by Chris Adams
So without Chandler’s restraining influence, it was left to Jeffery to try to control the tiger, a task that was beyond even the arch manipulator. Jeffery was now inextricably tangled with his maverick star and needed him generating income, which is maybe why he accepted a fee of only thirty thousand dollars for his appearance and the subsequent film rights at Woodstock. When he couldn’t get him top billing at the three-day event, he compounded the felony by insisting that Hendrix close the show. The organizers were happy to agree, for due to logistical reasons, most people would have left the site long before Jimi got on, and indeed by the time he took to the stage, the vast crowd had shrunk from a quarter of a million to twenty-five thousand. But none of these tawdry commercial maneuvers matter, for in the end what lives on in the collective memory is Hendrix’s famous rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” That brief performance has become not just the signature shot of that singular event; it has become one of the iconic moments of that troubled decade.
But just as I drew your attention away from the subject of Jimi’s earnings by pointing you in the much sexier direction of his onstage presence, so those who espouse the murder theory depend upon the gravitational pull of the Jeffery legend. They paint him as the villain of the piece, a man who had Jimi kidnapped, stole all the money, and had no interest in his artist’s music. For their conspiracy theory to work, they need to convince you that Jimi was desperate to break away from this conniving suit who had him tangled up in contractual chains. But one singular fact belies this, for it seems that Mike Jeffery had preceded his hippy artist into the netherworld of psychedelia and that he and Jimi seemingly tripped together on many occasions. Now as anyone who has done acid will tell you, that’s not something you would ever be doing on a serial basis with someone you strongly dislike. Let’s just say that the vibes would not be conducive to good mental health.
So although Jeffery undoubtedly had tax shelter companies and bank accounts in the Bahamas and, as Noel Redding testified, was seen leaving JHE gigs with briefcases of cash, the actual picture that emerges is more one of chaos rather than simple mendacity. The truth is, Hendrix was a tiger that no sane manager would have chosen to ride, for in the midst of the legal battles with Chalpin, perversely he turned up at the PPX studio where Curtis Knight was recording and proceeded to jam away with his erstwhile employer, while Chalpin let the tape run! Naturally, all of these tracks soon saw the light of day, and it’s not hard to imagine the expression on Jeffery’s face when he heard that news. So if ever an artist found a way to thumb his nose at a supposedly “all-powerful” manager, this would have to be it! In fact, Hendrix was totally uncontrollable. All Jeffery could do was hang onto his coattails and hope for the best.
As ’69 careered into ’70, the reports of disastrous Experience concerts began to mount, and if there were still real musical milestones in this period, they depended upon the specific cocktail that Jimi had just consumed. If the drugs were good, so was Jimi, but on the opposite end, he was often in no condition to get onstage, let alone play. In the case of the Miami Festival, he actually came back the following night to make amends for the previous day’s shambles. Yet at no time did he ever seek medical or psychiatric help, or even admit that the shit he was serially consuming was seriously damaging his playing and his health, for the truth is, to do so back then would have been considered extremely uncool!
To illustrate how prevalent the drugs culture was at that time, on the first day of Jimi’s last month on the planet, on the Gothenburg leg of the Cry of Love tour, his bass player Billy Cox was spiked with LSD and over the course of the next week suffered the terrifying effects of involuntarily ingesting a large amount of this frighteningly powerful drug. Usually an anchor in a sea of madness, Cox became mentally unhinged, ranting incoherently, and it became apparent that the only person who could calm him down was his old army buddy. Somehow Hendrix got him through the next four gigs, but back in London, Billy’s condition deteriorated, and after being intravenously sedated, he was flown back to Memphis, where happily he soon recovered.
At this point Jimi actually considered bringing Noel back on board just to finish the remaining legs of the tour, but in the event, they were canceled, leaving him in the city that had made him a star with time on his hands and, for the immediate future, no musical commitments. In the next week, Jimi “proposed” to a Danish model; became the “fiancé” of a German figure skater; called Chas Chandler to ask him to take over from Mike Jeffery as his manager; and gave Linda Keith a sunburst Strat to replace the one she’d “borrowed” from Keith Richards just four years before. The phrase “all over the place” springs to mind, but even from that short list, the sunburst Strat for Linda does stands out.
