by Lewis Shiner
Graham said, “Did he practice a lot when he was a kid?” It seemed like a dumb question and I wanted to kick Graham for asking it.
“He used to practice all the time. I mean, I didn’t have to tell him, it was just something he wanted to do. He’d be watching TV, there was a program around that time on TV with the little kid Opie…”
“The Andy Griffith Show,” Graham said.
“The Andy Griffith Show. Jimi, he always used to be laughing about the kid walking along there and dropping the fish off the line…he used to be watching that, and in between, like, in the commercials he’d be plunking the guitar. He just played it all the time, carried the guitar with him, everywhere he went.”
I tried to ask about Jimi’s mother. I knew she and Al had divorced, that Jimi resented not getting to see her. When Al had refused to let Jimi go to her funeral, this was back in 1958, it had put a permanent barrier between them. Al was polite but evasive, insisted that none of that had been a problem.
I was out of steam. Graham asked a few more questions, got Al to give us the addresses of the houses they’d lived in while Jimi was growing up. Then Al took us into the other room and had us sign his guest book. We shook hands all around and thanked him and went outside.
The morning clouds had burned off. I could see Mt. Rainier in the south as I walked to the car. There was enough haze that it seemed to float unsupported in midair. Graham saw where I was looking and said, “Some days it’s there, some days it’s just gone. Some days it floats, like today. The Indians were supposed to have a legend about it, that when it disappeared it went into the spirit world. If you were on the mountain when it disappeared, it would take you with it.”
We got in the car. I headed back toward town, Graham checking the map for the addresses that Al had given us. “So,” he said. “What did you think?”
“I don’t know. I guess if my old man had outlived me, he would have told everybody that we were pals too.”
“Exactly.”
“He was really sweet, Al was. I mean, I liked him a lot. But there was stuff that bothered me. If he and Jimi were that tight, how come he had to get a copy of Are You Experienced? from a neighbor?”
“Especially since there were British singles from December of sixty-six on, and the American album didn’t come out until August of sixty-seven.”
“None of which Jimi sent him.”
“You know what got me? That stuff about The Andy Griffith Show. Jimi and Opie. Here’s Opie, like Jimi, growing up with a single dad. Only Opie has got Aunt Bea and the world’s most perfect father, and Jimi has his grandmother and, well, let’s just say…a flawed human being.”
I took Yesler to Twenty-sixth, where Jimi grew up, then down Twenty-sixth to Washington. It’s a quiet urban neighborhood on the south side of town, lots of low frame houses, poor but well kept. There was some kind of family dispute that had emptied out onto the lawn, one guy yelling at another one from the yard, the second one walking away and turning back every few steps to shout something. On the porch a woman stood with a little boy held against her skirts. We kept driving. Somebody had scrawled HOMES NOT DOMES on the side of an empty building. We went around the block and drove north again on Twenty-third Avenue, past Garfield High School. Al said Jimi had “got to be a visitor up there,” and then dropped out in his senior year.
Graham had asked Al where he thought Jimi was headed musically. “The last time I saw him,” Al said, “when he was out here, he said that he was going to change his style, and he was going to change his mode of playing or whatever. That was July of seventy. Performed out there at Sicks Stadium, they had it outside. It rained, I got soaking wet.”
That night I dreamed my father and I are stalking each other through this old frame house. It’s a lot like the Hendrix house on Yesler. We both have pump shotguns and there is patricidal rage in my heart.
When I woke up I felt a wave of sadness. The night before it seemed to really mean something that I’d known, even asleep, that he was dead. I’d thought maybe it was a new start.
Over breakfast, Graham said, “Admit it. You’re thinking about it.”
“About what?”
“The album. First Rays. Hell, your name is Ray. It’s like fate or something.”
“Graham, if I started to want to do this album, it would mean…” I shook my head. “It’s just a bad idea, okay?”
