Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (21 page)
Read Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Online
Authors: Pamela Des Barres
Four days after Marvin Gaye’s death, a line of more than ten thousand passed by his open casket. Stevie Wonder sang to the sobbing mourners, a trembling Smokey Robinson read the Twenty-third Psalm, and then the body was cremated, the ashes scattered into the ocean by his children.
Father gave an interview in jail, saying he wasn’t guilty, that he didn’t think the gun had real bullets in it, that he had shot in self-defense. “I pulled the trigger,” Gay told the
Los Angeles Herald.
“The first one didn’t seem to bother him. He put his hand up to his face like he’d been hit with a BB. And then I fired again.” Father said he didn’t know he had killed his son until hours later when a detective gave him the news. “I thought he was kidding me. I said, ‘Oh God of mercy, oh, oh, oh!’ It shocked me. I just went to pieces.” Later that month a small brain tumor was discovered inside Father’s head and removed. In June Alberta Gay filed for divorce after forty-nine years of marriage. In September Father pleaded no contest to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, convincing the judge that he had acted in self-defense. He was sentenced to five years’ probation, serving no jail time for the killing of his son.
Los Angeles Herald.
“The first one didn’t seem to bother him. He put his hand up to his face like he’d been hit with a BB. And then I fired again.” Father said he didn’t know he had killed his son until hours later when a detective gave him the news. “I thought he was kidding me. I said, ‘Oh God of mercy, oh, oh, oh!’ It shocked me. I just went to pieces.” Later that month a small brain tumor was discovered inside Father’s head and removed. In June Alberta Gay filed for divorce after forty-nine years of marriage. In September Father pleaded no contest to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, convincing the judge that he had acted in self-defense. He was sentenced to five years’ probation, serving no jail time for the killing of his son.
Marvin Gaye’s entire life was made up of the blues. Even when he sang about the sweetness of being loved, the heartache and tears in his high, angelic tenor could easily be heard. He was a reckless, selfish, macho man, but he studied the Koran and was interested in Buddhism. He spoke of writing a book about Jesus returning to modern-day Israel. He wanted to be a pure man for his beloved Lord, and he suffered untold hell because his nature prevented him from standing behind a pulpit, spreading the word of God. But Marvin made the stage his pulpit, the recording studio his church, calling Jesus’s name on the final track of his final album. “Marvin was strictly music,” says Frankie. “It was his gift. His lyrics are always about love, and they will teach you something.”
In the song “Love Party” on
What’s Going On,
Marvin announces that the “world is not for long … . There’s only time for singing, and praying, and having a love party.”
What’s Going On,
Marvin announces that the “world is not for long … . There’s only time for singing, and praying, and having a love party.”
“I knew when I heard about [Marvin’s death] that it was God’s will,” said Anna Gordy Gaye. “I thought about the fact, oddly and ironically, the very person who helped bring him into this world … God had the same person take him out of this world.”
JIMI HENDRIX
I
was a little virgin girl the first time I met Jimi Hendrix. When he loped toward me wearing a lopsided grin and that bright, blazing, hand-painted eyeball jacket, his frizzed hair going every which way like electricity on fire, I felt deliciously cornered—and scared to shivers. “What are
you
doing later?” he asked with piercing expectancy, but all I could do was stammer and stutter some lame, polite excuse. I don’t believe in harboring regrets, but how about having regrets about something you
didn’t
do?
was a little virgin girl the first time I met Jimi Hendrix. When he loped toward me wearing a lopsided grin and that bright, blazing, hand-painted eyeball jacket, his frizzed hair going every which way like electricity on fire, I felt deliciously cornered—and scared to shivers. “What are
you
doing later?” he asked with piercing expectancy, but all I could do was stammer and stutter some lame, polite excuse. I don’t believe in harboring regrets, but how about having regrets about something you
didn’t
do?
My photographer, Allen Daviau (who is now Stephen Spielberg’s cinematographer), called one morning to ask if I would like to dance in a short film with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. My mission was to wriggle around behind the group for their first American release, “Foxy Lady.” I had, of course, heard about the Experience: how the Seattle-born guitar god had gone to England, picked up some cute, skinny English boys, then returned to conquer the United States. And I had a serious penchant for skinny English boys. “Gee, Allen,” I said, trying to remain calm, “that sounds like fun.”
