For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “All Along the Watchtower”. Part one was on the original version by Bob Dylan, while this part is on Jimi Hendrix’s cover version.

Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Games People Play” by Joe South.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

Errata: I mispronounce Ed Chalpin’s name as Halpin for most of the episode. And towards the end I say “January the 28th 1969” when I meant 1970

Resources

I will be putting together Mixclouds in the next few days (this originally said “tomorrow” but things have come up — I will do them while on holiday and edit the links in later).

Information on Jimi Hendrix’s life came from Room Full of Mirrors by Charles R. Cross, Crosstown Traffic by Charles Shaar Murray, and Wild Thing by Philip Norman. It should be noted that Norman’s book contains some factual errors and disputed claims, but it’s also the most recent of these three and contains new information the other two don’t.

I also referred to two guides to his music, Jimi Hendrix On Track by Emily Stott, and The Complete Guide to the Music of Jimi Hendrix by Peter Doggett.

Information also came from A Film About Jimi Hendrix by Joe Boyd.

There are many, many, many compilations of outtakes and live recordings by Hendrix, with and without the Experience, but all most people will really need are the three studio albums Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland.

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Transcript

A few notes before I begin. First a slight erratum for the last episode — I ended the episode saying that the Isle of Wight show was Jimi Hendrix’s penultimate show. It wasn’t, quite — as you’ll hear in this part he actually played a handful of shows after that, all in a one-week period, but the list I referred to was incomplete.

Secondly, this episode features discussion of racism, domestic abuse, drug abuse, and suicidal ideation. It also, by necessity, features repeated use of a word for Romani people beginning with a “g” that many of those people consider a slur. My understanding, which may be wrong, is that it is not always considered a slur in British English the same way it is in American English, and that many people of that ethnicity living in the UK have it as their preferred term for themselves, but I normally avoid using the word wherever possible (and I have to avoid it more than you might think, given that in the late sixties and early seventies almost every rock star seemed determined to use it constantly in song lyrics). In this case, I literally can’t avoid the word without going into ridiculous circumlocutions, as it’s a word that Hendrix not only repeatedly used in interviews, and in a song title, but also in an album title and in the names of two different bands. So I apologise in advance to anyone to whom hearing that word causes offence or upset, but there is no way to avoid it, and I’ll be using it in full when it comes up in this episode (though still trying to avoid it in future episodes).

When we left the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the end of the episode on “Hey Joe”, they had just released their first single, and that had quickly made the top ten in the UK. As with many debut records at the time, it hit the top forty more because of the efforts of the management team than because of the record itself — Mike Jeffery, who co-managed the group with Chas Chandler and had previously managed the Animals, knew that the way to get a chart hit was to bribe radio stations and to send people round to buy multiple copies from chart return record shops.

But that hyped success soon became legitimate success, and Jeffery and Chandler took advantage of it, sending the group all over the country, playing every tiny club they could be booked into, sometimes causing trouble, as when the group played a ballroom in Ilkley in Yorkshire which only had room for two hundred and fifty people. Six hundred attended, and the police tried to shut the show down.

And in between these gigs in Hull and Ilkley and Leeds, the group were trying to record a follow-up single and an album to go with it. The intro to that single, “Purple Haze” starts with a dissonant chord — there’s an interval called a tritone, which is the distance of a sharpened fourth or flattened fifth

[plays tritone interval]

That’s a relatively common interval these days, for example you can hear it as the first two notes in the Simpsons theme:

[Excerpt: Simpsons theme]

And it turns up in things like diminished chords, which were showing up a lot in pop music at this point — they seemed to be George Harrison’s favourite chords, for example. But it’s still a dissonant interval — one that was for a long time regarded as literally “the Devil’s interval”, it was known as diabolus in musica, the Devil in music. And the start of the single has two tritones back to back, B flat with E on top:

[Demonstrates]

Followed by the E with the B flat on top:

[Demonstrates]

Put together that’s:

[Demonstrates]

Hendrix may have got the idea to use tritones in his intro from Miles Davis’ “Walkin'”, which does something similar:

[Excerpt: Miles Davis, “Walkin'”]

The intro then contains another dissonant chord that has become known, because of Hendrix’s prominent use of it here and in “Foxy Lady” as the “Hendrix Chord”. That chord is an E7#9:

[Demonstrates chord]

A dominant seventh sharpened nine chord like that is a chord that gets used a lot in jazz, because the chord has both a minor and a major third in it, spaced out far enough that they don’t butt up against each other too much. When playing the blues, you’ll often play both the minor and major third of a scale, to imply a “bent” or “blue” note somewhere between them, so in the key of E you might play a G note on a lead instrument against an E7 chord in the rhythm instrument, where the E7 chord has a G# in it. A dominant seventh sharpened nine chord just makes that G note part of the chord, so the notes are E, G#, B, D, G. It’s a chord that basically compresses the whole blues scale into one chord, and like the diminished chord it was a favourite of George Harrison’s. He’d used a dominant seventh sharpened nine in his solo on “Til There Was You”:

[Excerpt: The Beatles, “Til There Was You”]

and there are both G7#9 and D7#9 chords in “Taxman”:

[Excerpt: The Beatles, “Taxman”]

An E7#9 is also the very opening chord of “I Feel Free” by Cream:

[Excerpt: Cream, “I Feel Free”]

And both those latter two songs, only released a few months earlier and both by people that Hendrix admired, might have put the chord into his mind. But Hendrix’s use of the chord, coming straight after the tritones, one form of dissonance going into another, was such a powerful introduction that from that point on a dominant seventh sharpened nine chord has been known to guitarists as “the Hendrix chord”:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Purple Haze”]

“Purple Haze” was one of Hendrix’s early attempts at songwriting, written after Chas Chandler heard Hendrix playing around with a riff in a dressing room and told him “that’s your next single”.  It was also the start of the group’s studio experimentation. “Hey Joe” had been recorded quickly, in a fairly standard way for pop singles of the time, as one might expect for something produced by Chas Chandler, who had of course had a very successful pop career himself, and who when they were making “Hey Joe” was very conscious that they were recording a track without yet having a deal.

“Purple Haze” though was a new single by a band who at this point were a known quantity. They had a deal, they had a big hit single. Now they could show what they could really do. After a failed attempt at recording it at De Lane Lea studios, where they’d recorded “Hey Joe”, Chandler decided to move them to the better facilities at Olympic Studios, where they started working with a new engineer, Eddie Kramer, who was almost as enthusiastic about Hendrix’s experimentation as Geoff Emerick was for the Beatles.

For the first time on record, Hendrix was using some of his new effects pedals — effects pedals had not really been a thing up to this point, at all. There had been a fuzz pedal introduced a few years earlier, which the Stones had used on “Satisfaction”, but other than that pedals had not really started to be created. But guitarists were starting to experiment more with their tone — live, bands were using a lot of feedback as a way to create sounds people hadn’t heard before, while in the studio people like the Beatles were experimenting with putting guitars through Leslie speakers  and other ways to change their tone.

And with transistors now becoming much more readily available, it was only a matter of time before people realised they could fit into pedals which a guitarist could operate with their feet, rather than having to be bulky standalone units. The fuzz pedal had been an early example of this, but it was only in 1967 that pedals started to proliferate.

One of the first of these was made especially for Hendrix, by Roger Mayer, an electrical engineer Hendrix had met at a nightclub. This pedal allowed Hendrix to play a note and have it doubled at the octave, and he used it on the solo:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Purple Haze”]

Eddie Kramer was happy to work with Hendrix to get sounds like this onto tape, and was also very happy to alter Hendrix’s voice, adding reverb and burying it in the mix — Hendrix was never happy with his own voice, and only started singing at all after hearing Bob Dylan, realising one didn’t have to be a technically perfect singer to perform.