“It’s a bad idea now, but maybe it’ll turn into a good idea later.” I started to say something and he held up both hands. “That’s all I’m going to say. Not another word from me, I promise.”
I left for Austin that morning and it was night by the time a taxi dropped me off at the house. I was surprised at how little I wanted to be there. I left my suitcase in the hall and slept in the white room.
The next morning I couldn’t face the rest of the house. All my music books were there in the white room, so I took what I had on Hendrix and lay down on the bed with it.
People talk about Hendrix in the same breath with Joplin, as if he’d died with a needle in his arm. The truth is he had about one too many sleeping pills after a couple of long days. He wasn’t depressed, he didn’t mean to kill himself, he didn’t even want to get high. He just wanted to get some sleep. The actual cause of death on the certificate is “inhalation of vomit,” same as my father. If the old bastard had a grave he’d be spinning in it.
Hendrix was a black musician with an almost exclusively white audience. He grew up with the blues and did the chitlin circuit of southern R&B clubs in his late teens, backing the Isleys and Little Richard. From there he went to New York and fronted his own band, sometimes called the Rainflowers, sometimes Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village. They played rock standards, “Hey Joe” and “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Wild Thing” and “Shotgun,” and Hendrix took everything he’d learned into a new dimension of feedback and echo and sustain and sheer volume. This was the summer of 1966.
That’s where Chas Chandler, newly ex-bassist of the Animals, discovered him and took him to England. There he found him a couple of English boys with the right haircuts: Mitch Mitchell, a brilliant jazz drummer, and Noel Redding, an out-of-work guitarist on bass by default. In 1967 they demolished the Monterey Pop Festival and in ’68 they were tearing up the charts. By ’69 Hendrix was headlining pop festivals, with or without the Experience, including Woodstock. On Friday, September 18, 1970, he was dead.
There was a sound in his head that he was never able to get out. He told Rolling Stone, “I just lay around daydreaming and hearing all this music.” And he said, “I just can’t play guitar that well to get all this music together.” With his third album, Electric Ladyland, he began to produce himself, spending endless hours and days and weeks in the studio. The studio bills were so high that it seemed like a good idea to build his own. The idea became Electric Lady studios in Greenwich Village, where he slowly accumulated pieces of a new double album, First Rays of the New Rising Sun. It was to be his farewell to conventional electric rock and roll. He’d talked about various new directions, especially moving deeper into jazz with Miles Davis and Gil Evans.
First Rays was to be the ultimate fusion music: rock, jazz, blues, R&B. Healing music, unifying music. Only Jimi couldn’t seem to get it together. Chas Chandler says that the night before he died, Jimi called and asked him to come back and produce the new record, like he had the first two.
I went upstairs and listened to Cry of Love, and Rainbow Bridge, the two records Reprise cobbled together from the pieces Jimi left behind. Yes, there is something here. You can feel Hendrix’s urgency and frustration, and it gives the music, some of it anyway, a fearsome power. There is also an incredible diversity of music tangled together.
What finally did it for me were the pictures of Jimi in his final days. No more processed hair, just a short Afro showing signs of gray. He was tired of the stage show, of playing with his teeth, of setting the guitar on fire. He wanted people to listen to th
e music, and you can see the fatigue in his face.
He’s never alone. The people around him all want something. Young women, black activists, promoters, musicians, all basking in the glow. There’s this one picture in particular by Erika Hanover, the German photographer who took so many classic rock photos. Jimi is sitting in a restaurant with a half-eaten plate of food in front of him. Hanging on to his right arm is some unidentified woman with long black hair, looking at him with both adoration and anticipation. In his left hand is a cigarette which has burned down to the filter. His eyes are puffy and tired, but you can see that he wants very badly not to disappoint anyone. He smiles bravely for the camera.
