by Chris Adams
As it happens, this particular one lay in a cupboard in the Gerrard Street offices for the next two years, by which time Jeffery had moved his operation to New York. Typically, the bailiffs were on their way to clear the place out in lieu of unpaid rent when the guitar was rescued by Garland. For obvious reasons, neither Jeffery nor Chandler showed the slightest interest in what became of all these disembodied necks and headless bodies that the JHE crew had begun to accumulate from the spring of ’67, for they had much bigger fish to fry, and to them, the tattered Strats were just part of the wreckage left behind after the JHE tornado had blown through town. So just to stress, there was never an inventory of Hendrix guitars, and initially replacement Strats were bought when needed. Later the savable parts were kept for further use, for the less Jimi liked a guitar, the sooner it got trashed. When the JHE moved across the Atlantic, Neville Chesters was continually buying replacements, effectively beginning a three-year pipeline of Strats, most of which were then serially cannibalized.
Three months after the Astoria show came the ritual burning at Monterey. In this case, Hendrix had to conjure something special to outdo Pete Townshend’s “follow that” shenanigans, and knowing the impact that the Astoria burning had created, this was his go-to strategy. As it happens, Don Pennebaker filmed the festival, and the relevant footage shows Jimi playing a distinctive red Strat oversprayed with psychedelic scrawlings and closes with him kneeling over the blazing body, twirling it round, breaking it into three parts, and tossing it out into the crowd. So basically that’s that one gone! There could be no auction for this dismembered relic, especially when you discover that part of the broken body is now in a Hendrix museum in Seattle. But if you believe that, you’d be wrong.
Just as enough bits of the one true cross emerged in medieval Europe to build the Globe Theatre, so it’s proving with Jimi’s Strats. An excellent example of this syndrome was provided by his longtime gofer, Howard Parker, known as “H,” who seemingly stayed at the Zappa family home in the late sixties and gave Frank a Strat that Jimi had set alight at the May ’68 Miami Festival. According to Zappa, H told him that Jimi had given the guitar to him, just as Mitch Mitchell had claimed that one of the Rye Telecasters was a gift. This is a regular motif with Hendrix guitars, for the alternative would be to admit that it was stolen. (Think about it, what guitarist buys a drummer a guitar?)
As we saw, a damaged Strat would normally have gone into one of the flight cases after a concert and lain there until it was needed to provide parts for the ongoing replacement cycle. But with no inventory, it’s inevitable that the odd one would escape. So this particular escapee then lay forgotten in Zappa’s basement until ’97 and upon its rediscovery, Zappa was to be seen posing with it on the covers of specialist guitar magazines. Now for me, the image of this iconic star holding up the scorched Sunburst Strat crystalizes the strange way that history confers gravitas in hindsight, implying by association that the Miami audience were blessed by witnessing some holy event. Only Jimi didn’t set fire to his Miami Strat!
But that little detail didn’t stop the relic industry, for after Zappa died, his son Dweezil had it repaired and, in 2002, put it up for auction with a reserve of £465,000, which it failed to reach. But as with the proliferation of holy relics, yet another Monterey Strat then surfaced, this cunning Lazarus job coming courtesy of Tappy Wright, who explained that Hendrix had actually used his favored black Strat all the way through the Monterey gig but was unwilling to immolate it, so using his usual MO, swapped it for the red painted one just before the end of the set. And of course, he’s right. Pennebaker’s footage shows a very stoned Brian Jones introducing the unknown guitarist; then Jimi launches into “Killing Floor” on a Black Beauty, but by the time he gets to “Wild Thing,” the last song of the set, it’s the red one with those psychedelic scrawlings that he’s now using.
Now there are a good few Hendrix sites out there that list all the guitars he ever used on God knows how many different gigs, but I’ve yet to see one that highlighted this anomaly. The “Monterey Strat” always refers to the one that was barbecued, never to the one that he did 90 percent of the set on. So here we have a classic example of sleight of hand, where the audience’s eye is taken in one direction while the real business is being done in the other. Of course, it perfectly demonstrates the methodology used by the JHE crew when it came to managing Jimi’s Strat abuse. Thus, the ones that were his “keepers” were protected, while the ones that didn’t cut it live were sacrificed and then cobbled back together for somewhere further down the road. But given that Hendrix obviously favored this particular black Strat, you’d imagine it would be worth a great deal more to a real collector than the other burnt offering. In this case, you’d be right, for with his impeccable provenance, Tappy achieved his Strat hat trick when the Monterey Black Beauty sold for £237,000.