Olympic studios was also perfect for Hendrix in another way — as Chas Chandler said “A great asset was that it seemed you could play louder than other studios.” — though how much louder was a matter of some dispute between Chandler and Hendrix, as Hendrix was using two Marshall stacks at full volume in the studio, which Chandler thought was a little excessive. Hendrix complained that he wasn’t being allowed to record things his way, and Chandler supposedly handed him his passport and told him to piss off back to America if he didn’t like it.

Lyrically, the song was inspired by the science fiction that was Hendrix’s biggest lyrical influence other than Dylan, but it’s also notable that it’s the first time Hendrix brings up magic and putting a spell on someone. In this case, the lyric seems at least partly inspired by “I Put a Spell on You” by Screaming Jay Hawkins:

[Excerpt: Screaming Jay Hawkins, “I Put a Spell on You”]

The lyric was also, by all accounts, originally much, much longer than the released version, so much so that Hendrix would later complain that the track as released was not really “Purple Haze” — Chandler helped Hendrix shape what was originally an overlong song into something punchy and commercial.

It may have been an artistic compromise Hendrix later regretted, but commercially it paid off — “Purple Haze” made number three on the charts, and was the first single to be released on a new label, Track Records, set up by the Who’s managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, who had set the label up specifically for Hendrix — they couldn’t manage him, because Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffery had already signed him, but they wanted to get some of the money they knew was coming to him.

“Hey Joe” had originally been meant to be released on the label, but Lambert and Stamp hadn’t finished setting it up at that point, and so instead the record had been put out by Polydor, who distributed Track Records (and also distributed the label the Who were on, Reaction, which was owned by Robert Stigwood rather than by Lambert and Stamp, another reason they wanted to set up their own label).

But the recordings weren’t actually owned by Track *or* Polydor, rather they were owned by a company that Mike Jeffery had set up, which licensed them to Track, which licensed them to Polydor. It’s a complicated chain of rights ownership, made possible by the fact that Jimi Hendrix was in the habit of just signing any contract put in front of him, which given the levels of honesty among the music business in the 1960s was not the most advisable policy.

The group were now bona fide stars and so, rather than playing one-off gigs in Ilkley, they were now sent out on one of the package tours with other pop stars — because at this point, in most people’s minds, the distinction between “pop” and “rock” that would only a few months later solidify into an almost impermeable barrier had not yet been made. And so above the Jimi Hendrix Experience on the bill for this prominent national tour were Cat Stevens, who had just had his first top ten hit with “Matthew and Son”:

[Excerpt: Cat Stevens, “Matthew and Son”]

The Walker Brothers, featuring Scott Walker who would later go on to be possibly the most idiosyncratic artist in the whole of popular music, but who at this point was recording Righteous Brothers soundalikes and Four Seasons covers like “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More”:

[Excerpt: The Walker Brothers, “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More”]

And of course the man of the moment, the man who had kept the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane” off the number one spot, Englebert Humperdinck:

[Excerpt: Englebert Humperdinck, “Please Release Me”]

As you might imagine, the group didn’t feel particularly comfortable on a bill with these acts, and Hendrix in particular was looking for some way for the group to stand out, and on the opening night the journalist Keith Altham suggested that Hendrix could set his guitar on fire on stage. According to Altham, he only meant it as a joke, but Chas Chandler latched on to the idea, and that night Hendrix poured lighter fluid over his guitar and set it alight, during, of course, “Fire”:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Fire”]

While the burning got headlines, Hendrix by all accounts didn’t think it had worked as a piece of stagecraft, and dropped it from his act for the moment.

“Fire” was one of several songs that the group were working on for their forthcoming debut album, and it’s one that more than any of them shows the influence of Hendrix’s days playing the Chitlin Circuit. While it has all the psychedelic tricks, like a solo with the octave pedal that Hendrix had used on “Purple Haze”, the basic feel of the song comes from “Land of 1000 Dances”, the hit by Wilson Pickett, who Hendrix had been a backing musician for in at least one show in 1966:

[Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, “Land of 1000 Dances”]

And while the song’s lyrics are, as far as one can tell, mostly double entendre, they also have a very innocent, domestic, inspiration. The song’s lyric comes from Hendrix visiting the mother of Noel Redding, the Experience’s bass player and at that point the band member Hendrix was closest to. Hendrix was cold and wet and wanted to, literally, stand next to her fire, but couldn’t because the dog was in the way — hence “move over, Rover, let Jimi take over”.

Similarly mundane was the inspiration for the far from domestic “Third Stone From The Sun”. While the song is a psychedelic science fiction extravaganza, this musical motif at the beginning of the song:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Third Stone From The Sun”]

Was apparently inspired by this one:

[Excerpt: Coronation Street theme]

According to Kathy Etchingham, Hendrix’s main girlfriend at the time, Hendrix was a major fan of the soap opera Coronation Street, and in particular of the character Ena Sharples (who we’ve actually heard in an earlier episode, as in 1961 her grandson was played by Davy Jones, later of the Monkees), and there is definitely an air of the theme tune about Hendrix’s track.

“Fire” and “Third Stone From The Sun” were both included on the group’s debut album, Are You Experienced, which was released a week after the group’s third single, “The Wind Cries Mary”, a gentle ballad inspired by Curtis Mayfield, which like the first two singles wasn’t included on the album:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “The Wind Cries Mary”]

Mayfield may have been the musical inspiration, and Hendrix had been playing a version of the music even back when he was still performing as Jimmy James, but the lyrical inspiration for the song was once again domestic — though in this case a domestic dispute. Kathy Etchingham is one of the few women to have been in a relationship with Hendrix and adamantly insist that he was never physically violent with her — sadly stories abound of Hendrix behaving in unspeakably violent ways towards women he considered “his” who he thought were interested in other men, while of course he considered himself perfectly free to sleep around with whoever he wanted, and those stories have also been told by others about Etchingham, but she has always denied, and continues to deny, that she was ever abused, and she would know better than anyone.

They did, however, still have a fractious relationship, and after one row over Etchingham’s cooking, in which she threw crockery at him, breaking it, before storming out, he wrote the lyric to “The Wind Cries Mary” — Mary is Etchingham’s middle name, and the lines about the broom are, according to her, about Hendrix sweeping up the broken crockery while she was out.

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “The Wind Cries Mary”]

The single made number six on the charts, and the album, released a week later, made number two. The album’s success was all the more impressive because it was made in a rush — there were a total of sixteen sessions spread over five months, but Chas Chandler later calculated that they had only spent seventy-two hours, total, in the studio making the album, and they were desperately trying to get the album done in breaks from their constant touring schedule, rather than spending a prolonged period in the studio at one time.

This stop-start slapdash recording process, while the results were impressive, led to tension within the group. In the early part of their time together, while even the band’s name made it clear that Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding were sidemen rather than equals, Hendrix had done everything he could to make the group seem like an actual group, and had particularly become good friends with Redding, and encouraged the other two to speak up in interviews and stood up for them in arguments with Jeffery about their wages. He’d been less close with Mitchell at first, as Mitchell had been less happy playing the material the group played in their early sets, but he respected both men.

But under the time pressure of the studio, that respect started to slip away. This was largely down to Chas Chandler. Chandler’s experience in the Animals had led him to the belief that band democracy simply doesn’t work, that if you let everyone try to have input you end up with watered-down compromises that please nobody. As far as Chandler was concerned, Hendrix was the star, he was the producer, and Redding and Mitchell were there to do as they were told, not because they necessarily had bad ideas but because they were there to realise Hendrix’s vision while also making commercial records, and as Chandler put it “they were starting to come up with suggestions, but … We didn’t need to be arguing with Noel for ten minutes and Mitch for five … We just couldn’t afford the time.”

