by Chris Adams
However, Kevin’s time with the Burnettes was numbered, for on their next trip to West Germany, while doing a residency at Club E in Marburg, he discovered that not all of the fee was making its way back to the troops. Although they were a five piece, it seemed the cash was being divided six ways, with two shares going to Landon. Understandably, this led to friction, and while the others seemed prepared to live with it, Kevin quit. As the perennial fixer, Noel then recruited Dover-born Jim Leverton, who would later become one of the springs in his own band, Fat Mattress (or Thin Pillow as Jimi called them), but at this stage, Jim’s CV was a tad less fashionable, for just prior to this, he had been part of Engelbert Humperdink’s backing band.
With Leverton on board, they set off for yet another German stint, but before they left, Noel managed to break the neck of his new Gibson 355 while fooling around onstage. So for their next Storeyville residency, he was forced to use the unloved Tele, a situation that he refers to in his autobiography. “Now the girls were screaming at gigs. Whether it was us or the fashion, I neither knew nor cared. I loved the attention better than the Telecaster I was then playing. I’d fatally injured my Gibson Stereo during a Who number. . . . I’d picked the Telecaster because of Booker T. and Mick Green, but it wasn’t me.”
Back in the UK, Noel decided he’d had enough of the double-dealing Landon and formed a new outfit called the Loving Kind with Leverton and Kircher, and through the Humperdink connection, they were taken up by his manager, the name-changing impresario Gordon Mills. In January ’66, he landed them a deal with Piccadilly Records, and in the next few months they released three singles, none of which remotely troubled the public’s radar, though for Redding’s subsequent career, the studio experience he gained would turn out to be crucial.
While under Gordon’s wing, they were used as the house band to back his other artists, though the roster was not always as A list as Engelbert. One of the tracks they laid down was for a barman discovered by Mills working in a pub in Shepperton. At this point another familiar name enters the frame, for the ex-Scotch of St. James maître d’, Jonathan Rowlands, was then working as a publicist for Mills, and in keeping with his trade he managed to put an attractive spin on what is otherwise a very tacky story. It seems Mills had dropped into the Shepperton pub one evening and was struck by the barman’s strong facial resemblance to John Lennon. Engaging him in conversation, he discovered that the man’s name was indeed Lennon and that he had spent the war years sailing back and forth across the Atlantic on the convoys of Liberty boats that had provided Britain with its vital supply lifeline. In short, according to Rowlands, the middle-aged barman knew nothing of his superstar son, a situation that Mills immediately sought to remedy by kindly dropping him off at John’s front door.
The ensuing doorstep conversation was seemingly short and terse, but having failed in his first attempt at reconciliation, Der Beatle Vader was persuaded (if that’s the correct word) to communicate musically with his rediscovered offspring by recording a talking song called “That’s My Life,” as a riposte to the oft-repeated accusation that he had abandoned him in his infancy. The fact that Alf actually blamed his prolonged absence on the sea (that’s my life) adds a certain degree of poignancy to proceedings, but even the greatest of spin doctors would have been hard pressed to recycle such a shoddy piece of opportunism on Mills’s part as altruism. That said, Rowlands admits that he did try!
But if this all leaves a slightly bad taste in the mouth, at least it meant that on a purely practical level Noel was au fait with life in the studio, which was to stand him in good stead when he began working with Hendrix, for Chas Chandler was not the kind of guy to get involved with players who couldn’t tick this particular box on their CV. But studio experience was all Noel got, for after their Piccadilly singles sank without trace, each of the Loving Kind moved on to pastures new. In Noel’s case that was to help put together yet another New Burnettes lineup to back Neil Landon on a tour of the North. This suggests that he was now feeling the pinch, because as previously intimated, he and Neil were no longer bosom buddies. But as we shall presently see, the two of them obviously patched things up on this tour, which tells us that Noel was not the kind of guy to harbor a grudge.