I threw on my favorite blue-velvet rag, hitchhiked over the hill to a crumbling
Hollywood mansion-turned-hippie-den, and for many, many hours danced on top of a white column behind Hendrix, Noel Redding, and Mitch Mitchell while “Foxy Lady” blasted down the peeling walls. Jimi kept peering at me from the corner of his eye, but Noel Redding looked like a safer bet to me, and by the end of the day we were holding hands.
Hollywood mansion-turned-hippie-den, and for many, many hours danced on top of a white column behind Hendrix, Noel Redding, and Mitch Mitchell while “Foxy Lady” blasted down the peeling walls. Jimi kept peering at me from the corner of his eye, but Noel Redding looked like a safer bet to me, and by the end of the day we were holding hands.
My relationship with Noel continued (in various forms) for several years. We are still friends today. I spent a lot of time around Jimi Hendrix and had a whole lot of very naughty fantasies about him (and his guitar!) but never really got to know him. Not many people did. Even though he was deeply private and often said he was from another planet(!), Jimi Hendrix let us all know him in a very profound and personal way through his music. “I sacrifice a part of my soul,” he said, “every time I play.” Jimi went to another level with his guitar. Pete Townshend agreed: “What the Who were doing was important, but Jimi was an epiphany.” According to Bruce Springsteen, Jimi showed us all there was “a deep ecstasy that could be had.”
Jimi Hendrix had only a little over three years to make his illustrious mark. His death, which occurred during the early-morning hours of September 18, 1970, when he was twenty-seven, seemed all wrong. Jimi suffocated on his own vomit after ingesting nine potent sleeping pills in the London flat of one of his girlfriends, Monika Danneman, and at 12:45 P.M. was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington.
There were two people I really wanted to sit down and have big chats with: Monika Danneman, of course, and a former girlfriend of Jimi’s, Kathy Etchingham, who enlisted Scotland Yard to reopen the investigation two years ago after digging up new “facts” about Jimi’s death.
Jimi’s childhood was difficult. His mom, the lovely Lucille, was a hard-drinking wild woman, dissatisfied with her lot in life, constantly drowning her sorrows in men and booze. When her husband, Al Hendrix, got out of the army, he found his three-year-old son, Johnny Allen, with a family friend in California and took him back home to Seattle on the train. Suspecting that little Johnny had been named after one of Lucille’s lovers, Al changed his son’s name to Jimmy Marshall (named after himself and his brother Marshall). Before long Lucille was back (actually back and forth), and after three years of trouble and two more sons, the couple divorced in 1951. It was hand-to-mouth much of the time for Al and his boys. There was a whole lot of moving around and a lot of different schools for Jimmy. Al switched jobs often and he enjoyed gambling. It got so difficult to find work that he eventually fostered out Leon and Joseph, and Jimmy would spend weeks at a time with friends and relatives. Nicknamed “Buster” after Flash Gordon’s Buster Crabbe, he escaped into science fiction, painting stars and planets with his watercolors, chasing around whichever neighborhood he found himself in, wearing a handmade cape. He was once suspended from junior high school for wearing bright red pants!
When Jimmy was fifteen, Lucille, the mother he barely knew and rarely saw but adored anyway, died of an alcohol-related illness. His father didn’t have a car, and Jimmy didn’t make the funeral. Maybe he stayed home out of respect for Al. He had learned, through hardship and through Al’s example, to keep his feelings under wraps, but he was destroyed by Lucille’s death. He would see her in his dreams for the rest of his life.
I fly to Seattle to meet Jimi’s dad, Al Hendrix, now seventy-seven years old and finally the victor after years of litigation over his son’s estate. Al and his daughter Janie now control all of Jimi’s musical assets. Jimi Hendrix makes as much money now—if not more—as he did when he was alive. His Woodstock guitar recently sold for $750,000.
When Al opens the door of a modest house on the outskirts of Seattle, I am immediately struck by his sweet smile—Jimi’s sweet smile. All along the walls are Jimi’s gold records, pictures, paintings. When I marvel, Al tells me that the gold records are duplicates, the originals stolen long ago. Who would do something like that? I wonder. He shakes his head. He can’t figure it, either. He invites me in and we sit on the couch with Janie (Jimi’s stepsister) and one of her toddler sons. When I ask Al how Jimi did in school, he grins. “Oh, he was more or less a visitor.” Just like he was in life. “He dropped out of school and went to work with me since I had my own landscaping business. He tried to get jobs otherwise, like a busboy, but that was before all the civil rights. If you were black, well, then you couldn’t get that position,” he says matter-of-factly . Was Jimi Hendrix a good gardener? I wonder. “First he didn’t like to get his hands dirty,” Al laughs. Then, after a while there, he found out the easy way to run around doing it, so he enjoyed it.” I ask Al if Jimi’s musical gift came from him.”Oh, I had it in my mind I wanted to play,“he admits, still smiling. “I fooled around with the piano, but then it was the saxophone.” Janie tells me that her dad is being overly modest.
