The Grail Guitar

by Chris Adams

  The Ricky Tick circuit, formed by John Mansfield and Philip Hayward, used venues in over twenty English towns during the four years of its existence, and the Hounslow club, which was above garage premises, was a claustrophobic space. The Experience had already played it, but by now they were really taking off, and health and safety not being what it is nowadays, that Friday night the place was jammed to the rafters. As usual, toward the end of the set, Jimi began to ramp up the tension, running his fretboard up and down the mic stand, but with no backup guitar he was risking his favored white Strat, and in the process, he managed to ram it into the ceiling, jarring the headstock and damaging one of the machineheads. Luckily for the crowd, he had more than enough improvisational skills to continue as if nothing had happened, but the band were due back at Olympic at midnight to do the next set of overdubs, and the recording studio is a very different environment from a crowded club. For a start, it demands that the instrument be perfectly in tune, and you can’t achieve this with a damaged machinehead. So with the most important overdubs of his life waiting, Hendrix was now effectively guitarless.

  But luckily for Jimi, he had a Kent muso in the band, and in the sixties that meant he was only one degree of separation away from another Kent muso playing somewhere in the thriving London rock scene, and sure enough, Noel’s old band, the Lonely Ones, were gigging just a few miles away in the cramped basement disco in South Kensington known as Blaises. The guitarist was a good friend of his called Trevor Williams, and as luck would have it, the two had recently swapped guitars, so Noel set off with Jimi’s blessing to ask a favor. As it happened, Trevor was more than happy to oblige, so as the hands of the clock passed midnight, Noel headed back to Olympic clutching the white ’64 Tele that he’d bought the year before in the Frankfurt PX but had never really liked. Now obviously this was not an ideal solution, but recalling Womack’s story about the special relationship Hendrix had had with a white Tele on the chitlin’ circuit, the appearance of this one must surely have brought a smile to his face. Either way, he proceeded to restring it left-handed before spending the wee small hours weaving it into the magic tapestry that would become “Purple Haze.”

  So how do we know all this? Well, in keeping with our urtext mission statement, we had found someone who was there that night, and we’ll come to his part in the proceedings shortly. But let’s first pause to consider the fact that we’d solved the conundrum of why Jimi had used a Tele on “Purple Haze” rather than his trademark Strat. The simple truth is, he had been forced to, for given his onstage antics in the club that night, the virtuoso Jekyll was once again in thrall to the impromptu impulses of his stage alter ego, the showman Hyde. If you think back, he’d had an argument with Linda Keith in New York on this very subject, and the same syndrome would become a recurring motif throughout his short career, for the more he resorted to pyrotechnics and tricks, the less satisfaction he seemed to derive from what was in effect his very lifeblood . . . the act of performing. Indeed, there is something strangely symbolic about the situation he found himself in that evening, for if you recall, the damaged Strat had a double cutaway that allowed him to reach the higher frets on the fingerboard, while the borrowed Tele had none. So even with an “any port in a storm” last-minute replacement, Mr. H had still contrived to derail what was undoubtedly a pivotal session.

  But as always with Hendrix, there was a whiff of serendipity in the air, and it arrived that night courtesy of a young electronics engineer then working for the British Admiralty in the field of vibration and acoustic research at Teddington in the western suburbs of London. The engineer in question, Roger Mayer, was a big rock fan, and he had recently been using his technical skills to collaborate with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page on a set of distortion pedals, or fuzz boxes as they were then called. After watching Hendrix play at a club called the Bag of Nails on January 11, he was suitably knocked out, and at the finale, he had gone up and introduced himself in that casual offhand way that insiders then tended to use in the hip London rock scene: “Hi there, my name’s Roger, and I’ve got this new sound you might be interested in . . .”

  Since arriving in London, Jimi had been buying his equipment from Ivor Arbiter’s Sound City in Shaftesbury Avenue and had actually used an Arbiter Fuzz Face pedal on “Hey Joe!” So, intrigued, he invited Mayer to a gig at the Chiselhurst Caves in Kent. There, Roger introduced him to a prototype of the Octavia, which he had designed to produce a doubling effect one octave higher than the note being played. Jimi tried it out in the dressing room and, suitably impressed, asked him to bring it along to the Ricky Tick Club so he could use it on the Olympic session.

