| 10th September 2006 05:55 AM |
|
|
| Ten Thousand Motels |
The Sunday Times September 10, 2006
Experience this
Hendrix at the Albert Hall, 1969 — no wonder they call him a genius, says Robert Sandall
It wasn’t billed as a “farewell concert”, the way Cream’s triumphant valedictory show at the same venue three months earlier had been. Our free CD, The Last Experience, gives no clue either. The blistering performance on this live recording of the last British concert given by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, in February 1969 at the Albert Hall, suggests that the band who had broken and recast the mould of rock in a little over two years were still at the top of their game.
When the mood took him, Jimi Hendrix continued to play like the virtuoso who Pete Townshend, of the Who, said “sold the idea of the electric guitar as an instrument in its own right” to a mass audience. The sounds he coaxed from his Fender Stratocaster on Foxy Lady or Purple Haze showed the same mastery of the previously untapped potential of the instrument that had astonished London’s resident guitar god, Eric Clapton, when Hendrix arrived in the British capital in September 1966.
Here, Clapton realised, was a player who hadn’t just copied the old Chicago blues men, as he had. According to Clapton, “The British blues scene was getting pretty boring before Jimi. The stage was set for somebody to take things further. It could have been anybody, but it absolutely had to be him”.
Hendrix was the first polymath of pop. Thanks to his stint as a side man with the Isley Brothers, he had a working knowledge of the latest R&B style, soul music. Backing Little Richard, he had observed one of the great showmen at close quarters. And he was no stranger to jazz. Most impressive of all, Hendrix had grasped that the electric guitar was as much an electronic instrument as it was a louder version of the acoustic. Thanks to his preference for using right-handed guitars upside down, the left-handed Hendrix viewed — literally — the instrument’s tone and volume knobs differently. They were the first thing he saw when he looked down, and the magic of his playing derived partly from the way he used them to control and contour his sound. With his powerful Marshall amps habitually turned up to the limit, his guitar became hypersensitive to the slightest — or the heaviest — touch. Which was how Hendrix could create noises resembling those of a synthesizer with his knob-twiddling hand while performing amazing feats on the fretboard with the other.
The spell Hendrix cast over the London hipoisie was instant. “We just felt he was ours,” said Mick Jagger. “We adopted him.” Europe caught on quickly and, following an incendiary display at the Monterey festival in 1967, which was introduced by Jagger’s bandmate Brian Jones, the Jimi Hendrix Experience pretty much ruled the world of rock. They became the biggest earners on the live circuit, commanding at least £20,000 a night, and released three wildly acclaimed albums and a string of hit singles.
After a year away, touring and recording mainly in America — Hendrix’s home for his first 24 years — the Jimi Hendrix Experience returned to England to play two London shows early in 1969. At the end of the second concert, fans invaded the stage; and a band that never usually bothered with encores acknowledged the emotional significance of this homecoming by returning to play three.
The more seasoned Experience-watchers in the Albert Hall on February 24 suspected that this might well be the last time the Experience played to a British audience. They were right. The band split in July after playing Denver, Colorado, the final date of an exhausting jaunt around America.
The parting would probably have happened earlier if Hendrix’s astronomically spendthrift ways hadn’t forced him to keep on gigging to generate cash. At the end of the Experience’s 1968 tour of the USA, which brought in about $500,000, there wasn’t enough money on hand to pay the band’s hotel bill in Miami, forcing them to flee via the bathroom window.
Broke or not, by Christmas, Hendrix and his bass player, Noel Redding, were publicly talking about moving on. Hendrix had told the British rock journal Melody Maker that “very soon, probably in the new year, we’ll be breaking the group apart for selected dates”. Redding, who had stormed out of the recording of Voodoo Chile after Hendrix showed up with the Jefferson Airplane’s bassist, Jack Casady, in tow, was openly engaged in forming his own group, Fat Mattress.
The reasons for Hendrix choosing Redding as his bass player in the first place have never been entirely clear. The bass was not his instrument, and when he presented himself at the office of Hendrix’s manager, Chas Chandler, Redding was under the impression that he would be auditioning for the post of guitarist in Chandler’s old group, the Animals. Hendrix reportedly took a shine to him because his frizzy hair reminded him of his idol, Bob Dylan.
Perhaps a man who had for years been bossed around by R&B band leaders on the “chitlin’ circuit” was attracted to a bass player who needed instruction. Hendrix dictated all Redding’s parts to him, and even played some of them when the band came to record. This naturally became a source of friction; and when Hendrix refused to put out She’s So Fine, a track Redding had written for Axis: Bold as Love, as a single, an already tense relationship dissolved into open hostility.
If Redding felt starved of attention, by 1969 Hendrix was suffering from too much of the wrong sort. The clearest indication yet that he had had enough of the peculiar celebrity routines of the period came in early January, when the Experience appeared on a live television show for the BBC, Happening for Lulu. The plan was for the band to knock off a couple of hits and for Hendrix to end the programme singing a duet with the flame-haired Glaswegian pop princess. In the event, Hendrix poured howling feedback over her introduction and, after one verse of Hey Joe, paused to make an announcement: “We’d like to stop playing this rubbish and dedicate a song to Cream.” The Experience then resumed with a lengthy version of the recently disbanded Cream’s classic Sunshine of Your Love, which was still in progress at the end of the live broadcast.
This histrionic gesture of frustration ushered in a bumpy year for Hendrix. A few weeks later, he met the German ice-skating instructor Monika Danneman, who was to usurp his English girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham, and who failed to intervene in time on the night that he died. Just before this fateful encounter, a tryst with a groupie led to the birth of the only child the Hendrix estate ever acknowledged as Hendrix’s offspring — and, in 1998, paid $1m. (James Henrik Daniel Sundquist now lives quietly in Stockholm.) In other respects, by 1969, Hendrix’s creativity was beginning to stall. The songs for which he is best remembered had mostly been recorded, and the best of those to come — his electrifying performance of the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock — was not an original composition. The European tour that preceded his English shows elicited some of the first bad reviews the Experience had received. “Listless and tired,” was one Swedish critic’s assessment. This poor showing was later attributed by Redding to the problems the band had had locating any drugs to get them through it.
An increased reliance on ever harder substances ruined the first of the Albert Hall shows, when Hendrix overindulged in cocaine and had to be pushed onto the stage by one of his management team. “He was so stoned, he was legless,” she reported later. Hendrix’s first narcotic love, LSD, had given way to cocktails of uppers, downers and booze, like the one that finally killed him in September 1970.
But, on a good night, the power was still with him, and February 24, 1969, was one such. It wasn’t Hendrix’s last performance in the country that gave him his big break, but it was way better than the frazzled display he put on at the Isle of Wight festival in the summer of 1970. Better, too, than any of the other live bootlegs of the only rock guitarist and songwriter who truly deserves to be called a genius.
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
|