But all this confusion brings us right back to the fact that without a guitar inventory, there’s no trail! As we saw from our glimpse inside Mitch’s studio in Rye, the solid-bodied guitar cases were stacked in wheeled flight cases, and damaged or not, each guitar would have been put in its case after the gig. But though we can account for the two burnt Strats and the one stolen in Darlington, we have no idea how many walked out of dressing rooms. In his diary, Neville Chesters reports that he bought a secondhand Strat in Manny’s in March ’68, only to have it stolen the very next night in Columbus, Ohio! Jimi also gave guitars away, to Alexis Korner, Al Kooper, and Mick Cox, lead guitarist with Eire Apparent. By ’69, he was keeping guitars in his new Electric Lady Studio, and after his death, Noel Redding reckons that as many as thirty of these New York guitars disappeared, which may explain how Tappy Wright finished up with three examples, including the Monterey Strat.
As for the provenance of my own Tele, there were two more interesting clues we had recently picked up. The first came courtesy of a Hendrix biography we had earlier looked at and discarded, namely, ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky. If you recall, the author couldn’t tell his Teles from his Duo Sonics, so we felt there was no sense in trawling through it cover to cover, but when Eric revisited it to check another fact, he noticed there were quotes from both Eric Barrett and Gerry Stickells, so he decided to do one of his speed-reads. Lo and behold, on page 191, in the context of the February ’68 tour, he found a reference to Jimi carrying what amounted to a portable recording setup, and in among his guitar inventory was “an old Telecaster.” Now in light of the fact that this information could only have come from Stickells or Chesters, we saw it as another piece of corroborating evidence that Hendrix had viewed the Tele as a distinct color on his recording palette that he would go to whenever he wanted a certain effect.
But as it happens, Eric had also discovered an Internet post describing yet another example of a “Hendrix Tele.” This occurred in 1974, when a young man called Ray Walton walked into a music shop on Charing Cross Road, just along from the junction with Denmark Street. Like me, a year earlier, he was after a guitar, and like me he was smitten by a Tele. But unlike me, he was left-handed. Here, in his own words, is what happened:
I think the shop was a subsidiary of another outlet in Denmark Street itself, off the top of my head, maybe Top Gear. I had the choice of buying a new one or one displayed on the wall with a note that said, “Very interesting History—£152.” I remember this vividly. The guitar was a chipped/battered 1966 left-handed maple neck blonde Telecaster with an added P90 pickup. When asked about the history, the shopkeeper told me (in so many words, as I can’t remember exactly), “No, I won’t tell you, as it might influence you in making the choice from buying new or old.” I was not a proficient left-handed guitarist at the time, but I was told by my fellow band member that in new guitars, the wood would have to settle and the neck could warp a bit over time, but in the older ones, the neck would have already settled in. So I plumped for the old battered one at the price above. Only then did he tell me the very interesting history bit. He said that Mitch Mitchell had br
ought in three Hendrix guitars because he was skint [broke] and needed some quick money. He then showed me and my pal the other two on the back wall. Of course, it could have been a sales ploy, but by not revealing the true history info beforehand, I don’t think so. Really it did not bother me at all one way or the other. I just wanted to get home and play it! At that time, the value as to who had previously owned it did not come into it. I paid £152 and was satisfied. He actually offered me a letter of authenticity. At the time, I was oblivious to any in-depth knowledge on Jimi, and all I wanted to do was go home and play my newly purchased guitar with my band.
So like me, Ray had bought a “Hendrix” Telecaster, but unlike me, he decided to check out the provenance of the guitar.
I frequented the Marquee in Wardour Street at the time, as did Mitch Mitchell, so I asked my mate Robbie Dervish, a Marquee barman and friend of Mitch’s, to check out whether he did in fact sell them to the guitar shop, or whether the shopkeeper was using a sales pitch. Mitch confirmed that he did sell them to him and said the Telecaster was a Hendrix studio guitar that Jimi did not like using a lot. Although it did not mean a lot to me then and for me it was just a great guitar for playing rhythm and chords in a band, I did have it modified in appearance in the early 1980s to take away the battered look. The original pickups (P90) and most other bits were not changed, and I still have the guitar packed away and sitting dormant at the moment. I was also told later by an expert on old guitars that the machineheads may have been changed back then, and one of the pickups added.
