Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  “By then it was clear that the world was not just going to turn Day-Glo and solve everything. What I came into in seventy was just about the end of the party. There was still a bit of food and drink left, but there were more empty cans than full ones and a lot of the bottles had roaches in them.

  “It was basically the slow deflation of hippie. It receded, and what was left in its wake was very big colors and flared trousers. It was like hippie with all the style and creativity taken out. If you want to use music as a reference point, the death of Hendrix and the breakup of the Beatles essentially put the kibosh on the sixties.”

  “Or maybe even earlier,” I said. “Brian Jones dying, and then Altamont.”

  “Yeah. Could be.”

  “I just can’t seem to get a handle on it. Why it had to happen. Even how it happened.”

  “The late sixties were about the notion of an infinite expansion of possibilities. By the end of the sixties it was a sense of the contracting of possibilities again.”

  “Was it the drugs?”

  “The drugs went with the times. In the Mod era in London it was pills and a bit of pot. In the hippie era it was pot and a bit of acid. By about seventy, serious powders were beginning to get fashionable. There was a bit of this, y’know, doomed young poets and romantic squalor kind of chic going on.”

  “The Jim Morrison thing.”

  “Yeah, like on Celebration of the Lizard. Morrison was just ahead of his time. By seventy it was everywhere. It was like the moment had come and gone.”

  “Where did First Rays fit into all that?”

  “It was a millennial concept. Hendrix was a millennial optimist. But I think his belief in the power of music to heal was really damaged by the fact that he finally realized how fucked-up his own situation was, and how little control he had over his own life. Because that last tour, things had been intensely mismanaged, he had these immense bills to pay for the construction of Electric Lady studio, and his record royalties were frozen because of lawsuits. The only way he could pay his bills was to do a tour he didn’t want to do, where an audience insisted that he did his old act, which he didn’t want to do. When you see him in the Isle of Wight film, you spend an hour looking at a man who is really not enjoying himself. I mean, he only smiles about two or three times in the whole show.

  “Hendrix knew that he had to regain control. He’d started to get his own lawyers and accountants. He wanted to wrap everything up with First Rays of the New Rising Sun and make that like the absolute peak of his rock and roll or pop career. What he was intending to do when he died was to go to New York, get all the tapes of the First Rays stuff, and bring them back to London and get together with Chas Chandler to finish them. To overdub and mix and edit them with Chandler. He was looking to tidy up all loose ends, get everything cleaned up, and go forward from there. And that’s the precise point at which he died.

  “He died because he was sloppy with prescription drugs.” There was pain in Charlie’s voice suddenly, and this vast wistfulness. “I mean, in the universe next door he woke up with a shocking hangover and, y’know, slept it off and carried on. Or he woke up in a puddle of his own puke and thought, ‘Oh shit, man,’ went and had a shower and probably didn’t drink any more alcohol or take any more drugs for a couple of days. Or if they’d sat him up, or laid him on his side in the ambulance, he’d have got to hospital, they’d have pumped his stomach, told him he was a very silly boy, and sent him home. Then he would have gone to the studio with Chandler and First Rays of the New Rising Sun would have come out in late seventy or early seventy-one. There you go. It would have been a different world. And frankly a preferable one.”

  We sat there for a while watching the black taxis queue up on St. Giles High Street. With great British delicacy Charlie said, “So, then, what are your plans?”

  I looked at my watch and told him I knew he had to be going. I thanked him for his time and we both stood up. “If you want to walk with me,” he said, “the Experience’s original rehearsal room was just up there on Denmark Street.”

  We walked toward Charing Cross Road. The streets feel uniquely London: the tall, charcoal-business-suit-colored buildings, the red double-decker buses, the arrows painted on the crosswalks advising pedestrians which way to look for oncoming traffic. Denmark Street is livelier, with a few trees and window boxes, a mystery bookshop, cafes, and a row of music shops with overpriced American guitars in the windows. The buildings are three stories, different shades of brick and stone, all shoved up against each other.

