A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 147: “Hey Joe” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Episode Date: April 16, 2022

Episode one hundred and forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hey Joe” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and is the longest episode to date, at over two hours. Patreon backers also have a twenty-two-minute bonus episode available, on “Making Time” by The Creation. 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/ (more…)

A History of rock music in 500 songs by Andrew Hic. Episode 147 Hey Joe By the Jimmy Hendricks experience. Just a quick note before we start. This episode deals with a song whose basic subject is a man murdering a woman and that song also contains references to guns and in some versions to cocaine use. Some versions excerpt that also contain misogynistic slurs.

If those things are likely to upset you, please skip this episode, as the whole episode focuses on that song. I would hope it goes without saying that I don't approve of misogyny, intimate partner violence or murder. And my discussing a song does not mean I condone acts depicted in its lyrics, and the episode itself deals with the writing and recording of the song rather than its subject matter. But it would be impossible to talk about the record without ex-executive.

excerpting the song. The normalisation of violence against women in rock music lyrics is a subject I will come back to, but did not have room for in what is already a very long episode. Anyway, on with the show. Let's talk about the folk process, shall we? We've talked before, like in the episodes on Stagger Lee and Ida read, about how there are some songs that aren't really individual songs in themselves, but are instead collections of related songs that might happen to share a name or a title or a story or a melody, but which might be different in other ways. There are probably more songs that are like this than songs that aren't, and it doesn't just apply to folk songs, although that's where we see it most notably. You only have

to look at the way a song like Hound Dog changed from the Willie May Thornton version to the version by Elvis, which only shared a handful of words with the original. Songs change and recombine, and everyone who sings them brings something different to them until they change in ways that nobody could have predicted, like a game of telephone. But there usually remains a core, an archetypal story or idea, which remains constant no matter how much the song changes,

like Stagger Lee shooting Billy in a bar over a hat, or Frankie killing her man. Sometimes the man is Al, sometimes he's Johnny, but he always done her wrong. And one of those stories is about a man who shoots his cheating, woman with a 44 and tries to escape, sometimes to a town called Jericho, and sometimes to Juarez, Mexico. The first version of this song we have a recording of is by Clarence Ashley in 1929, a recording of an older folk song that was called, in his version, Little Sadie.

Now last night for you take a little round, I met a little sinny and a gloater down, I run right home and I went to bed, a 44 smoke-liss none of my head. At some point next morning It's a high of best nine The family known The family known as cocaine blues Standing around I'm going to take stature

At some point Somebody seems to have noticed That that that song Has a slight melodic similarity To another family of songs The family known as Cocaine Blues Or Take a Whiff on Me

Which was popular around the same time Cocaine Habit The Worm Means in a low And so the two songs became combined, and the protagonist of Little Sadie now had a reason to kill his woman, a reason other than her cheating, that is. He had taken a shot of cocaine before shooting her.

The first recording of this version, under the name Cocaine Blues, seems to have been a Western swing version by W.A. Nichols' Western aces. Went right home and I went to bed. Stuck at Loving 44 beneath my head. Got up next morning and I grabbed that gun. Took a shot of cocaine and the way I run. Made a good run, but I run too slow. They overtook me down in more as Mexico.

Woody Guthrie recorded a version around the same time. I've seen different dates and so don't know for sure if it was before or after Nichols' version. And his version had himself credited as songwriter and included this last verse which doesn't seem to appear on any earlier recordings of the song. Jury found me guilty in the first degree and they laid me down in the penitentiary.

Yes, the judge found you're guilty and the jury too. Cried Lord and heaven has some mercy on me. I'll be here for the rest of the rest. my life, all I'd done was kill my wife. That doesn't appear on many later recordings either, but it did clearly influence yet another song, Mose Allison's classic jazz number,

Parchman Farm. I'm going to be on this farm for my natural life. Well, I'm going to be here for the best of my life, and all I did was shoot my wife. I'm sitting over here on parchment farm. The most famous recordings of the song, though, were by Johnny Cash, who recorded it as both cocaine blues and as transfusion blues. In Cash's version of the song, the murderer gets sentenced to 99 years in the Folsom Pen, so it made sense that Cash would perform that on his most

famous album, the live album of his January 1968 concerts at Folsom Frizen, which revitalized his career after several years of limited success. The judge who smiled as he picked up his pen Ninety-nine years in the Folsom Pen Ninety-nine years underneath that ground I can't forget today I shut that bad bitch down Come on you gotta listen unto me Lay off that whiskey

Well that was Cash's first live recording at a prison though It wasn't the first show he played at a prison ever since the success of his single Falson Prison Blues, he'd been something of a hero to prisoners, and he had been doing shows in prisons for 11 years by the time of that recording. And on one of those shows,

he had as his support act, a man named Billy Roberts, who performed his own song which followed the same broad outlines as Cacane Blues, a man with a 44, who goes out to shoot his woman, and then escapes to Mexico. Roberts was an obscure folk singer,

who never had much success, but who was good with people. He'd been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1950s, and at a gig at Gerdie's Folk City, he'd met a woman named Neela Miller, an aspiring songwriter, and had struck up a relationship with her. Miller only ever wrote one song that got recorded by anyone else, a song called Mean World Blues that was recorded by Dave Van Runk. What are you thinking of?

