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| Ten Thousand Motels |
New Hendrix bio is a very intimate one
By GENE STOUT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER POP MUSIC CRITIC
In 1967, the year Jimi Hendrix became the toast of London, a bartender at a working-class pub in Liverpool mistook the rock star for someone far less glamorous.
"Sorry, mates, we can't serve your sort in here," the crusty old barkeep told Hendrix and his bandmate, Noel Redding. "We got rules, you know."
The humorous story is recounted in Seattle music journalist Charles R. Cross' new book, "Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix" (Hyperion, 400 pages, $24.95).
Hendrix and Redding puzzled over the bartender's rebuff. Both musicians wore purple scarves around their necks and "halos of frizzy hair," Cross writes. Hendrix was dressed in wine-red velvet trousers, a frilly pirate shirt, ancient British military jacket and black cape.
Hendrix wondered if he was being discriminated against because of his skin color, though such problems were unusual at the time in England.
His second thought was that his military jacket, a relic of the glory days of the British Empire -- purchased at a flea market -- might be offensive to English war vets. It had given him problems before.
When pressed for an explanation, the bartender angrily pointed to a sign on the door.
"If we let one of you in, the whole goddamn place will be full of your sort, and that's no way to run a pub," he bellowed.
Redding collapsed in a fit of laughter after finding a circus poster on the pub door, with a note below it that read, "No Clowns Allowed."
"There's a circus up the street, and this chap doesn't want any clowns in here," Redding told an incredulous Hendrix. "He thinks we're clowns."
Redding's anecdote is one of hundreds of well-researched stories in Cross' book that creates a more intimate portrait of the flamboyant rock star from Seattle than previous biographies.
"It took several interviews with Noel to get the entire story, but it's a very powerful one because it's an entryway into talking about the larger issues that Jimi faced," Cross said in an interview this week at a Richmond Beach coffee shop.
"His race was something he was thinking about a lot. And his outlandishness was a challenge. Jimi Hendrix was almost like an alien on this planet. He'd look that way if you saw him on the street today. But in the staid world of the '60s, he was a trip everywhere he went. Being mistaken for a circus clown when at that point you're the hottest star in England illustrates the strange contrasts of his life."
Fans who think they know everything about Hendrix, the legendary guitarist who died in London in 1970, will be intrigued by Cross' book, the follow-up to "Heavier Than Heaven," his New York Times best seller on Kurt Cobain.
What Cross unearthed about Jimi's childhood is funny, poignant, provocative and sometimes disturbing. While living at the Rainier Vista apartments in the mid-'50s, with one of many families he stayed with when things weren't going well at home, Jimi made an "otherworldly" prediction about his future: "I'm going to leave here, and I'm going to go far, far away. I'm going to be rich and famous, and everyone here will be jealous."
But Jimi, often called Buster by family and friends, was so poor that he was often forced to scrounge for food. He begged for leftovers at a burger joint across from Garfield High School after learning that unsold burgers and fries were thrown out at the end of the day.
Years later, when he returned to Seattle in 1968 to perform his first Seattle concert after becoming famous, Hendrix appeared at an assembly at his alma mater, Garfield High, where students who had no idea who he was -- and had never heard his songs on black radio stations -- began heckling him.
"At the time, Garfield was highly politicized and the Black Power movement was blooming," a student recalled. "To have this strange, hippie musician come along bothered kids."
One of the book's more startling revelations is the story of Hendrix's elaborate ruse for getting out of the Army in the early '60s by feigning homosexuality. He told the base psychiatrist an outrageous story about how he had developed homosexual yearnings for his bunkmates.
Cross learned of the ruse after locating Army records that hadn't previously been public.
"It was absolutely shocking," Cross said. "Here's a man that we identify as one of the biggest sex symbols in popular culture and he is feigning gayness to get out of his military service, which could get you killed in that environment. It was a tricky thing. If he didn't get out of the service, he risked ostracism."
The tale of Hendrix's discharge from the Army is one of many personal revelations that make "Room Full of Mirrors" unusual among Hendrix biographies. The reality of his life didn't always match the myth.
