The Grail Guitar

by Chris Adams

  Chapter 12

  Sam

  So if you recall, Martin Vinson had confirmed that the psychedelic Tele had accompanied Trevor Williams to the Bohemian quarter of Munich, where the band was just beginning to get back on its feet. It was at this juncture that the larger-than-life David Llewelyn announced that he might have the perfect manager for them, the man in question being an old school friend who was extremely wealthy but, according to David, badly in need of an occupation, presumably to stave off the effects of that virulent strain of ennui that can reputedly strike down the super-rich.

  The millionaire was Dutch, born Stanley August Miesegaes but known to his friends by the acronym Sam. He was then living in Geneva, and the alma mater that he and David shared was Harrow, one of the two great public schools of England. Sam’s parents had divorced before the war, and having enrolled him at Harrow, his invalid mother then tragically died. Alone in an alien country, Sam found a soul mate in the musically gifted Llewelyn, whose own mother had died of leukemia when he was only three. Both shared a deep love of classical music and found in it a balm for the emotional wounds that life had so casually inflicted, but while David went on to study music, Sam chose a more prosaic path, moving to Switzerland where he gained a diploma in business studies. But being the heir to a fortune, he could afford to indulge his passion for the piano, and one of Rachmaninoff’s concert grands had pride of place in “Aganippe,” his capacious house at Versoix, a municipality on the shores of the breathtaking Lake Geneva.

  This then was the man whom David had in mind to “manage” the young English musos, even though Sam apparently knew nothing of the shark-infested waters of the rock business. But having whetted the band’s appetite and gone off apparently to play Sam the newly recorded film music, Llewelyn promptly disappeared. Two weeks went by with no word, but according to Martin, Andy Andrews had taken note of Sam’s number and now phoned him to find out what was happening. Strangely Sam could shed no light on his old friend’s whereabouts, but Llewelyn had told him about his “joint venture” with the English rock band and had obviously done a decent selling job, because Sam now invited Andy to come to Geneva to play him the film music tapes.

  At the lakeside house, Andy met the multimillionaire and his beautiful wife Lillian, both of them smooth and sophisticated and Sam seemingly reminiscent of Brian Epstein. Having listened intently to the tracks, he immediately declared his interest and then took Andy down to the basement, where next to his wine cellar was a large unused room that he suggested should be big enough for the band to rehearse in. When Andy concurred, the Dutchman then took him upstairs and gave him a brief tour of what would become their accommodation. Back in Munich, an incredulous Joint asked why this enigmatic millionaire was opening his doors to five down-and-out rockers, but Andy could only surmise that they had stumbled upon that rarest of all beasts, a latter-day artistic patron. It seemed the Dutch dilettante had glimpsed something in their musical collaboration with Llewelyn, and the bottom line was, he was prepared to back them. But before they could move into his home on the shores of Lake Geneva, one of their number decided he’d had enough and headed back for England.

  When Martin first told me about his strange decision, I have to admit that my first thought was the selfish one that we would now lose the trail of the psychedelic Tele, but I was also taken aback, for after what they’d been through, to give up just when they’d found a financial backer sounded perverse in the extreme; but he explained that by now they’d been gone from the UK for over a year, and homesickness and fatigue can combine to crack all but the strongest. All of which is true, and in the context of who “makes it” to the top and who doesn’t, it’s crucial, for as the cliché goes, only the strong survive, and unless you complete the course, when it comes to the fame stakes, you’re just another “also ran.”

  But of course, Martin was aware of this. Looking back, he knew that this decision was one of the big turning points in his life, and he told me that he was to live to regret it big style, even in the short term; for on the back of the film money the band then earned, they bought themselves new suits, flew back to the UK, hired a flashy car, and drove down the main street in Folkestone, stopping outside the men’s clothes boutique where he was now eking a living. Needless to say, the poor guy was gutted. I remember when he told me this story, it was a Friday about five, and I told him that I’d have to finish the conversation because I was due to meet Eric Barnett for the usual twice-weekly confab in our local pub. By this time Martin had become really involved in our Quest, fascinated at the way we’d traced so many people, but my mention of the pub brought a little sigh.

  “Do you drink real ale?” he asked.

  “Indeed I do,” I replied.

  “That’s what I really miss here in France. A nice pint of Spitfire!”

  So Martin had taken us as far as he could go on the trail of the psychedelic Tele, but happily he was about to pass on the baton, for in the meantime, we had given him Andy’s e-mail address, and the two of them were now back in touch. It quickly transpired that the sixteen-word e-mail had had nothing to do with reticence and everything to do with a dislike of computers! This problem was easily solved, and soon he and I were chatting away on the phone. Like Martin, Andy was a really nice guy, very approachable with a great sense of humor and a very balanced view about his shot at fame all those years ago. One of the first things I asked him was how Trevor was, and he said as far as he knew, their old guitarist was living in Spain with the latest in the long line of women who had graced his life.

