The Grail Guitar

by Chris Adams

  Obviously the man to ask about this would be NuNu Whiting, who went on to drum tech for Alan White of Yes, but for most ex–JHE roadies, forty years of being plagued by Hendrix freaks has created a silent zone when it comes to talking about the man himself. There again, this particular question really involves his time with the late Mitch Mitchell, so all was not lost. But either way, rollers and country houses would cost big bucks, and at this point Mitch, like Noel, was certainly not receiving JHE royalties, so although he was gigging on a regular basis, it’s hard to see even a top-rate muso’s earnings supporting such a lifestyle.

  So how was he doing it? Interestingly, in Are You Experienced? Redding says that when he visited Mitch in the early seventies, he saw a “huge room” full of speaker cabinets and amps, including a full Altech Lansing PA with monitors. This is obviously the rehearsal barn, but the fact that it was packed with gear is just one pointer as to how Mitch maintained his lifestyle. It’s another part of the JHE equation that tells the full story, for we now know for certain that Mitch also had the “JH EXP” stencils that were used by the road crew to mark and thus identify their back-line gear.

  On this subject, I knew from talking to Roger Mayer that people close to Jimi are apt to shake their heads about the amount of “Hendrix” amps that have surfaced over the years, and if you combine this with Noel’s mention in his autobiography of a Sussex dealer who told him that Mitch was slowly selling off gear, a picture emerges of a man who has woken up to the unpleasant fact that he’s been robbed of his royalties and resorts to the Ways and Means Act to get what’s rightfully his. This painful necessity can be traced back to October 11, 1966, when he and Redding signed a production contract that set out the split on record sales. Jimi got half of the 2.5 percent royalty, Noel and Mitch a quarter each. A piddling rate, but if you pro rata it up into the multimillions, it’s still a substantial sum. But fatally, all three were persuaded to leave their copies of the contract in Jeffery’s office for “safekeeping,” and partly because Chas had been selling basses to help finance the band, Noel and Mitch obviously felt that to demand a copy would have been seen as tantamount to questioning his honesty. Sadly, that rash decision was to come back to haunt both of them in the rhythm section big style.

  But in the context of our Quest, this NuNu story had highlighted the fact that a crucial seam of evidence could come from within the JHE crew. The problem was trying to tap it, for as a rule, rock-era roadies did not discuss their former employers. They tended to live by an unwritten code, the essence of which was a bit like the Italian notion of omertà. Like a band of brothers, outside the mainstream, they kept their cards close to their chests, because to do otherwise would be seen as extremely uncool. So even if we could reach them, the chances of getting any survivors to take the time and trouble to talk to us was remote.

  Besides, purely on a logistical level, most of them were in the States, and our budget didn’t extend to doorstepping them. We had discovered that NuNu lived in Atlanta and had put out feelers, but meanwhile, we were back in limbo. Adding to our frustration was a feeling of so near and yet so far. We had been given a fleeting glimpse inside those black flight cases and had seen two Telecasters emerge, so what we really needed now was a way to push the investigation forward, and given that the solution to our mystery could well lie within the ranks of the roadies, we decided it was high time we opened a file on the JHE crew.

  Chapter 17

  The Crew

  Like many of my generation, I thought rock music would change the world, but now as I trundle my trolley round the supermarket and hear all those old sixties hits ringing out in time to the tills, I have to accept that it’s just a variation on a theme that’s been running since the Romans fed Christians to lions. Basically, it’s show business, and the real reason for the truism that “the show must go on,” is that for the players, it’s what puts food on the table. But whenever I hear that saying quoted, I’m reminded of a story that sums up the psyche of those unsung heroes of rock, without whom there would be no show at all.

  When Peter Gabriel suddenly announced he was leaving Genesis in 1975, there was much doom and gloom in the record label that had worked so hard to get the band to where it was and also among the crew, who saw the distinct possibility of their livelihood disappearing. It took Charisma some time to realize the replacement was under their noses, and it wasn’t till they’d auditioned quite a few candidates that in desperation they allowed Phil Collins to “have a go.” Of course, the effect was both immediate and startling, though no one should have been surprised that he “sounded so much like Peter” as one executive put it; after all, he had been doubling Gabriel’s vocals onstage for four years. So understandably, it was sighs of relief all round and the celebration in the label’s office was echoed among the crew, who saw an execution turn into a last-minute reprieve. But bending metaphors, the “guilty party” was still on board for the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour and would be there until the last show at the Olympia in Paris, which left room for the roadies to make a wee point.