Understandably this attitude rankled with Redding and Mitchell, but nonetheless they remained utterly professional and able to quickly pick up on new songs. Chas Chandler estimated that the total time to record “The Wind Cries Mary”, from Hendrix bringing the song into the studio to the completed track, was twenty minutes. And similarly, when the group were going to play a set at the Saville Theatre, owned by Brian Epstein, and knew it was likely some of the Beatles would attend, three days after the release of the Sgt Pepper album (which kept Are You Experienced off the number one slot on the UK album charts), Hendrix brought a copy of the album into the dressing room half an hour before the show started, and told them the title track was going to be their opening number:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (live)”]

Paul McCartney still talks about seeing that show, and Hendrix having learned his song so quickly after the album came out, as being one of the great thrills of his life — but note that he talks about *Hendrix* learning his song in three days. Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell learned it in half an hour.

At the time of that show, the Jimi Hendrix Experience were still primarily a UK phenomenon. In May, Reprise Records released “Hey Joe” as a single in the US, largely on the recommendation of Mick Jagger, though it hadn’t been much of a success, and Hendrix was still largely unknown over there. But that was all about to change:

[Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)”]

We’ve obviously talked about the Monterey Pop Festival many times since episode 151, and it’s going to come up more, but there were four acts among all those who played at the festival that weekend who had their careers changed permanently. Two of them — Otis Redding and Janis Joplin — we’ve already done episodes on. We’ll be covering how the Who’s career changed at Monterey in a future episode, but the Jimi Hendrix Experience were the fourth of the major hits of the festival, and the only one for whom it was their first ever US gig.

The Who and the Experience were actually there for the same reason — in both cases they were recommended by Paul McCartney, who was on the festival’s board of directors, largely as an emeritus position, but who had been asked who the best live acts on the London scene were and named those two bands.

While the two bands had been recommended by the same people, there was not much love lost between them at this point. Keith Moon, on first meeting Hendrix, had called him a “savage”, and while Pete Townshend was always impressed by Hendrix, and later became friendly with him, he had been one of those people who had been intimidated by Hendrix pushing all the top tier of London guitarists off their pinnacle, and resented Hendrix for what he thought of as Hendrix stealing his act by destroying instruments, though Townshend was always careful to distinguish what the two did, saying of Hendrix “We’re talking crass, show business nonsense here. My guitar smashing started as a serious art-school concept with a clear manifesto.”

Townshend had very, very, complex feelings about Hendrix, stemming partly from his own awareness of his own whiteness — he will frankly admit that at that point in time he was not comfortable around Black people and had no real feel for Black music, though that has by all accounts changed in the intervening decades — partly from jealousy of Hendrix as the new kid, partly from sexual jealousy — like almost all straight and bi women in the London scene, Townshend’s then-girlfriend, later his first wife, found Hendrix extraordinarily attractive, and partly because he saw Hendrix as someone who was inspiring an identity crisis in the whole London scene, showing them that most of what they were doing was stolen from Black Americans, and that they *weren’t* Black Americans, thus leading them to question everything about their own art.

It’s also the case that while someone like Clapton or Jeff Beck felt threatened by Hendrix’s virtuosity, in a very real sense Hendrix was treading more on Townshend’s toes than theirs. According to Charles Shaar Murray, Hendrix once told Mike Bloomfield that ‘he wanted to burn Clapton to death because he couldn’t play rhythm’. As Murray astutely points out, almost all the guitar heroes on the London scene at that time were strictly lead players, playing licks they’d learned from Albert King or Elmore James records or doing long psychedelic freakouts, but only John Lennon, Keith Richards, and Townshend were really solid rhythm guitar players. Hendrix, like Townshend, was playing both rhythm and lead parts, because he’d come up through the chitlin circuit backing people like Don Covay, Little Richard, and the Isley Brothers, not showing off his lead skills but playing parts closer to what Curtis Mayfield or Steve Cropper would play. Of all the guitarists in London, Townshend was thus maybe the closest stylistically to Hendrix, even though the two sounded very different.

As a result of this there was a lot of tension between the two bands backstage at Monterey, and there were other issues that affected that show particularly. Hendrix had brought his own Marshall stacks from the UK, but the Who’s management had insisted they rent some cheap Vox amplifiers, which meant that not only could they not play as loudly as they normally did, they couldn’t smash the amps at the climax of their show.

Both bands knew that the other was one of the best live acts around, and that they were impossible to follow, and given the chaotic nature of the festival, with no fixed lineup order, neither of them wanted to follow the other. There was a tense stand-off between the two bands, until finally Hendrix suggested flipping a coin. The Who won, and got to go on first:

[Excerpt: The Who, “Substitute (live at Monterey)”]

They ended the set with a version of “My Generation”, which ended with Townshend smashing his guitar and Keith Moon kicking over his drums:

[Excerpt: The Who, “My Generation (live at Monterey)”]

Hendrix was determined to do better, and after the Grateful Dead, who were slotted in between the two bands and who, as so often in their career, flubbed an important gig and went down badly, the Jimi Hendrix Experience came out and played the set of their lives. The set mixed the three singles they’d released up to that point in the UK — and a double A-side of “Purple Haze” and “The Wind Cries Mary” was released in the US a couple of days after Monterey to capitalise on the performance — with the cover versions that were normally in their set, like “Killing Floor”, the Howlin’ Wolf song with which Hendrix had blown Clapton off the stage when they’d first met, and a song by Hendrix’s favourite songwriter of the time, Bob Dylan:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Like a Rolling Stone (live at Monterey)”]

Al Kooper, who had played the organ on Dylan’s original of that, was backstage and Hendrix had asked him to replicate his organ part with them, but Kooper, not knowing how good Hendrix was, had refused.

The one real problem in the set came seven songs in — Hendrix liked using very light strings so he could bend them a lot, and he also used the tremolo arm on his Strat a lot more than most people. The result was that he always had chronic tuning problems on stage, and he put the guitar badly out of tune at the end of “The Wind Cries Mary”, and had to struggle through “Purple Haze” more or less fighting his instrument.

But it was the last song that sealed the legend of Jimi Hendrix forever:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Wild Thing (live at Monterey)”]

The performance of “Wild Thing” was not anything particularly special musically, but what impressed the audience wasn’t the band’s playing, but the way Hendrix ended the song. Remembering what he’d done at the beginning of the Englebert Humperdinck tour, he once again poured lighter fluid over his guitar and set light to the instrument, while it was still plugged in, the sound of the flames and the snapping strings being picked up by the pickups and amplified while Redding and Mitchell raved up behind him.

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Wild Thing (live at Monterey)”]

When he walked off the stage, Andy Warhol and Nico, who had been backstage studiously ignoring everyone they thought was less cool than them — which is to say everyone — came up to him and kissed him on both cheeks. The Jimi Hendrix Experience had conquered America.

Not that everyone saw it that way. Robert Christgau, a man who was normally one of the most perceptive music critics of his generation, wrote the single most misjudged review of his career. Apparently seeing Hendrix’s performance as little short of a minstrel show, he used a racialised term about him which I am not going to repeat (but which is easy to find if you google “Christgau” and “Hendrix” together), quoted someone else using an actual racial slur about Hendrix, and in some of the phrases I *can* repeat said “He was terrible.” “Grunting and groaning on the brink of sham orgasm, he made his way through five or six almost indistinguishable songs” and “I suppose Hendrix’s act can be seen as a consistently vulgar parody of rock theatrics, but I don’t feel I have to like it. Anyhow, he can’t sing.”

Christgau’s assessment of Hendrix’s musical merits is of course his own business, but the racial insensitivity on display in his review is breathtaking, though sadly far from exceptional in rock writing of that era. Jann Wenner, who is *not* a perceptive critic, also gave the show a negative review, saying “Although he handled his guitar with rhythmic agility and minor drama, he is not the great artist we were told.”

Pete Townshend bumped into Hendrix at the airport after the show, and in an attempt at bridge building apologised to Hendrix for the pre-show tension and offered to buy part of the destroyed guitar. Hendrix responded by calling Townshend either a “honkie” or a “cracker”, depending on which version of the story you read, though the two would later patch things up and become quite close friends.

The group followed their performance at Monterey with a short residency at the Fillmore in San Francisco, where Bill Graham quickly promoted them from support to headliners after they got a tremendous audience response, and some club dates including at the Whisky A-Go-Go, where they didn’t take advantage of the prestigious booking, as Hendrix got drunk and didn’t play well.