As we saw at the outset, I was sitting beside her in the Leicester Square Odeon when up on the screen came Hendrix playing his Isle of Wight version of “Red House.” By this stage of the movie I had realized that Dempse was not bullshitting; Linda had indeed “discovered” Jimi, but still, a shiver ran through me when he sang her name and I heard her little involuntary intake of breath. That reaction suggested there was much more to their relationship than just a quick fling in the summer of ’66; and given that Jimi was a serial philanderer on a monumental scale, I think the way he sang about her is perhaps indicative of a man who knows he will never smell a rose as long as he continues to live in a sewer.
Two months earlier, Hendrix had recorded a track called “Send My Love to Linda” and, indeed, had invited her to the opening of his Electric Lady Studio in New York City on August 26. She had politely declined, so now in the last week of his life, he actually arranged to meet her and brought along the sunburst Strat.
He had phoned me a few days before he left US to invite me to the opening of his studio in Manhattan which I think was the night before he came to London. We arranged to meet at Tramp on Jermyn Street. We met up, he was with his Scandinavian girlfriend and I was with my fiancé Lawrence Kershen, a London barrister. True to his current form—he asked me to marry him but I laughed and waved my huge engagement ring in his face. He seemed hurt and I regretted my response. He gave me the guitar as we left.
So was she “the love of his life,” as Dempse later intimated? Personally I doubt it. The love of Jimi’s life was undoubtedly a guitar, and when he broke it, there was always another one to hand, though even then he had his favorites. But unlike Kathy Etchingham, the lady he met on his first night in London in ’66, and really his only long-term girlfriend, Linda was not the kind of woman to forgive infidelity. If you were lucky enough to have ever gained her love, that should have been more than enough to fulfill all your earthly desires. But Jimi had no real sense of fidelity. In every sense, he had always been “Stone Free,” and so, after this brief uncomfortable reunion, they passed out of each other’s lives.
Two nights later, Jimi turned up at Ronnie Scott’s club to jam with Eric Burdon, and for the one and only time since the pair first met, Hendrix was guitarless. Again, this is symbolism in hindsight because he obviously had more than one guitar with him in London, but it’s hard not to read more into the situation in the context of his gift to Linda. Certainly Burdon was struck by the absence and immediately knew that his friend was in big trouble. And he was right! Adrift, rudderless, and desperately unhappy with what he had become, the only thing Jimi really had left was a steady supply of women and of drugs. Most of the former were au fait with the protocol of the latter, especially the potential dangers of vomiting while lying on your back, but sadly his current, figure-skating “fiancée” was not as adept at clearing out windpipes as many of her predecessors, and so she left him to his lonely fate in room 507, in the basement of the Hotel Samarkand in Notting Hill Gate, supposedly to go out to buy herself some cigarettes.
Much drivel is written about the “twenty-seven club,” although a case could be made for the proposition that you have to get well past that age before you begin to appreciate how sweet life is and what a waste it is to die young.
People pour so much drama into events, creating a “historical” perspective, and partly that’s down to our deep need to see everything in terms of stories, which are all supposed to have endings, tragic or otherwise. The crucial component in the story of Hendrix’s death is the moment he decided to take a handful of the ice skater’s sleeping pills without knowing what the correct dose should be. If the instructions had been in English, he might have taken three or four instead of nine, though on occasion he’d been seen throwing handfuls of downers down his gullet.
But these Vesparax were ultrastrong barbiturates, the recommended dose seemingly being half a pill, which is truly bizarre. Why produce medication that needs to be cut in half? But questions like this tend to make Hendrix’s death much more mundane, as indeed it must have been for the ambulance crew who turned up at the flat after he choked on his own vomit. They’d probably seen this kind of thing dozens of times before: drug taker dead in bed, face up; nothing new there. The truth is, Jimi had been serially flirting with death for a long time, and on that particular night, he finally scored.