  Mayer is one of the few people still alive to talk about that eventful night, and he recalls vividly the moment that Jimi rammed the Strat into the low ceiling of the crowded club, bending just one of the machineheads. But one or three, it made no difference, for that little accident was enough to make the Strat temporarily unplayable. Mayer also remembers Noel suggesting that he go and get “his Telecaster back” for the session, though of course, by now it belonged to Trevor. Then later, back at Olympic Studios, Mayer remembers Redding arriving with the white Tele, and with the strings being changed, and as far as he could tell, Jimi seemed perfectly at home with it. In fact, it seemed obvious to him that Hendrix must have played a Tele on the chitlin’ circuit, because it was the soul player’s instrument of choice.

  As for the “one good tone” quote, Mayer dismisses this, saying that’s not how Jimi thought. A guitar was a guitar, and the bridge pickup on the Tele was pretty close sound-wise to that on the Strat, if a bit brighter; so to create that particular sound, he reckons that Jimi used the high trebly tone of his experimental Octavia combined with the bite of the bridge pickup to give the overdubs a special cutting edge. And of course, this is where the Octavia pedal made all the difference, because in effect it overrode the missing cutaway and let Hendrix reproduce the notes he needed by playing them an octave down the fretboard. So whichever way you look at it, what we have here is a unique set of coincidences with an outcome not intentionally designed but serendipitously found. And as if to underscore its very uniqueness, having adapted this prototype Octavia especially for the session, Mayer then consigned it to the bin!

  Later in his career, and without Chandler’s restraining influence, Hendrix’s production techniques came to resemble James Joyce’s mania for serially editing his work even after the proofs had gone off to the printers. Thus two further production sessions of two hours each were booked on February 5 and 6, and yet another bounce on February 7 freed up space for background vocals and sound effects. This tends to highlight how easy it was to overegg the pudding, for even as early as this, his second single, Jimi was showing signs of that total inability to let go of the current work in progress. That said, the final mixes of both “Purple Haze” and “Fire” were done the next day, and the track was now irrevocably in the can.

  So, there you have it, chapter and verse. If you trawl through all the Hendrix biographies, even the ones that deal with the technical side of Jimi’s career, you’ll find they all fail to mention that these overdubs and the ones on “Fire” were done on a borrowed Telecaster. But following our urtext rule, we had spoken to Roger Mayer, who was at both the Ricky Tick gig and the ensuing session, and he had confirmed that the white Richards Strat had been damaged in the club and the replacement Tele had arrived with Redding. Now to put this in some context, “Purple Haze” is generally agreed by experts and the public alike to be a real milestone in rock music, the highest peak of psychedelia, one of the most famous riffs ever, and for that we obviously have Hendrix, Redding, Mitchell, and Chandler to thank. But purely on a sound level, it now seems that the actual recording owes its uniqueness to a crazy paved trail of happenstance, where the innovative skills of Eddie Kramer, the electronic wizardry of Roger Mayer, and Jimi’s musical genius all combined with the unknown thief in Darlington and the “untimely” small accident in the jam-packed, low-ceilinged Ricky
Tick Club to create a singular moment in rock music history.

  Part II

  Following the Tele Trail

  Chapter 9

  Psychedelic Makeover

  By now I’d come to the conclusion that our Quest was a bit like a cold-case detective story, with layers of time covering the evidence and many of the participants either untraceable or dead. But being a fan of Michael Connelly and his seminal LA sleuth, Harry Bosch, I knew a successful outcome in such cases usually depends upon identifying any remaining leads and tracking them down to their logical conclusion. To extend the crime-writing metaphor, it seemed that in my colleague Eric Barnett, I had been fortunate enough to find my own John Rebus, Ian Rankin’s antihero, famous for his love of tobacco and Edinburgh’s authentic real-ale pubs. In fact, as a native of that city and a confirmed smoker, this profile could have come straight from Eric’s CV, and just like Rebus, his research had a dogged unwavering quality, fueled by an unbending belief in the infallibility of his own instinctive nose.