But they soon had a tour that seemed to some to be as bad a match as the Englebert tour had been, though it was also obviously a fantastic opportunity. The Monkees were at this point arguably the biggest band in the world other than the Beatles, and Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork had both been at Monterey and Dolenz in particular had been hugely impressed by Hendrix’s performance. They decided to offer Hendrix the support slot on their upcoming tour. Hendrix didn’t like the idea — he detested the Monkees’ music, and had said so publicly, though he ended up getting on rather well with the actual band members. But Mike Jeffery, who wanted to start making some real money from his client, thought it was an excellent idea.

Micky Dolenz still shows exactly what the problem was with this bill in his solo performances to this day:

[Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, “Purple Haze (live)”]

The Monkees’ audience simply didn’t want Hendrix, and while the Monkees themselves relished the opportunity to stand at the side of the stage every night and watch Hendrix play, it soon became clear that the combination just wouldn’t work. To save everyone’s face, a story was concocted that Hendrix had been dropped from the tour after a campaign by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who were allegedly complaining that Hendrix’s act was simply too erotic for the children of America.

Jeffery quickly put together a string of club dates to fill the gap, and Hendrix found himself back in New York, playing some of the same clubs he had been playing before Chas Chandler had discovered him, though this time as the star.  At the same time the Experience were playing New York, the Mothers of Invention had a residency at the Garrick Theatre there. Hendrix and the Mothers would become quite friendly, and Hendrix would pose for the cover of their album We’re Only In It For The Money, where they parodied the cover of Sgt Pepper, and it was around this time that Frank Zappa introduced him to something that would change his style forever.

Hendrix had grown up listening to his father’s record collection, and that included a lot of jazz and big band music, and he had always been fascinated by the sound of trumpet players like Cootie Williams, the lead trumpet player with Duke Ellington’s band:

[Excerpt: Duke Ellington and his Orchestra featuring Cootie Williams, “New East St. Louis Toodle-Oo”]

Williams got that unique tone by moving a plunger mute in and out of the bell of his trumpet, and Hendrix had always wanted to get a tone on his guitar that sounded like that. And at some point in 1967, probably at this meeting, Frank Zappa told Hendrix about the wah-wah pedal, which had come out in February of 1967 and had originally been invented to do just that — and was marketed as an alternative to mutes for horn players originally, using the name of the jazz trumpeter Charles McCoy.

But it had almost immediately been taken up by guitarists. Zappa had got his horn players to start using the pedals, but was also using one himself — though he used it rather differently from how most guitarists would — whereas most guitarists will raise their foot up and down on the pedal, creating a “wacka wacka” noise, Zappa would often keep his foot in one position and just use it to shape the tone of the notes he was playing. A more standard use of the pedal had come in May, when Eric Clapton had used it for the first time on Cream’s B-side “Tales of Brave Ulysses”:

[Excerpt: Cream. “Tales of Brave Ulysses”]

Hendrix immediately took to the wah-wah, which took over from the octave pedal as his new favourite guitar pedal.

The time in New York also, though, led to one of the odder sidesteps in Hendrix’s career. Hendrix was returning to Greenwich Village as a star, but not as a star with a lot of money. Hendrix was, for most of his life, chronically short of money. There are various reasons for that — partly, he was just the kind of person who would go out and buy a new car, with cash, even though he didn’t have a driving license or anywhere to park it; partly, many many people who Mike Jeffery managed have suggested, in so many words, that Jeffery was at the very least a fraudster and at worst a gangster; and partly there were lawsuits that locked up his royalties — and one of those lawsuits was indirectly precipitated by his lack of money.

While in New York he did manage to repay forty dollars to an old bandmate who had lent him the money to go to London with, but when he met up with another old friend, Curtis Knight, the former lead singer of Curtis Knight and the Squires, with whom he’d played a couple of years previously, he wanted to take Knight out for dinner but was short of cash. Knight suggested that they go round and visit Ed Chalpin, the owner of the record label for which the Squires had recorded, and borrow some money off him.

What Hendrix only vaguely remembered, because of the habit I mentioned earlier of signing anything put in front of him,  was that as a member of the Squires he’d actually signed a three-year recording contract with Chalpin, less than two years earlier, for the princely advance of one dollar. Chalpin was indeed very happy to meet up with his old acquaintance Jimi and to take him and Knight out for a meal… and why didn’t they come back to his studio for a jam session?

They did, and Chalpin made a plan. He was going to take those jammed tracks, and the recordings they’d made earlier and put out a new Jimi Hendrix album.Chalpin started suing everyone involved with Hendrix’s career, pointing out that he did actually have a valid contract with Hendrix that had another fifteen months on it.

Four days after Chalpin sued Hendrix’s labels, Hendrix actually went back into the studio with Chalpin and Knight, though he did show a little bit of awareness of the legal situation:

[Excerpt: Curtis Knight and the Squires, “You can’t use my name dialogue” into “Gloomy Monday”]

Unsurprisingly, Ed Chalpin did not pay attention to any pinkie promises not to use the name of the most marketable new guitarist in the world when selling his new recordings of him, and an album duly came out, licensed by Chalpin to Capitol Records, credited to Jimi Hendrix and Curtis Knight, with a big photo of Hendrix at Monterey on the cover.

The legal squabbles between Chalpin and Hendrix’s British associates would last for years.

The group’s time in New York also brought home to Hendrix how much his reputation was only with white listeners and not with Black ones, and he started to worry about what that said about him.

In truth it said little about him, and a lot about marketing categories. In Britain, to sell Hendrix to the hip British audience, a lot had been made of his influence from people like the Beatles, Dylan, and Muddy Waters — and he *was* influenced by those three artists, a great deal. But namedropping those performers didn’t help at all among the Black audience in Harlem. Obviously everyone knew the Beatles, but Dylan barely had any recognition among Black listeners, and while Muddy Waters was of course one of the great Black musicians and bandleaders of all time, he was yesterday’s news. By the mid-sixties, the only major blues artists who were still making a living on the chitlin’ circuit were people like B.B. King and Albert King, whose music had always had horn sections and was closer to soul music than to people like Waters or John Lee Hooker, who by this point were mostly playing to white college audiences.

Hendrix came up a few years after the last original generation of great bluesmen for whom the blues was a living music, people like Buddy Guy, and a few years before the revivalists like Robert Cray. At this point the young musicians who were citing Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf as influences were all people like the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Canned Heat, and Mike Bloomfield — white people who had learned the music from records. In the late sixties, Black audiences wanted Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and James Brown, musicians who were looking to the future, not people imitating Muddy Waters.

It didn’t help that Hendrix’s label in the US was Reprise records, which at that point had no idea how to market to Black audiences. The label had started out owned by Frank Sinatra and putting out mostly music by Sinatra and his friends, and while the label was now pivoting towards the hippie counterculture, the musicians it was in the process of signing in the late sixties were people like the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, Tiny Tim, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the Electric Prunes, and Arlo Guthrie — many of them truly great musicians, but none of them ever likely to trouble the R&B charts.

And Hendrix’s band didn’t help in that respect. As Hendrix’s friend Robert Wyatt later said “It would have been hard to imagine any of Hendrix’s records with that splashing drum sound and unfunky bass and all that looseness sitting neatly in the tracks of a Motown record”.

So Hendrix was being sold as “a Black man playing white people’s music”, and that’s how audiences responded to him, even though if you listen to his music at all it’s clear that the single biggest influence in his music is Curtis Mayfield, and his years of playing in soul bands are audible in every single note he played.

And this was actually obvious to other Black *musicians*. Hendrix is always spoken of as if his major influence was on white musicians and as if he had no impact at all on the Black music scene, but in truth there are whole strains of Black music for decades to come that have Hendrix’s fingerprints all over them. It’s impossible to conceive of the records of Sly and the Family Stone, or Norman Whitfield’s work with the Temptations, or the seventies work of Curtis Mayfield or Bobby Womack, or Parliament/Funkadelic, or Prince, or Miles Davis’ fusion records, without the influence of Hendrix.

