Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (22 page)

Read Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Online

Authors: Pamela Des Barres

One of Keith Richards’ girlfriends, Linda Keith, turned Chas Chandler on to Jimmy, knowing Chas was about to leave his post as bass player for the Animals to go into management with Animals manager Mike Jeffrey. Chandler knew right away that he wanted to work with Jimmy, and after some initial hesitation (he always seemed to lack self-confidence, especially about his singing), Jimmy agreed to go to England when Chas promised to introduce him to Eric Clapton. When he arrived in London on September 24, 1966, Jimmy called his dad in Seattle at four in the morning. “He told me, ‘Well, I’m over here in England now and I’m auditioning for a bass player and a drummer. It’s just going to be a trio and I’m gonna call it the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and I’m gonna spell my name J-I-M-I.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s a little different!’” Al remembers telling Jimi that the call was going to be expensive and then they both started crying. Al was so excited that he forgot to tell his son that he had remarried.
This is where Kathy Etchingham enters the picture. Jimi got together with the nineteen-year-old the very night he arrived in London. I meet up with Kathy for drinks in a pub near her home in the English countryside. She appears to be a genteel English lady in her mid-forties, dressed in tweeds, who dotes on her teenage kids. She gets fire in her eyes when she talks about Jimi Hendrix. “Jimi said, ‘I want to talk to you, I think you’re beautiful,’ the usual line.” She smiles ruefully. “We all went back to the hotel and had drinks. ‘Shall we go to my room?’ he said, and I stayed the night. The next morning Linda Keith got the maid to open the door, whereupon she grabbed his guitar, held it over his head, and off she went with it!” Kathy is quite gleeful with this recollection. “When I first met him all he had was a guitar in a case, a couple of satin shirts, a jar of Noxema, and a bag of rollers. I used to set his hair in rollers.” Jimi eventually got his guitar back from the scorned Linda and spent a large part of the next three years with Kathy Etchingham. “Jimi had a great sense of humor.” She grins. “The English have a dry sense of humor, and he picked it up, slotted in
very
quickly.”
Chatting it up with Jimi Hendrix’s dad and sister Janie in Seattle. (VICTOR HAYDEN)
Chas was true to his word, and not only did Jimi get to meet Eric Clapton, he had the rare opportunity to jam with Eric’s group, Cream, at a concert in London. When Jimmy launched into Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killin’ Floor,” Eric just
walked to the side of the stage and stood there dumbfounded. It wouldn’t be long before the best guitar players in England found themselves trying to keep up with Jimi Hendrix. After hearing Jimi play at the club Blaises, Jeff Beck said, “I think I’ll go get a job in the post office.”
Jimi held auditions and was soon fronting a trio with bass player Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, having already signed management papers with Chandler and Jeffrey. Nobody mentioned Mike Jeffrey’s shady past and supposed hushed-up mob connections. Besides, who knew what was going to happen? Bands didn’t really think about money in the sixties and were usually kept in the dark about contracts and deal making.
The Experience played some French dates with pop star Johnny Hallyday and headed for the studio, where they cut “Stone Free” and “Hey Joe.” Chas worked out a deal with the Who’s managers, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, to release future Experience records on their new label, Track, if the first single on Polydor was successful. It was, entering at number thirty-eight on the U.K. national singles chart the last week of 1966.
During a gig in Germany, Jimi was yanked offstage by overzealous fans and got pissed off during a gig when he found that his guitar had been damaged. He went nuts and smashed the guitar and the stage to pieces. When the amazed audience ate it up, Jimi decided to put the destruction into his already-flashy act—a tongue-in-cheek version of what the Who were already doing.
The Experience were getting rave-up reviews in the British press and packing houses almost nightly, but Jimi Hendrix remained a soft-spoken, shy, and private man. Meanwhile Chas was trying to establish Jimi as the madman of rock, and accomplished this when
Disc
and
Music Echo
dubbed him “The Wild Man of Borneo.” He did look incredible with his electric hair, gold-braided Victorian military jacket, and tight velvet trousers, but despite impending fame and glory, the only thing that ever seemed to matter was the music. And he had unique goals. In January 1967 Jimi told
New Musical Express,
“I want to be the first man to write about the blues scene on Venus.”
His music was coming from a place to which few had dared venture. A British journalist let the tape run after an interview, while Jimi was talking to Eric Clapton: “Music, man, it means so many things. It doesn’t necessarily mean physical notes that you hear by ear. It could mean notes that you hear by feeling or thought or by imagination, or even by emotion … .”
The second single, “Purple Haze,” was obviously written about Jimi’s frequent forays into the land of LSD, but he wisely told the press the song had come from a dream about walking around under the ocean. Jimi had, in fact, been experimenting with various illegal substances for quite some time. “Purple Haze” went to number three on the charts, followed by a third smash, “The Wind Cries Mary,” written after a horrendous argument with Kathy (her middle name is Mary).
The first time Jimi burned his guitar, journalist Keith Altham says the band was backstage trying to figure out how to stir up the Finsbury Park audience, when Altham pulled a lighter out of his pocket and jokingly suggested Jimi light up his guitar. Lighter fuel was produced, and the rest is legend.
The first album,
Are You Experienced?,
reached new dimensions and is still impossible to categorize. It soars. In “Foxy Lady” Jimi announced, “Here I come, baby, I’m comin’ to
getcha
!
”
and a million girls opened up their arms.