"It's a great example of the contrast between what really happened in Jimi's life and what Jimi told people," Cross said.
Cross did more than 300 interviews for "Room Full of Mirrors," a book as challenging to write as "Heavier Than Heaven." "The main difference with this book was that I had never met Jimi Hendrix, and I wasn't an African American growing up in Seattle," Cross said over coffee.
"So it was a different emotional terrain that required a lot more historical research. It really forced me to go back and learn quite a bit about the African American experience in Seattle."
What Cross sought as a biographer was a sense of authenticity.
"One of the real challenges for a biographer is that you can't go back and re-create history 100 percent, though I try with as many voices as possible. What you want is an emotional tone that people who knew Jimi will recognize. Even if the specifics don't match what they remember, they'll read the book and feel like they met him again."
The story of Hendrix's childhood offers what Cross calls "a secret history" of the African American experience in Seattle in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.
"The history of African Americans in Seattle is something that hasn't been written about much," Cross said. "We like to think of Seattle as this white, liberal place. We put the blinders on. And the truth is that Seattle did not have the overt racism of the South; it was more economic and housing based. Blacks could not live outside the Central Area, and there were (covenants) preventing them from living in many developments."
What may surprise Hendrix fans who remember Jimi's father as a kindly old gentleman who basked in his son's legacy is that their relationship was often as strained and ugly as any father-son relationship can be. Al Hendrix, who often drank to excess, could be brutal and mean, making bad decisions that would scar his sons Jimi and Leon emotionally. Cross went to extraordinary lengths to piece together the story of Jimi's mother, Lucille, who died in 1958 under mysterious circumstances. Jimi was deeply devoted to her and later wrote songs about her.
At Renton's Greenwood Memorial Park, where the remains of Jimi and Al and other select family members are entombed in an elaborate new crypt, Cross hounded cemetery officials to find the lost, neglected grave where Lucille Hendrix Mitchell (previously Lucille Jeter Hendrix) had been buried decades earlier.
"The rediscovery of the grave of Jimi Hendrix's mother was the most chilling moment in the four years it took to write 'Room Full of Mirrors,' " Cross says in the author's foreword.
He was appalled that Lucille was buried in a pauper's grave.
"I still cannot believe that Al Hendrix let his ex-wife, Jimi's mother, be buried in a pauper's grave without a headstone. This is a family that has spent $40 million on legal bills and nobody has $2,000 to buy a headstone for Jimi Hendrix's mother? It's egregious. It's a sin against nature. It just shows you the spiteful meanness of this family and their secrets."
Cross' goal as a Hendrix biographer was to reach a general audience.
"This is a great American story. It's a great African American story. I'm trying to write cultural history, not rock history," Cross said. "I'm trying to write biographies that senior citizens in book clubs will find fascinating."
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| sirmoonie |
Strange stuff
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4730547.stm |
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| VoodooChileInWOnderl |
LOL Sir Moonie that's a cool story hehe
Hendrix 'quit army with gay lie'
Jimi Hendrix pretended to be gay so he would be discharged from the army, according to claims in a biography that has used his military medical records.
The rock legend said he left the 101st Airborne Division aged 19 in 1962 after being injured on a parachute jump.
But Room Full of Mirrors by Charles R Cross says army records show he was discharged for "homosexual tendencies".
Hendrix wanted to escape the army to play music, Charles R Cross says
Mr Cross says Hendrix had a legendary appetite for women - he even had an affair with actress Brigitte Bardot.
But he had told a base psychiatrist at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he had fallen in love with a fellow soldier, the book claims.
No Vietnam objections
Mr Cross says the star enlisted in the US army to avoid being sent to jail after being arrested in stolen cars in his home town of Seattle.
He did not leave because of objections to the US role in Vietnam, but simply because he wanted to play music, according to the biography.
Hendrix avoided being sent to Vietnam and concentrated on music, becoming one of rock's most revered guitarists.
He became a star in 1966 with psychedelic rock hits such as Hey Joe and Purple Haze, and a legendary live performance.
Room Full of Mirrors is being published to mark the 35th anniversary of his death from a sleeping pill overdose in London in 1970.