But all that was to come. At the time, all Hendrix could see was that he was being rejected by his own community, and that started to hurt.

It’s notable that the single the group recorded in New York, “Burning of the Midnight Lamp”, featured the great Black backing vocal group the Sweet Inspirations, the same people who sang backing vocals for Aretha, and is about loneliness and depression — though it’s also notable that for all that, Hendrix isn’t trying to make his record sound like a soul record. Indeed, with its combination of wah-wah guitar and harpsichord, the closest resemblance to anything else in music at the time is to some of the material of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a group who Hendrix was a big fan of.

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Burning of the Midnight Lamp”]

That track, with its depressed mood and odd sound, didn’t chart as highly as the group’s earlier singles, only reaching number eighteen in the UK — still a hit, but not as big a hit as some of the others.

But that was made up for by the release in the US of a revised version of the Are You Experienced album, which as was often the case in the US dropped several of the album tracks and replaced them with the three singles that had been released up to that point. Despite the group not yet having had a hit single in America, the album made the top five, and became one of the biggest-selling records Reprise had ever released up to that point.

The group had to get a second album recorded and released before the end of the year, but of course that didn’t stop Mike Jeffery from sending them out on the road as much as possible, but at this point at least the packages the group were being put on were more appropriate. They were often on the same bill as other acts Jeffery and Chandler managed, like Hendrix’s friend Eric Burdon or the jazz-prog band Soft Machine, and when they weren’t it was packages like a tour with The Pink Floyd and the Move — the latter of whom were friendly enough with the Experience that on one track on the new album, “You Got Me Floatin'”, Roy Wood and Trevor Burton of the Move joined Graham Nash of the Hollies on backing vocals:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “You Got Me Floatin'”]

There was a lot of this kind of in-studio collaboration between artists going on — Nash, who for a while shared a flat with Mitch Mitchell, also appeared along with Gary Leeds of the Walker Brothers providing footstep sound effects on another track on the album, “If 6 Was 9”:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “If 6 Was 9”]

Hendrix, Leeds, and Nash were also among the musicians who played in an uncredited supergroup of sorts who backed Paul McCartney’s brother Mike (who used the stage name Mike McGear so he couldn’t be accused of capitalising on his brother’s fame) and the poet Roger McGough (who was McGear’s collaborator in their group the Scaffold) on their duo album McGough & McGear, which was produced by McCartney and former Yardbird Paul Samwell-Smith. There are no credits for individual tracks, but it’s known that Hendrix, and probably also Noel Redding, appeared on at least the tracks “So Much” and “Ex-Art Student”, the latter of which also featured Dave Mason of Traffic on sitar:

[Excerpt: McGough and McGear, “Ex-Art Student”]

The sessions for the second album, titled Axis: Bold as Love, stretched out far longer than for the first album, starting even before Are You Experienced was released, and finishing five months later, interspersed with all the group’s touring, and the record ended up costing ten thousand pounds to make, rather than the few hundred Are You Experienced cost.  The record might be the definition of “difficult second album” — the relationship between Hendrix and Chandler started to deteriorate, as Hendrix wanted to spend more and more time in the studio doing retake after retake to get the sound in his head, while Chandler thought there was no need to keep going past a certain point.

There was also starting to be more desire from the other members for input into the records. For the first time, the band did a Noel Redding original, which Redding also sang lead on, and which showed Redding’s desire to perform more pop-oriented music like the Small Faces or the Move (even as those bands were moving into heavier rock):

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “She’s So Fine”]

And Redding was also increasingly starting to resent the way that Hendrix would tell him exactly what to play, rather than allowing him to come up with his own parts. The strongest friendship in the group was starting to wear down over this. The stress caused by the album can probably be summed up by the fact that a few days before it was meant to come out, Hendrix accidentally left the only copy of the master tape for side one in a taxi, and after all that work getting the album perfect Hendrix, Chandler, and Kramer had to redo the whole mix overnight to get it out on time.

Axis: Bold as Love is generally considered the weakest of the three Jimi Hendrix Experience albums, and contains few of the songs that get cited as all-time classics, though it does have its defenders, and “Little Wing” is generally considered among Hendrix’s best songs:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Little Wing”]

Hendrix was also starting to feel constrained by the format of the small group — and burned out by the constant pressure to record and tour. He told Melody Maker “I’d like to take a six-month break and go to a school of music. I’m tired of trying to write stuff and finding I can’t. I want to write mythology stories set to music based on a planetary thing and my imagination in general. It wouldn’t be similar to classical music, but I’d use strings and harps with extreme and opposite musical textures… I’d play with Mitch and Noel and hire other cats to supplement us.”

Hendrix would also talk in interviews at this point about wanting to do stage shows that incorporated a dramatic element, and maybe touring with Procol Harum and having them join the Experience on stage as actors in a musical play. But while he talked about wanting to change up the show, he didn’t. According to Noel Redding, he refused to rehearse new material — the group barely ever played anything from Axis on stage — and then complained that they weren’t doing anything new.

Hendrix seemed to believe — whether correctly or otherwise — that all the audiences wanted from him was “Purple Haze” and “Hey Joe” and so that’s what he gave them, over and over, later often writing in his diaries after shows “S.O.S”, standing for “same old” and then a word I can’t say here but which you can definitely guess.

Tensions between the group members, especially between Hendrix and Redding, also grew higher after a Scandinavian tour in early 1968, when according to Redding “We all got rotten drunk. Jimi had been hanging out with this gay Swedish journalist. Perhaps he was putting ideas in Jimi’s head, but Jimi suggested we should have a foursome.”

Redding, who was straight, wasn’t interested in having a gay foursome, and Hendrix (who on at least two other occasions we know about propositioned other men to join him in group sex, though on both those occasions — with the drummer Dallas Taylor and with Arthur Lee of Love, a woman was also involved) got very frustrated and started smashing up the hotel room, and ended up breaking a window and cutting his hand, getting fined for it.

After the Scandinavian tour, it was back off to America. Mike Jeffery sent both the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Eric Burdon’s New Animals on separate, though sometimes overlapping, tours of the States, promoted with a joint press conference announcing “The British are Coming”. Along with them came two other bands Jeffery and Chandler managed, who would act as support for both bands, swapping places occasionally. The first of these was a band called Eire Apparent, who originally featured guitarist Henry McCullough, who would go on to join Wings, but who had to quit the band shortly after the tour started after being deported for cannabis possession and was replaced. Hendrix actually took Eire Apparent into the studio while they were on tour and produced a single for them:

[Excerpt: Eire Apparent, “Yes I Need Someone”]

Hendrix also played on that track, and he produced the group’s first album, which also featured Mitchell, Redding, and their friend Robert Wyatt, who added backing vocals with Redding on “The Clown”, which also featured Hendrix playing guitar:

[Excerpt: Eire Apparent, “The Clown”]

Wyatt was the drummer and lead singer of Soft Machine, the other band who were regularly supporting the Experience in the US, and who also recorded their debut album during that tour, this one not produced by Hendrix but by Chas Chandler and Tom Wilson:

[Excerpt: Soft Machine, “Joy of a Toy”]

The 1968 tour was one that caused Hendrix to confront a great deal about his past. He came back to Seattle on the tour, visiting his family for the first time in years — the reunion brought him closer to his brother Leon, but brought up a lot of bad memories of his father’s abuse and of his dead mother.

There were also daily reminders of the racism which Hendrix could never totally escape — in Britain, for example, he’d had to move out of the flat he was subletting from Ringo Starr after it was discovered there was a prohibition in the lease on Black people renting it — but which was a lot less blatant in the UK, and manifested in different ways. On the US tour things went from, at best, Hendrix having to get white colleagues to hail taxis for him to, at worst, discovering that the driver who had been booked to drive them between shows for part of the tour was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, or a policeman who was part of the security detail for one of his shows pulling a gun on him after seeing him with a white woman, leading to all the police pulling out of working the show that night en masse.