So once this last Burnettes stint was over, the unemployed muso caught a train for London on September 26, and arriving at Charing Cross, he bought the Melody Maker, took it to a nearby pub to read over a pint, and in the classified section, duly came across the ad for a guitarist for the New Animals. And so he turned up at the Birdland for his date with what would prove to be destiny, lugging what he later described as a “two-pickup Gibson.” Now we’ll return to this guitar shortly, but let’s stay in the moment, and Redding’s first meeting with Jimi. In his autobiography, Noel tells it exactly how it was, with none of the supercool coats of aftershine that “history” would later apply.
According to the ultra-fashion-conscious Noel, Jimi’s boots were grotty, black, zipped winklepickers, his tan raincoat equally questionable, and when they went to the pub after what had turned out to be a vocal-less jam, for once the American had to buy the drinks, having at last met someone more broke than himself! Then when Hendrix asked him to come back the next day, Noel actually had to borrow ten bob (fifty pence) from Chandler. So what all of this tells us is that in the days leading up to this seminal event he was totally broke, a situation that might well have been temporarily solved by selling the unloved and surplus-to-requirements Fender, but that was no longer an option, for as we shall see, during the period between returning from Germany in July ’65 and March ’66, he had already swapped the white ’64 Tele.
As I just mentioned, Noel turned up at the Birdland with a “two-pickup Gibson,” and in his autobiography he says that he’d swapped the Telecaster for this guitar. Personally, I find this a very interesting description because a lot of Gibson guitars have two pickups, but whether they do or not, all of them have a model number or name. Sometimes, as in the SG, it just means Solid Guitar, or as with the 355 Stereo, it’s three digits; but others have descriptive names, such as the Flying V or the Melody Maker. So for a Gibson player like Redding to refer to one of their models as a “two pickup” is a bit like Tiger Woods asking his caddy for one of those big clubs with the small hat on it. If we also take into account the salient fact that he doesn’t even say when he swapped it, we’re left with the distinct impression that by the time he eventually got round to transferring his memories to paper in the late eighties, this part of Noel’s life had become something of a blank, though given the variety of medicinal compounds that he serially describes within those pages, maybe this is not surprising.
Either way, for the purposes of our present exercise, we can now say definitively that by the time of the September Birdland audition, the white ’64 Tele that he had purchased in the PX in Frankfurt had definitely changed hands. But before we disclose how, let’s return to those early Experience recordings.
Chapter 8
The “Purple Haze” Session
Thus far we’ve established that Jimi Hendrix’s first long-term Strat came from a room in the Americana Hotel on New York’s Seventh Avenue (for rock ’n’ roll tourists, it’s now the Sheraton). We also know that this particular guitar, “borrowed” by Linda Keith from her boyfriend Keith Richards, was still Jimi’s only instrument when the band played the Olympia in Paris in October ’66 and that shortly thereafter he acquired a right-handed black Strat to use, or rather abuse, at the end of his set. Given that this was the first Strat that Hendrix actually purchased, albeit with money advanced by his management, there can be no doubt that by now, the orthodox right-handed model was his favorite guitar, so before we hone in on the “Purple Haze” recording sessions, let’s examine why he found it such a perfect fit.
Jimi used a variety of guitars in his short career, but no matter how many makes he flirted with, it is as the quintessential Strat player that he’ll always be remembered. There’s real poetic justice in this, for
hard as it is to believe, he was responsible for single-handedly rehabilitating the reputation of this postmodern icon. You see, when Jimi first arrived on British shores, the Strat was still indelibly linked in most people’s minds with the late fifties and the British band that perfectly summed up that era, namely, the Shadows. This was the lull after the rock ’n’ roll storm of the midfifties, when pop stars all wore shiny suits and bop haircuts and most of them were called Bobby (Darin, Vee, Rydell, et al.). During those years, Hank Marvin and his buddies two-stepped their way across the British stage, exuding a slick, shiny image that inevitably pigeonholed the Strat as little more than the tacky prop of a high-class showbiz combo. In fact, to show how synonymous Marvin was with the Strat, it’s worthwhile noting that the main importer, Selmer, actually refinished most of the models they brought into the UK to match the salmon-pink color that Hank’s Fiesta Red Strat had by now faded to.