  Charlie stopped and pointed to a restaurant on the south side of the street. The sign says BARINO TAVOLA COFFEE BAR. Above it are two stories of red brick flats. “There, I think. Apparently he got a bit loud, enough to annoy the neighbors. And after a particularly hard night he’d have a bit of trouble tuning in the morning, y’know. He’d be tuning up at three hundred watts. Shaking the street.

  “It’s funny. A decade later the Sex Pistols would have their own rehearsal space just down the street. It’s all there somehow, in this street, over those few years. Two groups that had so much to say about the times they lived in. Taking something as far as it can go, until it simply snaps.”

  We shook hands and I thanked him again, and he hurried off toward the Tottenham Court Road tube stop. I stayed for a few minutes to picture Hendrix rehearsing above my head, full of excitement, feeling everything was just starting for him. It would have been winter, of course, but something about 1966 always seems like summer to me.

  Denmark Street empties into Charing Cross Road, which looks new and is full of bookshops and nightclubs. The Marquee Club moved here only a few years ago. It’s a punk and alternative venue now. The chalkboard outside advertised bands like Thin White Rope and the Alarm. I bought a T-shirt anyway, in memory of the Stones and Yardbirds and all the other brilliant bands that started out there.

  I followed Charlie’s directions west to Wardour Street, where the Marquee used to be. The address matches a gap in the solid wall of buildings. Black streaks of soot from a fire have left stains all over the surrounding brick. Across the street is a pub called the Intrepid Fox, from which Hendrix was supposedly ejected late one night. It’s been freshly painted red, with hanging plants and posters inside from American crime films.

  I turned right and walked up to Oxford Street, with its boutiques and record stores and mobs of foreign tourists. Two blocks north is Margaret Street, where the Speakeasy had been at number 48. Now it’s just a pair of glass doors, locked, with a directory inside listing a couple of foreign-sounding businesses. The stairs lead up now instead of down and there’s no trace of the club that used to be in the basement.

  For a while it had been the center of fashionable London. People would go to the Marquee to see a show—Hendrix, say—and then go to the Speak afterwards for spaghetti bolognese and a few rum and Cokes. Hendrix would likely show up there too, and jam until dawn. He was supposed to meet Sly Stone there the night before he died.

  I took the Underground to Notting Hill Gate. In the sixties, Charlie said, it was the nearest thing to a genuinely integrated neighborhood in London. It was the home of the Free School and black activist Michael X; boutiques and vegetarian restaurants lined Portobello Road; West Indians and hippies and Marxist radicals lived cheek to jowl. All the underground papers were published here, and everybody came here to score. “A liberated zone,” Charlie called it.

  Now it seems to be endless rows of white-columned town houses, half with scaffolding across them as they’re cleaned and pressed for new, upwardly mobile tenants. I thought of Van Dyke Parks and “columnated ruins domino.” I thought of Los Angeles devouring itself, and Austin doing the same thing, driving dozens of poor families out to make room for one rich one, carting its history to the dump.

  I walked down to Ladbroke Grove, immortalized in Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. On Lansdowne Crescent the neighborhood turns into walled gardens and trees, balconies with hanging baskets. No cabs, no traffic at
all, just private cars parked along the street. Birds clucked quietly and even the sunlight seemed muted.

  Number 22 is one of dozens of identical white-stone row houses. It used to be the Samarkand Hotel and there is still a brass Buddha on the door at street level. Black wrought-iron steps lead down past a couple of trees to the flat where Hendrix stayed. A window with Venetian blinds opens onto the stairs.

  Hendrix had stood where I was standing, but I still didn’t have the picture. It was like in L.A., seeing the bulldozer where Brian’s house used to be. The past felt out of reach.

  I ate and took a train to Russell Square. It was nearly ten o’clock and the sun was just going down. There were clubs and shops and bars and theaters, an entire city full of things to do. What I wanted was to go to the Speakeasy, or the Bag O’Nails, and watch Mick Jagger walk in with Marianne Faithfull, or see McCartney with Jane Asher at the table across the way. I wanted Jimi Hendrix to come onto the tiny stage and jam with Sly Stone. I wanted Brian Jones not to be dead and George Bush not to be president. I wanted to feel like my life is happening right now. Not in some vague possible future time where Lori manages to leave Tom, and not in some inaccessible past where I’m still in love with Elizabeth. Now. Right this minute.