These tensions, along with the stress of playing those SOS shows and the need to record yet another album without having the time to properly do it, and the increased drug use, made Hendrix become steadily more aggressive and irritable. His violence against girlfriends became notably worse, and he was starting to fall out with all his collaborators.

(Incidentally, I need to say this here again — violence against women was *endemic* in musicians at this point, and as I said at the beginning of the series, if I talked about it properly every time it came up, this would not be a series about music but a history of misogynistic crimes. However, I have found myself *revolted* when researching this episode how pretty much every biography of Hendrix will talk about him as a lovely, affable, peaceful man only pages after recounting some horrific act of abuse, which is inevitably excused as him “only” being violent when he was jealous or drunk, as an aberration in his character rather than a central feature of it. So, as I never want to be that kind of person, I want to reiterate here that my not going into detail about these things is *not* meant to be that kind of minimisation, and Hendrix’s behaviour towards women, like that of so many of his contemporaries (and too many today) was disgusting and inexcusable. Editorial note over, back to the story)

And in the middle of all this, he was having to work on his next album, the first sign of which was a single:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “All Along the Watchtower”]

The group had started work on “All Along the Watchtower” in January 1968, before the stress started to get to Hendrix, and like many of the recordings he was involved in at that point it was a collaboration with many of his favourite musicians. And those favourite musicians did not include Noel Redding.

At first it wasn’t even necessarily “All Along the Watchtower” that Hendrix wanted to record after he heard John Wesley Harding for the first time — the song he latched on to at first was “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”, and there was initially talk of him recording that one. He loved the whole album, and would later record “Drifter’s Escape” as well. But much as he’d astonished the Beatles by performing “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” just days after the track came out, now he was going to take a song by his other current idol and make it into his own.

The initial recording, in January, was cut in Olympic Studios’ four-track facilities in London, and the basic track they cut there just consisted of two acoustic guitars, a six-string played by Hendrix and a twelve-string played by his friend Dave Mason of Traffic, and Mitchell on drums. Hendrix was going to overdub the bass part himself, and when he informed the group that he wanted to do that, Redding went to the pub rather than stay in the session. Another visitor to the pub was Hendrix’s friend Brian Jones, who turned up *after* he had got drunk and tried to add piano to a couple of takes, before gently being removed from the instrument.

This kind of attitude to friends turning up — sometimes accomplished musicians, more often just scenesters — was starting to infuriate Chas Chandler. Chandler wanted to run tight sessions with minimal nonsense, but Hendrix liked to have his friends around him, and jam, and explore ideas while the clock was running. This is sometimes portrayed as an art vs commerce thing, and there is an element of that — obviously Chandler didn’t want to waste money — but it’s important to remember that Chandler had been a musician himself, in one of the most respected bands of the mid sixties, and had played on a string of classic hit singles that had been made that way. As Eddie Kramer later explained, “without Chas there would have been no huge superstar. To start with, Chas recognised Jimi’s talent, and then he was able to corral that raw talent and develop it and encourage it. He would sit with Jimi every night, helping him to write lyrics and helping him with the song structures, encouraging him to write. However, during that third album the sessions took their own course, and Jimi, with his strong vision, just allowed things to happen in a very casual way.”

After getting rid of Jones, Hendrix, Mason, and Mitchell went through several more takes — Mason had difficulty getting the rhythm down the way Hendrix wanted it — and then Hendrix overdubbed his bass and lead guitar, before the group went off on tour again.

Brian Jones did make one actual musical contribution to the track though — it’s him playing the vibraslap, the unusual percussion instrument at the start:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience,  “All Along the Watchtower”]

Work on the track, and on the album, continued at the Record Plant in New York, where the tape was transferred first from four-track to twelve, and then to sixteen — a revelation for Hendrix, who had never previously used more than four tracks, and who had done most of his recording in Britain where even the Beatles had only just switched to eight-track.

The Record Plant was a big part of the reason for the increasing looseness of Hendrix’s sessions. The new studio had only been set up in March 1968, by Gary Kellgren, Tom Wilson’s favourite engineer, who had engineered sessions Wilson had produced for the Mothers of Invention, the Velvet Underground, and Chandler’s old bandmate Eric Burdon, as well as engineering the session for “Burning of the Midnight Lamp”.

Wilson and Chandler had used the studio as soon as it opened, to produce the first Soft Machine album with Kellgren engineering, and Chandler had booked the studio solid for six weeks to make the next Jimi Hendrix Experience album. The studio had even agreed to hire Eddie Kramer, who wanted to move away from England to a country he saw as less interested in punishing success, and who took over the sessions after he got over there, with Kellgren doing a couple while Kramer was moving over.

But the whole reason that the Record Plant had been built was that Kellgren wanted to build a studio that went against all Chandler’s instincts. He didn’t want a studio that was antiseptic and white and full of people watching clocks, he wanted to build somewhere comfortable for people to hang out and relax and get their creative juices flowing.

In Hendrix’s case this generally took the form of him going to a nightclub called the Scene that was round the corner from the Record Plant, staying there til five hours after the session started, and then showing up with a couple of dozen new friends, some of them musicians.

Chandler soon tired of this, and as he was also becoming increasingly worried about Mike Jeffery’s attitude to financial probity, he decided to get Jeffery to buy him out of his contract. Jeffery paid three hundred thousand pounds to become Hendrix’s sole manager, and Hendrix took over production:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “All Along the Watchtower”]

In some ways, Chandler got out at the right time. “All Along the Watchtower” would be the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s last major hit single — “Crosstown Traffic”, the follow-up, only scraped the bottom of the UK top forty and didn’t get any higher than fifty-two in the US, while “Watchtower” made the top twenty in the US and number five in the UK.

The track, as finally finished in the Record Plant, is an extraordinary-sounding thing, with a sense of doom which is simply not there in Dylan’s original, and which would soon start a whole subgenre that has been labelled apocalypse rock, and which is indelibly associated with the Vietnam war, even though Hendrix himself at this point was still a supporter of the war (a position which he would modify over the next year, as he became more aware of the way opposition to the war was entangled with support for civil rights).

Hendrix’s version of the song, in fact, became so highly regarded that Dylan himself, when he returned to touring in 1974, based his arrangement in live performances on Hendrix’s rather than his own original version:

[Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Band, “All Along the Watchtower (live)”]

And when future cover versions have tried re-examining and recontextualising the material, or parodying it, or creating cut-ups, like the version by XTC, it’s always been Hendrix’s version they’re riffing off:

[Excerpt: XTC, “All Along the Watchtower”]

The album for which “All Along the Watchtower” was the advance single, Electric Ladyland, would end up being the last studio album Jimi Hendrix would complete, and the only one where Hendrix was the credited producer, Chandler having left after recording something like a quarter of the album. It was also an album that wasn’t really by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, despite the credits. Of the sixteen tracks on the album, less than half actually featured all three members of the band — seven had someone other than Redding on bass, and two more featured Hendrix’s old friend Buddy Miles, another veteran of the chitlin’ circuit who was by this point the drummer with the Electric Flag, in place of Mitchell.

Indeed, the album could even have ended up with fewer tracks featuring the full band than it did — there’s an early take of Redding’s only song for the album, “Little Miss Strange”, that while it was produced by Hendrix had a band consisting of Redding on guitar, Steve Stills on bass, and Miles on drums, with Hendrix and Mitchell not on the track.

