Our Friend, Roger Mayer, just sent me this amazing article. I remember having read parts of this before somewhere \u2013 but could never remember where. Big thanks to Roger!
\nCheck out the \u00fcbercool products from Roger Mayer on VintageandRare here:
\nHope you enjoy the article.
\nKind regards, Nicolai<\/p>\n
Jimi Hendrix: \u2018You never told me he was that good\u2019<\/strong> During those three years and 362 days living in London, Hendrix had conjured \u2013 with his vision and sense of sound, his personality and genius \u2013 the most extraordinary guitar music ever played, the most remarkable sound-scape ever created; of that there is little argument. Opinion varies only over the effect his music has on people: elation, fear, sexual stimulation, sublimation, disgust \u2013 all or none of these \u2013 but always drop-jawed amazement.<\/p>\n The 40th anniversary of Hendrix\u2019s death next month will be marked by the opening of an exhibition of curios and memorabilia at the only place he ever called home \u2013 a flat diagonally above that once occupied by the composer George Frideric Handel, on Brook Street in central London, in the double building now known as Handel House. The flat will be opened to the public for 12 days in September and there is talk about plans for a joint museum, adding Hendrix\u2019s presence to that already established in the museum devoted to Handel. Involved in the discussions is the woman with whom Hendrix furnished the top flat of 23 Brook St, and with whom he lived: the only woman he ever really loved, Kathy Etchingham. I want people to remember the man I knew.\u201d When she met Hendrix (the same night he landed in London), he had already lived an interesting, if frustrating, 23 years. He was born to a father who cared, but not greatly, and a mother he barely knew \u2013 she died when he was 15 \u2013 but adored (she\u2019s said to be the focus of two of his three great ballads, \u201cLittle Wing\u201d and \u201cAngel\u201d). He had always been enthralled by guitar playing \u2013 a \u201cnatural\u201d,immersed in R&B on the radio and the music of blues giants Albert King and Muddy Waters. When he was 18, he was offered the chance to avoid jail for a minor misdemeanour by joining the army, which he did, training for the 101st Airborne Division.<\/p>\n His military career was marked by friendship with a bass player called Billy Cox from West Virginia, with whom he would play his last concerts, and a report which read: \u201cIndividual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations. Misses bed check: sleeps while supposed to be working: unsatisfactory duty performance.\u201d Hendrix didn\u2019t fit because he wasn\u2019t black enough for Harlem, nor white enough for Greenwich Village. His music was closer to the blues than any other genre; the Delta and Chicago blues which had captivated a generation of musicians, not so much in the US as in London, musicians such as John Mayall and Alexis Korner, and thereafter Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page among many others.<\/p>\n As luck would have it, the Brits were in town and Linda Keith, girlfriend of the Stones\u2019 Keith Richards, persuaded Chas Chandler, bass player of the Animals, to go and listen to Hendrix play at the Cafe Wha? club in the Village. Chandler wanted to move into management and happened to be fixated by a song, \u201cHey Joe\u201d, by Tim Rose. \u201cIt was a song Chas knew would be a hit if only he could find the right person to play it,\u201d says Keith Altham, then of the New Musical Express, who would later become a kind of embedded reporter with the Hendrix London entourage. \u201cThere he was, this incredible man, playing a wild version of that very song. It was like an epiphany for Chas \u2013 it was meant to be.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTo be honest,\u201d remembers Tappy Wright, the Animals\u2019 roadie who came to Cafe Wha? with Chandler that night, \u201cI wasn\u2019t too impressed at first, but when he started playing with his teeth, and behind his head, it was obvious that here was someone different.\u201d Before long, Hendrix was aboard the plane to London with Chandler and the Animals\u2019 manager, Michael Jeffery, to be met by Tony Garland, who would end up being general factotum for Hendrix\u2019s management company, Anim. \u201cWhen he arrived,\u201d recalls Garland now, sitting on his barge beside the canal in Maida Vale, west London, where he now lives, \u201cI filled out the customs form. We couldn\u2019t say he\u2019d come to work because he didn\u2019t have a permit, so I told them he was a famous American star coming to collect his royalties.