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| icydanger |
quote:
Ten Thousand Motels wrote:
New Hendrix bio is a very intimate one
By GENE STOUT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER POP MUSIC CRITIC
In 1967, the year Jimi Hendrix became the toast of London, a bartender at a working-class pub in Liverpool mistook the rock star for someone far less glamorous.
"Sorry, mates, we can't serve your sort in here," the crusty old barkeep told Hendrix and his bandmate, Noel Redding. "We got rules, you know."
The humorous story is recounted in Seattle music journalist Charles R. Cross' new book, "Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix" (Hyperion, 400 pages, $24.95).
Hendrix and Redding puzzled over the bartender's rebuff. Both musicians wore purple scarves around their necks and "halos of frizzy hair," Cross writes. Hendrix was dressed in wine-red velvet trousers, a frilly pirate shirt, ancient British military jacket and black cape.
Hendrix wondered if he was being discriminated against because of his skin color, though such problems were unusual at the time in England.
His second thought was that his military jacket, a relic of the glory days of the British Empire -- purchased at a flea market -- might be offensive to English war vets. It had given him problems before.
When pressed for an explanation, the bartender angrily pointed to a sign on the door.
"If we let one of you in, the whole goddamn place will be full of your sort, and that's no way to run a pub," he bellowed.
Redding collapsed in a fit of laughter after finding a circus poster on the pub door, with a note below it that read, "No Clowns Allowed."
"There's a circus up the street, and this chap doesn't want any clowns in here," Redding told an incredulous Hendrix. "He thinks we're clowns."
Redding's anecdote is one of hundreds of well-researched stories in Cross' book that creates a more intimate portrait of the flamboyant rock star from Seattle than previous biographies.
"It took several interviews with Noel to get the entire story, but it's a very powerful one because it's an entryway into talking about the larger issues that Jimi faced," Cross said in an interview this week at a Richmond Beach coffee shop.
"His race was something he was thinking about a lot. And his outlandishness was a challenge. Jimi Hendrix was almost like an alien on this planet. He'd look that way if you saw him on the street today. But in the staid world of the '60s, he was a trip everywhere he went. Being mistaken for a circus clown when at that point you're the hottest star in England illustrates the strange contrasts of his life."
Fans who think they know everything about Hendrix, the legendary guitarist who died in London in 1970, will be intrigued by Cross' book, the follow-up to "Heavier Than Heaven," his New York Times best seller on Kurt Cobain.
What Cross unearthed about Jimi's childhood is funny, poignant, provocative and sometimes disturbing. While living at the Rainier Vista apartments in the mid-'50s, with one of many families he stayed with when things weren't going well at home, Jimi made an "otherworldly" prediction about his future: "I'm going to leave here, and I'm going to go far, far away. I'm going to be rich and famous, and everyone here will be jealous."
But Jimi, often called Buster by family and friends, was so poor that he was often forced to scrounge for food. He begged for leftovers at a burger joint across from Garfield High School after learning that unsold burgers and fries were thrown out at the end of the day.
Years later, when he returned to Seattle in 1968 to perform his first Seattle concert after becoming famous, Hendrix appeared at an assembly at his alma mater, Garfield High, where students who had no idea who he was -- and had never heard his songs on black radio stations -- began heckling him.
"At the time, Garfield was highly politicized and the Black Power movement was blooming," a student recalled. "To have this strange, hippie musician come along bothered kids."
One of the book's more startling revelations is the story of Hendrix's elaborate ruse for getting out of the Army in the early '60s by feigning homosexuality. He told the base psychiatrist an outrageous story about how he had developed homosexual yearnings for his bunkmates.
Cross learned of the ruse after locating Army records that hadn't previously been public.
"It was absolutely shocking," Cross said. "Here's a man that we identify as one of the biggest sex symbols in popular culture and he is feigning gayness to get out of his military service, which could get you killed in that environment. It was a tricky thing. If he didn't get out of the service, he risked ostracism."
The tale of Hendrix's discharge from the Army is one of many personal revelations that make "Room Full of Mirrors" unusual among Hendrix biographies. The reality of his life didn't always match the myth.