  Like all good fictional detective teams, we met regularly to take stock of our progress, and three months into our Quest we sat down over a pint of real ale to review our findings. Thus far, our research had led us up a few frustrating blind alleys, and naturally enough we had taken our share of wrong turnings, but reducing it all to the barest of bones, we felt we could now safely state three facts:

  The guitar used on the overdubs of “Purple Haze” was a white 1964 Telecaster, which had originally belonged to Noel Redding.

  Sometime in the summer of 1966, Noel had swapped it with Trevor Williams, guitarist in his old band, the Lonely Ones, possibly for a “two-pickup Gibson.”

  The Telecaster was presumably returned to Trevor after that overnight Olympic session in February ’67.

  So how did these discoveries fit with my own Tele, brought into Sound City six years later by a “Hendrix roadie”? Well, the plain, unvarnished truth was that nothing we had found so far had brought us any closer to answering that. We had confirmed at the outset that both guitars were manufactured in 1964, and both were white with a dark, rosewood fretboard, but as I’d told Eric repeatedly, this must apply to dozens of others. The question still remained, could they be one and the same? With no further evidence to back up this proposition, my gut instinct said no, but Eric disagreed, though his theory had to be predicated on the possibility that someone in the Jimi Hendrix camp had bought the guitar off Trevor at a later date. But either way, it was obvious that our next task was to find out what had happened to Noel’s erstwhile buddy, so it was agreed that Eric would set to work, tracking him down.

  His first port of call was the Kentgigs website, where he got the webmaster to put up a post asking for information about the ex–Lonely Ones guitarist. As we shall see, this was to bear fruit in a most unexpected way, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Trawling through the site, he went back to the Lonely Ones page and scrutinized the various lineups through the midsixties. This was no easy task, as the personnel had changed on a regular basis, but from this complex database, he extracted one interesting name. This was a drummer we mentioned earlier, Laurie “NuNu” Whiting, who according to the site had gone on to “become one of Hendrix’s Roadies.” Given that we were looking for connections between Trevor’s guitar and mine, the mention of a Hendrix roadie was too good to miss, so Eric added him to our list of leads to follow up.

  The site devoted a fair amount of space to midsixties Lonely Ones, and a photo showed the lineup as it was the night Noel turned up at Blaises. Sporting de rigueur mod haircuts were Andy Andrews, Trevor, bass player Martin Vinson, and Keith Bailey, the drummer whom Noel had tried to recruit for the Experience. Beside him was his Swindon buddy, Rick Davies, who had an interesting link attached to his name, which we’ll get to later. Further down the page was a subsection entitled “The Joint,” and it turned out this was the same unit, augmented by two sax players. It seemed the Lonely Ones had headed for Europe in ’67 and at some point had renamed themselves before recording some film music in Munich. This had since been released on CD under the title Freak Street, and knowing the amount of sixties music that had been recycled with the digital age, Eric added this tidbit to our short list of leads.

  Then, following another clue, he discovered that in the early seventies, a Trevor Williams had been playing bass with a band called Audience, who had been stablemates of ours at Charisma. I had met their front man, Howard Werth, at the label’s Soho offices, but by this time the band had broken up, so I didn’t know the other members. Also I was skeptical that this was the right Trevor, mainly because of the instrument change, but Eric pointed out that Noel had done the same switch, so I swallowed my doubts and e-mailed the Audience fansite. Their webmaster duly wrote back to say that I could reach Trevor through something called the Fox Project, and when I Googled the link, I found it was a Kent-based charity dedicated to the protection of the red fox. Geographically, this was promising, so I sent him an e-mail, explaining who I was and asking about his old Tele. Back came a reply saying that sadly my information was wrong because he’d never owned a Telecaster bass! So as I’d suspected, we had the wrong Trevor Williams. After slagging Eric about the infallibility of his nose, I e-mailed an apology and got the following reply:

  Hi Chris. That particular Trevor was a member of one of Noel’s earlier bands (The Lonely Ones?) and I think he was later with Judas Jump—remember them? Some years back, a researcher from the Southbank Show found me and said I’d been mentioned by Noel in his autobiography as having lent him my guitar. I said at the time that I might have done, because we played with the Noel Redding Band two or three times and I might have lent my bass to his band. But I couldn’t be sure. Clearly, my story wasn’t interesting enough and I heard no more!