Jimmy had wanted a guitar for a long time, pretending to play on a broom, graduating to a cigar box and then to a one-string ukulele. Then Al bought Jimmy a real guitar during a poker game. “I paid five dollars for Jimi’s first guitar, an old beat-up acoustic. After I found out he could play the guitar, well, then I went and got him an electric one.” It was a white Supro Ozark bought at Myers Music Store on First Avenue. Janie interjects that Al got his saxophone the same time Jimi got his guitar, and the two practiced together, but Al got behind in the payments. “I let the sax go back to the people and kept up payments on the guitar.” Wise move.
In the summer of 1959 Jimmy played his first gig with a local group called the Rocking Kings, making thirty-five cents. Pretty soon the teenagers were making sixty-five dollars playing parties, and it was obvious that Jimmy had found his niche. He had huge hands, his thumb almost as long as his fingers, so he could hook it over the neck of his guitar like an extra finger. When he wasn’t practicing or spending time with the girls, Jimmy listened intently to
Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, imitating the masters. When the Ozark got stolen, which was a traumatic event, Al eventually replaced it with a white Danelectro, which Jimmy tied with feathers and painted red. The quiet kid who kept to himself was already getting a reputation for being eccentric—and extremely talented. When he became a member of the Tomcats, Jimmy quit school. All he wanted to do was play.
Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, imitating the masters. When the Ozark got stolen, which was a traumatic event, Al eventually replaced it with a white Danelectro, which Jimmy tied with feathers and painted red. The quiet kid who kept to himself was already getting a reputation for being eccentric—and extremely talented. When he became a member of the Tomcats, Jimmy quit school. All he wanted to do was play.
After a big fight with his dad and because he couldn’t find himself a decent job, Jimmy got it into his head to join the army. He figured he would be drafted anyway but if he volunteered he would at least be able to choose his post. “What Jimmy wanted,” Al recalls, “was one of those ‘Screamin’ Eagles’ patches [as a parachutist for the 101st Airborne] and so the sergeant tells him, ‘Well, to do that you have to enlist.’ So Jimmy upped and volunteered before he got drafted.”
Jimmy left his steady girl, Betty Jean, and headed for basic training at Fort Ord in California, then was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky He got lonesome right off the bat, writing a lot of letters back home. He didn’t like being told what to do, but he seemed to enjoy the thrill of parachuting. Jimi wrote to his dad that he would try as hard as he could “so that the whole family of Hendrix’s [
sic
] will have the right to wear the Screamin’ Eagle’s patch of the U.S. Army Airborne.” A little over eight months later Private First Class James Marshall Hendrix won his much-desired patch, and he wanted out. One of the many rumors that have sprung up about Jimi was squelched by sister Janie. Supposedly after a few tries with the army psychiatrist, Jimmy went so far as to break his ankle on a parachute jump. The truth is, he injured his back and got his discharge in July 1962.
sic
] will have the right to wear the Screamin’ Eagle’s patch of the U.S. Army Airborne.” A little over eight months later Private First Class James Marshall Hendrix won his much-desired patch, and he wanted out. One of the many rumors that have sprung up about Jimi was squelched by sister Janie. Supposedly after a few tries with the army psychiatrist, Jimmy went so far as to break his ankle on a parachute jump. The truth is, he injured his back and got his discharge in July 1962.
Instead of going back to Seattle, Jimmy and his army buddy Billy Cox decided to take their chances in Nashville, and the two musicians wound up playing the club circuit, backing artists like Carla Thomas and Curtis Mayfield. Jimmy was getting a lot of attention, already experimenting with feedback and nurturing his innate flamboyance. In the spring of 1963 Jimmy went on the road with “Gorgeous” George Odell and wound up spending two years backing various black performers on the “chitlin circuit,” driving hundreds of miles without much pay. But Jimmy soaked up the music, playing behind major black acts like Solomon Burke and Jackie Wilson. When a New York promoter caught Jimmy stealing someone’s thunder at a club one night, he convinced him to take his guitar to Manhattan.
