The Grail Guitar

by Chris Adams

  After Chandler’s departure, Jeffery had the field all to himself and promptly claimed that Redding and Mitchell had merely been paid employees of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Without that missing contract, Noel was simply faced with a fait accompli, and in the late seventies his lawyer accepted a settlement of £100,000 to waive his rights to all past and future royalties. In his autobiography, this comes across as the lowest point in his long descent from fame. He knew his rightful share should have been near the seven-figure bracket, but faced with the possibility of getting nothing, he was forced to take what he could get, which after legal fees amounted to £64,000. Now all this occurred before the digital revolution spawned scores of CDs bearing Jimi’s name, with combined sales well into the tens of millions, so is it any wonder that in years to come, Noel would come across as a bitter loser?

  Understandably then, his book doesn’t make for easy reading. In fact, I found it eerily reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s famous novel The Trial, in which the protagonist “K” is arrested one day by unidentified agents of a totalitarian state and charged with an unspecified crime. In Redding’s case, the nightmare scenario came courtesy of packs of highly paid music-biz lawyers who at one point in his ten-year legal battle refused to even acknowledge that he’d been part of the Jimi Hendrix Experience! And all the while, rubbing salt deeper into his wounded psyche, was a constant stream of Hendrix reissues, each begetting yet more legal vampires, whose corporate names all contrived to sound like variations on that firm of music publishers in Mel Brooks’s film The Producers.

  Underscoring the Kafkaesque atmosphere is the pharmaceutical aspect of the book. Noel’s days begin with “leapers,” which no amount of sleepers can nullify, and stirred into this deadly chemical cocktail are lines of coke, jolts of amyl nitrate, production lines of joints, and the odd dash of opiates. In keeping with the zeitgeist of the times, he’s surrounded by like-minded lemmings, all intent on getting as far away from normal consciousness as possible. The perfect setting for this rush from reality is LA, where he lived for a time after Jimi’s death and reverted to bass in another power trio called “Road.” But guitarist Rod Richard was no Hendrix, and after just one album and one gig, they split. By now he had a bad Mandrax (methaqualone) habit and was well into record-label whore mode, where the sole object of the exercise is to bag a big advance. So names like Motown, Polydor, and Warner Brothers are splattered across the pages of his biography, all signposts to nowhere in the midday LA smog.

  By ’72, Noel had bought the house in Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life, and in the three decades left to him, he fronted a band he called the Clonakilty Cowboys with fine players like Thin Lizzy guitarist Eric Bell. Along the way, he regained his love of music and playing, often in small pubs on acoustic guitar, and as late as ’97 he was back gigging with his old friend Neil Landon at the Fabrik Club in Hamburg, where Neil had lived since the seventies. But sadly the money worries never quite left him, and in a final exorcism of the vampiric ghosts of the Experience, near the end of his life, he sold the bass he had used on those famous recordings for £10,000 just to keep the financial wolves from the door of his house near a sandy beach in Clonakilty in the county of Cork.

  Today there is a thriving musical scene in the town, not least because of his presence there for over thirty years, and after his death in 2003, the locals showed how much they loved and respected the boy from Folkestone when they put up a plaque in his memory. From the point of view of our Quest, he had set the whole drama in motion by “picking” the Tele at the PX in Frankfurt in ’65 and then borrowing it back for the “Purple Haze” session after the Ricky Tick gig. As the quote that starts this chapter shows, he was always a paradoxical character, but despite the rancor that pervades his autobiography, he did enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that he’d outlived his nemesis, Michael Jeffery, by all of thirty years.

  The rogue had actually followed his dead superstar into that unreturnable bourn just a month after I bought the white Tele in Shaftesbury Avenue. As might be expected of such a complex chap, the manner of his passing was not mundane, for unless you happen to be a pilot in an aeronautics team, the chances of dying in a midair plane collision are about a billion to one; but never a man to be daunted by long odds, he did exactly that while aboard a Spanish Airlines DC9, which crossed the path of a chartered Coronado 990 six miles above a radio beacon in the city of Nantes, the ancient capital of Brittany. At this point, French air-traffic controllers were on strike, and the report of the gaffs made by the military stand-ins makes grim reading, though some Hendrix fans may be tempted to say that one particular passenger possibly got no more than he deserved.

