways, life for kids in the early fifties was idyllic. Traffic was light, so streets were safe to play in, and at home, the wireless churned out the type of anodyne entertainment that suited an adult generation that had been dragged through the mincer of war. In that pretelevision society, Saturday cinema ruled the roost, and black-and-white Westerns and war films with their highly polarized sets of goodies and baddies reflected a world with an overarching sense of order and normality. Then in mid-decade, into this innocent conformist soup hurtled a comet called rock and roll.

  Like a thousand other teenage boys, Noel was soon buying a guitar on the hire-purchase system (paying it off while using it) and forming a band, in his case the Lonely Ones, named after a Duane Eddy hit. On bass and drums were schoolmates “Andy” Andrews and Pete Kircher, though by 1963, Pete had moved on and been replaced by Laurie “NuNu” Whiting (of whom, more later). Noel then briefly followed Kircher into a band called the Burnettes, fronted by a singer called Neil Landon, who in the fullness of time would hit the charts as one of the Flowerpot Men. (Remember that invitation to go to San Francisco, where the flowers grew so very high?)

  No sooner had Noel rejoined the Lonely Ones than the Burnettes landed a six-week stint in West Germany, on wages of twenty pounds a week “all found.” But wages were not all that Noel would be missing out on, for the German club scene was then a finishing school for aspiring musos, a school where you had to play six hours a night, seven nights a week, so any serious musician would come back a much better player. So when Noel received a cable from the Burnettes offering him the position that their current guitarist was just about to vacate, he needed no second bidding. Flying straight back from Barcelona (which I’ll explain later), he was welcomed back into the fold, ready for their next German outing.

  Now I know from personal experience that life on the road can become dehumanizing, but Noel’s time on the Storeyville circuit in ’64 and ’65 consisted of extended residencies. This meant there was no traveling, no never-ending succession of hotels and road signs; he would have had time to hang out with acts passing through, such as the Merseybeats and the Searchers and the new sensation, Tom Jones, recently discovered by a name-changing impresario called Gordon Mills who will appear serially in this tale. Mixing with guys like this who had already “made it” was invaluable experience, not just for the kudos and the contacts but because their success could rub off and act as a catalyst; as in, if they can do it, then why not us?

  The Burnettes were back in Frankfurt in both May and July of ’65, and as Kevin Lang recalls, they had become friendly with some American GIs from the local Rhine Main Air Base, which led to an invitation to avail themselves of the facilities of the US Army Post Exchange. The PX, as it’s known, was basically a huge shopping mall, with everything the typical American soldier and his family could need or desire, but it was the moderately priced beer and cigarettes that initially attracted the two Burnettes, till they found a shop window full of guitars costing half what they would in the UK. Faced with this unique opportunity, Noel did what any young aspiring guitarist with a few bob in his pocket would do; he immediately bought himself a brand-new sunburst Gibson 355 Stereo. Then, a few weeks later, he went back to purchase an Olympic White 1964 Fender Telecaster with a rosewood fretboard. Now a Telecaster at that time in the United States cost $208, though for a “custom finish,” which Olympic White technically was, Fender added 5 percent, making the retail price in the PX $218. But at this point, the exchange rate was a heady $2.80 to the
pound, so effectively, the Tele would have cost him just under £78.

  Despite this purchase, Noel was always a Gibson man at heart, for prior to buying the 355 Stereo, he had used an SG. But in his 1990 autobiography, Are You Experienced? he explains how he was a big fan of Mick Green, guitarist with the Pirates, and at that time Mick stood out from the early sixties crowd because he played a Telecaster. As a guitarist, I know that liking the look and sound of an instrument is one thing, but you only find out whether it’s right for you when you play it in anger. This happened with Noel in Frankfurt’s Storeyville Club, and unlike me, he’s on record as saying that once he used the Tele onstage, he never actually liked it. That said, he may well have bought it partly as a business venture, for if he sold it on without a scratch for £100, he’d make himself a nice little profit. So without being mendacious, it could well have been a case of, “if it doesn’t suit me, I know that someone will take it off my hands.”

  Either way, in the summer of ’65, both guitars came into the UK through Folkestone in the group’s van, and the reason Kevin Lang remembers this event so vividly is because as they drove off the ferry, a customs official pulled them over. Kevin describes the sinking feeling this immediately caused, though in truth this had nothing to do with Noel’s Tele and everything to do with several hundred cigarettes they’d concealed in Pete Kircher’s bass drum. As it happened though, his kit was red, like the packets of Winstons they had bought at the PX, so thanks to the color blend and the opaque front skin then used by drummers, miraculously the customs man didn’t spot the contraband. Instead, he homed in on Noel’s guitars, first getting him to open the Telecaster case. When he remarked on how fresh the guitar looked, Noel, always the cheeky chap, told him he had a much better one in the other case, and pulling out the Stereo 355, treated the official to a few impromptu riffs. Either the guy was impressed with Noel’s playing skills or he couldn’t help but admire his brass neck because after a bit of banter he waved the band through. And again, this is a classic case of urtext, because the scary nature of the whole incident branded itself permanently on Kevin Lang’s memory.