The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  Meanwhile, Gibson’s current line of solid-body electric guitars was struggling. Ted McCarty, the Gibson president who’d overseen the creation of the Les Paul Model and the company’s golden era of electric instruments, had left the company to take over Paul Bigsby’s business. Bigsby himself had spent his later years focused on producing the True Vibrato—the whammy bar that had prompted Leo Fender to design his own for the Stratocaster. The Bigsby version had become a classic; Gibson and Gretsch ordered them in large numbers, and Bigsby enjoyed his late-life success, spending time with friends and family, buying a new Cadillac every two years, finally even hiring others to help him produce vibratos. In 1965, he’d retired and sold the business to McCarty.

  Without McCarty’s strong vision, Gibson was a little lost. Les claimed the company was even considering ceasing production of fully electric instruments altogether, in order to concentrate on hollow-body and acoustic guitars. The older hands in charge had missed the news that among young rock players, their old, chunky, original solid-body was coming back into fashion. But Les Paul was happy to tell them.

  38.

  “I DON’T HAVE MY OWN GUITAR”

  NEW YORK, SPRING–FALL 1966

  The first thing she noticed was Jimi Hendrix’s hands. They were enormous, spindly things—massive brown spiders on the ends of skinny little arms that crawled around his guitar fretboard seemingly without effort. They looked even bigger that night, shooting out of one of the cheetah-print tunics that were an odd choice of outfit for Curtis Knight and the Squires, especially for a show at a massive theater called the Cheetah Club, on Broadway and Fifty-Third Street in Manhattan. It was all just too much cheetah.

  Linda Keith couldn’t stop watching this nameless guitar player, following those hands as they coiled and slid around the little Fender Duo-Sonic guitar. Those hands outmatched both their instrument and their band, she thought. The sideman to whom they belonged seemed an obvious star, relegated to the supporting role of rhythm work, confined to a cheap, student-model Fender. Linda Keith, a twenty-one-year-old, serenely beautiful English model then staying in New York, knew something about stars. She was the girlfriend of Rolling Stone Keith Richards.

  Linda invited the intriguing guitarist to her table for a drink, and she and Jimi Hendrix and a few friends ended up back at her posh apartment on Sixty-Third Street. There they stayed up all night talking (and apparently only talking), listening to records and discussing music, art, their paths in life. Linda got Jimi Hendrix his first dose of LSD, and played him Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde for the first time, introducing him to a drug and an album that would become constant companions.

  Linda wanted to know why such an obvious talent as Jimi Hendrix was languishing in a third-rate rhythm and blues band. She probably didn’t find out then the full extent of Jimi’s desperation—didn’t learn until later that after years crisscrossing the country as a sideman in various groups, Jimi had landed in near-destitution in New York City. He was at that point essentially homeless, intermittently starving, bouncing from the arms and the cheap rooms of one paramour to the next, or relying on the kindness of friends for shelter and meals, always indentured to whatever band happened to be employing him.

  Linda asked why Jimi didn’t sing on his own. Jimi said he didn’t think his voice was very good—although maybe, he mused, as Bob Dylan’s vocals filled her apartment, properly good singing didn’t matter much anymore.

  Linda asked why Jimi was working for other bandleaders, debasing himself with cheetah print, instead of leading his own group.

  “I don’t have my own guitar,” Jimi replied.

  And it seems to have been true. Jimi was then using a sunburst Fender Duo-Sonic loaned to him by Curtis Knight, his bandleader, because Jimi didn’t have his own instrument. He was an incendiary guitarist without a guitar.

  Linda Keith decided right then to take on Jimi’s career as a personal mission—to encourage him to sing and lead his own group, to spread the word about this unknown talent to her friends in the English music scene. She couldn’t let Hendrix’s obscurity stand. But before he could make any steps toward independence and perhaps recognition, Jimi needed his own guitar. When the Rolling Stones arrived in New York to begin a US tour a short while later, Linda made a bold move on Jimi’s behalf: she apparently pilfered a white Fender Stratocaster from the hotel room of her boyfriend—snatched a brand-new guitar from the lair of Keith Richards himself—and gave it to this unknown guitarist. Rummaging around Richards’s hotel room that day, Linda also grabbed a demo he had of a song called “Hey Joe,” by the singer Tim Rose—a grim, moody tale of betrayal and murder—and gave it to Hendrix. These events would later seem almost impossibly auspicious, but Keith claims they happened. (“This is rock ’n’ roll history,” Richards confirmed in his autobiography.)

