The Grail Guitar

by Chris Adams

  But the strange thing is, this same gene must have applied just as much to Jimi Hendrix as it did to those of us with a zillionth of his talent. After all, he had stood on a club stage in New York in ’66 playing his socks off for a young white dude called Andrew Oldham who had met his performance with the kind of blasé indifference that would have made a lesser man’s toes curl. So what did Jimi think that night after his “showcase,” sitting with Linda Keith in the Red House on Fifty-Ninth Street? Did he doubt for a moment that it was his “destiny” to become famous? After all, he had no confidence in his voice, and at that point he hadn’t written one song. Basically all he had was his virtuosity, and much of that was a theatrical box of tricks he’d picked up from other guitar hustlers on the road. So what gave him the kind of incredible self-belief that would soon emanate from him like a visible aura? Was it an inner conviction in his guitar playing, or was it the knowledge that women were drawn to him like flying insects to a night lantern? Or was it, in some Faustian sense, a combination of both?

  I use the term “Faustian” because in my brief encounter with the effects of “celebrity,” I had found the whole thing very creepy, as if by going along with fan worship, I was being lulled into an unwritten pact with darker forces inhabiting rock music. On the sole occasion that I walked onstage in front of tens of thousands of people, at the ’72 Reading Festival, it felt as if I was actually being lifted up by some invisible hand. In a strange way, it reminded me of the electric current passing through my body all those years before but without the juddering pain. But back in the early seventies, I had no interest in the esoteric, and the notion that such forces might permeate the universe was not remotely on my priority list. I was on a mission to succeed, and like a tactically innocent guinea pig, I had no overview of the strange things that were happening to me. Reality was simply that vast sea of faces, swelling in time to the beat of the music.

  But sadly, the road that led to the rainbow was consuming us even as it led us onward. For Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, out there on a never-ending succession of American towns, fame was no longer something to be pursued and caught. It had happened, like jumping into the ocean. But the thing about the sea is, once you’re in it, you only feel wet for a moment and then you’re just drifting on the swell, glimpsing sky and white horses at the peaks, darkness in the troughs. Enough of this and you come to a point where your reflection peers back from the dressing-room mirror with dead eyes. For me, this happened in ’74 in Hamburg, on tour with Gentle Giant, and in his book, Noel says that it happened to Jimi in ’69, when after two years of grueling touring, he suffered a breakdown and tried to slash his wrists. This episode remains uncorroborated, but for me, Noel always comes across as someone who knows the truth from falsehood.

  Interestingly, he says that by this time, Hendrix had begun to look down his nose at both him and Mitch, which could be true, for I found that there was a corrosive fascism at the heart of rock that became more prevalent the higher you climbed the virtuosity chain. It seemed that this was an aspect of becoming lost in the oceanic void. You would begin to lose relative values, like Neil Armstrong on the moon, unable to tell if he was looking at hills a few hundred yards away or a ridge of giant mountains ten miles in the distance. Maybe it all comes down to that proverb, about what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world . . .

  Yet here I was forty years on, pursuing another dream, physically embodied by my white ’64 Telecaster but laden with its own Faustian echoes. For at the heart of our search for the Holy Grail of the Hendrix legend there lurked the strange supernatural force that once permeated the psyche of the medieval world, namely, the belief in the power of holy relics. Like an echo of the splinters of the one true cross, there had come a need to worship the burnt Strat that Jimi had set alight at Monterey, to touch any fretboard his fingers had caressed, in order to possess a tiny piece of the guitar genius. So, far from being the technologically advanced secular society we like to think of ourselves, it seemed that the same age-old forces were still at work, reshaping our individual emotional responses into irrational communal urges.