So what are we to make of these three “new” ex-Hendrix guitars? Obviously if the shop was charging over the odds for them, then it would have been a sleazy little racket! But like me, Ray had paid the going rate for the guitar. In fact, a year after I bought mine, he paid just £2 more, so there’s no question of either trader making a killing. The same is true of whoever sold them into the shops, whether that’s Mitchell in Ray’s case, or a “Hendrix roadie” in mine. Fact is, the sellers were simply getting the market price, so there was no financial motive other than the one that makes the world go round. In which case, we’re faced with a nexus of several facts.
Jimi used a Tele for the overdubs on his most famous track, and from then on, there was usually an old Tele lying around in the studio.
According to Pete Davies, Mitchell had two Teles at his studio in Rye in 1971, one with a maple neck strung left-handed. On it he saw what he thought was a humbucker, a pickup that is hard to tell from the P90. Externally, both look exactly the same, but the smaller P90 has a single coil.
Ray Walton’s barman friend confirmed that Mitch had sold three Hendrix guitars to the shop in Charing Cross Road. Ray bought a battered left-handed, blonde, maple-neck Tele with a P90 pickup that sounds eerily like the one that Pete Davies saw. Now this last fact has to be the crucial one. We know Jimi was going through guitars on a regular basis and that it was his road crew’s job to see that he didn’t run out of them. The most vulnerable part of any guitar is usually the neck, and though as we saw with the Miami Telostrat, the heel of the Tele neck is not exactly the same as a Strat’s, it would have made sense to use one in extremis. In fact, the crew would do whatever they had to so that the show could go on. So the way I see it, when the music suddenly stopped in this game of instrument abuse, there were still two Teles in those black flight cases. The maple-neck one finished up with Ray Walton and the rosewood neck with me.
But go back to that Hendrix quote about the Tele having only two tones, one good, one bad, and you’ll find he then adds, “and a very weak tone variation.” Now as we’ve seen, the bridge pickup on a Tele has a similar sound to its equivalent one on the Strat, so that would give you the “good tone,” and as logic would suggest, the “bad tone” front pickup was replaced on Ray Walton’s Tele by the fatter-sounding Gibson P90, while my own Tele had likewise been modded by routing out a space to fit either a humbucker or a P90. This would solve the “weak tone variation” that Hendrix described, and you can see his thinking here. He likes the bright sound he gets from a Tele, so why not adapt it to expand the palette? As time went on, he got more into Gibsons such as the Flying V he used at the Isle of Wight, so with just one simple modification, he has himself a studio hybrid that doubles as a spare neck when necessary. It all fits nicely into place, just like the modular necks on those old Fenders.
Chapter 19
Tele-photo!
Fifteen months or so into this process, we had come to the conclusion that the “Purple Haze” Tele just didn’t want to be found. I know this sounds uncomfortably like anthropomorphism, but that’s the way it began to feel, because right from the start there was a total absence of any photo either of the Noel Redding/Trevor Williams guitar or of Jimi Hendrix playing a Tele. Alongside Bobby Womack’s testimony, there were reports that Al Kooper had seen Jimi, pre–Chas Chandler, in Greenwich Village carrying a cardboard box containing a white Tele, but whether this was the same one, neither had found their way onto celluloid. On this side of the Atlantic, it was the same story, and though Kevin Lang had sent us shots of a fresh-faced Redding at the Storeyville Club in ’65, he was always playing that Gibson 355 Stereo.
Another method of provenance was the serial number, and earlier in the proceedings, we had contacted Fender to ask if they might have records of batches of instruments sold to the US Army. The answer was no, because twenty years after Leo Fender’s company was taken over by CBS, there was an employee buyout, and there is no paper trail dating back to those days. Our next line of enquiry was the US Army post exchange. Working on the remote possibility that individual branches of this vast organization might just have kept sales records from the sixties, we had found the address of their headquarters in Dallas, Texas, but before we could write to them, we discovered that the Frankfurt PX had actually been bombed in November 1985, by persons unknown, though one of two men who left a BMW filled with explosives beside the fuel depot was seemingly wearing a checkered headscarf. In our post-9/11 world, this would now bring cries of “false flag ops!” but the pertinent point was that there was major rebuilding after the incident, so what had been a long shot was now no shot at all.