  The Coronado landed safely, but when it came to identifying remains of those on the DC9, there were none, a fact that has proved to be as manna from heaven for conspiracy theorists who believed he might have faked his own death. Amongst their ranks was Noel, who said that Jeffery had always had a fear of flying and had a habit of leaving on the flight after the one he had booked, though as a way of cheating death, this lacks a little in the logic stakes. Either way, no one could have foretold the ghastly sequence of events that would lead to the accident, and it’s worth noting that Gerry Stickells later identified some items of jewelry from Mike’s case, which unlike its owner, did survive the midair impact.

  At the time of his death, Jeffery was being sued by the Animals and was in turn suing Track Records for unpaid record royalties, and in keeping with his management style, one aspect of his legacy is a never-ending legal dispute that still provides a veritable blood bank for those legions of legal vampires. But in the end, the important point here is that millions of humans on the planet know who Jimi Hendrix was, while few have heard of Michael Jeffery. So let’s hope that Jimi can rest in peace without the perennial question of the ownership of the “rights” to his music being dragged through the law courts. Surely everything that he lived, worked, or stood for means that ultimately he belongs to the world and to history!

  As for the man whose vision helped launch him, Chas Chandler went on to manage Slade, who were the most successful band in the UK in the seventies with a string of top-ten hits. So the big man showed he still had the Svengali touch, though in this case his artists were a little more in the trilby mode. That said, they were never ripped off, kidnapped, or held to ransom, so by default, Chas showed what kind of manager Jimi would have had if Jeffery had not crawled out of the woodwork. Chas also bought IBC, the studio where we did all our recording with Shel Talmy, and at one point he actually owned his own label, Barn Records. In later years, he returned to Newcastle, where he went into business with architect Nigel Stanger, onetime sax player with the Animals. They developed the Newcastle “Metro Radio” Arena, a ten-thousand-seat venue that has featured artists such as Ray Charles and David Bowie. Building it seemingly meant a lot to Chas, but although he did live to see it open in 1995, he died a year later of an aortic aneurysm at Newcastle General Hospital.

  So having taken Hendrix from Greenwich Village to the pinnacle of rock stardom and been left with little else but the rancid taste of betrayal, Chas remade himself as producer and entrepreneur. On a prosaic level, his former home in Heaton now has a black plaque on the wall, but as for his real legacy, well how about his input into that string of great Animals singles and, of course, the first two-and-a-half Experience albums?

  Chapter 22

  Return of the Grail Guitar

  A few days after my last chat with Andy Andrews, I was having lunch when the phone rang and that familiar Kentish voice came down the line.

  “You’ll never guess who I’ve just been talking to, Chris.”

  “Not Trevor?”

  “You got it. I called his mum, and he answered the phone.”

  It transpired that Trevor Williams was now living permanently with his elderly mother in the family home in Dymchurch, though given the nature of his illness, permanence was a relative term. Andy had passed on the sad news of Martin Vinso
n and explained how in the course of our research we had helped to hook them up. Trevor had been sad to hear of an old friend’s passing but, like Andy, hadn’t seen Martin for all of twenty years, and the passage of time always brings a certain distancing from the effects of such events. Talk had then turned to the book and the elusive Telecaster, and Trevor had confirmed that he had indeed got it from Noel Redding and had loaned it back to him for the night of the “Purple Haze” session. Even though we knew this was the case, it was still important to get corroboration on a crucial piece of our jigsaw puzzle.

  So naturally Andy asked him if he still had the guitar, at which Trevor laughed and said no, nor could he remember offhand when he’d sold it. In fact, it seemed his memories of those times were distinctly vague, and this was down to several long-held lifestyle choices that involved all three of the unholy trinity, two of which were cigarettes and whisky. So in terms of our Quest, it was two steps forward, one step back! But as always, there are clues to be gleaned from any given situation, so thinking of the period after the Joint split, I asked Andy if Trevor was the kind of guy who would have sold a guitar if he was short of money.