\u201d<\/p>\n It is strange, tracking down Hendrix\u2019s inner circle in London. His own musicians in his great band, the Experience \u2013 Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell \u2013 are dead. Likewise, his two managers, Chandler and Jeffery, and one of his closest musician friends, the Rolling Stone Brian Jones; the other, Eric Burdon of the Animals, declined to be interviewed. But some members of the close-knit entourage are still around, such as Kathy Etchingham and Keith Altham, wearing a flaming orange jacket befitting the time of which he agrees to speak, in defiance of a heart attack only a few days before. For reasons never quite explained, the blues \u2013 both in their acoustic Delta form, and Chicago blues plugged into an amplifier \u2013 had captivated this generation of English musicians more deeply than their American counterparts. Elderly blues musicians found themselves, to their amazement, courted for concerts, such as an unforgettable night at Hammersmith with Son House and Bukka White. Champion Jack Dupree married and settled in Yorkshire. \u201cPeople [here] felt a certain affinity with the blues, music which added a bit of colour to grey life,\u201d Altham continues. And as Garland points out: \u201cWhite America was listening to Doris Day \u2013 black American music got nowhere near white AM radio. Jimi was too white for black radio. Here, there were a lot of white guys listening to blues from America and wanting to sound like their heroes.\u201d<\/p>\n Things happened at speed after Hendrix landed. \u201c\u2018Come down to the Scotch,\u2019 Chas told me the day Jimi arrived and hear what I found in New York,\u201d recalls Altham. \u201cJimi couldn\u2019t play because he had no work permit, but he jammed that night, and my first impression was that he\u2019d make a great jazz musician.\u201d That was the night, his first in London, that Hendrix met Kathy Etchingham. \u201cIt happened straightaway,\u201d she recalls. \u201cHere was this man: different, funny, coy \u2013 even about his own playing.\u201d \u201cA short while later,\u201d recalls Altham, \u201cChas took me to hear him at the Bag O\u2019Nails club [in Soho] for one of his first proper gigs, turned to me and said, \u2018What\u2019ya think?\u2019 I said I\u2019d never heard anything like it in all my life.\u201d At a concert in the same series, remembers Garland, \u201cMichael Jeffery put an arm round Chas, another round me and said, \u2018I think we\u2019ve cracked it, mate.\u2019\u201d They had: Kit Lambert, according to Altham, literally scrambled across the tables to Chas at one of the shows and said, \u201cin his plummy accent\u201d, he had to sign him. Chas needed a record contract, Decca had turned Hendrix down (along with the Beatles) and Lambert was about to launch a new label, Track Records, with interest from Polydor: \u201cThe deal was done, on the back of a napkin,\u201d says Altham.<\/p>\n Hendrix had formed his band at speed: a rhythm guitarist from Kent called Noel Redding \u2013 who had applied to join the Animals but to whom Hendrix now allocated bass guitar \u2013 and Mitch Mitchell, a jazz drummer seeking to mould himself in the style of John Coltrane\u2019s great percussionist, Elvin Jones. With a stroke of genius, Jeffery came up with the only name befitting what was to follow: the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Is there any line in rock\u2019n’roll more assuredly seductive as: \u201cAre you experienced?\/ Have you ever been experienced?\/ Well, I have\u201d (from 1967\u2032s \u201cAre You Experienced\u201d)? There was also curiosity from the emergent powerhouse of British blues: Cream and Eric Clapton. There was a particular night when Cream allowed Jimi to join them for a jam at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London. Meeting Clapton had been among the enticements Chandler had used to lure Hendrix to Britain: \u201cHendrix blew into a version of [Howlin’ Wolf’s] \u2018Killing Floor\u2019,\u201d recalls Garland, \u201cand plays it at breakneck tempo, just like that \u2013 it stopped you in your tracks.\u201d Altham recalls Chandler going backstage after Clapton left in the middle of the song \u201cwhich he had yet to master himself\u201d; Clapton was furiously puffing on a cigarette and telling Chas: \u201cYou never told me he was that fucking good.\u201d<\/p>\n With a reputation, a recording contract and the adoration of his peers, Hendrix was allocated a flat belonging to Ringo Starr, in Montagu Square, in which he lived with Etchingham, Chandler and Chandler\u2019s Swedish girlfriend, Lotta. It was not ideal, but base camp for an initial tour \u2013 as opening act for Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck, with the Walker Brothers topping the bill. Something was needed, Chandler thought, whereby Hendrix could blow the successive acts off the stage and Altham had the beginning of an idea. He said: \u201c\u2018It\u2019s a pity that you can\u2019t set fire to your guitar.\u2019 There was a pregnant pause in the dressing room, after which Chas said, \u2018Go out and get some lighter fuel.