  By now the Quest had taken me briefly into the lives of people who had lived through those iconic years, people who had known Jimi in his time in London, many of them, like me, moths who had circled the flame of stardom. Some who had pursued fame had been scarred by the experience, and a few, like Noel, had been left as half beings, only happy in the company of limelight. So understandably, I was starting to ask myself why I was doing this, when it was dredging up so many painful memories. But for Eric Barnett, there were no such qualms. He had spent his working life in insurance, a worthy if tedious business, and for him, this research was as rewarding as anything he’d ever done. So while I was reflecting on the nature of fame, Eric was still digging away, and unbeknown to us, much of what we’d uncovered in the past few months was about to crystalize into context.

  If you remember, he’d put a post on the Kentgigs website explaining how I’d come by my Tele and asking for information about Trevor Williams. Now, six months down the line, out of the blue, came an e-mail from a man I will identify only as the Expert. His initial message confirmed the fact that Trevor had indeed owned a ’64 Tele; he then asked if mine was for sale. A rudimentary Google told us that we were dealing with someone who knew a great deal about Jimi, which in turn led to the question, what does he know that we don’t? The answer to that would involve untangling Ariadne’s thread, but suffice it to say that he and Eric entered into a long, convoluted correspondence about Trevor’s Telecaster. According to the Expert, there were indications that mine could be that legendary beast, though at this stage he didn’t say what the indications were.

  Now coming from a Hendrix expert, the suggestion that my guitar could be the “Purple Haze” Tele was grist to Eric’s mill. He’d always believed in his gut what we were now hearing, though personally I found it surprising, because apart from the year, what was the Expert basing his premise on? Well there was the rosewood fretboard plus the finish, white with a black scratchplate, but at this stage he hadn’t asked for photos of the guitar, so without having seen it, what indications could he be referring to? Obviously it must be the left-handed Schallers, which Eric had mentioned in his post, but when asked about them, it soon became apparent that he didn’t really know what these were! When we explained, he fired back that Jimi could have played any known guitar upside down or backside foremost, and he wouldn’t have needed left-hand tuning pegs because, if he felt like it, he could have tuned the guitar with his teeth while soloing his way through “Machine Gun”! Obviously I’m extemporizing here, but the crucial thing is, he had failed to grasp that the Telecaster would never have been used live, only in a studio setting, where the Schallers would have made life easier for a left-handed player, which is probably why some thoughtful guitar tech had fitted them.

  When we brought up the remark by the Sound City assistant, he poo-poohed that too, saying that the guy had obviously been on the make. I knew this wasn’t the case, because the Tele was marked £150 when I walked in the door, and at no time was Hendrix even mentioned till I asked about the Schallers; but when we pointed this out in our next e-mail, all we got was another offhand putdown. It was at this point in the proceedings that he finally asked for photos of my instrument, specifically requesting that we include a close-up of the serial number on the back plate, which we duly sent. It was here the real fun started. He got back to us in a few days to say his own Fender expert believed that from what he had seen, my guitar had had a refinish, as the classic white body with the black scratchplate was no longer being made in ’64. In his opinion, it showed all the hallmarks of being a seventies makeover, intended to make it look like a fifties model, and furthermore with no Fender transfer on the headstock, it couldn’t be guaranteed that the neck was actually genuine. So in a few weeks we’d gone from it possibly being the “Purple Haze” Tele to it being a repainted mongrel with a fake neck!

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�But if you think about it,” said Eric, as we sat over a pint discussing this latest twist, “we both agreed that if you have Trevor’s Tele, then at some point it must have been refinished to get rid of the psychedelic paintjob!”

  And of course, he was right, but when we pointed this out to the Expert, it turned out that he knew nothing of the psychedelic artwork, nor for that matter that Trevor had been the lead guitarist with the Lonely Ones and had later been electrocuted in Rome whilst playing it. And it was at this point that the results of our researches came into focus, for we suddenly realized that we knew more about this guitar than anyone else on the planet, save for Trevor. So despite a host of Hendrix biographies, it seemed there were parts of his story that had remained untold. Indeed, the Expert’s input convinced us that what we’d discovered was actually breaking new ground. Considering this salutary fact, it became apparent that the most sensible course of action would be for me to share what we knew with the world in general by writing the book, dear reader, which you now clutch in your hands!