  The stage for the tour had a towered platform to each side, and as the show reached its nightly climax, the audience was thrilled by a remarkable sequence in which the auditorium was suddenly plunged into darkness and a black-catsuited Gabriel would appear in a tiny arc of light on the right tower, sing a dramatic line, and then as the spotlight swept across the stage, materialize on the left, making it look as if he had flown from one to the other. In reality, this effect was achieved by placing one of the crew, of similar build and height, in an identical black catsuit on the other riser. But come that last night in Paris, when the sweeping spotlight reached the left tower, the roadie was standing there stark naked, and the huge crowd gave such a horrified gasp that when it arrived back at Gabriel, he was now frozen in horror, staring not at his double but at his nemesis. Ditto this effect three more times with extemporized antics on each occasion from the naked roadie.

  There were no such exploits on Jimi Hendrix’s tours, but crews back then were much smaller affairs. We’ve identified four individuals who cover the Jimi Hendrix Experience (JHE) era, the first of whom joined for the Munich gigs in November ’66 and was still there at the Open Air Love and Peace Festival on the island of Fehmarn, off the coast of Germany, in September 1970. Gerry Stickells was Noel Redding’s “drinking mate,” but he got the job mainly because he was a mechanic, a vital skill in an age of unreliable vans. At the start, he and Noel shared a flat, and a serial crasher on their floor was Lemmy, now of Motorhead, who later referred to Noel as the self-proclaimed “best guitarist in Kent.” (How quickly we forget favors!) Lemmy was just one of a cast of lesser names who passed through the JHE ranks, but Gerry was the real deal, and to give you some idea of his loyalty, in his autobiography, Noel tells how in the United States in ’68, he was reduced to scrounging money from the band to pay expenses, as the elusive Mike Jeffery could never be found.

  But Stickells wasn’t just a driver. When Hendrix arrived in the UK, he was unhappy with all the amps he tried, so Chas went to Pete Townshend for advice. Next day the Who’s roadie, Neville Chesters, arrived with a Marshall Super 100 head, which Jimi immediately fell in love with, and tickled by the fact that the man who’d built it was his near namesake, he asked to meet him. Mitch Mitchell had worked at Jim Marshall’s store, but when he took Jimi along to meet him, the canny Londoner got the impression that this black dude was on the make. Hendrix doused that fire by saying he’d pay top dollar for the amps if he could get backup wherever he was playing. This was a nasty little tail sting that might mean flying a tech to the United States to change a valve, so Marshall offered to train one of the roadies in amp maintenance. Noel then invited Chesters on board, but as Hendrix was the new kid on the block and the Who were huge, he declined, so Stickells stepped up to the plate, and with the problem solved, the two James Marshalls went on to become one of those rare rock marriages made in heaven.

  With Gerry at the start was the man
who accused Jeffery of murder. Tappy Wright had roadied for the Animals, but after the first Experience US tour, he quit to become Jeffery’s office manager. He also broke the roadie code by publishing his memoirs, and in them he says that Stickells could never stand Jimi’s music, which seems odd. Wright married a Polish princess and lived in a London mews, maybe because prior to the memoirs he had sold two Hendrix guitars at Sotheby’s, neither of which Redding recognized! I had actually been offered a route to him through an Animals connection, but as he wasn’t part of the crew at the only point where the “Purple Haze” Tele could have reentered the Hendrix camp, I elected to pass.