Luckily one of the first people Jimmy met upon arriving in Harlem was a former girlfriend of Sam Cooke’s, a stunning street-smart lady named Fay. She and Jimmy began a tempestuous fling almost instantly. Many years later Fay told
Gallery
magazine, “All our activity took place in bed … . He was well-endowed, you see … He came to the bed with the same grace as a Mississippi pulpwood driver attacks a plate of collard greens and cornbread after twenty
hours in the sun. He was creative in bed too. There would be encore after encore … hard driving and steamy like his music. There were times when he almost busted me in two the way he did a guitar onstage.” In between steamy bouts, Fay took Jimmy around town, introducing him to all the right people, and late in December of 1963 the twenty-one-year-old was hired for his first sessions with Lonnie Youngblood, a sax player.
Gallery
magazine, “All our activity took place in bed … . He was well-endowed, you see … He came to the bed with the same grace as a Mississippi pulpwood driver attacks a plate of collard greens and cornbread after twenty
hours in the sun. He was creative in bed too. There would be encore after encore … hard driving and steamy like his music. There were times when he almost busted me in two the way he did a guitar onstage.” In between steamy bouts, Fay took Jimmy around town, introducing him to all the right people, and late in December of 1963 the twenty-one-year-old was hired for his first sessions with Lonnie Youngblood, a sax player.
Things began picking up: Jimmy won first prize at the Apollo Theater Amateur Night. He met Sam Cooke. He got a gig with the Isley Brothers. Jimmy didn’t much like the sideman mohair suit uniform, but he enjoyed the travel, and he loved to play. He toured with the Isleys until he was fed up with the routine and went back to Nashville. In January 1965, going by the name Maurice James, Jimmy landed a gig with Little Richard, but it didn’t last long. Jimmy was just too compelling to stay in the background. He played briefly with Sam and Dave and, after a short stint with Ike and Tina Turner, headed back to New York. It wasn’t easy but Jimmy was committed. In a letter back home, he told his dad that as long as he still had his guitar and amp, “no fool can keep me from living.” Even though Jimmy couldn’t even afford to feed himself every day, he vowed he would “keep hustling and scuffling until I get things to happen like their [
sic
] supposed to for me … .” When he heard Bob Dylan’s
Highway 61 Revisited
, Jimmy headed in a new direction. He left Harlem for Greenwich Village and started writing his own soul-searching prose. After a few dates with Curtis Knight, Jimmy finally got his own lineup together, calling the band Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. They made about seven dollars a night playing at the Cafe Wha?, and though Jimmy was penniless and starving, he was getting a name for himself. He played for a few nights with John Hammond, Jr., at the Cafe Au Go Go, where British rock royalty—the Stones and the Beatles—got their first shocking dose of the remarkable guitarist who played his Strat upside down and with his teeth. Without even realizing it, Jimmy was shaking up the music world.
sic
] supposed to for me … .” When he heard Bob Dylan’s
Highway 61 Revisited
, Jimmy headed in a new direction. He left Harlem for Greenwich Village and started writing his own soul-searching prose. After a few dates with Curtis Knight, Jimmy finally got his own lineup together, calling the band Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. They made about seven dollars a night playing at the Cafe Wha?, and though Jimmy was penniless and starving, he was getting a name for himself. He played for a few nights with John Hammond, Jr., at the Cafe Au Go Go, where British rock royalty—the Stones and the Beatles—got their first shocking dose of the remarkable guitarist who played his Strat upside down and with his teeth. Without even realizing it, Jimmy was shaking up the music world.
Jimi Hendrix: “Here I come, baby …” (ROZ KELLY/ MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/VENICE, CALIF.)
Jimmy lived with different girls during this period, and one of them, Diane Carpenter, claims to have had his child—a daughter, Tamika, who is now in her late twenties. There was a paternity suit, but Tamika has never been formally recognized by the Hendrix family. In 1969 Jimi Hendrix supposedly
fathered another child in Sweden, called Little Jimi by his mother, Eva Sundquist. The twenty-five-year old, who looks uncannily like Big Jimi, is now suing the Hendrix estate.
fathered another child in Sweden, called Little Jimi by his mother, Eva Sundquist. The twenty-five-year old, who looks uncannily like Big Jimi, is now suing the Hendrix estate.
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