\u2019\u201d Garland remembers: \u201cI went out into Seven Sisters Road [in north London] to buy lighter fluid. At first, it didn\u2019t make sense to me \u2013 there were too many things going on to worry about lighter fluid \u2013 but it all became clear in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n Altham borrowed a lighter from Gary \u2013 the third Walker brother and drummer \u2013 and that night, at the Astoria theatre in central London, Hendrix set his guitar ablaze for the first time. \u201cOne of the security guards said, \u2018Why are you waving it around your head?\u2019\u201d recalls Altham. \u201c\u2018Cause I\u2019m trying to put it out,\u2019 replied Jimi. Actually, he only did it three times after,\u201d says Altham, \u201cbut it became a trademark.\u201d<\/p>\n The touring began in earnest during that winter of 1966-7: around working men\u2019s clubs and little theatres in the north of England. \u201cThat\u2019s when I remember him at his very best,\u201d recalls Etchingham. \u201cAnd at his happiest. The small clubs in regional venues. When he was desperate to make a name for himself, but was also playing for himself. In the working men\u2019s clubs, they just wanted some music to enjoy while they drank their beer. In the small theatres, people had come to hear him. But that was his best music ever \u2013 played for its own sake. None of these crazy expectations, no one hanging on \u2013 just the people he knew, liked and trusted, and his own music.\u201d<\/p>\n But what was this music, this singular, uplifting, otherworldly, menacing, exotic and erotic sound? \u201cHendrix was a magpie,\u201d says Altham. \u201cHe would take from blues, jazz \u2013 only Coltrane could play in that way \u2013 and Dylan was the greatest influence. But he\u2019d listen to Mozart, he\u2019d read sci-fi and Asimov and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix. Then there was just the dexterity \u2013 he was left-handed, but I remember people throwing him a right-handed guitar and Hendrix picking it up and playing it upside down.\u201d \u201cAnd don\u2019t forget,\u201d says Tappy Wright, who acted as roadie at first, then joined the management team, \u201cwe were using the cheapest guitars. These were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic, but stretched to the fucking limit.\u201d<\/p>\n The most precious insight comes from Etchingham. \u201cPeople often saw Jimi on stage looking incredibly intense and serious. And suddenly this smile would come across his face, almost a laugh, for no apparent reason,\u201d she says. \u201cWell, I remember that very well, sitting on the bed or the floor at home in Brook Street. Sometimes, he would play a riff for hours, until he had it just right. Then this great smile would creep across his face or he\u2019d throw his head back and laugh. Those were the moments he had got it right for himself, not for anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n Touring ran concurrent with work in the studio \u2013 first the singles: \u201cHey Joe\u201d, the inimitable \u201cPurple Haze\u201d and \u201cThe Wind Cries Mary\u201d, written for Kathy when Hendrix was left alone at home after she had stormed out from an argument, so the story goes (Mary is her middle name). \u201cI never realised quite how hard he worked,\u201d says Sarah Bardwell, director of the Handel House Museum, researching her new charge. The Experience would finish a concert up north, drive south, record between 3am and 9am, then return north for two more shows each day. LSD had yet to play a major role \u2013 if the Experience were on amphetamines, it was to keep the schedule. \u201c\u2018What?\u2019 the band would say,\u201d recalls Altham. \u201c\u2018That\u2019s it,\u2019 Chas would reply. \u2018Now for the next one.\u2019\u201d But the soundscape unique to Hendrix, pushing the technology to its limits, was not serendipity, nor was it only about Hendrix\u2019s genius: there was science behind the subliminal magic. \u201cThis was not \u2018psychcolergic\u2019, as Eric Burdon used to call it,\u201d says Garland. \u201cHendrix knew exactly what he was doing.\u201d And this process began with a man called Roger Mayer. \u201cWe started from the premise that music was a mission, not a competition,\u201d says Mayer, who describes himself as a \u201csonic consultant\u201d to Hendrix. \u201cThat the basis was the blues, but that the framework of the blues was too tight. We\u2019d talk first about what he wanted the emotion of the song to be. What\u2019s the vision? He would talk in colours and my job was to give him the electronic palette which would engineer those colours so he could paint the canvas.