"It's a great example of the contrast between what really happened in Jimi's life and what Jimi told people," Cross said.
Cross did more than 300 interviews for "Room Full of Mirrors," a book as challenging to write as "Heavier Than Heaven." "The main difference with this book was that I had never met Jimi Hendrix, and I wasn't an African American growing up in Seattle," Cross said over coffee.
"So it was a different emotional terrain that required a lot more historical research. It really forced me to go back and learn quite a bit about the African American experience in Seattle."
What Cross sought as a biographer was a sense of authenticity.
"One of the real challenges for a biographer is that you can't go back and re-create history 100 percent, though I try with as many voices as possible. What you want is an emotional tone that people who knew Jimi will recognize. Even if the specifics don't match what they remember, they'll read the book and feel like they met him again."
The story of Hendrix's childhood offers what Cross calls "a secret history" of the African American experience in Seattle in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.
"The history of African Americans in Seattle is something that hasn't been written about much," Cross said. "We like to think of Seattle as this white, liberal place. We put the blinders on. And the truth is that Seattle did not have the overt racism of the South; it was more economic and housing based. Blacks could not live outside the Central Area, and there were (covenants) preventing them from living in many developments."
What may surprise Hendrix fans who remember Jimi's father as a kindly old gentleman who basked in his son's legacy is that their relationship was often as strained and ugly as any father-son relationship can be. Al Hendrix, who often drank to excess, could be brutal and mean, making bad decisions that would scar his sons Jimi and Leon emotionally. Cross went to extraordinary lengths to piece together the story of Jimi's mother, Lucille, who died in 1958 under mysterious circumstances. Jimi was deeply devoted to her and later wrote songs about her.
At Renton's Greenwood Memorial Park, where the remains of Jimi and Al and other select family members are entombed in an elaborate new crypt, Cross hounded cemetery officials to find the lost, neglected grave where Lucille Hendrix Mitchell (previously Lucille Jeter Hendrix) had been buried decades earlier.
"The rediscovery of the grave of Jimi Hendrix's mother was the most chilling moment in the four years it took to write 'Room Full of Mirrors,' " Cross says in the author's foreword.
He was appalled that Lucille was buried in a pauper's grave.
"I still cannot believe that Al Hendrix let his ex-wife, Jimi's mother, be buried in a pauper's grave without a headstone. This is a family that has spent $40 million on legal bills and nobody has $2,000 to buy a headstone for Jimi Hendrix's mother? It's egregious. It's a sin against nature. It just shows you the spiteful meanness of this family and their secrets."
Cross' goal as a Hendrix biographer was to reach a general audience.
"This is a great American story. It's a great African American story. I'm trying to write cultural history, not rock history," Cross said. "I'm trying to write biographies that senior citizens in book clubs will find fascinating."
ty for thread and info
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| VoodooChileInWOnderl |
Seems that Jimi and the Stones are on the news like in the old days. Jimi is in the new Rolling Stone Magazine cover.
The Legend of Jimi Hendrix
In 1966, he arrived in London an unknown. A week later, he was a superstar
By CHARLES R. CROSS
Jimi Hendrix took his first footsteps on British soil on Saturday, September 24th, 1966, arriving at Heathrow at nine in the morning. As he walked off the plane, he carried a small bag that contained a change of clothes, his pink plastic hair curlers and a jar of Valderma cream for the acne that still marred his twenty-three-year-old face. These few items, along with his precious guitar, were all he owned.
Escorting Jimi was Chas Chandler, formerly the bassist for the Animals, who was launching himself as a manager. Chandler had come upon Jimi in a Greenwich Village club and spilled a milkshake on himself, convinced that Jimi was his ticket to riches. Jimi was penniless at the time, having spent the previous three years as a backup musician on the chitlin circuit. Though Jimi had been born in Seattle, and didn't even begin to play guitar until he was fifteen, by the time Chandler met him he had already toured the nation with countless R&B combos, including Little Richard and the Isley Brothers. In Greenwich Village, fueled by both LSD and Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, Jimi was attempting to re-create himself as a solo act. He was playing to twenty teenagers when Chandler arrived, yet Jimi still only agreed to follow him to England if he promised to introduce him to Eric Clapton.