  The white Stratocaster Linda Keith stole completely changed Hendrix’s situation. He quit Curtis Knight’s band and formed his own, based out of Greenwich Village, called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames: a trio focused on acid-soaked covers of blues and R & B hits—Howlin’ Wolf, the Troggs, Bob Dylan, Wilson Pickett. It didn’t matter that the Strat Keith had stolen was right-handed and Jimi was left-handed. He’d been playing righty guitars since he was a kid in Seattle, just by flipping them over and restringing them to maintain the usual string order.

  It was likely that same Stratocaster, dangling upside down from his bony shoulders, restrung to work for Jimi’s left-handed brain, that soon drew notice at a Village dive called Cafe Wha?. The club was basically a tourist trap, flypaper for underagers coming in to explore the big city, but it had a small stage and a regular crowd. Jimi now had a Stratocaster and a fuzz pedal, a card-deck-sized metal box that made his guitar sound like a buzzing bee or an electric razor. (Gibson had introduced the first commercial fuzz pedal in 1962, the one famously used on the Rolling Stones’ 1965 hit “Satisfaction.”) The bewildering things Jimi could do with these tools began to attract any New York denizen interested in the guitar or the state of rock music. “H-bombs were going off, guided missiles were flying—I can’t tell you the sounds he was getting out of his instrument,” said Mike Bloomfield. “He was getting every sound I was ever to hear him get, right there in that room with a Stratocaster . . . How he did this, I wish I understood.”

  Linda Keith came to Jimi’s regular Wednesday afternoon shows and brought industry figures like Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ manager, to see him and hopefully sign him. But Oldham didn’t see the appeal. Linda then brought the Rolling Stones themselves to a Blue Flames gig at a larger room in midtown, but Jimi could barely grab their attention with all the ladies strutting around. Her efforts to find a powerful believer in Hendrix seemed to have failed. Then, one evening, she ran into an acquaintance named Chas Chandler, bass player for a respected British R & B group called the Animals, outside a New York club. She told Chandler about Jimi, and they agreed to meet the next day at the Wha? for the Blue Flames’ regular gig.

  Chandler showed up in a suit—tall, proper, resolutely British, with a baby face that couldn’t hide the fact that he was far older than the rest of the crowd. He sat down with Linda Keith and ordered a milkshake. Jimi had been tipped off to Chandler’s presence, of course, and up on the tiny stage of the Wha? he set off even more fireworks than usual—including his own interpretation of “Hey Joe.” Jimi juiced his version with fluid runs up and down his Stratocaster, inflecting it with the yearning, unstudied character of his voice, inhabiting the grim fatalism of the lyrics. Watching this happen, Chandler had such an epiphany that he spilled his milkshake all over himself. He already loved “Hey Joe,” believing it could make a huge hit in England if performed the right way. And here was a tall, beautiful American black man, singing the song gruffly but with magnificent intensity, leaving pauses in the lyrics to pour out soulful lines on his Stratocaster. Here, Chandler thought, were the ingredients of a tremendous hit—and nobody but him seemed to have noticed.

  Immedi
ately after the gig, Chandler asked if Jimi was willing to go to England, where, Chandler said, he could make Jimi into a star. The Animals bassist had been looking for a way out of playing music for a living and into a career as an artist manager; in Jimi, he saw an ideal first client. Hendrix hesitated, not quite sure of the claims of this unknown British bloke—but sure, he said, he would go. Why not? It wouldn’t be for another month or so anyway, since Chandler still had some US tour dates left to play with the Animals.