<\/p>\n \u201cLet me try to explain why it sounds like it does: when you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form,\u201d he adds. \u201cThe electronics we used were \u2018feed forward\u2019, which means that the input from the player projects forward \u2013 the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing \u2013 so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive \u2013 it is speed-forward analogue, a non-repetitive wave form, and that is the definition of pure music and therefore the diametric opposite of digital. \u201cLook, if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples \u2013 it depends on how you throw the stone, or the wind. Digital makes the false presumption that you can predict those ripples, but Jimi and I were always looking for the warning signs. The brain knows when it hears repetition that this is no longer music and what you hear when you listen to Hendrix is pure music. It took discussion and experiment, and some frustrations, but then that moment would come, we\u2019d put the headphones down and say, \u2018Got it. That\u2019s the one.\u2019 \u201cBut I take none of the credit,\u201d insists Mayer. \u201cYou can build a racing car just like the one that won the 1955 grand prix. But if you can\u2019t drive like Juan Manuel Fangio, you\u2019re not going to win the grand prix. Jimi Hendrix only sounds like he does because he was Jimi Hendrix.\u201d<\/p>\n Everyone knows that Hendrix had hundreds of women, often concurrently \u2013 but that is not as interesting as the fact that, says Altham, \u201cKathy Etchingham was the love of his life\u201d. Mayer recalls them \u201coozing affection, even when there was a row \u2013 he needed her very badly indeed\u201d. Hendrix called the flat into which he moved with her in 1968 \u201cthe only home I ever had\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe knew we wanted Mayfair,\u201d says Etchingham, \u201cso we could walk to the gigs, but the prices were high, even though it was a little seedy \u2013 \u00a330 a week.\u201d The couple furnished the split-level, top-floor apartment together with prints and wall hangings from Portobello Road. When Hendrix found out that Handel had lived downstairs, \u201che went round to HMV or One Stop Records to get Messiah,\u201d says Sarah Bardwell. \u201cWhat is so interesting is that they were both musicians from abroad, who came to London to make their name in this building.\u201d<\/p>\n It feels extraordinary now to walk over the venerable floorboards past a replica of Handel\u2019s harpsichord, portraits of the composer and the score of Messiah in the room in which it was composed, then up a wooden staircase to Hendrix\u2019s whitewashed sitting room and bedroom above. Sarah Bardwell\u2019s aim is for a joint Handel-Hendrix house museum of some kind. Blue English Heritage plaques accompany each other on the wall outside; Hendrix was added in 1997, a labour of devotion by Kathy Etchingham, who recalls English Heritage balking at the fact that the shop front below was a lingerie shop, \u201call mannequins wearing suspenders and knickers\u201d, which needed covering up while the plaque was unveiled.<\/p>\n Now, it is the posh Jo Malone perfumery, though \u201cin our day it was Mr Love\u2019s cafe,\u201d she recalls fondly. \u201cOn the corner of Oxford Street. And there was an Indian tea shop we\u2019d go to in South Molton Street, and always HMV or One Stop \u2013 and we\u2019d walk to the gigs along Regent Street or across Hanover Square, and maybe take a taxi home.\u201d<\/p>\n The memories of the people who actually knew him overshadow the tragic, antiheroic Hendrix of popular imagination. Etchingham and Keith Altham recall a man with a sense of humour. \u201cIf things were getting tense in the studio,\u201d says Altham, \u201che\u2019d just play \u2018Teddy Bears\u2019 Picnic\u2019.\u201d Adds Tony Garland: \u201cIf I told Jimi to \u2018kiss my arse\u2019, he\u2019d answer, \u2018You\u2019ve got a rubber neck, do it yourself\u2019 with a sly grin. You always knew you were with someone quicker-witted than yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n Altham also talks about Hendrix \u201csaying nothing to reporters, or contradictory things, on purpose. He would pat his fingers against his lips mid-sentence and go, \u2018etcetera, etcetera, etcetera\u2019, in order to say, in effect, nothing. He wanted the music to speak. He also had this way of saying things that made you do a double take: \u2018Did he really say that?\u2019 Such as, just before he went on to play with Clapton, who was his idol, for the first time, he told me, \u2018I want to see if he is as good as he thinks I am\u2019 \u2013 which is not at all the remark you first think it is.\u201d<\/p>\n But many of those who comprised Hendrix\u2019s inner circle in London now talk about some demise in his mental agility once he became popular in his native US, a mass commodity caught between the triangle of his own \u201cracially transgressive\u201d music, his blackness and the black power movement, and his overwhelmingly white audience. Even then, though, Hendrix closed the 1969 Woodstock festival with a version of \u201cThe Star-Spangled Banner\u201d, which became the anthem for both the movement against the war in Vietnam and Hendrix\u2019s own complicated empathy with the young American fodder sent to fight it, as a former military man himself. Many of his childhood friends were over there, some never to return. The anthem made Jimi famous worldwide, veering into a vortex out of which emerged \u201cPurple Haze\u201d, a glorious, lyrical dirge \u2013 for something, for everything; an endpiece not only to Woodstock but to so many dreams.