How Jimi conquered London... and then the world!
Hendrix died 50 years ago on Friday. In part two of our extract of his new book, PHILIP NORMAN recounts his brief stardom
IN APRIL 1966, Time magazine published a cover story, dubbing London the “style capital of Europe”, describing the explosion of youthful creativity and introducing the so-called British Invasion – English bands who were taking the States by storm. Chief among them were the Rolling Stones, who had started out as missionaries for the blues and retained that love even after their transition to pop. When they appeared on a US pop show called Shindig, they insisted one of the most hardcore of all bluesmen, Howlin’ Wolf, should also be on the bill.
From then on, their US tours regularly brought the likes of Muddy Waters, Ike and Tina Turner and BB King out of the blacks-only Chitlin’ Circuit as guest artistes. Almost as crucial to the Stones’ evolution were the young women who took their principal members to a higher social and cultural level than their modest provincial backgrounds promised.
For Keith Richards, it was the wellconnected Linda Keith, a beautiful – and strong-minded – model. Despite a ban on wives or girlfriends, when the Stones toured America for a fifth time in May 1966, Linda was defiantly staying at her own expense with a friend in New York.
One night, they decided to check out a recently-opened place, the Cheetah Club at 53rd and Broadway. The house band that night was Curtis Knight and the Squires with Jimi Hendrix on lead guitar.
Since arriving virtually penniless in New York in January 1964 after an empty promise of work, the young guitarist had been living hand to mouth.
“His clothes were terrible,” Linda recalls. “He had a kind of frilly Cuban shirt, bell-bottom trousers that were too short, cheap boots, hair that was obviously curled with rollers. But his playing was sensational.”
When he came off stage, Linda told him she’d loved his performance and invited him to her table. One of the first questions she asked was why he didn’t sing as well as play guitar?
The answer was he felt self-conscious because his voice lacked the soulful rasp of an Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett. Linda recalls: “I told him, ‘Listen to [Bob] Dylan, that should be proof you don’t need to sing in the way everyone else does’.”
At the end of a chaste night, Linda promised to use her connections with the Stones and other industry figures to help Jimi. They spent most of that summer hanging out while Linda waited for Keith Richards to come off the road, though her efforts to interest the band’s manager Andrew Oldham and US record exec Seymour Stein in Jimi came to nothing.
One night, with the camaraderie of British bands abroad, the Stones and Animals, who were performing a farewell tour, were out clubbing together.
Chas Chandler, the Animals’ bass player, told Linda he wanted to move into management: “So I piped up, ‘I’ve got just the person for you’.”
When Jimi auditioned for him, Chandler marvelled in his broad Tyneside accent: “This is ree-dic-lous. Why hasna’ anyone signed this guy up?” He moved swiftly to remedy the situation.
IT WAS meant to be a low-key introduction to London. Having arrived three days earlier from New York with an overnight bag and $40 from a friend, Jimi Hendrix played at the Scotch of St James club in Mason’s Yard, Mayfair, on September 27, 1966. He had no work permit and the 23-year-old guitarist had been held up for two hours at
Heathrow before being granted a seven-day visitor’s visa prohibiting any employment during that time.
Since Jimi could not be launched with any kind of formal concert, he was to be covertly slipped into circulation via the clubs frequented by London’s leading pop names, playing solo or sitting in with their house bands for free. Thus, if challenged by the authorities, he could argue that jamming was not work but leisure.
CHAS CHANDLER had borrowed a guitar for his protege and persuaded Welshman Rod Harrod, who managed the Scotch nightclub, to let his star appear with the house band. “Chas had this wild-looking character with him who he’d just brought from New York and said was a brilliant guitarist,” Harrod recalls. “I’d never heard of him or seen him play, so I just said, ‘I’ll take your word for it, Chas’.”
Like all the ‘in’ clubs, the Scotch was subterranean, tiny and pitch-black, but harboured more alabaster pop star faces per square yard of darkness than any of its rivals. On its opening night earlier that summer, Harrod had counted “three Beatles, three Rolling Stones, two Who and two Kinks”. But on the Monday night of Jimi’s debut, few such luminaries were in evidence, although Paul Mccartney would later claim to have been there incognito.
Jimi went onstage with the house band, plugging his borrowed guitar into their amp. In observance of his visa, he was not being paid and played just four numbers before Chandler dragged him off the stage.
Alas for Chandler’s hopes of a low-key entry into London clubland, the night descended into violence and recrimination after Linda Keith joined the