  I asked if this meant he was now retired, but all Andy could tell me was that he had been involved in property development, and with the 2007 recession, things hadn’t gone well for him. Health-wise, it seemed the ailment in question was liquid in form, and sensing we were moving into a delicate area, I changed the subject; thinking about the famous “two-pickup Gibson” that Noel Redding talks about in his biography, I asked him what kind of guitar Trevor had owned when he first joined the Lonely Ones. The answer was none, as Andy remembered that he had been forced to borrow an Epiphone Casino from their previous guitarist, Ian Taylor, who had moved on to keyboards. Working on the premise that Ian might be able to fill in some of the guitar gaps, I then passed his name and details on to Eric.

  Next time I spoke to Andy, he was happy to take up the story where Martin had left off, with the band moving to Geneva and settling into Sam’s luxurious villa in Versoix. Life had taken such an incredible set of twists over the past few months that he had to keep reminding himself that all this might disappear as quickly as it had arrived, so for once, the “fun and crumpet (women)” was forgotten as the band got stuck into the new material they were now cowriting with David Llewelyn. With Andy back on bass, they rehearsed daily in the basement studio, and in January ’69, they headed for Munich to record a five-song demo with which Sam intended to land them a recording deal. As David had intimated, the millionaire had no experience of the barracuda-infested waters of the biz, but it now transpired that he had a buddy who did.

  Bert Cantor was a friend of Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, and so Sam headed to New York to play him the material. Grossman listened politely to the tape and then invited Sam and Bert to share lunch with him and a lady friend, who turned out to be Janis Joplin. A good time was had by all, but by the time dessert had arrived, Grossman had disabused the naïve Swiss millionaire of the notion that the uncooly named “Joint” was ever going to be the next big thing. So like Linda Keith with Hendrix two years before, Sam was discovering what life was like in the knockback capital of the world. But undeterred, he ploughed on. He knew that to make it, the band would now have to move back to London, so on his return from the States, he arranged to go there with the demo to seek out a management/agency deal.

  Relationship-wise, everyone with the exception of Trevor seemed to be on excellent terms with their patron, but there was a reason for this, which would come out much later, for it seems he was now havi
ng an affair with Sam’s wife, Lillian. Not the best political move then, but this was the swinging sixties, and the concept of free love necessarily had its up and its down sides. Either way, their host seemed prepared to live with the situation, and happily the lake house was big enough to contain the band’s eclectic personalities and the new gear that he had purchased on their behalf. In their studio, they now had a state-of-the-art Binson PA, and crucially, Trevor had a second guitar, a white three-pickup Les Paul SG Special, which he began to use on the movie scores. This begs the question, was the Telecaster still on board? The answer from Andy was yes, for it definitely wasn’t traded in for the Les Paul.

  Armed with the new material, Sam flew to London, and a meeting with the Australian impresario Robert Stigwood, who liked what he heard but made them a management offer on condition that they change their singer, as he didn’t care for Andy’s voice. Now the band could have responded in an “all for one, one for all” fashion, but sadly, when the scent of fame is in the air, that kind of thinking is rare, and Sam drove the final nail deep into Andy’s coffin by accepting Stigwood’s proviso as a fait accompli. This was a bitter pill for Andy to swallow, for it was he who had started the band with Noel all those years ago, and back in ’66, he had landed them a deal with Parlophone that had taken him into Abbey Road to record a version of a song called “A Rose Growing in the Ruins” written by soul greats Ashford and Simpson. Parlophone had then released the record under the name “John Andrews and the Lonely Ones” and wanted him to go solo, but he refused, preferring loyalty to expedience. So now, sickened by this turning of the tables, he headed for Italy to stay with a German muso friend.

  The bass replacement was Steve Brass, who like Keith and Rick, was from Swindon, so by now, Trevor was the sole Folkstonian in the band. With Andy gone, the singing duties would be shared between Rick and Trevor, and when Stigwood’s company, RSO, got them a residency at the Rasputin Club in March, the band headed back to London, where Sam booked them into the Royal National Hotel, near Russell Square. It was agreed that he would attend their “showcase” in the Marquee Club scheduled for Saturday, June 21, but a few days before the gig, Andy turned up at Aganippe to collect his gear, to find Sam on a real downer.

  It seemed that in the weeks since Andy’s departure, relations between Sam and the band had deteriorated badly. In fact, the only one now showing him any respect was Rick, and worried that he was throwing good money after bad, he invited Andy to accompany him to the Marquee gig to gauge the band’s attitude. Andy must have had a moment’s satisfaction in discovering that the dynamic had changed so drastically in his absence, but he was well aware that a negative outcome might open him to accusations of sour grapes. On the other hand, he owed nothing to his ex-bandmates, and he was beholden to Sam for all he had done. And besides, a stay at the Mayfair Hotel sounded very appealing.