  But one other thing the Expert had done was to raise questions about the authenticity of my guitar, and given that Eric had been toiling away over a hot PC for months, I decided it was time to talk to one of my neighbors, who happens to be a well-known luthier. Jimmy Moon has made solid-bodied and acoustic guitars for some very big names, and what he doesn’t know about old Fenders could be written on the back of a plectrum. So I took it to his shop, and he shook his head when he saw the clunky Schallers and then bemoaned the lack of the original Fender transfer on the headstock. Turning the guitar over, he pointed out yet another piece of “modding” (musospeak for modification) where part of the upper rear of the body had been beveled to take away the sharp edge that digs into the player’s ribs. This was at least practical from a comfort point of view, but taken with the Schallers and the missing transfer, he reckoned it would really affect the value of the guitar. I thanked him for the advice but explained that I wasn’t in the selling market, so this list was of little import.

  After a quick examination, he said that the guitar had definitely been refinished at some point, for the scratchplate, or as the Americans call it, the pickguard, had filler round the rims of the screws that hold it on. I told him the Expert’s Fender advisor believed it had been modded to give it the classic fifties blackguard look, but Jimmy just shrugged and then got back to the matter in hand. Having checked that the serial number on the back plate proved it was a ’64 model, he unbolted the neck to examine the butt, but where the date stamp should be, there was none. Unfazed, Jimmy explained this was not uncommon for guitars of this age. However, it was when he removed the scratchplate that the plot really began to curdle, for it was immediately apparent that someone had done a chisel job on the center of the body, hollowing out a cavity a few centimeters wide.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked.

  “Looks like someone’s put a humbucker on here at some time! That’s maybe why you’ve got a black scratchplate.”

  In practical terms, Jimmy was right, because the Gibson humbucker is much larger than the Tele front pickup, so whoever had modded it would have had to cut a bigger aperture in the scratchplate to accommodate it. When he later removed the humbucker, the mystery modder may have made a virtue of a necessity by replacing the white guard with a black one. But more importantly, we now knew that the only differences we had so far found between the “Purple Haze” Telecaster and mine, namely, the psychedelic makeover and the color of the scratchplate, could now be discounted. The fact was, nothing we had thus far discovered in our months of research had disproved the possibility that this could well be the same guitar that Trevor had lent out that night in February 1967, aka, the “Purple Haze” Telecaster. So it seemed that our Quest was still very much alive and well.

  Chapter 15

  Last Rays

  In a book called Rock Roadie published in 2009, one of Jimi Hendrix’s former roadies, James Tappy Wright, made the sensational accusation that Mike Jeffery had murdered Hendrix by stuffing sleeping pills in his mouth and pouring red wine down his gullet. According to Tappy, the motive for this was simple. Hendrix was about to break away from Jeffery’s stranglehold, and there were far too many skeletons in the company cupboard for this to be allowed to happen. And, oh yes, Jeffery had taken out an insurance policy on Jimi’s life that stood to earn him two million pounds. This is not the place to dissect conspiracy theories, but the story loses some of its gravitas when we discover that Jeffery was in Majorca at the time of Hendrix’s death, and he never received a penny on any alleged insurance policy.

  The fact is, whatever Jeffery’s shortcomings as an artist manager, Jimi’s gypsy nature never allowed him to properly engage in the “uncool” process of dealing with the tacky business affairs and the huge sums of money his music was generating. Seemingly, he never asked for or ever received royalty statements or checks from Jeffery’s company, Yameta. He just bought what he wanted and sent them the bill. This could be a car, in his case Corvettes, an apartment, or guitars—these, as we have seen, on a serial basis. This way Jimi could have all the trappings of rock star wealth without ever having to dirty himself spiritually with the subject of filthy lucre. It’s what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.”