  So crucially it appeared that others had been down this path before and had hit the proverbial dead end. But at least Trevor had opened up a route from this cul de sac with the little nugget that his namesake had gone on to play in Judas Jump. We soon established that this late sixties supergroup included former members of two well-known acts, the Herd and Amen Corner, both managed by a man who has already cropped up in this text, the infamous Don Arden, father of Sharon Osbourne. Tales told of Arden’s business methods are not all rosy, but he obviously had an eye for talent as his company, Galaxy Entertainments, also managed other acts such as the Small Faces and the Move. So following this new seam, Eric went off to do some digging and soon came up with our next lead.

  Nowadays Val Weedon is a campaigning journalist, but as a teenager, her first job was as a receptionist in Arden’s offices in Carnaby Street, where she saw many pop stars of the sixties pass through her foyer, and forty-odd years on, part of her website is devoted to reminiscences of those far-off days. Looking back, she wondered out loud why some bands had made it big, while others, just as talented, hadn’t, and using social sites on the Internet, she had managed to track down some of Arden’s old clients who had slipped into obscurity. One such was the Lonely Ones, whose drummer, Keith Bailey, she had dated, and it transpired that she’d recently made contact with their former singer, Andy Andrews. If you remember, this was the schoolboy friend with whom Noel had started the band back in ’61, and he had also been in the ’67 Blaises lineup, so Eric immediately e-mailed Val to ask if Andy might still be in contact with Trevor Williams. Her reply arrived four days later:

  Apologies. Only just found your message (it got sent directly to my junk mail for some reason!). I think Andy had a contact number for Trevor, but I know that the last time he spoke to him he wasn’t doing very well health wise. So not sure if he would ever make contact. Andy has tried encouraging Trevor to meet up with us at one of the gigs that he plays in Deal, but Trevor has never turned up. I do know he hasn’t played guitar for many years. Anyway, not sure if that’s of any help? Good luck!

  Attached to the message was Andy’s e-mail address, so using what had now become a basic pro forma, Eric got a message off to him. A week p
assed and then came a reply: “Hi Eric. The guitar in question had psychedelic artwork and did indeed originate from Noel. Hope this helps. Andy.”

  At our next biweekly real-ale meeting, we dissected this terse, sixteen-word message and decided there were three things to be extracted from it. First was the affirmation that the Tele had come from Noel. Second was the information that it had had psychedelic artwork, which was totally new to us, and third there was Andy’s brevity, which suggested that he was not the kind of guy to hand out information willy-nilly. In fact, Eric had indicated in his e-mail that we’d like to contact Trevor, but tellingly, this request had been totally blanked.

  Now as we’d seen from the “wrong” Trevor Williams, other Hendrix buffs had been down this trail before, so it was possible that some of them might have pissed into the proverbial pool of goodwill. Given that we were essentially cold calling people, we had to be sensitive to the fact that some of them might not want to rake over the distant past. We could be dredging up painful memories or reopening long-forgotten feuds, for guys who lived cheek by jowl on the road for years can finish up detesting the sight of each other. Truth was, we couldn’t even be sure which of them was still aboveground, and we now knew from Val Weedon that Trevor wasn’t in the best of health. So all things considered, we decided to back off at this juncture and pursue some of the other potential leads we had come up with.

  One such avenue was the film music recorded by the Lonely Ones under their dodgy pseudonym, and after a bit of digging I found a music site called Artist Direct, which featured a page for the Joint and their reissued album Freak Street, with a track called “Dinosaur Days” available to listen to. The music was very much of its time, with a strong vocalist singing an Indian-style melody over busy drums and a bustling Doors-type organ, but when it came to the snatches of improvised solo, I could tell immediately from the cutting edge that the guitar being used was a Telecaster. As I was asking myself if it was possible to recognize the specific tone of my own Tele, I began to scan down the track list, and below it, I noticed a Facebook comment in a thread to someone called Paul Brett. “I’m playing bass on some of the tracks and didn’t get a credit.” And there beside the comment was a tiny photo of the man who had posted it: Martin Vinson! It was one of those eureka moments when you mentally punch the air with joy, and carried along by this energy, I immediately sent off a friend request with a short explanatory sentence: “Hi Martin, I’m a musician based in Glasgow, doing some research on my old ’64 Tele and was wondering if I could maybe pick your brain. Cheers, Chris Adams.”