Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (24 page)

Read Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Online

Authors: Pamela Des Barres

Right in the middle of the sessions, Mike booked Jimi a tour of Europe following an appearance at the Isle of Wight festival in England. Jimi was exhausted and staggered through Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, and when his bass player, Billy Cox, suffered a paranoid breakdown and went back home to his parents, Jimi decided to spend some time in England. Although he checked into the Cumberland Hotel, Monika says that Jimi asked her to rent a private flat so they could “have some peace.” She also insists that Jimi wanted to hold a “really big” press conference to announce their engagement, but because her father had just suffered a heart attack, she didn’t want to, as the shocking news might have killed him. “So I said, ‘I just can’t do it—on maybe the death of my father,’ and he understood that completely, but he was very upset, I was very upset. At the end Jimi talked to my mom, asking how long until he could do the press conference, and my mom said, ‘Wait till tomorrow, tomorrow might be better.’ And it went on for a few days—he never made it because he died.”
On September 14 Jimi went to see her at the private flat in Notting Hill, and the following night the couple went to Ronnie Scott’s club, where Kathy Etchingham says that Devon Wilson kicked Monika right out of her chair. (I believe it. Devon crashed my twenty-first birthday party and stole all my presents!) On Wednesday, the sixteenth, Jimi spent the day with Monika, and she claims he was with her the entire night, but according to Chas Chandler, he and Jimi had a business meeting, and Alan Douglas maintains that Jimi then spent the night with him and some friends and drove Alan to the airport the following morning.
On September 17 Monika took some photos of Jimi in the backyard, holding a basket of flowers. “He was full of plans,” she says. “He was working aggressively, attacking the old view of himself. The photographs of him in the garden show him very naturally [as] the gardener. He just wanted to show his natural side and not this image that had been following him for years.” I ask Monika if Jimi seemed content the last day of his life. “He was very happy, making plans in regard to us getting married, having children. He had already chosen the name for our first son—translated, it was Thunder. I was at that time still very conservative, so to name a child this way was very unusual. I was so much in love with him, I said all right. If he wanted that name, that name it would be.” Then the couple went shopping, where, oddly enough, they bumped into Kathy Etchingham and then Devon Wilson, who invited Jimi to
a party that night. He accepted. Monika says he was going to the party to tell Devon to leave them alone. Kathy Etchingham says that is “utter claptrap.”
At one A.M. Monika drove Jimi to Kit Lambert’s party and he asked her to pick him up in half an hour. People already at the party, however, said that Jimi got there much earlier than one A.M., and when Monika called on the intercom, he didn’t want to leave but finally went downstairs after several buzzes. Chuck Wein says he has it on eyewitness authority that Jimi went to the party that night to see Devon, so that he could tell her he loved her and say goodbye to her.
Mitch Mitchell says he called Jimi at the Cumberland, inviting him to jam with Sly Stone at the Speakeasy about midnight, and Jimi had enthusiastically agreed. When Jimi didn’t show, Mitch says he had an odd feeling that was “hard to define.”
Monika says she and Jimi stayed up talking until past dawn. “He had a huge amount of faith in God and the higher power. I just loved listening to him because the things he told me were so amazing! He couldn’t find very many people who were interested in that, and for him it was very, very important. He was in both worlds, he was on a higher plane.” She says she fell asleep in Jimi’s arms and woke up a little after ten A.M., to find him sleeping soundly Knowing he had smoked his last cigarette, she went “quickly to a shop not far away,” and when she came back with the cigarettes, Jimi was still asleep, but she noticed “some sort of something dripping out of his mouth.” When she attempted to wake him up and wasn’t successful, Monika says she realized Jimi was in trouble. She called Eric Burdon’s hotel to speak with a friend of Jimi’s, Alvinia Bridges, “who was very much with musicians,” trying to locate Jimi’s doctor, but Alvinia didn’t know who Jimi’s doctor was. “I told her Jimi was sick and I couldn’t wake him up, and I had found in the meantime that there were some sleeping tablets missing—nine altogether—and she said, ‘Get the ambulance.’” According to Eric Burdon’s autobiography, Monika called him “at the crack of dawn,” and in an interview with the fanzine
Straight Ahead,
Eric said that when he told Monika to get an ambulance, “she argued about it, saying that there [were] incriminating things in the flat, which I guess she took care of.”