I got two packages from UPS. One was from Graham, with videotapes of Hendrix and audiotapes of a radio show called Live & Unreleased from Labor Day of 1988. The other, from Mike Autrey, had a typewritten manuscript called Crosstown Traffic by an English music journalist named Charles Shaar Murray. There were also two Xeroxed pages in Hendrix’s handwriting. The first was titled “Songs for Strate Ahead,” with ten of the First Rays songs, enough for a single album. The second, according to Autrey’s note, was later, a list for First Rays itself. It was broken down into four sides, though Jimi had obviously quit before he had anything but “Angel” figured out for side four. Bruce Gary, who put together the radio show, had found it in a box of quarter-inch stereo mixes for the album at Al Hendrix’s house.
I broke down and said yes to enough repair work to keep my hands busy, to help fill the hours. I took walks again in the morning, three and four miles a day. I went to book and record stores a couple of times a week and came home with a stack of books on Hendrix and England in the sixties. And finally I bought a new TV and VCR with some of Graham’s money, as much as anything so there would be voices in the house again. I was tired of days where I didn’t hear another human voice.
I followed the news about the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square. For a while it seemed like the sixties all over again, only better, where unarmed kids faced down tanks, soldiers threw down their guns to join the protesters, working people gave the students food and money to survive on. Later I watched the first reports of the massacre come in. It had the horrifying inevitability of the National Guard opening fire at Kent State, or the Chicago police moving through Lincoln Park.
I couldn’t watch the news after that. I retreated to the past, watching and listening to Jimi Hendrix on tape, or reading about him, thinking about First Rays. I memorized the song lists, could almost hear the finished albums in my head.
I talked to Elizabeth maybe five or six times. A month after she moved out, we had dinner at the Lone Star Cafe, a chicken-fried-steak place down the street from me. Neither of us ate much. She talked mostly about Dude, and about summer school.
Eventually Elizabeth said, “I’ve gone out a couple of times with this new teacher that transferred in. It’s a little weird. I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing with him because I don’t know where the marriage is. Is this like a trial separation? Are we going to get divorced? Are we waiting for something? If so, what is it exactly that we’re waiting for?”
My stomach clenched and I wanted nothing more in the world than for the conversation to be over. I was trying to second-guess her again. Did she want me to set her free so she could start over? Did she want things left open?
I thought of that Hanover picture of Hendrix, trying to make everybody happy.
“I really don’t see,” I said, “any reason to go on. If you’re ready, then, I guess I’ll go ahead and file.” I got my breath and said, “For divorce.”
She sat back in her chair. She’s always been good at hiding what she feels. Most of the time I think she has it hidden even from herself. “I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s get on with it.”
When I got home I called Graham. “I’m not saying yes. But fly me to London and I’ll take a look.”
I went to see a lawyer the next day and she gave me a bored account of the process. Texas is a no-fault divorce state. She would file a petition on my behalf alleging that the marriage had “become insupportable” and there was no “reasonable expectation of reconciliation.” Elizabeth’s lawyer would respond with a meaningless formal denial, we’d work out a property settlement, wait sixty days, then I would go before a judge who would sign off on the whole thing. All very simple, all very cut-and-dried. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or depressed by the simplicity of it. Weren’t marriages supposed to last forever?
I came home and took my wedding ring off and put it in a drawer. Then I sat in a lawn chair and watched the sun crawl down the sky. Okay, I thought. You wanted it, you got it. Now what?
Two weeks later I was on a plane for England. It was June 27, blistering hot in Austin. I hadn’t been to London since I was a kid and I was genuinely excited about it. I’d spent six months in the Sudan with my parents in the early sixties, turned thirteen while I was over there. My father was doing salvage archeology for the Aswan Dam, early human settlements, not pyramids or anything glamorous. We saw Europe on the way over and the way back. What I remember most about Africa is trading Pepsi bottle caps to native kids for dried dates, which I ate constantly, and them throwing rocks at me for going around without a shirt. Nobody had told me that it broke some kind of religious taboo.