  “In a minute! He was always the kind who lived for the moment!”

  That was handy to know, but even more positive was the news that Andy had arranged to visit Trevor in the coming week as seemingly he had a lot of photos in the family garage, which might help to jog his memory of those long-forgotten times. And on that hopeful note, we left it, with Andy telling me to expect some cuttings and info on the various Lonely Ones lineups that he’d looked out since our last chat.

  We had come across the coastal village of Dymchurch before in our research, because Noel’s mum had moved there in the midsixties. Around the same time, Noel tells in his book how they were on holiday in Spain when he got a cable inviting him to join the Burnettes and how she drove him like a mad thing from Rosas to Barcelona Airport just in time to catch a flight home. This had surprised us, as the picture we had of the Reddings didn’t quite square with seaside bungalows and motoring holidays on the Mediterranean, and indeed, the Hendrix Expert had dismissed the idea that Noel would have had enough cash in ’65 to buy two guitars at the PX only months apart. But the mystery was solved when Andy happened to mention that around then, Noel’s mum had inherited a considerable sum of money, and on the strength of it, the family had bought the bungalow and two MG 1300 cars.

  The other mention of Dymchurch had come in the context of the Lonely Ones, for though we had always believed that they’d played their last gig in Geneva in 1967, before renaming themselves the Joint, we now found this was not the case. It seems that when Noel was living in Aldington, during the post-Hendrix period, he contacted Andy about reforming the band for a gig at the Neptune Hotel in Dymchurch. Andy was up for it, but unfortunately the date clashed with Supertramp’s first trip to Munich, so he had to pass. Noel then put a band together with NuNu Whiting on drums and Martin Vinson on bass, so interestingly, this put NuNu in the same frame as Noel at a point when the psychedelic Tele was around.

  But within a few weeks, Noel’s situation changed drastically. At this point he was still under Mike Jeffery’s management and, if you recall, he had been told that he could very well be back in the frame for the Experience gig, so basically he was in stasis, waiting for the phone to ring. However, despite this, in November ’69, he managed to find time to marry a young Danish lady who claimed to be pregnant by him, though as it turned out, the honeymoon was short lived, for on New Year’s Eve she walked out and promptly had her lawyers freeze his assets. So in the first days of the new decade, the Kentish lad suddenly went from relative wealth on the back of the Fat Mattress advance to being totally broke.

  It must have crossed Noel’s mind that with the death of the sixties, the spell that had shot him to fame was suddenly broken and, like Cinderella, he had awoken to find the team of white horses turned into packs of legal rats. Of course, this is just the kind of situation that can be helped by recourse to the Ways and Means Act, and though Noel mentions nothing about trading the Tele in this context in his autobiography, it’s a salient fact that the first eight months of 1970 merit only 8 pages in a 230-page book. This lack of detail can be partly ascribed to the fact that he’d stopped keeping up his diary after the Mile High Stadium debacle, and now that the years on the road had finally caught up with him, it appears this particular period had simply become one long, nightmarish blur.

  So some parts of the Dymchurch jigsaw had fallen into place, but the one person who could possibly tell us what had happened to the Telecaster was frustratingly still beyond our reach. A week went by with no word from Andy, and when I phoned him, he was apologetic. Trevor hadn’t returned his last call, and he really didn’t want to start hounding him. I agreed that this wouldn’t be a wise course of action and said I’d e-mail him David Llewelyn’s photos.

  At the next biweekly meeting with Eric Barnett, we discussed our options and decided that even though we’d been trying to get to Trevor for almost a year, there was no sense in pushing things at this stage. It would be better to leave it a week and then I would call Andy, ostensibly to check that he’d got the digital images of the Munich session. But when I did, nothing on the Trevor front had changed. He was still incommunicado, and understandably Andy was still loath to chase him. However, given that so much was riding on this, he said he’d leave it a few more days and then give it another go, and on that note, we rang off.