But after the year zero explosion caused by “Please Please Me,” salmon pink was no longer on the young muso’s palette. The polished lacquer of showbiz was anathema to the new wave of players who would ride across the Atlantic on the Beatles’ coattails. These guys sported leather and denim and played strange exotic makes such as Rickenbackers, Epiphones, Guilds, and Gretches, and overnight they conspired to make Hank Marvin’s gleaming-pink Stratocaster deeply unfashionable. As for the Neanderthal Tele, well, seemingly the Strat had always outsold it by a ratio of eight to one, so with the exception of the odd guitarist such as Andy Summers and Mick Green, it wasn’t even a blip on most aspiring musos’ radars.
By late ’66, sales of the Strat had declined to such an extent that Bill Carson, a swing guitarist who had been a consultant in the instrument’s design and later joined Fender’s sales division, is on record as saying that his team was actually predicting its imminent death. But one thing about rock ’n’ roll is its amazing ability to reinvent itself, and when Hendrix burst onto the scene in ’67, the instrument suddenly took on a whole new dimension. Where Hank’s Stratocaster never had so much as a smudge, Jimi’s looked as if it had been used in a street fight. It was the musical version of the jeans they now sell, already distressed. But more importantly, it didn’t sound like the same beast either. Instead of an anorexic echoing vibrato, it now moaned and groaned and squealed and screamed, and when Jimi took his teeth to it, the Strat became the sexiest guitar on the planet, if indeed the man coaxing these incredible sounds from it was actually from this planet, which some of us doubted.
Of course, there were other, purely practical reasons the Strat was the perfect fit for him. For a start, he was a leftie who had learned to play on a right-handed guitar simply by turning it upside down and reversing the strings, and back when he was starting out, he could have done this with just about any axe, acoustic or solid bodied. But as you progress and start to solo on the high notes on the fretboard, you need a guitar with a cutaway, which effectively gives the instrument a much longer neck. This would have narrowed his options, for many guitars, like the Telecaster, only have a single cutaway, so if you turn it over, the high frets are inaccessible. But the opposite is true of the more advanced Strat. With its classic double cutaway, it can be played both ways, so right from the start, Hendrix and the Stratocaster were a perfect fit.
So it’s fair to say that Jimi’s image is inextricably linked with the Strat. He rehabilitated it, reshaped its sound, made love to it onstage, and then set fire to it and serially smashed it to pieces. But given this potent mythical relationship, why would he have ever used the humble Tele? As Paul Newman famously said, “Why go out for hamburger when you’ve got steak at home?” Well in a strict chronological history of Fender guitars, the Tele came along four years before the Strat, and its denigrators nicknamed it “The Plank,” because of its unyielding square contour. They claimed that it was simply the early prototype for the Strat; but suggest that to a Telecaster player, and he’s liable to ask whether the Veedub Beetle was the prototype for the Golf!
Fact is, they’re both classics of their kind, though in the sonic world that Jimi set out to explore, he could go exponentially further with a Strat. In fact, as previously mentioned, he’s on record as saying that the Telecaster only had two tones, one good, one bad. That naturally feeds into the Strat player’s assumed superiority, though it seems that in certain circumstances, the “one good tone” was good enough for the greatest rock guitarist who ever lived. But trying to convince legions of Strat fans that he chose to use it for crucial studio overdubs rather than his beloved Strat is a bit like trying to convert art historians to the notion that Leonardo painted by numbers. Prejudice is an extremely strong force, so basically these naysayers just don’t want to believe it ever happened. But happen it most certainly did, though before we get down to chapter and verse, we need to set the scene.