Part of the reason seems to have been that Hendrix was getting ever more interested in emphasising his own Black roots in his music. The title track,  “Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)”, one of the tracks that only features Hendrix and Mitchell, is his most blatant homage to Curtis Mayfield yet:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience,  “Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)”]

While “Voodoo Chile” is the culmination of a long blues tradition. It’s a variant of a song called “Catfish Blues”, the first version of which I know of is by Robert Petway:

[Excerpt: Robert Petway, “Catfish Blues”]

It’s a blues standard — there’s a version of it by Lightnin’ Hopkins, for example:

[Excerpt: Lightnin’ Hopkins, “Catfish Blues”]

While Muddy Waters recorded a version of the same melody with different lyrics under the title “Rolling Stone”, a title which inspired a band, a Dylan song, and a magazine:

[Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Rolling Stone”]

The Jimi Hendrix Experience had recorded their own version of “Catfish Blues” in a BBC session in 1967, incorporating bits of “Rolling Stone” and two other Muddy Waters tracks with similar melodies, “Rolling and Tumbling” and “Still a Fool” :

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Catfish Blues (BBC session)”]

And so when Jack Casady of the Jefferson Airplane and Steve Winwood came into the studio, Hendrix and Mitchell jammed with them — and without Redding — as Hendrix sang some new lyrics which combined Waters’ voodoo-related lyrics from songs like “Hoochie Coochie Man” with Hendrix’s own interest in science fiction, becoming the fifteen-minute blues jam “Voodoo Chile”:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Voodoo Chile”]

That wasn’t the end of the “Voodoo Child” concept, though. The next day film cameras were in the studio, and Hendrix wrote another song based around the same concept, and taught it to Redding and Mitchell, who recorded it while being filmed. It became “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”, probably the last of Hendrix’s most well-known songs to be completed during his lifetime:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”]

As you might imagine, Noel Redding constantly being left out of recordings, and having to play exactly what Hendrix told him to play when he was included, didn’t sit well with him, and he was also eager to get back to playing guitar, his first instrument. Redding formed his own band, Fat Mattress (who Hendrix referred to as “Thin Pillow”), and *they* were managed by Chas Chandler, with whom Redding agreed about Hendrix’s habit of getting into endless jams with his friends rather than knuckling down in the studio with his bandmates. And they were booked in as the support act for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, so Redding would end up playing both halves of the show. Their music was very different from the Experience’s, showing Redding’s wish to make music that was more like the Move or Small Faces:

[Excerpt: Fat Mattress, “Petrol Pump Assistant”]

For now, Redding continued in both bands, although by early 1969 nobody was happy in the Jimi Hendrix Experience any more. Hendrix was getting more ambitious for his own music — he was still technically living in London, though the Experience’s constant US touring meant he was spending more time in the US than at home, and had moved into a house next door to one that had previously been the home of Handel, and was inspired by Handel to want to make more complex music. He was also sick of Noel Redding, and wanted to help out his old Army friend Billy Cox, who he’d always liked playing with — and he was increasingly becoming aware of an attitude among the more militant Black activists that he should not be playing with white musicians at all.

Hendrix was increasingly just playing *badly* on stage. He’d turn up and give a perfunctory performance, often on acid, playing the SOS songs, often putting his guitar out of tune and then either getting angry at the audience for their impatience while he tuned it, or just continuing to play out of tune for the rest of the set. And then after playing the Hollywood Bowl or the Albert Hall or somewhere and giving a shoddy performance for huge paying crowds, he’d go off to a small club somewhere and jam with his friends and play better than ever. Rolling Stone called one of his performances like “watching a bullfighter who’s so good that no bull challenges him, and therefore there’s no danger and therefore no suspense.”

He also got busted for drug possession crossing the border from the US into Canada — he was later found not guilty — and as part of his bail for a long time in 1969 he couldn’t leave the US even if he wanted to. His ties to the London scene that had made him were growing weaker by the day.

Things came to a head at a festival in Detroit, where Noel Redding was greeted with surprise by some of the other acts on the bill — they thought he wasn’t in the band any more.  Then Hendrix, who was on acid, announced on stage that that show would be the group’s last ever show together. Taking these as subtle hints that he wasn’t wanted any more, Redding quit the band and flew back to London to work on Fat Mattress’ first album instead.

Billy Cox joined Hendrix and Mitchell for some TV appearances, and then Hendrix moved to Woodstock, to a house Mike Jeffery had arranged for him in the hope that he could basically copy Dylan and get a new band together there. Hendrix did get a new band together — Cox on bass and their old friend Larry Lee, who had played with the two of them in the King Kasuals years earlier, on rhythm guitar, plus drummer Juma Sultan and conga-player Gerardo Velez.

And then he decided to go off to Morocco and not tell anyone.

He flew back nine days later to an understandably angry band, who weren’t getting on particularly well — Cox and Lee were chitlin’ circuit R&B players, while Sultan and Velez were jazzers, and they didn’t mesh at all well. And by this point, Hendrix was also not getting on with Jeffery, who he was starting to realise might not have his best interests at heart.

The new group — called Gypsy Sun and Rainbows — were booked to appear at the Woodstock Festival, but they were shambolic and not getting any better, so Hendrix got in touch with Mitch Mitchell and asked him to fly over and join the new group, meaning there would now be three percussionists. Mitchell said of the ten days rehearsing with them that they were “probably the only band I’ve ever been involved with that did not improve over that time. I got the feeling that Jimi simply wanted to get through the gig and start again.”

The Woodstock gig was in most respects a massive anticlimax. The group were meant to headline the last night at 11PM, but the event was so shambolic and ran so late that they ended up going on at nine the next morning, after almost everyone had already gone home.

But there was one performance that Hendrix gave that morning that became legendary:

[Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, “The Star-Spangled Banner (Woodstock)”]

Hendrix had played the American National Anthem a few times before, but this one was somehow different. To everyone who listened to it it seemed to have the same apocalyptic air as his “All Along the Watchtower”, to be his comment on everything that was going wrong in Vietnam. It would be Jimi Hendrix’s last major cultural impact on the world:

[Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, “The Star-Spangled Banner (Woodstock)”]

For the last year of his life, Hendrix spent most of the brief amount of time he wasn’t on tour in New York, working on new music and also supervising the planning of a new recording studio, to be called Electric Lady, which was being built mostly so he wouldn’t have to spend so much money on studio time for his future records. But things kept getting in the way.

For example, his manager, Mike Jeffery, had Mob connections, and somehow, in a way that has never been conclusively settled, this led to Hendrix getting kidnapped by gangsters and held for ransom — different people have said either that this was done to get money out of Jeffery or at Jeffery’s instigation to show Hendrix who had the real power in their relationship. Whatever the cause, Hendrix was soon freed — it turned out there were some advantages to being on Frank Sinatra’s record label.

Gypsy Sun and Rainbows split up very quickly, and for the next year Hendrix would be constantly trying to pull together a supergroup of musicians who were able to meet his musical standards, and never getting very far. In particular, he wanted a singer, because he was never comfortable with his own voice, and at various times there were plans for him to form a band with Arthur Brown of the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, with Steve Winwood, or with Arthur Lee of Love. The latter is the only one that got as far as recording anything, when Hendrix joined Love for a session that produced the track “The Everlasting First”, not a highlight of either’s discography:

[Excerpt: Love, “The Everlasting First”]

But there’s one collaboration that I can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t have been fascinated to hear, had it worked out. Miles Davis had recently started working with the guitarist John McLaughlin, one of the few guitarists of a similar level of technical skill to Hendrix, and had been getting interested in developments in rock music that McLaughlin told him about. The two had recently collaborated on an album that often gets called the first fusion album (though of course, as we always say, there’s no first anything), Davis’ “Bitches Brew”:

[Excerpt: Miles Davis, “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down”]

McLaughlin knew Mitch Mitchell from before either had become successful, and he’d introduced Davis to Hendrix, thinking rightly that the two would get on like a house on fire. The two men soon made plans to record an album together, with drummer Tony Williams. And Hendrix knew who the perfect bass player would be.

Unfortunately, what Hendrix didn’t know was that the Beatles had split up, though that hadn’t been made public, and Paul McCartney had retreated to his Scottish farm and cut off contact with everyone, so he never received the telegram the three musicians sent him asking him to play on their album…

Sadly the album never got made even without McCartney, as Davis and Williams demanded an unreasonably large amount of money, and the main lasting impact of it was that Alan Douglas, the producer lined up for the sessions, later became for decades the man in charge of putting together Hendrix’s posthumous records, with controversial results.