  By mid-1967, Jimi’s guitar abuse had become so endemic that Noel badly needed a man who could fix broken Strats. Happily one such specimen soon turned up after the Who’s Eve of Destruction lark at Monterey, when the aforementioned Neville Chesters contacted him to ask if his job offer was still open. Noel said yes, for when it came to cannibalizing Strats, there was no one with a better CV. As it happened, Neville’s job was to drive the truck with the gear, often hundreds of miles a day, while the band flew with Stickells from gig to gig, so in the end he only stuck it for nine months. After a concert in White Plains, New York, in April ’68, there was a rare break in the schedule, at which point he went off on vacation and never came back.

  Eric Barrett joined for the next European tour but almost quit before the first gig in Milan because the equipment was in such a mess. This says a lot about morale at that time, but like Stickells, Barrett was a pro who was in it for the long haul, and the show was soon back on track. Taking over the guitar tech duties, he became au fait with Hendrix’s playing foibles, learning how to set up his guitars, which gauge of string he used, and what tension he wanted on the neck. Interestingly, it was on Barrett’s watch that a guitar called the Telostrat made its appearance. This was at the ’69 Newport Festival, when for the only time, Jimi used a hybrid comprising a maple Tele neck and a white Strat body. Now these two parts do not fit perfectly, but photos of the gig show they had been tailored to create a seamless match, so someone either did a first-rate combo job, or the hybrid was bought on the road. Either way, this would have been down to Barrett, but it’s worth noticing that it never resurfaced, so on balance it seems likely that after its one appearance, the neck and body were separated and kept for future recycling.

  Barrett says Jimi was really rough on tremolo arms and tells how guitars sometimes had to be totally stripped down and then reassembled, so he obviously succeeded in meeting his employer’s demands where others had failed. As evidence of this, there’s a great photo of the two of them arriving at Heathrow just weeks before Hendrix’s death. Style-wise, the long-haired, sunglassed Barrett looks totally at home beside his superstar employer, but it’s their demeanor that I find most interesting. Both men are smiling, relaxed in each other’s company, Jimi with two flight bags and Eric clutching a roadie’s black attaché case. It looks as if Hendrix has just cracked a joke, for Eric is laughing, and in this unposed concourse snapshot we get a glimpse of two colleagues, one more famous than the other, but each a part of an interlocking relationship, both dependent in some ways upon each other.

  So Eric Barrett was at the top of our “talk to” wish list, but according to the Hendrix Expert, he had suffered a stroke and was way past the point of reminiscing about those times. But as I said, I had put out feelers to try to track the crew down, and it was at this point that my main man got back to me. Our ex–road manager Arnie Toshner went on to do monitor mix for the likes of Eric Clapton, Kiss, and Stevie Wonder, and when I say that he found his spiritual home in LA, you’ll garner something of his persona. The epithet that catches Arnie is “sharp,” so when I told him of our Quest, he was immediately interested. He remembered accompanying me that day to Sound City, and having worked in the biz for a long time, he was in the habit of knowing a man who knew a man, if he didn’t know the man himself, and Eric Barrett fell right into that category.

  He first established that the Expert was wrong about the stroke. Eric was in good health and also living in LA. It transpired that Arnie had recently delivered a eulogy for a mutual friend, another Scots roadie, and though Barrett never gave interviews or spoke about Hendrix, on the basis of having seen Arnie in that setting, he was prepared to do lunch and look at the photos of my Tele. Arnie then booked a table at a restaurant in Santa Monica, and the two men met and spent an hour chewing very good food and old rock-biz fat. Strangely, it turned out that Eric had been brought in by Charisma in ’72 to give our road crew technical advice for our trip to New York with Genesis, so he and Arnie had met all of forty years ago.

  Toward the end of lunch, he asked to look at the photos. Arnie obliged, and Barrett took a minute or so to peruse them, and then shook his head. The guitar was not familiar. He also remarked that with all the axes Jimi had used, the back plates were perennially off, to let him make truss rod adjustments on the night. The truss rod runs through the neck, and when it’s tightened, the strings move closer to the fretboard, a process known as “lowering the action,” allowing the guitarist to bend them higher and play faster. So over the piece, to save time and effort, it seems Barrett just left the back plates off permanently. And that quote about there always being an old Tele lying around in the studio? Well that didn’t get discussed. The fact is, Barrett had done what he said he’d do, and Arnie knew instinctively that it would be uncool to pursue the matter further. That’s the unwritten code that old roadies live by.

