by Mick Farren
I believe our modern celebrity worship would now turn such an occurrence into a bedlam of ravening fans and paparazzi, but in those less complicated days the criterion was still one of cool. Those who had drifted in from the mêlée outside the Marquee obviously and instantly recognised Hendrix, but their only intrusion was a shouted comment, a wave or a swift thumbs up. I certainly would not have approached the man, had not one of the roadies, a stalwart known as Bazz, beckoned me over. I had met Bazz via Joy, who knew him from the days when he’d roadied on the northern club circuit. Now he worked for the Nice, but was out on loan to the Jimi Hendrix Experience. I moved to the end of the bar and Bazz introduced us. I shook hands with the new guitar virtuoso and immediately noticed that his hands were huge and pliable, like those of a star basketball player. He was soft-spoken and seemed shy and a little overwhelmed by all that was happening to him.
We grinned at each other, acknowledging our near-identical hairstyles, and then I found myself in another of those awkwardly pointless conversations. Talking to Miles for the first time had been hard enough, but what the fuck do you say to Jimi Hendrix that doesn’t come out sounding excruciatingly lame? Yes, I told him how much I admired his playing, and he, in turn, nodded modestly. I suddenly realised he wasn’t actually any better at this kind of interaction than I was.
‘Are you coming to see the show tonight?’
I hesitated. That was the question I’d just been asking myself. ‘That’s why I came down here, but . . .’
He looked concerned. ‘There’s a problem?’
‘Only that you seem to have sold out the place twice over.’
Hendrix glanced at Bazz, and Bazz nodded. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
Now you might think that, as an egalitarian and man of the people, I would turn down such preferential treatment – yeah, right. Dream on. With Bazz opening all doors, both real and metaphoric, we moved into the Marquee, and not just into the body of the club, but on into the bar, through into the dressing room with its beer stains and its legendary graffiti like ‘CLAPTON ISN’T GOD!’ and ‘PETE TOWNSHEND IS A ROCKER AND A NOSE TO BOOT!’ When Hendrix started his set, we advanced right onto the side of the stage, so that I was standing no more than twelve feet from him, with a completely unhampered view.
Anything one might now say about Jimi Hendrix on stage has to be essentially redundant. For more than thirty years we’ve listened to the recordings and watched the films and video clips, and it is almost impossible to re-create the absolute awe at not only seeing the man play, but from such a vantage point. His energy was superhuman. To say that he was driven by a demon would be trite, and misleading, since there was absolutely nothing demonic about Jimi. At the risk of sounding like some New Age ditz, the shriek of Hendrix’s guitar was truly a cry of love. He loved what he was doing to such a quantum degree that it encompassed the entire audience. His blatant sexuality was, of course, supremely evident, but to interpret it as sinister you’d have to be either a monstrous prude or a pathetic racist. His dirty boogie had no mean streak, and his technique was so effortless that he was able to take time out to joke, frolic and tease.
Most critics concentrated on the flamboyant showboating, the playing behind his head, the picking with his tongue and teeth, but I was more impressed by the smaller moves, the simple hammering of the strings with his fluent right hand, the easing of the whammy bar, the actual flexing of the neck against his body to produce slight variations of tone and nuance. It might seem odd to use the word ‘nuance’ in the context of such wildly aggressive music played at deafening volume, but Hendrix’s attention to detail amid the maelstrom was uncanny. As he moved into the more profound and introspective parts of his solos, I could almost see his mind working, and his intensity of rapt concentration as he eased through the magnetic fields of the Marshall stack, exploiting each unique fluctuation between the speaker coils and the pickups on his guitar. One of Hendrix’s favourite images was that of the Merman, the quasi-human who could swim with the fishes and dance with the dolphins. Maybe that was how he saw his guitar playing, as a Merman surging through the bubblefields of an electronic sea.