Once in England, Chandler immediately set out to turn Jimi into a star. On the way from the airport, they stopped by the house of bandleader Zoot Money. Jimi attempted to play his Stratocaster through Money's stereo, and when that failed, he grabbed an acoustic guitar and began to wail. Andy Summers, who a dozen years later would help form the Police, lived in the basement and heard the commotion. When he came upstairs to join the informal party and found himself mesmerized by how Jimi's huge hands seemed at one with the instrument's neck, he became the first of Britain's guitar players to be awed by Jimi's phenomenal skill.
Also rooming in the house was twenty-year-old Kathy Etchingham, who would soon also be smitten by Jimi. She worked as a part-time DJ and had dated Brian Jones, Keith Moon and a few other rock stars. Money's wife tried to wake her to tell her about the new sensation in the living room. She said, "Wake up, Kathy. You've got to come and see this guy Chas has brought back. He looks like the Wild Man of Borneo." The tag would later end up as one of Jimi's nicknames in the tabloids, a consequence of his unkempt physical appearance and his race, both of which were so unusual on London's music scene that he might as well have been a new anthropological discovery. The name was racist, of course, and the description would never have been used for a white musician. Still, Jimi enjoyed the nickname, as it sounded mysterious and foreign, qualities he hoped to cultivate.
Etchingham was too tired to take a peek at the so-called wild man, but later that evening she went for a drink at a club and discovered Jimi onstage. As he started to play blues tunes, the club went silent and the crowd watched in a sort of shared rapture. "He was just amazing," Etchingham recalled. "People had never seen anything like it." Eric Burdon of the Animals was one of the many musicians at the club that night. "It was haunting how good he was," Burdon said. "You just stopped and watched."
Walking out of the club, Jimi -- unaware that British cars drove on the left side of the street -- stepped in front of a taxi. "I managed to grab him and pull him back, and the taxi just brushed him," Etchingham said. Later, Jimi asked her to come to bed with him. She found him charming and handsome, and consented. They would stay together for the next two years, and Etchingham would be one of Jimi's longest-term girlfriends. She knew everyone on the scene, and she became his entree into Swinging London and friendships with the Who, the Rolling Stones and many other bands.
Jimi had been in England less than twenty-four hours and he'd already wowed a key segment of London's music scene, bedded his first English "bird" and narrowly avoided death. He had spent twenty-three years of his life struggling in an America where black musicians were outcasts within rock music. In one single day in London, his entire life had permanently been recast.
Chas Chandler's partner was Michael Jeffrey, the Animals' manager and a former British intelligence officer who did little to defuse sinister rumors that he had killed people as a spy. They placed a "musicians wanted" ad in Melody Maker, which drew in a twenty-year-old guitar player named Noel Redding. He had never before played bass, but Jimi liked Redding's frizzy hair, which reminded him of Dylan, and he was hired.
Even after Redding was hired, Chandler phoned Brian Auger, who led the blues-based jazz band the Brian Auger Trinity, and proposed a radical idea. "I've got this really amazing guitar player from America," Chandler told him. "I think it would be perfect if he fronted your band." Auger declined. As a fallback, Chandler asked if Jimi could at least jam with the Trinity at a show that evening. To this, Auger agreed.
The Trinity's guitarist, Vic Briggs, was setting up his gear when Jimi came onstage. Briggs was using one of the first Marshall amplifiers, an experimental model that had four six-inch speakers -- smaller than the later Marshall stacks but still capable of tremendous power. When Jimi plugged his guitar into the amp, he turned the amplifier volume knobs to their maximum, much to Briggs' amazement. "I had never had the controls up past five," Briggs said. Seeing Briggs' look of horror, Jimi said, "Don't worry, man, I turned it down on the guitar." He shouted out four chords and began.