  So was this yet another blind alley removed from our route map or a one-way street that I’d been travelling down the wrong way? Well as is often the case with detective stories, it was a bit of both, for sometimes it’s not what people say that is illuminating but what they don’t. In this case, the omission was telling, for Eric Barrett had not taken one look at the guitar and laughed, saying Jimi had never played a Tele. He had taken time to look at it carefully, which meant that Pete Davies’s account was correct; there were Telecasters in the Hendrix guitar horde. But of course, there was another factor at work here, which would have made recognition all but impossible, for if you remember, both Jimmy Moon and the Expert’s own Fender geek had been certain that my guitar had been given a makeover.

  We also knew from the cavity beneath the scratchplate that at some point it had been a hybrid with a humbucker, but this was not apparent from the photos and not something Arnie could have raised with Barrett. So if the guitar’s appearance had been changed radically due to the makeover, was it surprising that he didn’t recognize it? As always with our Quest, any given answer seemed to lead to another set of questions. But in the greater scheme of things, we had learned a vital lesson from Arnie’s meeting, and that was, if you try hard enough, you can always find a way to get to the person you need to speak to, provided they’re still aboveground. At this point synchronicity kicked in, with a phone call from Andy Andrews to tell us he had just discovered that Trevor was now living with his mum at the family home in Dymchurch, just along the coast from Folkestone, and Andy was hoping to visit him in the near future. So now it was a case of watch this space!

  Chapter 18

  Holy Relics

  As Eric Barnett and I approached the anniversary of the start of our Quest, we were still in pause mode on the Trevor Williams front, but our file on the Jimi Hendrix Experience (JHE) crew had indicated that NuNu Whiting was not part of the setup while Jimi was alive. The obvious conclusion was that he had begun to work for Mitch Mitchell soon afterward and had become a “Hendrix roadie” by association, which might clear up the mystery of why the Sound City assistant would have given someone that sobriquet two years after Jimi’s death. But while we waited for Arnie to get back to us on the Atlanta front, there was another aspect of the crew’s duties we felt was worth homing in on, and that was the way they catered for Jimi’s Strat abuse.

  In the early days, there wasn’t enough money to allow Jimi to destroy guitars willy-nilly, but in January ’67 Chas Chandler
and Mike Jeffery signed a US recording deal with Warner Brothers that netted an advance of $150,000, and suddenly cash flow was no longer an issue. In the next few weeks, the black Strat stolen in Darlington was replaced by a second white Strat, and when he played the Marquee on March 2, Jimi was sporting a Sunburst. However, it never became a “keeper,” for a few weeks later he immolated it on the first night of the Walker Brothers tour at the Finsbury Park Astoria (later renamed the Rainbow), and from then on, his recurrent guitar abuse became a potent publicity tool.

  The idea for the Astoria pyrotechnics was hatched on the night with Keith Altham, one of that clutch of London music journalists who could make or break careers, depending on who owed whom a favor. Chandler then sent press agent Tony Garland off to buy a can of lighter fluid, and this was passed to Hendrix at the end of the set. He proceeded to ignite the Dog Strat, but getting caught up in the drama of this novel ritual, he got a bit too close to the action and had to be taken to hospital for burns to his fingers. Not the most sensible activity for a virtuoso player, but the resultant publicity probably made the pain worthwhile.

  Now interestingly, the burnt Astoria Strat recently came up for auction after being found in the family garage by Garland’s nephew, so on the night, Garland obviously told the crew that he’d need it for publicity reasons. Shortly afterward, Jimi did an interview with Melody Maker at the Gerrard Street offices where the writer mentions him fingering the burnt guitar, and this tells us two things. First, the crew hadn’t begun to cannibalize the damaged Strats, a process that would involve keeping the parts that remained intact for further use. But more important, it tells us that in the spirit of the times, no inventory of guitars was being kept, for this one never returned to the fold. In other words, from the time Jimi started serially destroying Strats, it was simply left to the crew to repair, cannibalize, or dispose of them as and when they saw fit.