  Of course, there is another reason he may have wanted to ignore the sordid details, because by mid-1968, Hendrix was spending faster than he was earning. As early as ’67, the dispute with Ed Chalpin over the notorious PPX contract had gone to court, a territory inhabited by the vampires of the music biz, who would be feasting on this particular legal bloodletting for years to come. As we’ve seen, the settlement they reached meant that Hendrix had to deliver a new album for PPX (Band of Gypsys), from which neither he nor his American label, Reprise, would earn a brass farthing, while Chalpin would also receive 2 percent of the full Jimi Hendrix Experience (JHE) catalog to date, plus one million dollars. Now if you combine this with the bill for a three-month booking at the Record Plant for the Electric Ladyland album and the massively overbudget project to build Electric Lady Studios, you soon arrive at a point where even Mike Jeffery’s eyes would start to water. The fact is, by now Jimi Hendrix was the conductor of one huge train-crash choir!

  At the time he was using the Record Plant in 1968, their sixteen-track studio rate after midnight peaked at $160 per hour, and with multitrack tapes then costing $120 a time, that would normally have run up a bill of $2,500 for an all-night session. Obviously block booking would reduce that kind of figure substantially, but set against that, you have to remember that Jimi wasn’t just recording there. He was also using the studio for jamming purposes. In fact, this must have been one of the most expensive party rooms in New York, for in the end, even at “lockout” rates, he reportedly ran up a total bill of three hundred thousand dollars. This made building his own studio almost a necessity, but this project in turn developed into a financial nightmare. The chosen site was the Generation Club in Greenwich Village, which just happened to be the meat in an unusual topographical sandwich, with an underground river below and a movie theater above. So this was maybe not a huge mark on the smarts front for whoever carried out the initial survey.

  Then there was Jimi’s wish list, conveyed to designer John Storyk, including a multicolored light machine to create varying shades of ambience and round windows (?). But frighteningly, during all this work, the studio was suddenly flooded, and the ensuing exploratory investigations elicited the existence of the underground river. Pumps were then needed, not a fixture normally associated with recording environments as the noise they generate will necessarily call for extensive and expensive soundproofing. So given all this, Jimi’s personal budget allocation of $350,000 was not enough to cover costs, and Warner Brothers had to step in to save the project. But even then Jimi had to dig deep into his pocket, on one occasion having to transfer seventeen thousand dollars from his personal account to pay for two Ampex tape machines, and after all this, the grand opening didn’t ha
ppen until August 1970, meaning he only ever got to record there once! Leaving aside the pathos, what it all adds up to in debt terms is basically a stop-motion animation of a molehill gradually becoming a mountain in the space of just two years.

  But while Tappy may be off the beam on the murder charge, he is more convincing on the reason for Chas Chandler’s sudden decision to sell his stake in his superstar to Mike Jeffery. As he tells it, in ’69, Chas returned home unexpectedly one morning to find Hendrix in bed with his wife Lotta. Now considering all he’d done for Jimi, is that not a nauseating image? If anyone was responsible for Hendrix’s incredible ascent to stardom, surely it was Chas. But now the big Geordie was no longer Svengali; if anything, he was Frankenstein, being destroyed by the monster he had helped to create. There and then he cut himself off from both artist and spouse and sold his share in Hendrix for £100,000, a huge sum at the time, though just a fraction of what he might have earned in the long run. But then, the big man was never driven by money. Friendship and love were always more important to him, and this double betrayal spelled the end of both marital and artistic relationships.

  This would also explain why he stayed silent for the rest of his life about the bad times with Hendrix. Psychologically he had moved on, content to have the split described as “musical differences,” even if it meant being labeled a throwback to the days when you made records for ten bob in the last thirty minutes of studio time. Yet if you think about it, that’s exactly what he did when he helped to create “The Wind Cries Mary,” surely the most perfect example of what Hendrix could achieve in the studio given the right artistic atmosphere. Just take a trawl through the supposed nuggets that Mitch Mitchell and Eddie Kramer extracted from listening to hundreds of hours of sixteen-track reels after Jimi’s death to make Rainbow Bridge or Cry of Love, and see if you can find anything remotely in the same class.