Although everyone else in the room was clearly focused on the man’s guitar playing, I was also listening to his vocals. Clearly afraid of his own voice, believing that it was in no way a comparable instrument to his guitar, his singing was often a throwaway punctuation to his guitar parts. And yet, limited as Hendrix might have thought it, he could be moving and evocative when he sang ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ with so much more sympathy than Dylan’s accusatory original, or shouted with joy on ‘Stone Free’, or when he did his later versions of Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’, or his amazing reading of the Beatles’ ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. While Hendrix admitted he didn’t have the vocal power of James Brown or his old employer, Little Richard, it heartened me to see how much attention he paid to phrasing and content, and he was able to use them as part of his seduction of the audience.
Over the course of the rest of his life I would see Jimi Hendrix many more times, but never with the proximity or the real (or imagined) insight of that night at the Marquee, except one time, when the insight was of a very different kind. Later in the summer of 1967 I was booked to appear on the TV show Late Night Lineup and talk to the bright and attractive host Joan Bakewell (dubbed by the contemporary media ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’) about some dumb topic like ‘what we hippies really want’. While waiting to make my contribution, rather than just leaving me to drink in the green room, a production assistant took me to a control room overlooking another studio where, to my amazement, Hendrix was recording for TV. While he ran through ‘Purple Haze’, wringing the maximum impact from his guitar, the engineer, a forty-something timeserver with a pipe and Fair Isle sweater, who would have been happier running sound for Alma Cogan or Matt Monro, slapped on more and more limiters, muttering angrily to himself, until he’d made Hendrix’s supernatural guitar sound as though it was being broadcast over a phone line.
‘I don’t know what this silly bastard thinks he’s doing, coming in here making a racket like that.’
His attempts to get some Bert Weedon dance-band guitar sound said it all about the widening culture gap between the generations. Finally he took his hands off the board in a gesture of surrender and turned to the onlookers. ‘I mean, who booked this prat? Call that a guitar? He can’t even fucking play.’
Art to the Rescue
The fingers of my left hand were twisted into her long, light brown hair. More of it fell across her face and brushed against my skin and the yellow velvet of my jeans. Her head bobbed, her left hand and long orange nails dug into my thigh, and my breath came in short, sharp gasps. My right hand was on her left breast, and my imagination couldn’t believe that it was finally being overtaken by reality. Her lips and tongue were so diligent and willing, and my flesh so eager and weak. Only a few feet away people were laughing, talking and arguing, a crowd of total strangers, but, because they were looking out from the light, they couldn’t see us even when they glanced in our general direction. On one level this was nothing more than a cheap and naughty thrill-in-the-dark blowjob, with the added jolt from the possible danger of discovery; on another, it was oral sex of massive symbolic significance. In the black rubble of the backstage Roundhouse, I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me, but in the very anonymity of the encounter I was filled with a sense of all-consuming triumph and a form of physical vindication of a kind that I had never experienced before. I was losing my rock & roll virginity.
Of course, even with the nameless art-school band, girls had been there, but they were friends, acquaintances, easy action or elusive nymphs of aching desire. They knew us – and took us or rejected us – for who we were, and were little impressed with our rocker pretensions. There, in the darkness on the outer circumference of the Roundhouse, she on her knees, me on my feet, my back against the dirty brickwork, with Victorian railway soot and antique pl
aster marking the shoulderblades of my sweat-soaked purple shirt, the pretensions had finally worked. This woman was not giving sex to me as a human being, per se, but to the singer with the band – an otherness, a symbol, a thing of my own creating. The odds were that I’d never know her well enough to guess at her motivation, at what brought her to that heated trembling, crouching connection in the darkness – indeed, I would never know her at all. That was the kick. Maybe she was operating according to her own inadequacies. Maybe she was breaking imposed patterns of school, religion and family by engaging in anonymous and all-but-public sex. Maybe she was looking for her part of the fun and applause by sucking the cock of the boy who had just come off the stage. Or maybe she was just erotically deranged. Frankly, my dear, I didn’t give a damn. That I didn’t care was the whole point, and therefore, before I’m accused of cruel objectification, let me point out that any objectification was at the very least a two-way street. I was certainly an object, but an object of desire, and I was revelling in it.