  When Chandler returned to New York some five weeks later, though, he found that his would-be client had gotten cold feet. England was so, so far away, and Jimi would have to go all alone, without his Blue Flames. Jimi was only twenty-three; he hadn’t been home to Seattle in six years, and England sounded like a strange place. Would he really be accepted over there? What kind of money did they use? Could you get LSD? What was the country even like?

  Chandler persisted, and Jimi’s hesitation finally came down to one question. He put it to Chandler that September of 1966: if he did move to England, would he get a chance to meet Eric Clapton, that great English guitar player?

  Oh, yes, Chas Chandler assured him. Jimi and Eric Clapton would certainly get an introduction.

  39.

  “FROM COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ANGLES”

  HOLLYWOOD AND DETROIT, 1966

  Carol Kaye had played her Fender bass for the biggest names in music by 1966: for Nancy Sinatra and Tina Turner; for Ray Charles and Sam Cooke; soon, she’d play for the Doors and Simon and Garfunkel. She earned double the union scale—$208 per session—by never flinching at a late night or a merciless schedule. But for Carol and her fellow studio pros, a Beach Boys recording session was still an incomparable slog, an ordeal to be endured.

  Brian Wilson preferred to record in Hollywood, at the Western or Gold Star studio, setting aside an entire three-hour block (or more) for a single song, instead of tracking several, as was typical. Like most studio tracking rooms, these were stark caverns with about as much charm as a middle-school cafeteria, their interiors so flooded with fluorescent light that Carol usually wore sunglasses inside. The linoleum floors were littered with discarded sunflower seeds, empty paper coffee cups, and gum wrappers. Blue-jeaned musicians sat on metal folding chairs, wearing headphones caked in the grease of a thousand previous sessions, telling jokes to ease their stress and boredom—usually with a punch line referencing someone else’s race, gender, or body size.

  As the sole female player in the room, Carol learned to curse and insult like the men did. She didn’t smoke, but she chewed gum and swilled coffee to stay awake, and suppressed her hunger with sunflower seeds and cans of soup from the vending machine. If Brian Wilson, the artiste-in-chief, got so lost in sound that he forgot his players’ comfort, she wasn’t afraid to remind him. Racing to the restroom once after Wilson pushed the players for hours without even a five-minute break, Carol flipped the bird in the direction of the Beach Boys’ resident genius. He was shocked—but afterward, breaks were more forthcoming.

  Wilson worked tirelessly now, worried that new developments in rock music had made his band obsolete. Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” had injected artful bitterness and wry observation into hard-driving rhythm and blues. The Beatles’ Rubber Soul had introduced the concept of the rock album as a complete creative work, rather than just a set of singles interspersed with filler. The Beach Boys had been America’s foremost producers of songs about cars and girls and surfboards and hot rods, despite the fact that Wilson, the band’s chief creator, was always uncomfortable with such frivolousness. Now, challenged by the success of these high-minded rivals, Wilson pursued a mature sound for the Beach Boys. He made his old stage instrument—the electric Fender bass, now usually in the hands of Carol Kaye—a prominent part of it.

  “Sloop John B” arrived March 21, 1966, the first single from a new album called Pet Sounds. The Beach Boys sang the opening lines a cappella, surrounded by flutes, then Carol Kaye’s bass rumbled in with the drums, yanking the idyllic daydream into a torrent of sound. What began as a Bahamian folk tune about a ship and its sailors became, in Brian Wilson’s composition, a refracted portrait of longing: “I feel so broke up / I wanna go home.” High up in the mix, flutes and guitars fluttered, evoking the shimmering sea on a sunny day. Carol’s bass followed the singers, seeming to identify with them, undergirding the rhythm but intertwining with their soaring melody. The song was impossible without her bass.

  “Sloop John B” evinced obvious brilliance, but Carol and the other session players had doubts about the commercial potential of Pet Sounds. The album was moody and orchestral, complex and often slow. When it was released, the week after “Sloop John B” had peaked on the radio, Pet Sounds rose only to no. 10 on the Billboard 200, a poor showing for America’s leading rock ’n’ roll group. Even the critics were indifferent. Brian Wilson was deeply disappointed at the apparent failure of this full-length creative statement, but he resolved to try again.