<\/p>\n \u201cChas Chandler would come into the studio and find two women in his chair,\u201d recalls Tappy Wright. \u201c\u2018Get out of my chair!\u2019 he\u2019d say. And then, well, there were drugs, drugs, drugs. I never took any, because I had to make sure everyone got out of bed in the morning \u2013 but they were around, too much around.\u201d Altham says that Chandler told him \u201cthat he gave Jimi an ultimatum: \u2018Either I go or the hangers-on go.\u2019 But there was no getting rid of them, so Chas quit and Jimi was left with Michael Jeffery\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cJimi was at his best when the fame never got in the way of the music,\u201d says Etchingham, \u201cand at his worst when the fame took over, when people who hardly knew him suddenly became his best friends.\u201d \u201cHe had this thing,\u201d says Altham, \u201cof not being able to say no to people \u2013 and this became a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the flat on Brook Street became an open house, to journalists, anyone. \u201cIt\u2019s funny,\u201d says Sarah Bardwell. \u201cHere we are trying to contact his old friends who are now superstars for our events and exhibition, and it\u2019s like laying siege to Fort Knox! Yet Hendrix was available to anyone, perhaps almost too much so.\u201d It had been a long weekend on the Isle of Wight and, for me, an exciting one. I was compelled \u2013 not disgusted, as is the official history \u2013 by the determination of French and German anarchists to tear down the fences so that it be a free festival. I loved the fact that Notting Hill\u2019s local band, Hawkwind, played outside the fence in protest at the ticket prices. The strange atmosphere added to the climactic moment, after the Who and others: the one set, at 2am on the Monday, for which it was imperative to get down from among the crowds on Desolation Row and force a way right to the front and concentrate or, rather, submit to hypnosis. The set by Jimi Hendrix.<\/p>\n It is written in the lore of Hendrixology that this was a terrible performance. Hendrix had arrived exhausted, by the previous month\u2019s events, the upcoming tour, the day\u2019s violence and by walkie-talkie voices that somehow made their way into the PA system. But all I remember, having just turned 16, is a dream coming true: the greatest rock musician of all time (one knew this with assurance) dressed in blazing red and purple silks, actually playing the version of \u201cSgt Pepper\u2019s\u201d about which I had read so much in NME, playing \u201cPurple Haze\u201d, \u201cVoodoo Chile\u201d and a long, searing \u201cMachine Gun\u201d, just yards away. I remember the sound \u2013 the sounds, plural \u2013 bombarding me from the far side of some emotional, existential, hallucinogenic and sexual checkpoint along the road towards the rest of my life. I remember him playing the horn parts to \u201cSgt Pepper\u2019s\u201d on his guitar! I remember the deafening and painful silence after he finished his fusillade and in the crowd a mixture of rapture, gratitude, enlightenment and affection.<\/p>\n Afterwards, Hendrix went on a reportedly disastrous tour of Scandinavia and Germany (failing to meet one of his two children, by a Swedish girlfriend \u2013 the other he had sired in New York and also never met), before returning to the Cumberland hotel and the room in which he gave his last ever interview, to Keith Altham. (To mark the anniversary, the Cumberland has designed and decorated these rooms in a swirl of colour, stocked it with Hendrix music and called it the Hendrix Suite, in which people can stay.)<\/p>\n \u201cThere were two women in the room,\u201d recalls Altham. \u201cOne of them was a girlfriend called Devon Wilson and she was dodgy \u2013 she dealt him drugs and I can say that now because she\u2019s dead. But he knew me well by this time and he seemed better than I\u2019d seen him previously.\u201d The interview is a remarkable one, utterly devoid of all the nonsense that would ensue about suicide and a death wish. On the tape, Hendrix laughs and jokes; he tells Altham about plans to re-form the Experience and tour England again.<\/p>\n On the night of 16 September, Hendrix went to Ronnie Scott\u2019s without his guitar, hoping to jam with Eric Burdon\u2019s new band, War. Burdon considered him unfit to play. The following night, he returned and joined his friend on stage. \u201cI was tired, I missed it,\u201d says Altham, \u201cthough, of course, I regret that now. It was the last time Hendrix ever played the guitar.