Oh Jesus, yes, the climax was electric, probably more than the sum of its parts. My legs trembled, my spine stiffened and then I sagged. She rose to her feet, pressing against me, then drew back and smiled knowingly into my face. Mad or not, she fully understood the nature of the transaction, and how little-boy grateful I was. Then she kissed me hard, my come sticky on her lips and chin. Was this, when you got down to it, the taste of fame? She took hold of my hand and led me back towards the crowd and the lights and the more public part of backstage, where I knew some booze was stashed and joints passed underhand. Our momentary night-whisper world was gossamer history; we’d quickly part and I’d see her, in short minutes, talking intimately with a well-known black radical. I wasn’t dumped, we had both just moved on.
To recount this story feels a little strange. It echoes like a chest-beating boast, but the sexual response is such a part of rock & roll that to ignore it would be a self-censoring deception. Every rock & roller, from Elvis to Eno, took up the profession with at least the partial motivation of gratuitous orgasm, and I was no exception. That this young woman in semi-sheer chiffon and much-too-hippie eye make-up had all but jumped on me within minutes of my leaving the spotlight seems deserving of record. Like I said, the grateful death of my rock ’n’ roll virginity. As a posturing whore, I had made my first sale.
The occasion was the Dialectics of Liberation conference at the Roundhouse, and the Social Deviants had become part of the event by a circuitous route typical of the new phase of what was laughingly called our career. We had been accepted into art, and not before time, either, since we were running hard up against the indisputable awareness that, without a radical rethinking of our entire attitude and approach to music, we were too outlandish for the regular sub-Yardbirds club circuit in the London suburbs. Either we found a new arena or we’d have to concede defeat and give up the fight.
The Dialectics of Liberation conference was a perfect example of why the Sixties were not famous for their quality of rational thought or discussion. The weekend of seminars, lectures and free interaction was promoted as a very big deal, with all of the heavyweight names of the era supposedly pledged to attend – Allen Ginsberg, Emmet Grogan of the Diggers, black-power leader Stokely Carmichael, radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, Julian Beck of the Living Theater, Michael X, Timothy Leary, even philosopher Herbert Marcuse, plus a guy named Gregory Bateson, who claimed to be an expert on the language of whales and dolphins and may actually have been their human representative on dry land. With typical Sixties pre-event grandiosity, this gathering of what were supposedly the best minds of our generation was intended to solve all the problems of the planet. In fact, it devolved into yet another fine mess.
The post-conference entertainment was being organised by Carolee Schneeman, a New York conceptual artist and choreographer, who was part of the group centred around Robert Rauschenberg and the idea of ‘happenings’. Some idiot told Carolee that the Social Deviants were the authentic music of the underground, so we were hired. I believe she was under the impression that we were some electronic wind-chime ensemble, or at least the basically acoustic cacophony of the Fugs, because when we slammed into a teeth-grinding fuzz-tone thrash, a few people actually blanched. The performance was made even more edgy by it being Russell Hunter’s debut gig and the fact that we were lamentably under-rehearsed, saving our lives by coasting on fury rather than sound.