  • • •

  HALFWAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY, another bassist had become essential to a project quite different from Brian Wilson’s aesthetic jousting with the Beatles and Dylan. James Jamerson was a light-skinned black man with blue eyes and a mischievous smile. In 1964, he’d used his acoustic bass to conjure the warm, swinging throb of “My Guy” by Mary Wells, helping send it to no. 1 on the pop chart—the “white” chart, not the ostensibly “black” R & B chart. Afterward, the owner of the basement studio in Detroit where that hit was recorded decided that Jamerson was too important to be allowed to leave, and put him on a weekly retainer. Berry Gordy was building his Motown label into “the Sound of Young America,” and he knew that hits would come easier with the energy of this man’s grooves.

  There was just something about Jamerson’s style, as if he refused to accept the anonymity that had so long come with the bass player’s role. Soon after joining Motown, Jamerson switched from the acoustic upright to the Fender Precision Bass, a sunburst 1962 model that would become known as “the funk machine.” With the Fender, he could turn up the volume knob and be heard. Jamerson may have gone uncredited on every release, just like the rest of the Motown house band, but the way he played, there was no question he wanted to be out there, wanted to be known. Soon, he and the other artists at Motown were being heard more than ever before.

  The Supremes had put Hitsville USA at the top of the charts three separate times in 1964, with Jamerson’s bass more prominent on each song. “Baby Love” spent four weeks at no. 1 in the US and England, lifted up by the cooing of Diana Ross. In “Where Did Our Love Go,” Jamerson locked in with the piano, building a rhythm so fine and airy it seemed self-propelled. Thanks to a new eight-track mixing console in the Motown studio, Jamerson bounced even more clearly through the chords of “Come See About Me,” and things only picked up from there.

  Jamerson was at Hitsville in 1965 when the Temptations recorded “My Girl”; he invented the pulsing, unforgettable bass part that is the very first thing heard in the song. He was there when the Supremes recorded “Stop! In the Name of Love,” another eager, up-tempo no. 1, and was getting even more adventurous. He seemed to rummage through that Supremes hit, never remaining still, developing his signature, restless style. His approach worked that year when the Four Tops recorded “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” another no. 1.

  The Motown writers, producers, musicians, and stars were by then achieving the ambition Berry Gordy had laid out. Those impeccable rhythms, polished by the company’s quality-control efforts, were increasingly unforgettable to any ears that heard them, white or black, British or American. By 1966, a stunning 75 percent of Motown singles were entering the Billboard charts, compared with an industry average of 10 percent. From 1960 to 1969, according to the critic and historian Jack Hamilton, the label landed a song on the charts at the astonishing rate of one every week and a half.

  Detroit was even threatening to take over London. The Beatles adored the Motown sound
so much that they tried their best to copy it, right down to the intricate bass lines issued by this unnamed funk master. Paul McCartney knew where the interesting bass playing was happening: “It was [Jamerson], me, and Brian Wilson who were doing melodic bass lines,” he said later, “all from completely different angles: L.A., Detroit, and London, all picking up on what each other did.”

  So just like Carol Kaye, Jamerson was carving out a vital role for Leo Fender’s electric bass in the popular sounds of the 1960s. Yet the success of the Detroit effort, the persistence of those Jamerson grooves, carried a particular historic significance in the United States.

  The pattern in American music for decades had been that black musicians innovated new styles, while white players commercialized and profited from them. The choice of verbs varied with one’s perspective (from “steal” and “copy” to “borrow” and “popularize”), and there were always exceptions (Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole in jazz; Fats Domino and Chuck Berry in rock ’n’ roll), but the American pop industry largely reflected the country’s sharp racial division. Record labels, the press, and radio generally preserved a separation between radical, adventurous new black sounds and safe, salable white ones. Executives, parents, and concerned politicians believed that white youth had to be protected from black music. Others thought that black stars simply couldn’t become as popular with whites as people of their own race. The music industry was like any other institution in America: if you wanted to make it to the very top, you pretty much had to be white.