\u201d So it was, back in September 1970, that I made my way up Lansdowne Rise and round the corner to the Samarkand hotel after reading the news today, oh boy. I was amazed to have the pavement outside the address at which Jimi Hendrix had died that morning all to myself for a good couple of hours \u2013 not a soul. I went home, got some chalk, and wrote: \u201cScuse us while we kiss the sky, Jimi\u201d on the flagstones (OK, but I was only 16) and retreated to watch. Nothing happened and after another hour, a man came out and washed the words away and I returned home to write a lament in my diary, which I still have, the Standard\u2019s front page folded at the date.<\/p>\n Speculations about suicide and murder are too ridiculous to contemplate \u2013 most of them are probably concocted in order to dramatise and distract from the awful reality of such a genius dying in this way \u2013 but what does matter are Kathy Etchingham\u2019s reflections. \u201cLet\u2019s face it,\u201d says Tappy Wright, \u201cif Jimi had stayed with Kathy, he\u2019d probably be alive and playing still. Plus, he always said he wanted to be buried in London, not Seattle, where he was born and his family lived. It wasn\u2019t just me he told that, it was plenty of people \u2013 that this was home.\u201d \u201cStill,\u201d says Etchingham, \u201cat least we\u2019ve got the plaque, the Handel House Museum, and I\u2019m looking forward to seeing everyone in September.<\/p>\n They were great times and we\u2019ll take a trip down memory lane. Only 40 years is a long time and Jimi won\u2019t be there.\u201d<\/p>\n http:\/\/vintageandrare.com\/roger-mayer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our Friend, Roger Mayer, just sent me this amazing article. I remember having read parts of this before somewhere \u2013 but could never remember where. Big thanks to Roger! Check out the \u00fcbercool products from Roger Mayer on VintageandRare here: Hope you enjoy the article. Kind regards, Nicolai Jimi Hendrix: \u2018You never told me he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,155,582,583,64,26],"class_list":["post-606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-fender-stratocaster","tag-jimi-hendrix","tag-octavia","tag-roger-mayer","tag-vintage-guitars","tag-www-vintageandrare-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintageandrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintageandrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintageandrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintageandrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintageandrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintageandrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":805,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintageandrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606\/revisions\/805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintageandrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintageandrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintageandrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nOn the the 40th anniversary of the great guitarist\u2019s death, Ed Vulliamy speaks to the people who knew him best and unearths a funny, if driven, superstar.
\nEd Vulliamy
\nThe Observer, Sunday 8 August 2010
\nOn the morning of 21 September 1966, a Pan Am airliner from New York landed at Heathrow, carrying among its passengers a black American musician from a poor home.
\nBarely known in his own country and a complete stranger to England, he had just flown first class for the first time in his life. His name was James Marshall Hendrix.
\nOn 18 September 1970, four years later, I picked up a copy of London\u2019s Evening Standard on my way home from school, something I never usually did. There was a story of extreme urgency on the front page and a picture of Hendrix playing at a concert \u2013 still ringing in my ears \u2013 at the Isle of Wight festival, only 18 days earlier. The text reported how Hendrix had died that morning in a hotel in the street, Lansdowne Crescent in Notting Hill, in which I had been born, and a block away from where I now lived.<\/p>\n
\nIn a rare interview by telephone, (she has moved abroad), Ms Etchingham explains: \u201cI want him to be remembered for what he was \u2013 not this tragic figure he has been turned into by nit-pickers and people who used to stalk us and collect photographs and \u2018evidence\u2019 of what we were doing on a certain day. He could be grumpy, and he could be terrible in the studio, getting exactly what he wanted \u2013 but he was fun, he was charming.<\/p>\n
\nHendrix engineered his discharge in time to avoid being mobilised to Vietnam and worked hard as a backing guitarist for Little Richard, Curtis Knight, the Isley Brothers and others. But, arriving in New York to try and establish himself in his own right, Hendrix found he did not fit. The writer Paul Gilroy, in his recent book Darker Than Blue, makes the point that Hendrix\u2019s life and music were propelled by two important factors: his being an \u201cex-paratrooper who gradually became an advocate of peace\u201d and his \u201ctransgressions of redundant musical and racial rules\u201d.<\/p>\n