His concerts were becoming more free-form, and like one of his inspirations, jazz great Ornette Coleman, Jimi never played the same solo twice. He played behind his back, on the floor, with his teeth, shoving, pushing, humping the speakers while roadies struggled to keep them upright. The night he boggled minds and split open hearts at London’s Savile Theatre by starting the show with the just-released Beatles song “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” an astonished Paul McCartney was in the audience, along with Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton. At the end of the set Jimi threw his guitar into the audience, and on the back of the white Fender Jimi had written a love poem:
May this be
Love or just
Confusion born out of
frustration wracked
feelings
—
of not
being able to
make true physical
love to the
Universal gypsy Queen
True, free expressed music
Darling guitar please
rest. Amen.
After altering the course of music in Britain, Jimi headed back to America to play the Monterey Pop Festival, a three-day love fest for the free-love generation, which was being filmed by director D. A. Pennebaker. Jimi’s only request was that he bring along good friend Brian Jones to introduce the Experience. He wandered through the trippy-hippie crowd with Buddy Miles, Eric Burdon, and a very high Jones, ingested an intense new drug, STP, and painted his new Strat, looking forward to kissing the California sky. “I’m so high, living on my nerves,” he told Burdon. “The spaceship’s really gonna take off tonight.” The Experience was scheduled for one of the final slots on Sunday night, and the Who were so petrified at the thought of following Jimi that Papa John Phillips flipped a coin to find out Who would follow whom!
As legend has it, when Jimi lost the toss, he stood up on a chair and played mind-altering guitar while everybody stood by and gaped.
Brian Jones introduced Jimi as “the most exciting performer I’ve ever heard” and the Experience attacked the stage with a frenzied combination of rock/blues/jazz/Dylan that completely totaled the agog audience. Jimi rode his guitar, had sex with it, prayed to it, and then “sacrificed” the newly hand-painted Strat by squirting it with lighter fluid, killing it with fire, and then raising it from the dead. Pity the poor Mamas and Papas, who had to step onto that charred stage to close the festival. The
Los Angeles Times
said that after the Monterey spectacle, Jimi had “graduated from rumor to legend.” As the Experience went on to stun American audiences, they found that nobody wanted to follow them or open for them. After one show at the Fillmore in San Francisco, the headliners, Jefferson Airplane, just hid out until the Experience left town.
The band ripped up the Whiskey-a-Go-Go in Los Angeles. I was there—the entire building was full of raging, unearthly sound. But as the Experience changed the frequency in L.A., Mike Jeffrey was booking them on a tour with the Monkees. What could he have been thinking? The screaming teenybops just didn’t get it, and Jimi played most of the gigs with his back to the audience. Jimi did get friendly with Peter Tork, but the Experience lasted only a few days with the TV pop stars. Jimi’s sense of humor surfaced when he told
NME
that he thought the Monkees were replacing him on the tour with Mickey Mouse.
When asked by
Open City
magazine about “sexual and violent” live shows, Jimi responded, “A lot of people think what I do with my guitar is vulgar. I don’t think it’s vulgar sex … . It’s a spontaneous act on my part, and a fluid thing. It’s not an act, but a state of being at the time I’m doing it. My music, my instrument, my sound, my body are all one action with my mind … .” Jimi was still tripping on psychedelics, his mind wide open to astrology, numerology, the
I Ching.
During sessions for the second Experience album, Axis:
Bold as Love,
he was even experimenting with the ancient meanings, dynamics, and energy patterns of colors, weaving reds, blues, and greens into his rainbow of pounding sound.
The band played 255 shows in 1967. There was almost too much road travel. After a short Christmas break they were back at it again, and Jimi got into some trouble in Sweden. He had had a few drinks and proceeded to destroy Mitch Mitchell’s room and everything in it, putting his hand through the window before Mitch finally had to sit down on Jimi to stop the devastation. The police were called and Jimi was charged with criminal damage and hustled off to the hospital. For such a gentle, spiritual soul, Jimi seemed to have had quite a temper, sometimes taking it out on the women in his life.
Axis
went straight into the American Top Twenty, and another successful
tour of the United States followed. When I’m asked what my favorite live show is, I always say the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Shrine Auditorium on February 10, 1968. I felt like part of a levitating congregation in an electric church, awash in colored holy lights, drowning in screaming guitar chords.
When the Experience hit Seattle, Jimi was met at the airport by his father, Al, his new stepmother, Ayako, and her daughter, Janie. Jimi must have been nervous about playing his hometown, because reviews for the show were mixed. But Al seemed to have had fun at the concert: “We were all going in the back door, and of course the security were all around, and a lot of fans around there saw Jimi.” Al laughs, wiping away tears. “And we were going in and the guy got this big, large door open, and some of the fans just surged forward and Jimi says, ‘You just go on in!’ and the security guy said, ‘Hey! No!’ He was having a hard time holding them back, and ol’ Jimi, he’s going to let them go on in!” After an uncomfortable appearance at his old high school, the band headed for Texas.
Nonstop life on the road was (and still can be) dangerous and confusing, with kiss-ass strangers offering musicians double doses of all kinds of drugs, which were usually gobbled up for escape, sleep, and to beat off boredom. I remember Mitch taking a handful of downers and then asking someone else for more, having completely forgotten that he had just ingested enough to knock him out cold. And there were internal squabbles. Sometimes Jimi was moody and irritable, taking it out on his constant companions, Mitch and Noel, though Noel seemed to get the brunt of Jimi’s outbursts. And there were too many women. Devon Wilson was always around, a wild, wiseass black beauty, always on the hustle, but Jimi had a hot spot for her. He had a problem saying no and regularly had several girls on his arms, in his lap, and under the covers. And they were constantly at each other’s throats. There were riots at every gig. Every night was full of chaos, and everybody wanted a piece of it.

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