Monika says that when the ambulance man got there (at 11:27 A.M.) he checked Jimi’s eyes and assured her that everything would be all right, that “most likely in the afternoon we could both walk out of the hospital and would be laughing about the whole affair.” It didn’t quite happen that way. “They didn’t seem worried, so I wasn’t worried,” she insists.
Reg Jones and John Sua, the ambulance crew, told a different story to journalist Tony Brown: They remembered finding the door ajar, and nobody home except Jimi, who was lying on the bed. “It was horrific,” said Jones. “He was covered in vomit. There was tons of it all over the pillow—black and brown it was … . We felt his pulse between his shoulders, pinched his earlobe
and nose, shone a light in his eyes. But there was no response at all. I knew he was dead as soon as I walked into the room.” Monika says she rode in the ambulance with Jimi. “He was still alive and they recorded the death almost an hour later when he got into the hospital. Some people say I was not in the ambulance. How could I have known which hospital to go to? They didn’t go to the hospital which was the nearest because at that time in the morning they were full up and we were directed by radio to the other hospital.” John Sua says that Monika was not in the ambulance; the only people present were “me and the casualty, and Reg the driver. Nobody else.” In 1992, the London Ambulance Service conducted their own investigation of Monika’s allegation, and concluded: “ … it is apparent that the ambulance men acted in a proper and professional manner. There was no one else, except the deceased at the flat … when they arrived. Nor did anyone else accompany them in the ambulance to St. Mary Abbots Hospital.”
According to Monika, she waited around the hospital for some news. “Some time later a sister came to me and said that Jimi’s heart had stopped but that everything was all right now and not to worry, but I could tell the doctor was not taking anything serious. That’s when I said I wanted everything to be first class. They didn’t know who Jimi was because I didn’t tell them, but I did tell the doctor at that moment, ‘Listen, this man is a very famous composer and musician, you have to do everything you can do.’ Much later I did find out that there was no first-class treatment at all in this hospital. It didn’t exist. While they were treating him I went twice into the room. One time I saw them working on Jimi and they chucked me out, the next time they chucked me out immediately. In one statement the doctor said he came unconscious to the hospital. A little bit later he said Jimi must have died in either the flat or the ambulance. Later he made a statement I couldn’t believe—he said that Jimi must have died hours before! They wouldn’t have tried all kinds of treatment on him if he had been dead for many hours! I said to myself after reading that statement, ‘What kind of doctor is he? Under what kind of care was Jimi at that time?’
“I had promised Jimi a lot of things—one of the things was that, if he died, I would help to look after him for three days because he didn’t want to be buried alive. I can’t go into it, it’s too deep. Because I was not married to him, the next best thing I could think to ask was to see Jimi. They allowed me to see Jimi and my tears were just streaming, but the minute I saw Jimi in this little room, I just had to stop because he had a smile on his face and he looked so alive. There was no agony, it was just like he was asleep and had a beautiful dream.” But according to Doctor Seifert, who spoke with writer Tony Brown, this lovely scene never took place. “No one would have been allowed to look at him, or stand over him,” the doctor insisted. “That would never have been allowed.” And when Brown asked Monika who identified Hendrix’s body, she contradicted herself. “As far as I know, Gerry Stickells [jimi’s road manager]. I didn’t want to see him. They asked me, but I just couldn’t.” Hmmmm.
Still, I commiserate with Monika. No matter what kind of relationship she had with Jimi, she was obviously in love with him and must have been completely devastated. “I went from seventh heaven into hell,” she says sadly. “He was the love of my life.”