  Meanwhile, a small breakthrough came when Eric traced the other Lonely Ones guitarist, Ian Taylor, who, if you recall, had moved to keyboards when Trevor joined the band. Ian is one of a select few who have made a career in music, only in his case it was the serious variety, as he left the band to study classical guitar and eventually became a university lecturer. The first question that Eric asked him was what guitar Trevor had been playing when he came on board, and the answer was none, for Ian had had to lend him his own Epiphone Casino. In fact, it wasn’t til the Casino sustained a broken neck that Trevor actually bought one of his own, a relatively cheap, if apparently chic, Danelectro. His guitar troubles weren’t over, however, for it was then stolen from the van after a gig in Stoke, as Ian recalls forty-five years later: “I remember the night the Danelectro was nicked—Stoke or Hanley springs to mind—maybe outside ‘The Place’—we supported Long John Baldrey’s Steam Packet there. Trevor didn’t have a case for his guitar, and its cool looks made it really worth nicking (though it wasn’t expensive) so it disappeared when the gear was being packed into the van.”

  So once again the repaired Casino became a stopgap solution, but it was at this point that the multitalented Taylor decided to get serious about life and enrolled in music college, leaving Trevor to make his own guitar arrangements. All of this means we can now say for certain that it was in the summer of ’66 that the white ’64 Tele made its appearance in Trevor’s life, for by this time, Noel had finally decided that he was a Gibson man at heart and that the Tele he’d bought in the PX just didn’t meet his requirements.

  Later that same week I got a call from Arnie Toshner in LA. I brought him up to speed on the NuNu angle, explaining that he’d gone on to drum tech for Alan White of Yes. As expected, Arnie had a contact among the former Yes crew and said he’d call him. We talked about the specifics that NuNu might be able to help with, and he promised to get back to me as soon as he got a result. A few days later he called to say that he now had a phone number for NuNu, but our excitement was short lived, for he was soon back to say that the person who had answered the call had simply said there was no one there of that name.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m now working on getting his home address, so if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll just doorstep him.”

  As it turned out, Arnie was actually scheduled to visit Atlanta sometime in the not-too-distant future, but as yet, there was no definite date for this. So as always, it was back to the waiting game, though as it transpired, this time the wait
was not too long.

  It was Friday night when Andy phoned me. He had just spoken to Trevor and had arranged to visit him on the morrow, so one way or another, I could expect to hear from him in the coming days. When I passed this piece of news on to Eric at next meeting, his immediate reaction was, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” This was understandable, perhaps, given all that had gone down in the preceding eighteen months, but considering that I was the one who’d started off as Doubting Thomas, you’ll gather how low our horizons had become when even he was getting fatalistic about the outcome of our Quest. But we should both have remembered that, as the cliché states, “the darkest hour is just before dawn.”

  Talking of clichés, we’ve all heard the one that says, “If you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there.” In our ongoing process, this problem had raised its ugly head more than once, clouding certain bits of vital information in the grey mists of time; but here at the sharp end of our investigation, with just a few pieces missing from our jigsaw, I was about to talk to someone for whom the saying could have been coined. He is, of course, the man we’d been hunting down for the past year and a half, for on Monday afternoon, I got a phone call from Andy finally delivering what we had both been waiting patiently for all that time, namely, Trevor’s phone number and the go-ahead to use it.

  The voice that answered my call was deep and world weary, like a more middle-class version of Keith Richards. I introduced myself, and we exchanged a few pleasantries; then he said he’d be happy to tell me what he could remember of those far-off days. As usual, I had jotted down a short list of questions, but in a matter of moments I could see that this was going to be something of an ad hoc session. Right from the get-go, it was apparent that Trevor was marching to a different drum, and though he was obviously a man with oodles of personal charm, sadly the beat of that drum was about as precise as the distant sound of surf on some faraway beach.