\nMusic in London had reached a tumultuously creative moment when Hendrix arrived and was perfectly poised to receive him. \u201cThe performers were just your mates who played guitars,\u201d recalls Altham. \u201cIt was tight \u2013 everyone knew everyone else. It was just Pete from the Who, Eric of Cream, or Brian and Mick of the Stones, all going to each other\u2019s gigs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nPaul McCartney, John Lennon and the other Beatles quickly converged to hear this phenomenon, along with the Stones and Pete Townshend. Arriving one night at the Bag O\u2019Nails, Altham met Brian Jones \u201cwalking back up the stairs with tears in his eyes. I said, \u2018Brian, what is it?\u2019 and he replied, \u2018It\u2019s what he does, it chokes me\u2019 \u2013 only he put it better than that\u201d.<\/p>\n
\nIn various studios, ending up at west London\u2019s Olympic, work began. \u201cI used to ring them up to book time,\u201d recalls Etchingham. \u201cThirty quid an hour and they\u2019d want the cheque there and then.\u201d Chandler was aware of this and would occasionally hasten things along by taking what the band thought was a warm-up to be the finished product.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cWe call this the Surrey blues Delta,\u201d says Mayer, with a wave of his arms across the crazy-paving pathways of Worcester Park, near Surbiton. \u201cEric over here, Keith down the road, the Stones from there.\u201d Mayer was an acoustician and sonic wave engineer for the Admiralty, a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, but also an inventor of various electronic musical devices, including an improved wah-wah pedal and the \u201cOctavia\u201d guitar effect with its unique \u201cdoubling\u201d effect. \u201cI\u2019d shown it to Jimmy Page, but he thought it was too far out. Jimi said, the moment we met, \u2018Yeah, I\u2019d like to try that stuff.\u2019\u201d \u201cOne of my favourite memories of all,\u201d says Etchingham, \u201cis Jimi and Roger huddled together over the console and the instruments, talking about stuff way over my head, and then this glorious thing happening.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nDespite the distractions, there was one project consistently dear to Hendrix\u2019s heart: the state-of-the-art Electric Lady Studios in New York, opened with a party on 26 August 1970, the night before he was due to fly back to England to play the Isle of Wight festival. Only Hendrix was almost too shy to appear and, when he did so, he retreated to the steps outside, where he met a young singer-songwriter too shy to enter the fray \u2013 Patti Smith. \u201cIt was all too much for me. Johnny Winter in there and all,\u201d recalled Smith in a past interview with the Observer. \u201cSo I thought, \u2018I\u2019ll just sit awhile on the steps\u2019 and out came Jimi and sat next to me. And he was so full of ideas; the different sounds he was going to create in this studio, wider landscapes, experiments with musicians and new soundscapes. All he had to do was get over back to England, play the festival and get back to work\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
\nHendrix went on to a party with a German woman, Monika Danneman, and back to her rooms at the Samarkand hotel in Lansdowne Crescent. There are so many accounts of exactly what happened next, but all converge on the fact that he had drunk a fair amount, taken some kind of amphetamines (\u201cBlack bombers, I think, given to him by Devon Wilson,\u201d surmises Altham) and some of Danneman\u2019s Vesparax sleeping pills, not knowing their strength. He vomited during the deep ensuing sleep, insufficiently conscious enough to throw up; Danneman panicked, and telephoned Burdon, who urged her to call an ambulance. But the greatest guitarist of all time was dead upon arrival at St Mary Abbot\u2019s hospital, aged 27. (Sadly, Danneman took her own life in 1996.)<\/p>\n
\n\u201cJimi died because the simple things got complicated. He was born to a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who died and he died because he was in that flat in Notting Hill with a complete stranger who gave him a load of sleeping pills without telling him how strong they were. It\u2019s as simple and as complicated as that.
\n\u201cI\u2019m older and wiser now,\u201d she says. \u201cI enjoy culture and the fine things in life. I can look back and see all that more clearly than I did at the time \u2013 I was so young, only 24.\u201d Of the compelling memoir she has written, Through Gypsy Eyes, she says: \u201cI\u2019d like to go over it again, fill in a few things, but what I want now, most of all from this anniversary, is for people to understand that it was in Britain that he was welcomed, it was there he was happy and such fun to be around \u2013 yes, grumpy at times, and a handful \u2013 but such a man. I\u2019d like the young people to know that.\u201d<\/p>\n