Jimi turned twenty-four on November 27, 1966, but apart from the cool cognoscenti in London’s clubland, very few people even knew of his existence. However, all that was about to change, for Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffery had cut a deal with the German distribution giant, Polydor, to release “Hey Joe!” and on the back of this Chas landed him his first-ever music press interview with the Record Mirror. December then brought a sensational appearance on the penultimate edition of the UK’s top TV pop show, Ready Steady Go, and in its wake would come chart success and all the mayhem that sudden stardom implies. But for now, Jimi was still in the relative lull before the storm, and near the end of this period, on Boxing Day to be exact, in the dressing room of boxer Billy Walker’s Upper Cut Club in London’s East End, he came up with the classic riff that would become “Purple Haze.” With his commercial antennae quivering, Chandler pounced as soon as he heard it. “That’s the next single! Get it finished!”
That New Year’s Eve, the Experience played the Hillside Social Club in Folkestone, with Noel Redding returning to his Kent stomping ground as the conquering hero. Afterward, Jimi performed first-footing duties at Noel’s mother’s house, standing with his back to the coal fire and charming her with his disarming smile. And as the sixties clock ticked into its eighth year, this family vignette is one of the last glimpses we would ever get of the softly spoken, well-mannered gentleman that fame would soon begin to twist into the caricature of his onstage image.
As 1967 dawned, behind the scenes, Chas Chandler had been busy looking for a more suitable home than the anonymous German giant Polydor. He and Jeffery had already signed the band to a production contract, which meant they paid the recording costs and owned the master tapes they’d license to a record company. But these were the days when it was essential for artists to be associated with an ultrahip Indie, and with his inner-circle contacts, Chas had found just the right one. Like his chance encounter with Linda Keith a few months earlier, his deal with Track Records would seem to take serendipity to the “written in the stars” level, for its owners, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, managers of the Who, had just won a bitter court battle to free them from a highly onerous contract with Decca Records and their producer Shel Talmy, and were now about to launch their own label. The Jimi Hendrix Experience were the first artists signed to the label, and as Stamp and Lambert were among the hippest of the hip in swinging London and were already big fans of the new guitarist in town, it must have seemed like a rock marriage made in heaven.
On the practical side, the dowry from this union was an immediate advance of £1,000, which allowed Chas to take the band back into De Lane Lea Studios, and January 11 saw them doing a four-hour session to lay down the basic back tracks for “Purple Haze” and “Fire.” With twenty minutes of the session remaining, they decided to do a demo of a song that Jimi had finished the night before, called “The Wind Cries Mary.” Neither Redding nor Mitch Mitchell had heard it, so in parts, their playing was a bit rough and understated; but riding an inspired wave, Jimi then laid down vocals and lead guitar. In the coming days, they would rerecord it to get it “right,” but as far as Chandler was concerned, this basic sketch had caught t
he essence of the song, just as the Animals had done with their one take of “House of the Rising Sun.” It has to be said that the big man was spot on, for in due course, this hasty last-minute take would become the band’s classic third single. But purely in terms of our Quest, Eric Barnett had searched in vain for any mention of a Telecaster being used on this particular session, meaning that it just hadn’t happened.
On February 3, armed with the basic back tracks for “Fire” and “Purple Haze,” Chandler again showed his acuity by moving the band to the state-of-the-art Olympic Studios at Barnes, a London suburban district, where there would definitely be no complaining bankers. There, the resident engineer Eddie Kramer bounced the four tracks already recorded for both titles down to two, ready for Hendrix’s lead guitar, vocals, and any other overdubs, but at 7:00 p.m., the first part of the session then ended to allow the band to do a gig at the Ricky Tick Club, a few miles away at the London borough of Hounslow. Now as fate would have it, the previous night, the Experience had played the Blue Pad in Darlington, in the North East of England, and reports of the gig suggest that Jimi’s backup black Strat was by now in a very sorry state; but that didn’t stop some creep from stealing it immediately after the show, so crucially, as they headed for Hounslow, Jimi now had only the white Richards Strat.