The sound was a wall of feedback and distortion, which itself was enough to turn every head in the club; the moment also marked the beginning of Jimi's love affair with Marshall amplifiers. "Everyone's jaw dropped to the floor," Auger said. "The difference between him and a lot of the English guitar players like Clapton, Jeff Beck and Alvin Lee was that you could still tell what the influences were in Clapton's and Beck's playing. There were a lot of B.B. King, Albert King and Freddie King followers around in England. But Jimi wasn't following anyone -- he was playing something new."
Just a week after Jimi landed in England, Cream were playing a show at the Polytechnic in central London. Chandler bumped into Clapton a few days before and told him he'd like to introduce Jimi sometime. Meeting Clapton, of course, was the one promise Chandler had made to Jimi before they left New York. Clapton mentioned the Polytechnic gig and suggested Chandler bring his protege. In all likelihood, Clapton meant he would be glad simply to meet Jimi, but Jimi nonetheless arrived with his guitar. Chandler, Jimi and their girlfriends stood in the audience during the first half of the show, and Chandler called up to the stage and summoned Clapton over to ask if Jimi might jam. The request was so preposterous that no one in Cream -- Clapton, Jack Bruce or Ginger Baker -- knew quite what to say: No one had ever asked to jam with them before; most would have been too intimidated by their reputation as the best band in Britain. Bruce finally said, "Sure, he can plug into my bass amp."
Jimi plugged his guitar into a spare channel and immediately began Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor." "I'd grown up around Eric, and I knew what a fan he was of Albert King, who had a slow version of that song," recalled press agent Tony Garland, who was at the show. "When Jimi started his take, though, it was about three times as fast as Albert King's version, and you could see Eric's jaw drop -- he didn't know what was going to come next." Remembering the show later, Clapton said, "I thought, 'My God, this is like Buddy Guy on acid.' "
When Bruce told his version of the fabled event, he focused on Clapton's reaction and alluded to graffiti in London that proclaimed, "Clapton is God." "It must have been difficult for Eric to handle," Bruce said, "because [Eric] was 'God,' and this unknown person comes along and burns." Jeff Beck was in the audience that night, and he, too, took warning from Jimi's performance. "Even if it was crap -- and it wasn't -- it got to the press," Beck later said. Jimi had been in London for eight days and he had already met God, and burned him.
(Excerpted from RS 980, August 11, 2005)
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
The Sunday Times - Review
July 31, 2005
Hazy days
He arrived as a nobody but immediately had London’s greatest rock stars at his feet. Charles R Cross reveals the wild rise of Jimi Hendrix
In May 1966, a second-rate rhythm-and-blues group called Curtis Knight and the Squires were playing a woeful gig in the almost empty Cheetah Club in New York City when Linda Keith, a strikingly beautiful British model, found she couldn’t take her eyes off their guitar player.
“He had these amazing hands,” she recalled. “I found myself simply mesmerised by watching him play . . . He was clearly a star, though he was such an odd-looking star, and it was such an odd place, it didn’t seem right.”
Later that night, friends invited him back to an apartment on fashionable 63rd Street. Linda went too. Someone asked if he’d like some “acid”. “No, I don’t want any of that, but I’d love to try some of that LSD stuff,” he said naively, not knowing they were one and the same.
He later described to a friend that on his first acid trip he “looked into the mirror and thought I was Marilyn Monroe”. After May 1966 he chose to look in that mirror often. Lysergic acid diethylamide became a lens that filtered much of the music he would create during the rest of his short life as one of the world’s greatest rock stars.
The guitarist, who introduced himself as Jimmy James, was a 23-year-old veteran of the “Chitlin’ Circuit”, the network of black venues that dotted the United States in what was still a largely segregated music scene.
His background was one of deprivation in the northwestern city of Seattle. His mother had died from drink and he had been neglected by his father, who also suffered from alcoholism. As a boy he had become obsessed with the guitar, but he was so poor that his first treasured instrument was a throwaway with only one string. As a teenager he had joined the army to escape a prison sentence for riding in a stolen car — only to get out again by pretending to be gay, in order to become a full-time musician.
Since then he had played in obscurity for several years for black stars from Little Richard to Wilson Pickett, learning complex licks from some of America’s greatest blues guitarists and developing his musical voice. Yet he was still so poor he didn’t even own a guitar. And, as he eventually told Linda Keith, his real name was not Jimmy James but Jimi Hendrix.