Instead, Hendrix did another album altogether, a live album with a new group he called Band of Gypsys. The Band of Gypsys album — and possibly the band itself — only existed to fulfil a contractual obligation. As part of the ongoing lawsuits with Chalpin, he had agreed to give Chalpin one new album, of new material, that he could release in return for dropping his suits against Warners. That album was a live recording by a new trio in the same format as the Experience, consisting of Hendrix and his old friends Billy Cox and Buddy Miles, and with Miles taking as many lead vocals as Hendrix and writing two of the songs:

[Excerpt: Band of Gypsys, “Changes”]

The album is generally considered weak — Hendrix said of it “I wasn’t too satisfied with the album. If it had been up to me, I never would have put it out. From a musician’s point of view, it was not a good recording and I was out of tune on a few things … not enough preparation went into it and it came out a bit ‘grizzly’. The thing was, we owed the record company an album and they were pushing us, so here it is.”

It did, however, contain one track that’s generally regarded as among Hendrix’s best — “Machine Gun”:

[Excerpt: Band of Gypsys, “Machine Gun”]

A month later though, on January the 28th 1970, the Band of Gypsys played their last gig. By this point fences had been more or less mended between the members of the Experience, and Mitchell and Redding came along to see Band of Gypsys play Madison Square Garden as headliners on a bizarre bill for a “Festival of Peace” that featured the cast of the musical Hair, Dave Brubeck, and Harry Belafonte.

They sat backstage and watched as Hendrix came out and only played a song and a half before having to be helped off stage, he was so incapacitated. Both Redding and Buddy Miles say that they saw Mike Jeffery spike Hendrix with acid before he came on stage, and Jeffery used the debacle as an excuse to sack Miles and Cox, and to announce the reformation of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

But it was a new Jimi Hendrix Experience. Very quickly after Hendrix and Mitchell got together and started rehearsing, they decided they’d rather have Billy Cox as the bass player, and Noel Redding was once again sacked, this time without being told to his face. A tour was arranged for the new Experience, with Buddy Miles’ band as the support act to show there were no hard feelings, and they were also in the studio, recording songs that Hendrix thought were some of his best, like one about a dream he’d had as a child about his dead mother:

[Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, “Angel”]

But things weren’t going well at all for Hendrix. According to Miles, Hendrix was often suicidal by this point — he was using far harder drugs than he had been previously, and every time he tried to play his new music on stage, with its harder funk edge, audiences just shouted out for the SOS, so he gave it to them. He was starting to look physically ill and be despondent a lot of the time.

His mood didn’t improve when the tour took him to Seattle, where he saw some of his family again and had the same conflicted feelings he often did. As a kid he’d not been able to go to his mother’s funeral, and now he decided he needed to visit her grave for the first time, and spent hours searching for it but couldn’t find it. He told people afterwards “the next time I come back to Seattle, it’ll be in a pine box”.

From Seattle, the tour went to Hawaii, where Hendrix was dragged into being involved in a semi-improvised underground film called Rainbow Bridge, and then he was finally able to get to New York and spend a few days in his new recording studio, Electric Lady. There was an opening party for it with lots of major stars, and with some younger arty people, one of whom later recalled

“There was a party to open the Electric Lady studio, but I was too shy to go in, so I sat on the steps. And out came Hendrix; he asked what I was doing and said, ‘Hey, I’m kind of shy too.’ So we sat on the steps and he talked about what he was going to do when he got back from London; how he was going to create a new language of rock’n’roll; I was so excited. And then he was gone. He never came back.”

“So Jimi never got to record in Electric Lady, but I did.”

Patti Smith’s first record was indeed made at Electric Lady, and was a version of “Hey Joe”:

[Excerpt: Patti Smith, “Hey Joe”]

Hendrix had a lot of big plans for late 1970. He was going to do a show with Gil Evans, Miles Davis’ old arranger, who was going to create jazz versions of Hendrix’s compositions and have Hendrix solo over them, and they were going to do an album together. But first Hendrix flew over to play the Isle of Wight festival, the same place that his idol Dylan had played the year before, and gave what might be his last actually good performance:

[Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, “All Along the Watchtower (live at the Isle of Wight)”]

There followed an utterly disastrous tour of Europe, which started with a mere bad performance, but was followed by Billy Cox — who didn’t indulge in illegal drugs — getting spiked with acid and having a psychotic break as a result, Hendrix getting an infection that made him feverish, riots by fascists, and gales preventing outdoor shows. A few days in to the tour Cox’s mental health was so obviously not improving that they cancelled the rest of the tour and went back to London, with Cox being sent home to recuperate.

Hendrix was in a bad way in London. Not only was his friend ill, but he was having to deal with both a paternity suit and with ongoing legal actions from Chalpin, who was still suing his UK label. He was also entangled with multiple women, at least two of whom have since claimed he was engaged to them.

Starting from the tenth of September, at a loose end, he started to go out and reconnect with old friends. He went to a launch party for the first solo album by Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, who was delighted to meet up with his old friend:

[Excerpt: Michael Nesmith and the First National Band, “Nine Times Blue”]

He went to a club and tried to jam with Eric Burdon and his new band War, but was too out of it, mumbling “I’m almost gone”, and was in such a bad state the roadies wouldn’t let him get on stage. The next night he did get up on stage with them, his last ever performance.

Hendrix’s last two days are shrouded in mystery. If you were to take the word of everyone who claims to have seen him over those days, he must have been in at least five places at once most of the time, simultaneously at parties having a great time while alone somewhere else dropping hints about his imminent death.

There are lots of claims and counterclaims about how Jimi Hendrix actually died, and the truth will never be known. The woman he was with at the time, Monika Dannemann, has claimed that they were engaged but has been described by others who knew Hendrix as delusional and a stalker. She died by suicide in the nineties, and she told different stories on the day, at the inquest, and in later years, none of which seem to properly match the facts that can otherwise be established.

Eric Burdon, who was the first person Dannemann called when she found Hendrix dead, and was one of his closest friends, says *he* believes that Hendrix killed himself deliberately. Other people point to Mike Jeffery, saying he somehow murdered Hendrix — Jeffery had gangland connections, was strongly rumoured also to be in the Secret Service, and himself died in odd circumstances in 1973 which have led some to claim he faked his own death.

There are always stories like that that go around after a death like this, and there *are* discrepancies in the evidence and the timeline, but the simplest explanation for those is the obvious one that seems to jump out — that there was evidence of illegal drug use in the flat, and that Dannemann, possibly with other people’s help, tried to clear out the evidence before any officials could come round, and couldn’t keep her story straight afterwards.

For all the conspiracy theories, for all the myriad stories people tell, the most likely story is simply that Jimi Hendrix asked the woman he was with for some sleeping tablets, mistook the strong ones she had for the weak ones he normally took, took too many of them after drinking too much, and choked to death on his own vomit in his sleep.

The time between his first single with the Experience coming out and the release of his last studio album, Electric Ladyland, was twenty-two months. The time between then and his death, time spent doing tours he didn’t want to be doing, being prevented from putting out new music by contractual and managerial problems, and vainly trying to get in snatches of recording time to record tracks he would never be able to finish, was twenty-three months. Literally half of his career was spent doing what he called the SOS.

But those snatched recordings would eventually get released, endlessly repackaged, often with overdubs by musicians he never met, for the financial benefit of people who despised him in life. Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding stopped receiving royalties and later got one-off payments instead of proper royalties, after being told that there were not going to be any more releases so they might as well just take a payoff. Both are now also dead.

The recording Hendrix was going to do with Gil Evans eventually happened though, reworked as a tribute to Hendrix, and we’ll close with a small section of that, a section of the music he might have made had he lived, or had he not been forced to stay on the treadmill.

[Excerpt: Gil Evans, “Angel”]