Eric Burdon recalls calling Monika back the morning of September 18: “‘Monika, it’s Eric. Listen, just do what I say and don’t ask any questions. Phone an ambulance, now, quickly!’ She came back at me with ‘I can’t have people round here now, there’s all kinds of stuff in the house.’ ‘I don’t care, get the illegal stuff and throw it down the toilet, do anything you can, but get an ambulance now, we’re on our way over.’” When I ask Monika about Eric’s recollections, she says, “Eric Burdon is so identified with Jimi that he lost a bit—the reality.”
Kathy Etchingham says she believed Monika’s story at first, but after reading a manuscript supposedly written by Monika years later, she “smelled a rat.” “I realized she didn’t know Jimi at all! Describing how he rolled joints! I knew and everybody else knew that Jimi couldn’t roll a joint! I was the joint roller!” So Kathy went straight to her lawyers, and eventually to Scotland Yard, who began a new inquiry into Jimi’s death—twenty-three years later. I ask why she thinks Jimi left Kit Lambert’s party that night and went back to Monika’s flat. “She must have come back and demanded that he go with her. She had his favorite guitar in the car and he would have gone if his guitar was any way at risk. Monika’s been seeing Al Hendrix twice a year for twenty-four years. She’s convinced the old man that they were great lovers, about to be married, and he gave her a letter that this is true,” Kathy states with horror. “She uses this now to prove she was the great love of his life.” I ask Kathy if she thinks there was some kind of foul play. “I don’t believe there was a conspiracy to kill him, but Monika could have done more to save him. I think it was simply a catalog of falling errors. Gerry Stickells says he was called between eight-thirty and nine A.M., and when you consider that the ambulance wasn’t called until eighteen minutes past eleven—what’s going on? She wasn’t even on the ambulance.” Kathy shows me a stack of legal documents signed by doctors and ambulance men. “The ambulance men say she wasn’t there when they arrived, the door was open and just the body on the bed, covered in vomit, and he was dead on arrival at the hospital. They confirmed he was definitely dead.”
The Accident and Emergency Admissions officer at the hospital says he never even made out a patient’s admission card for Jimi because he was never officially admitted, having been pronounced dead on arrival. Dr. Seifert said that even though Jimi was taken into casualty as a matter of routine, he remembers that the monitor was “flat.”
Monika tells me she welcomed the new inquiry. “Scotland Yard said that if they had been able to prove Jimi had died earlier, they would have reopened the case, but when they found out what had been said at the inquest twenty-four years ago was the truth, they decided not to. They looked into whether Jimi
died a few hours earlier, which is a shame, really, instead of ‘Why did he die?’”
Though the cause of death was officially declared as “inhalation of vomit due to barbiturate intoxication,” blaring headlines around the world announced that the wild man of rock had overdosed on downers. And why had Jimi Hendrix taken so many sleeping pills—nine times the prescribed dosage? Recalling my own encounter with Mitch Mitchell (among others!), I figure Jimi took a few tablets, then took a few more without remembering the first handful. A friend of mine recalls giving Jimi a couple of Mandrax tablets a few nights earlier, and an hour later he asked her, “Where are those Mandies?”
One of the numerous surrealistic paintings of Jimi that Monika painted after his death. (COURTESY OF THE MONIKA DANNEMANN ESTATE; © MONIKA DANNEMANN)
Since Jimi had no will stating otherwise, his body was flown to Seattle for the funeral, which was held on October 1 at the Dunlap Baptist Church. Hymns were sung, brother Leon read a poem, a family friend read the eerily prophetic lyrics to “Angel,” the last song Jimi recorded, describing what his angel told him: “Today is the day for you to rise … You’re gonna rise.” Then Jimi’s fellow musicians, friends, and admirers tearfully filed by the open casket (Noel and Mitch held hands as they viewed Jimi’s body) before it was taken to Greenwood Cemetery, where Jimi was laid to rest near his own “angel”—his mother, Lucille.

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