Linda Keith was everything he was not: Jewish, well-off, highly educated, and part of swinging London’s in crowd. Her boyfriend was Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. The Stones were soon to arrive in the US on tour; she had come over early to get a taste of New York’s club scene.
Linda denies that the relationship with Jimi that night was sexual. “I was going out with Keith [Richards],” she said. “And I was a middle-class girl with middle-class values.” Instead they discussed a mutual passion: the blues. She played him obscure 45rpm records from Richards’s private collection.
Within days she bought Jimi a guitar, and with it he began to explore the coffee house scene in Greenwich Village. Jimi’s wild antics and over-the-top clothes hadn’t fitted in among his fellow blacks up in Harlem, but when he strode through largely white Greenwich Village in striped trousers and a calypso shirt with huge puffy sleeves, he found his outrageousness was embraced.
The Café Wha — a dark basement with earthen walls — didn’t have a liquor licence and consequently attracted small crowds of almost exclusively white teenagers. Musical acts were paid $6 for five sets. On the day he auditioned, Janice Hargrove was in the audience. “Anybody could get up and try out,” she recalled. “Most people were so-so. Jimi played, and everyone in the club was totally blown away, all 15 people.”
At the end of the evening Jimi was invited back. Free from the restraints of the Chitlin’ Circuit, he played the guitar with his teeth, behind his back and under his legs, and he humped it in a manner that was clearly sexual.
Inspired by Bob Dylan, acid, Linda Keith and new friends he was meeting in the Village, the “Jimi Hendrix” the world would soon come to know was created that summer in a dim basement New York club.
Linda took Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ manager, to the Wha, hoping he’d sign Jimi, but he was unimpressed. “The part of me that did like the music could see that he was trouble,” remembered Oldham, “and I had enough trouble already with the Stones . . . Keith was the kind of guy who might actually kill someone involved with his girlfriend.”
Linda argued that she and Jimi never began a serious romantic relationship, because he refused to settle down. She was amazed at how he managed to juggle his many girlfriends and how he conned each into thinking she was his sole focus. “He had this depth with women,” she observed. “All the women who say they were the great love of his life, they probably were in that moment.”
Jimi protested that his wandering ways were part of his “nature”. Linda recalled being in Jimi’s hotel room once when there were seven women sleeping in his bed. Despite his philandering, she worked tirelessly to bring him to the attention of the world.
Help came at last in the form of Bryan “Chas” Chandler, the bass player in the Animals. He planned to leave the group and he was looking for producing opportunities. After Linda dragged him to the Wha to hear Jimi play, Chandler became so excited that he spilt a milkshake on his suit.
When Chandler invited Jimi to England the idea scared him at first. He knew so little about Britain that he asked whether his new electric guitar would work with British electricity.
Chandler and Michael Jeffery, who managed the Animals, became Jimi’s co-managers. Jeffery was a mysterious figure behind the dark glasses he wore at all times. Like many rock managers he used fear and intimidation to his advantage in business dealings.
Immigration laws in Britain were strict, and getting Jimi into the country required correspondence to be forged that made it look as if he was being asked to come to the UK by a promoter. Jimi still had doubts. He told friends he’d be back soon.
On the evening of September 23, 1966, Jimi boarded a Pam Am flight at Kennedy airport. All he had for luggage was his guitar and a small bag that contained a change of clothes, his pink plastic hair curlers and a jar of Valderma face cream for his acne. In his pocket he had $40, borrowed from a friend.
He arrived at Heathrow at nine the next morning. A member of the Animals’ road crew carried his guitar through customs because of laws restricting foreigners from entering England for employment.
On the way from the airport they stopped by the Fulham house of Zoot Money, a bandleader, and his wife Ronnie. Jimi pulled out his Fender Stratocaster and attempted to play a few songs through the Moneys’ stereo. When that failed he grabbed an acoustic guitar.
Upstairs 20-year-old Kathy Etchingham was sleeping late after a night out. Etchingham was an attractive hairdresser and part-time DJ. She had previously dated Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and Keith Moon of the Who.