  I’m not afraid that saving Hendrix’s life would be hard to imagine. Like Charlie said, he could wake up with a hangover. They could have put him on his side in the ambulance. I’m afraid that I’ll go back, that I’ll wind up physically there, the way I did with Brian. Not because there’s no other way to get the album.

  Because I want to.

  I woke up at four in the morning. It was eleven P.M. in Austin, time to think about going to bed. I should have been deeply asleep. Instead I was thinking about Jimi.

  His final night has already passed into legend. Everybody has their own version of it, usually that Jimi called them up or came by sometime during the night to talk about his future. If you believe all the stories, he struck new management deals with two or three different people, hired numerous musicians for sessions, set up club dates and tours and recording sessions, wrote lyrics and made sketches for paintings.

  Some things seem pretty certain. He was hanging with a German woman, a beautiful blonde skating instructor named Monika Danneman. The room at the Samarkand Hotel was hers. The night of the seventeenth he went without her to a party at the flat of a young rich guy on the scene. He had a few drinks, maybe a joint, maybe retired to a back bedroom with one of the women. There was some of the Lizard King in Jimi, flesh to balance the spirit. He didn’t care much about drugs or booze, but women seemed so beautiful to him.

  Monika came to pick him up, and for some reason Jimi kept her waiting in the street. Finally they left and drove around for a while, getting back to Lansdowne Crescent before dawn.

  Jimi’d had trouble sleeping. His ulcers were acting up, partly because he was in such a quandary about his career. Later that day, Friday, a trial would get underway to settle the U.K. end of an old contract with Capitol Records. Then there was his bass player and old Army buddy, Billy Cox, who’d been given his first hit of acid in Holland and had freaked out in a major way. He was holed up in a hotel, trying to cool out enough for Jimi to ship him back to the States. All on top of the usual hassles of too much travel, too many people who wanted things from him.

  He asked Monika for some sleeping pills. He took a few and still couldn’t get to sleep so he took a few more. By this time the sun was up. During the morning he vomited in his sleep. Around ten-thirty Monika got scared when she couldn’t wake him and called for help.

  I can see his face. Tired and yearning at the same time. I can see him in the ambulance choking. Feeling his life slipping away from him and being unable to stop it. It’s what Lori meant when she said my father’s mask was full of vomit. Even if my father wanted to die, there was a part of him that wouldn’t let go, that knew there’s nothing after this, that fought for life to the end. And Jimi didn’t want to die. He must have felt so helpless and afraid.

  Once I’d taken three different kinds of pain pills after surgery on my gums, a half hour apart, trying to get something to work, and they’d all come on at once. I felt myself slip backward into darkness. I was sweaty, sick to my stomach, dizzy and scared. I thought at the time it was how Jimi must have felt.

  I didn’t want him to die. I had a feeling about him. He was like Brian Wilson, somebody really special. Like he was meant to be my friend.

  I got up and took a leak and washed my face. Sleep seemed unlikely. Okay, I thought. We’ll do this plain and simple and logical. The same way I did the Beatles song, the way I did Celebration of the Lizard. I got out my little hand-held cassette recorder and put on a work tape I’d made for First Rays, cuts from Cry of Love and Rainbow Bridge, from Loose Ends and War Heroes, bits and pieces from the Live & Unreleased radio show, finishing up with the instrumental jam he’d played at Woodstock. If I stumbled onto the real thing it could go right on that tape.

  Plain and simple. Hendrix lives. He goes to New York. He gets the tapes and brings them back to London. He and Chas work up the album. I would listen in and the music would come out of my little recorder.

  So. Step one. Put him on his side in the ambulance.

  I closed my eyes. Lansdowne Crescent. The trees are still green, the sky is gray. An ambulance pulls up to the curb, not an American EMS wagon but an old-fashioned British ambulance with the high, rounded back.