What I remember about England is the gleaming tile cities of the Underground and the sweetish smell of Penguin paperbacks. I vaguely remember our first hotel in Soho, this in 1963, and my mother’s shocked reaction to the strip joint next door, the photos on display in a glass case outside that she wouldn’t let me look at, though I could see enough from a distance to feel a sudden new and powerful interest. I remember some of the tourist stuff, Parliament and Big Ben. Mostly it was just another move, another dislocation.
At six in the morning London time, which was only one A.M. in Austin, the attendants came through with coffee and rolls and everybody opened their window shades to the daylight. The sunshine fooled me sufficiently into thinking I was awake and I watched the soft green hills of England unroll below me.
On Graham’s instructions I took the express train from Gatwick to Victoria Station, where I had my picture taken in a coin-operated booth and bought myself a one-week travel card for the Underground. Then I had a cup of coffee and watched the crowds, getting used to the vast, echoing station, getting used to the idea of being in another country.
Elizabeth and I had always talked about Europe and never been able to afford it. She loves everything English, got up before dawn to watch Charles and Di get married in 1981. I was conscious of how alone I was, prickly from being awake too long, full of second thoughts about getting involved in another album.
I wondered what it would be like to be there with Lori. She’s such a world traveler. She would know how to find the best restaurants, how much things are supposed to cost, how many stamps to put on her postcards home. It was three in the morning in Cozumel. Calling was not the thing to do.
I’d left a life behind me in Austin that felt like a dark room full of somebody else’s furniture. I couldn’t seem to move without running into something that hurt me. In England I was free of that. If not a clean start, it was at least a reprieve.
I took the Victoria Line to Green Park and the Piccadilly Line to Russell Square, where Graham had reserved a room for me at the Russell Hotel. From there I called Charlie Murray, who wrote the Crosstown Traffic manuscript and was supposedly a friend of Graham’s. Charlie said he would take me around and show me the Hendrix sights.
I met him in a literary hangout called the Cafe Munchen. It’s off New Oxford Street at the beginning of the West End. There’s a big office building maybe a block away that says Centre Point on it. To the south is the theater district, to the south and west is Soho and Wardour Street, to the north is the British Museum, and due west are the shops along Oxford, Bond, and Carnaby Streets.
There are metal tables on the patio of the cafe. The inside has a few ferns, a glass display case o
f boiled pub food, and a bar. Charlie was inside, near the door. He’s medium height, dark, with wiry hair and a crooked grin. He shook my hand and asked after Mike Autrey and Graham. Then he went to the bar and got a fat bottle of European beer for himself and a glass of lemonade for me, which in England is carbonated and tastes like 7-Up.
“Graham told me I should help you,” Charlie said. “And I get the feeling this has something to do with those two CDs he sent me. The Smile and the Celebration of the Lizard. The Doors is some really scary shit, man.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t crazy about this. Graham hadn’t told me that Charlie knew about the bootlegs.
“So,” Charlie said. “Naturally I’m dying to know where they came from.”
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I can’t.”
“Is it Hendrix next?”
I tried to think of a way out of answering, then finally gave up and nodded.
“Fantastic!” He slapped the table. “You’ve got some kind of line on unreleased stuff from First Rays, then, have you?” He had a slight stammer, which I hadn’t noticed until he got excited. “This is fucking great. What can I do?”
I shifted my glass around on the tabletop, still uncomfortable. “I need information. About everything. What the album would have been like, about Hendrix, about London in 1970.”
We went through my London A-Z and he showed me some of the crucial places: where Hendrix had played, where he had died. I wrote the addresses down. “But what was the city like? How was it different from now?”
He leaned back in his chair and thought for a second. “Soho—where the Marquee club was—is very different now. Basically they closed down most of the sex industry and moved the boutiques and designer restaurants in instead. It was definitely much wilder and woollier in those days. In 1970 I would come up to hang out with the underground press and then I would go home. I was basically an eighteen-year-old kid with a major Jewish afro.