  As I intimated at the outset, the Marquee was the hangout of a goodly proportion of the London rock press, and with no Internet and only one radio station in the UK, these guys had an inordinate amount of power in their shaky hands. All of which meant that one gig there could make or break you, and so it proved that Saturday night in June 1969. Whether they had simply become soft after months in their Swiss chateau, or whether they missed their former front man, the outcome was the same, for neither the gig nor the ensuing meeting went well. Three weeks later, Sam wrote to his lawyer about the amateurishness of the show, the lack of enthusiasm, and most telling of all, the wanton abuse that the equipment had taken, all of it bought and paid for by him. From the point of view of our Quest, it’s important to note that this included damage to the white SG that Trevor had been using. It could be that Trevor was pissed off at Sam for delivering the coup de grace to Andy, and this was his way of showing it, but either way, we knew from Andy that the psychedelic Tele had definitely come back with him to the UK.

  In the taxi on the way to the airport after the gig, Sam asked the former front man what he would do if he was in his shoes, and Andy said he’d end his support for the Joint and focus his patronage on one of their two front men, whom he believed had what it took to make it in this hardest of hard businesses. As we shall see, it wasn’t the person everyone thought would become famous, and Sam was initially undecided about taking his advice. But he did agree that backing the Joint was now a waste of money, so he told Andy to arrange with their roadie Phil Ingham to have the gear driven to Geneva while he mulled things over. Caught in a dilemma, Andy decided to accompany Ingham on the trip, so when Keith and Trevor came back from a short break, it was to find both the bus and the gear gone, not to mention their sinecure.

  Jimi at Olympia, Paris, October 18, 1966, with white Strat.

  Photo by Jean-Pierre Leloir.

  Jimi at Big Apple, Munich, November 8, 1966, white and black backup Strats.

  Photo by Ulrich Handl. Author has made all efforts to contact copyright holder of photograph.

  Jimi at the Blue Moon, Cheltenham, February 11, 1967, with two white Strats.

  Photo by Mike Charity, Camera Press London.

  Jimi and Noel at the Marquee Club, London, March 2, 1967.

  REX USA. A Division of Berliner Photography LLC.

  Kevin Lang and Noel Redding, Germany, July 1965.

  Courtesy of Kevin Lang.

  Linda Keith, circa ’66.

  Courtesy of Linda Porter.

  The Experience (Mitch Mitchell; Jimi Hendrix; Noel Redding) by Ian Wright, bromide print, February 2, 1967.

  Copyright Ian Wright/National Portrait Gallery, London.

  The Managers. Chas Chandler (left) and Mike Jeffery.

  Photo by Eddie Kramer (Kramer archives).

  The Lonely Ones. From top: Noel, NuNu, Andy, and Derek.

  Courtesy of John Andrews.

  Lonely Ones Munich. Clockwise from bottom left: Martin, Trevor, Keith, Andy, and Rick.

  Courtesy of John Andrews.

  The Joint. Clockwise from front: Andy, Rick, Trevor, Ian, Steve, Martin, and Keith.

  Courtesy of John Andrews.

  Trevor with David Llewelyn.

  Courtesy of John Andrews.

  Trevor with the “Purple Haze” Tele.

  Courtesy of John Andrews.

  Comparison shot of author’s Tele.

  Photo by C. Studzinski.

  Author with Tele, 1973.

  Author’s collection.

  Author’s Tele body.

  Author’s collection.

  Author’s Tele with humbucker cavity.

  Author’s collection.

  Headstock with left-handed tuners.

  Author’s collection.

  Andy Andrews at Botolph’s Bridge House.

  Author’s collection.

  Noel’s house in Aldington.

  Author’s collection.

  Noel’s plaque in Ardfield, County Cork.

  Photo by C. Studzinski.

  Noel’s house in Cork.

  Photo by C. Studzinski.

  Eric Barnett and Chris Adams with Keith Bailey.

  Author’s collection.

  Chapter 13

  Isle of Wight Connections

  As the last summer of the sixties grew warmer and Neil Armstrong prepared to blast off for the moon, fate had conspired to bring two of the main participants in our tale back to the UK, for though Jimi Hendrix and his crew were still mainly in the States, both Noel Redding and Trevor Williams were now back in Kent, as was the “Purple Haze” Telecaster.

  Now remember, if Eric Barnett’s theory was correct, the guitar must have reentered the Hendrix camp sometime prior to his death in September 1970, so we could now measure this window of opportunity in months, starting in July ’69, giving us fourteen in all. Interestingly, from this perspective, it seems that after the demise of the Joint, Trevor’s first port of call was his buddy Noel’s house in Aldington, and Eric was quick to point out that this opened up the possibility that the Telecaster could have returned to its original master at this juncture, an
eventuality made even more likely by the two friends’ widely divergent financial status, for at this stage, Noel was rock star flush and Trevor stony broke. Obviously, I could see where he was coming from, but as always, I was keen to separate wishful thinking from hard urtext evidence. Besides, around this time, Trevor had landed the gig with Judas Jump, and he could hardly have done that without a guitar. So once again it was back to creating a time line from our available leads.