Next we turned to Trevor Williams. He featured in many photos of the Lonely Ones, the Joint, and Judas Jump, but there were no stage shots among them. Maddeningly, there were onstage photos of the Lonely Ones on the Internet, including one of their drummer Keith Bailey on vocals, with Martin Vinson behind him on keyboards, but the photographer had totally ignored the side of the stage where their photogenic guitarist would have been found cradling his Tele. Our only description of the guitar had come from John Atkins, a Kent musician who had been a friend of Trevor’s brother. Having seen our post on the Kentgigs site, he had told us the Tele was “off white with a maple neck and a rosewood fingerboard.” He was certain the scratchplate was white, for like the Expert’s Fender geek, he knew that black scratchplates were not standard issue on midsixties Teles so he would have remembered if Trevor’s had had one.
But neither John nor anyone else on the sixties Kent scene could point us to a photo of Trevor playing it, before or after the psychedelic makeover. It was ditto for Trevor’s sojourn on the Continent, and though Eric Barnett had found a series of shots from the Titan Club in Rome, with the Lonely Ones logo on the bass drum, it turned out to be some local Italian musos using the band’s gear at the midway break! We then discovered that Trevor and the guys had appeared in that cellar scene playing their instruments in the German movie What’s Happening? but Eric could find no details of it on all the usual movie databases.
Compounding our sense of frustration was the news that Martin had had a suitcase full of old photos stolen from his flat in Chelsea in the late seventies. This was one of those teeth-grinding moments that the Quest would throw up, and another came courtesy of the Loving Kind/Fat Mattress bassist Jimmy Leverton, or rather the guy who handled the website for a band he now played with. An innocent request for information got us a stingi
ng e-mail telling us in no uncertain terms what to do with our Tele and hinting at the armies of assholes who had already asked a load of dumb questions about it. Having a relatively low squirm count, this was something I wasn’t used to, and it made me reluctant to expose myself to possibly even greater grief from others, further down the line.
But it also forced me to put myself in the shoes of the man who had owned the fabled invisible guitar. After all, if a minor player like Leverton had been getting hounded for years by these geeks, then it was no wonder that Trevor Williams had gone to ground, big style. We knew he’d remained active in the music business till the late seventies, with two single releases four years apart: “Lucy Brown” on Virgin in July ’75 and “Sweet Summer Wine” on the Frankfurt-based Bellaphon label in ’79. And according to sax player Alan Jones, he’d been active in London in the midnineties, but after that one encouraging call from Andy saying he was back in Dymchurch, we’d heard nothing.
The information about the psychedelic artwork had opened up a lead, and we’d tried to contact Gilbert O’Sullivan through his website, but though his webmaster had passed our message on, nothing had come of it. This surprised me, because on the scale of happiness that fame and fortune can deliver, Gilbert had seemingly scored a very high mark. He and his wife live on the Channel Island of Jersey and have two grown-up daughters, whose Dad is a very wealthy man, for in 1984 he sued his former manager, the name-changing Gordon Mills, who had signed him to both songwriting and recording deals with companies in which he had a controlling share. This exercise of “undue influence” falls under the broad heading of “conflict of interest,” which we touched on in the Hendrix context, and so the appeal court ordered Mills to reassign copyright of Gilbert’s songs to the writer, along with backdated royalties of seven million pounds. So with all the worldly riches a man could ever want, and a fiercely loyal fanbase to support his career, why wouldn’t he be happy to have the kudos attached to the title of having been the young artist who painted the “Purple Haze” Tele? And thinking about it, wasn’t it possible that the artist himself might have taken a photograph of his handiwork? However, there was no way of knowing, for like many others in this tale, Mr. O’Sullivan was out of reach, and indeed, Eric had received a hint that the artwork might actually have been done by his Notting Hill flatmate, Bob Hook, who had gone on to design some of Supertramp’s album covers. Sadly, though, Bob was no longer with us, so again we had hit a dead end.