Etchingham was woken by the commotion downstairs. “Ronnie said, ‘Wake up, Kathy. You’ve got to come and see this guy Chas has brought back. He looks like the Wild Man of Borneo’.”
That evening, his first in London, Jimi was on stage at the Scotch of St James, a club that attracted a clientele of musicians. As he started to play guitar blues, the club went silent and the crowd watched in a shared rapture.
“He was just amazing,” Etchingham recalled. “People had never seen anything like it.” There were so few musicians who were black on the London scene, and so many fans of American blues, that he was afforded instant credibility.
Eric Burdon of the Animals was at the club. “It was haunting how good he was,” Burdon said. “You just stopped and watched.”
At his hotel Jimi and Kathy went to the bar, where he asked, “Would you like to come to my room?” Etchingham consented. They would stay together for the next two years, on and off, and Etchingham would be one of his longest-term girlfriends. She became Jimi’s entrée into a new social world. Her friends, who included members of the Who, the Rolling Stones and many other bands, soon became his friends.
Jimi had been in England less than 24 hours and his life had been transformed. He’d already wowed a key segment of London’s music scene and found himself a girlfriend. He had spent 23 years feeling like an outcast. In one single day it felt like his entire life had permanently been recast.
Hendrix could not have arrived at a better moment. London in 1966 was at the height of the explosion of fashion, photography, film, art, theatre and music. Time magazine had done a “Swinging London” cover story in April, broadcasting to the world that the city was the cultural trendsetter.
Within days of his arrival, Jimi dazzled more music aficionados by jamming effortlessly with the Brian Auger Trinity, a blues-based rock band. “Everyone’s jaw dropped to the floor,” Auger recalled.
Then on Saturday, October 1, a week after Jimi landed at Heathrow, Eric Clapton and his fellow members of Cream were playing a show at the Central London Polytechnic. Chandler asked Clapton if Jimi might jam with them. The request was so preposterous that no one in Cream knew quite what to say. No one had ever asked to jam with them before; most would have been too intimidated by their reputation as the best band in Britain. Jack Bruce finally said: “Sure, he can plug into my bass amp.”
Jimi began “Killin’ Floor” — a blues classic often played by one of Clapton’s heroes, Albert King.
“I’d grown up around Eric, and I knew what a fan he was of Albert King, who had a slow version of that song,” recalled Tony Garland, Michael Jeffrey’s publicist. “When Jimi started his take, though, it was about three times as fast as Albert King’s version and you could see Eric’s jaw drop — he didn’t know what was going to come next.”
Graffiti all over London at the time proclaimed: “Clapton is God.” Jimi had been in London for a week and he had already met God and burned him.
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| stonedinaustralia |
if you only read one jimi hendrix book read this one
by charles shaar murray originally entitled Cross Town Traffic - "Jimi Hendrix and Post War Pop" which i think is a better and more accurate (tho perhaps not quite so saleable) title than "jimi hendrix and the rock and roll revolution" featured here |
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| blackandblue |
In a strange way I lost my interest in Hendrix. I was a fan once but nowadays I never listen to his records anymore... |
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| Taptrick |
Have you listened to the more recentlly released itemd or the boots Black & Blue? Morning Symphony Ideas was a good release. The track Scorpio Woman off it is beautiful and mournful. I have been listened to two alleged boots with interest of late as well. One with Steven Stills and one with Taj Mahal. Good explorative jammin stuff.
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| Taptrick |
...by the way, I'll be curious to read this and find out where the author is getting this story that Jimi faked being gay to get out of the army. It just doesn't seem to make sense to me for a number of reasons. First of all, during those years, if he tried something like this as an active duty member who had already gone through basic training and had a lot of money spent on him, I think they would have been more apt to prosecute him than give hime a discharge. Secondly, unless this author interviewed a direct witness to this, such as the psychiatrist or somebody, there shouldn't be any paper trail of this. His records should have been sent to The National Military Records Center and they would have been destroyed before the end of the 70s if I remember the protocols correctly. is medical records would not be considered to be releaseable prior to being destroyed either. Anyone read this yet? Does the author give a source?
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