  It wasn’t happening. I felt myself pull away from the image, afraid to let go. I had Lori on my mind instead of Jimi, and that blue hole off Palancar Reef where the bottom falls away forever.

  I got up, went to the closet. I put on jeans, a tattersall shirt and a sweater, socks and Converse All-Stars. I opened the blinds and let the lights of the sleeping city into the room. Then I sat back on the bed with my head in my hands and closed my eyes.

  Start again. Lansdowne Crescent. The white columns, the trees, the potted plants on the balconies. The bronze Buddha on the door of the Samarkand Hotel. Hendrix is downstairs, his body in spasms, his eyelids too heavy to lift, dizzy and sick and scared. Needing somebody to know what to do.

  The ambulance pulls up…

  I opened my eyes. It was gray and cool, close to rain. The ambulance had its lights flashing but no siren on as it rounded the curve of the street and pulled up in front of number 22. I was across the street, sitting on the curb, dressed in jeans and a sweater and tennis shoes.

  I wondered what I’d been so afraid of. I felt like I was underwater, weightless, exhilarated, powerful and free. I watched two young guys in white coats go down the stairs to Monika’s apartment. One was dark, maybe East Indian, with heavy beard stubble, and the other was blond with steel-rimmed National Health glasses. I crossed the street, letting a big, square Mercedes sedan pass in front of me. As I got to the top of the stairs the blond medic ran up toward me.

  “Best clear off, mate. We’ve got a bit of trouble here.”

  “Is something wrong with Hendrix? He’s a friend of mine.”

  “I wasn’t introduced. D’ye mind?” He pushed past me and I went down the stairs.

  I came in through the kitchen, then into the living room where there was a long white couch, a bar, a TV set, various cushions on the hardwood floor. A gas fire burned in the fireplace. A maple-neck black Stratocaster, the one he’d used at the Isle of Wight, lay on top of its case on a table in the corner. There was a dining area and beyond that French doors that led into the garden.

  Around the corner was the bedroom. The sour smell of vomit hit me as soon as I was through the door. Jimi lay on his back on the far side of the bed, covered to the waist. His bare chest moved up and down as he struggled to breathe. There were vomit stains on the pillows and sheets. Next to him was a chest of drawers with a sheet of paper on top. From across the room all I saw was handwriting, maybe a poem or lyrics.

  Monika stood near me, wearing bell bottoms and a red sweater. Her hair was light blonde, nearly white.
She had a strong nose and heavy-lidded eyes, and her mascara was badly smeared from sleep and tears. She was smaller than I’d pictured her, more vulnerable. The dark-haired medic was feeling for a pulse in Jimi’s wrist. He and Monika both turned to look at me.

  “I’m a friend of Jimi’s,” I said. “This happened before. You have to be careful he doesn’t choke.”

  “I don’t need any bloody advice,” the medic said. “Mind you stand clear of the door, he’ll be bringing a litter through.”

  I moved into the room. Hendrix was an unbelievably powerful presence, even unconscious. His huge hands lay on the outside of the sheet, dug into the mattress, and his face contorted in pain and confusion.

  You’re going to be all right, I thought. Just hang in there, man. I’m going to take care of this.

  The other medic came back with the stretcher and they loaded Jimi onto it with practiced timing. I followed them out to the ambulance and when they had him inside I said, “Make sure he’s sitting up. If you lay him down he’ll choke.”

  “We know what we’re about,” the blond said. “We always sit them up.”

  Not always, I thought. The blond got in back with Jimi and as I watched he sat Jimi up against the rear wall and strapped him in. The black-haired guy shut the rear doors and waved me away.

  “Where are you taking him?” Monika asked him.

  “St. Mary Abbots Hospital, Kensington.”

  She looked at me. “Do you know where it is?”

  I nodded. I’d looked it up on the map just the day before.

  “What is your name, anyway?” she said. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Ray. I’m a friend of Jimi’s. Where’s your car? We should follow them.”

  Monika nodded and we ran to a blue sports car parked down the street. The ambulance pulled out, the two-note European siren keening at last, and we swung in behind them. Monika drove like an expert, keeping right on their bumper in spite of the traffic.