Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

by Des Barres, Pamela

  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.

  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.

  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 Sa
m 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.

  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.

  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.

  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.