Part III
Outcomes
Chapter 16
A Shot of Rye
For Jimi Hendrix’s friends, lovers, confidantes, and colleagues, his sudden death left a void that would never be filled, and none more so than for his musical sparring partner, Mitch Mitchell. They had hit highs together that few musicians ever reach, pushing each other further out on the flight to higher ground, never happy just to coast, always searching, experimenting. In the coming years, the genius of Hendrix would leave a long shadow from which Mitchell never really emerged; but besides the emotional pain caused by the bereavement, Mitch was also affected on a more mundane level by the loss of his friend, for whilst Noel Redding had left in ’69, he had remained in the band all through the Band of Gypsys and Cry of Love period, so in the immediate aftermath of Jimi’s death, he was the one left to deal with Hendrix’s legacy.
This basically fell into two categories. First came the job of sifting through and then mixing the hundreds of hours of tapes that Hendrix had recorded in the last months of his life. Seemingly Chas Chandler was on the phone to him within twenty-four hours of Jimi’s death, offering his services, but Mitch obviously felt that he and engineer/producer Eddie Kramer were the best people to handle this delicate task. This resulted in the release of two albums, Cry of Love and Rainbow Bridge, works that have split opinions among Hendrix fans ever since. But this is not the place to make artistic judgments, for in terms of our Quest, what concerns us is the second aspect of Jimi’s heritage.
This comprises the actual physical detritus left behind in the wake of his demise, for though Jimi’s flat on West Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village was cleaned out within two days of that event, possibly on the orders of a New York–based Mike Jeffery, the Experience had been on that European tour, so their backline gear was still sitting in London. This meant that by default, Mitch became the heir to the black flight cases containing all of Hendrix’s amps, pedals, and guitars, and as we shall soon see, at least one of the Experience road crew seems to have stayed with him for at least a year after Jimi’s death.
By 1971, most of the post-Hendrix studio work was done, and back in the UK, Mitch did what most rock stars did in those days; he bought himself a house in the country, in his case in the East Sussex village of Rye, along the coast from Folkestone. He then converted the adjoining barn into a rehearsal studio, installed the Experience gear he had inherited, and began to invite his superstar neighbors, like Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton, back for “a play,” often after the local pub had shut. Later that year, possibly looking for players for a new lineup, he took under his wing a jazz-rock outfit from the West Country called Flying Fortress.
Flying Fortress was one of a hundred young bands of hopefuls, lured to the capital by the promise of fame, and like others, they got their first break courtesy of a university-booker-turned agent called Lindsay Brown, later head of the large promotions company Eagle Rock. Looking back, it would seem that Mitch’s interest was mostly in their guitarist Mike Parsons, of whom big things were expected, though tragically he was to die in a car accident in Cornwall the following year. But that summer, like many a musical patron before and since, Mitch got them a gig at his local village hall, where they were supported by a school band, whose guitarist was a young man called Pete Davies.