Although we didn’t realise it at the time, we actually provided a fitting finale to an entire weekend that had been characterised by anger and conflict. Stokely Carmichael had delivered what appeared to be a set speech, which was received with something close to a standing ovation. He then turned the tables by announcing that he’d actually been reading a speech by Adolf Hitler and castigated the crowd as a bunch of white-motherfucker closet Nazis. Later Michael X would cause even more furore by attempting to ‘out-black power’ Stokely, by waxing even more abusive and, in the process, laying the groundwork for the six months he spent in jail under the Race Relations Act. More chaos ensued when Laing and his Kingsley Hall anti-psychiatry gang took up a massive chunk of conference time, demonstrating what really happened when the lunatics assumed management of the asylum. I don’t think we ever got to hear anything from the whales via Gregory Bateson. The entire dog-and-pony show ended in misery and acrimony, with a highly emotional Allen Ginsberg tearfully wanting to know why we all just couldn’t get along. That my most vivid memory should be of my first rock & roll blowjob is a fairly accurate summation of the Dialectics of Liberation, and I think Allen, on whatever plane he now dwells, would approve.
The Dialectics of Liberation was by no means our first embrace of art as a means to the end of finding a place to play. The Social Deviants had lucked into a number of self-consciously multimedia art events. Our entry into that world had been when Joan Littlewood had us participate in some piece of mayhem at Stratford East, a strange combination of cockney music hall and avant-garde performance in front of a full, if baffled, house. The environment was certainly odd, but it was fantastic to play in a real theatre – just like the one where Abe Lincoln was shot – and we seemed to generate enough excitement to finish up, with the connivance of Ms Littlewood, doing an extra set outside in Angel Lane, which got us arrested for the first time. However, I got my picture in the Waltham Gazette, fist clenched beside a uniformed inspector, like Che fucking Guevara with an afro.
A second and third shot at the art crowd happened at an environmental art gallery in Kingly Street, tucked away in the West End, one block east of Regent Street, just behind Liberty’s. The space was a peaceful and beautifully designed combination of fountains and reflective surfaces, part science fiction and part Japanese modern, with a permanent exhibition of kinetic art. Only too happy to play there, we didn’t feel it was too cool to ask questions, and I never did figure out exactly what the story was behind 26 Kingly Street. Did it actually make money, or was it some millionaire’s elaborate tax loss? The most I gleaned was that it had something to do with the highly successful psychedelic design trio, Binder, Edwards and Vaughan, who had done a lot of work for the Beatles, including John Lennon’s famous customised Rolls-Royce and Paul McCartney’s flower-power piano. Whatever the answer, the place maintained a lively roster of events, from poetry readings to theatrical performance pieces and, astonishingly, the Social Deviants.
Glad as we were to be there, the place was hardly the environment for Deviant aggression, but amazingly, after we’d finished, only a few of the chilled-Chablis, culture-consuming crowd had left, and the rest applauded politely. It seemed to go okay, and we were invited back, although it really made little sense. I guess what we were witnessing was a strange variation of what I’ve always thought of as the art con. While not denigrating the good and true, art has its shell game that enables the facile and trendy – what might be called the Emperor’s latest set of clothes – to fool some of the people for a certain length of time. With the right line of bullshit, we might even
have worked the con, and nobody would have been any the wiser. Unfortunately this kind of quasi-creativity has always stuck in my craw. I am temperamentally far better suited to ripping away the curtain than I am to posing as the new wizard in the Emerald City. If I was ever to reach my uncertain goal in rock & roll, I knew I would not find it at any fashionable cocktail party – attractive though that route might seem.
What I was looking for could only be achieved by convincing at least some of my peers that what I was doing had not only honesty but some kind of merit, but before we ever got to that we had a few more of Jimmy Cliff’s metaphoric rivers to cross. Unfortunately one of the major rivers in my path was that, no matter how closely associated I became with the underground in general and the Friday-night UFO club in particular, the Social Deviants found themselves blocked from playing there, and the only available bridge was guarded by a tall, slim authoritarian troll (or Horatius, depending on one’s point of view) in a Mr Fish suit. Joe Boyd had publicly stated that we would only play at UFO over his dead body. This being the era of peace and love, shooting Boyd was pretty much out of the question, but he was a major obstacle in our path and something had to be done. Before we could deal with the matter of the Social Deviants at UFO, however, a crisis struck that would pretty much change everything.