After the schoolboys had finished their set, Pete got chatting to Mitch and managed to wangle himself and his drummer buddy a tentative invitation to a possible jam session at his studio the next day. Bright and early next morning, he and his friend caught the bus to Rye, arriving at nine, but it being a Sunday, unsurprisingly they found no sign of life. However, they hadn’t come all this way just to get the bus back home, so with the blissful ignorance of youth, they kept knocking till eventually the repeated banging brought results in the bleary-eyed form of Mitch’s drum tech, Laurie “NuNu” Whiting, whose name has already cropped up in this saga as an ex–Lonely Ones drummer. Understandably, NuNu was not entranced by this rude prenoon awakening, but taking pity on them, he took the youngsters into the studio, at which point I’ll let Pete take up the story:
Black flight cases, heaped in a pile, greeted us as we entered. Mitch’s black Gretsch double bass drum kit was already set up and gleaming, while at the end of the room stood Jimi’s Marshall stacks, ready and waiting, complete with grooved cabinets where Jimi had driven his guitar across the front. “JH EXP” was stenciled in white on the back. It was a dream come true; somehow we’d just joined the Jimi Hendrix Experience! Mitch’s roadie threw back the lids of the flight cases and started tossing out Univibes, Wah Wahs, Fuzz Faces, not just one, there were loads! It was real treasure trove. Snugly tucked inside one case was a brand-new Telecaster, gleaming cream with a maple neck, not a Strat, a Tele! However the strings were the wrong way round so I was given another Tele to play, one that Jimi had given to Mitch as a present. NuNu trundled off, leaving just me and my friend to jam all afternoon, playing our versions of “Rainbow Bridge,” loudly. In all fairness I spent most of the time getting electric shocks from the amps that weren’t rated for English current, but somehow it didn’t matter, I was playing Jimi’s guitar through Jimi’s amp, and it all seemed worth it. Later Mitch returned with the bass player from Blind Faith, Rick Grech. One thing of interest I did learn from Mitch was that most of Jimi’s guitars were now with Clapton, including his Flying V. The jam session Mitch had planned for all of us, Eric included, never happened, but we didn’t have to worry about the bus as NuNu gave us a lift home in Mitch’s Rolls Royce.
Having found Pete’s account on yet another guitar forum, Eric Barnett contacted him to ask if we could pick his brain on specific aspects of the story, and when he got a reply saying this was cool, we went back with more precise questions about the Tele. On further reflection, Pete recalled that the guitar he was given to play “was a bit beaten up and was probably blonde with a rosewood neck. The really nice Tele was the one that NuNu got from a flight case and kind of waved tantalizingly around, saying, ‘This needs to be restrung.’ It was white or cream and I think had a maple neck. I also think, though I may be wrong, that it had a humbucker pickup on it as well as the normal Fender bridge pick up.”
Now in the light of what we’d found under my scratchplate in Jimmy Moon’s shop, the mention of a humbucker on a white Telecaster certainly sent my heart rate up a beat or two, and though it seemed to refer to the newer of the two Teles, it’s important to remember that these guitars are modular, so necks can be swapped in a matter of minutes. But at this point it was important to take a step back and resist the temptation to construct a narrative from disparate elements, simply because it fitted our theory. The question was, could we corroborate any of what Pete Davies had told us? There was one obvious route, and that was to speak to someone in the band that Pete supported that night, namely, Flying Fortress.
It took us a few months and a good deal of detective wor
k to track one down, but we finally managed to trace the Fortress drummer, Keith Jones, to a West Country outfit called the Oggle Band. The usual pro forma feeler went out to a Facebook page and disappeared into the ether. Weeks went by and then came a message to say that Keith had retired and moved to Cornwall but that the writer would pass our message on. True to his word, he did and Keith promptly got back to us. It turned out he remembered the gig specifically, because that night Mitchell got up to jam with the band, leaving him a spectator. Afterward they headed for the pub, and Mitch then invited them all to come down to his house the next weekend “for a play.”
On arrival, the band was taken into the studio, and Keith’s memories of it are much like Pete’s, with the Jimi Hendrix Experience (JHE) stacks and PA; only being a drummer, Pete homed in on the dozen or so Gretsch drum kits stacked beside the back wall. The guys from Fortress then proceeded to jam among themselves for a while, but again Rick Grech appeared, at which point Mitch took over the main double bass drum kit, and Keith moved on to a second smaller one. All this tends to suggest that Mitchell was keen to see how Mike Parsons would fit with himself and the former Blind Faith bass player, and indeed the young guitarist did continue to work with Mitch off and on till his tragic death. The other thing of interest is that at one point, Parsons was given a white Strat to try out and being a right-handed player, obviously this guitar was strung normally. But according to Keith, on this occasion there was no sign of the two Teles.