That makes you tremble and turn away. Now, that's an original song, but it does bear a certain melodic resemblance to another old folk song, one known as Where Did You Sleep Last Night, or in the Pines, or sometimes black girl. My girl, don't lie to me. Where did you sleep last night? Come on tell me, baby.

Miller was clearly familiar with the tradition from which Where did you sleep last night comes. It's a type of folk song where someone asks a song where someone asks a question and then someone else answers it, and this repeats building up a story. This is a very old folk song format, and you hear it, for example, in Lord Randall, the song on which Bob Dylan based

A Hard Wains are going to fall. For here you been Lord Randall, my son, oh for here you been my bonny young man, I've been to the wild weddin'r make my bed soon. For I'm weary way hunting and a fain would lie do. I say she was clearly familiar with it, because the other song she wrote that anyone's heard was based very much around that idea.

Baby, please don't go to town, is a question and answer song. in precisely that form, but with an unusual chord progression for a folk song. You may remember back in the episode on 8 Miles High, I talked about the circle of fifths, a chord progression which either increases or decreases by a fifth for every chord, so it might go C-G-D-A-E. That's a common progression in pop and jazz,

but not really so much in folk, but it's the one that Miller had used for Baby Please Don't Go to Town, and she'd taught Roberts that song, which she only recorded much later. After Roberts and Miller broke up, Roberts kept playing that melody, but he changed the lyrics. The lyrics he added had several influences.

There was that question and answer folk song format. There's the story of Cocaine Blues, with its protagonist getting a 44 to shoot his woman down before heading to Mexico, and there's also a country hit from 1953. Hey Joe was originally recorded by Carl Smith, one of the most popular country singers of the early 50s. Joe

Where'd you find that pearly girlie? Where'd you get that jolly dolly? How'd you ate that dish I wish was my Joe? She's got skin as creamy dreamy eyes It looks so lovey-dovey lips of red as cherry-berry wine Now listen, Joe I ain't no here But oh buddy, let me tell you how I

That was written by Boodlow's brand a few years before the songs he co-worked for the Everly Brothers and became a country number one, staying at the top for eight weeks. It didn't make the pop chart, but a pop cover version of it by Frankie Lane made the top ten in the US. Alice and Joe, I ain't no heel, but oh buddy, let me tell you how I feel. She's a honey, she's a sugar pie,

I'm warning you, I'm gonna try to steal her from you. Hey, Joe, though we've been the best of friends, this is where that friendship ends, I got to have that dolly for my own. Lane's record did even better in the UK, where it made number one, at a point where Lane was the biggest star in music in Britain. At the time, the UK charts only had a top 12, and at one point four of the singles in the top 12 were by Lane, including that one. There was also an answer record by Kitty Wells, which made the country top ten later that year.

Oddly, despite it being a very big hit, that Hey Joe had almost no further cover versions for 20 years, though it did become part of the Searchers set list, and was included on their live at the Star Club album in 1963, in an arrangement that owed a lot to what did I say. But that song was clearly on Roberts's mind, when, as so many American folk musicians did, he travelled to the UK in the late 50s

and became briefly involved in the burgeoning UK folk movement. In particular, he spent some time with a 12-string guitar player from Edinburgh called Lem Partridge, who was also a mentor to Bert Janche, and who was apparently an extraordinary musician, though I know of no recordings of his work. Partridge helped Roberts finish up the song, though Partridge is about the only person in this story

who didn't claim a writing credit for it at one time or another, saying that he just helped Roberts out, and that Roberts deserved all the credit. The first known recording of the completed song is from 1962, a few years after Roberts had returned to the US, though it didn't surface until decades later. Roberts was performing this song regularly on the folk circuit, and around the time of that recording, he also finally got round to registering the copyright, several years after it was written. When Muller heard the song, she was furious,

and she later said, Imagine my surprise when I heard Hey Joe by Billy Roberts. There was my tune, my chord progression, my question-answer format. He dropped the bridge that was in my song, and changed it enough so that the copyright did not protect me from his plagiarism. I decided not to go through with all the complications of dealing with him. He never contacted me about it or gave me any credit.

He knows he committed a morally reprehensible act. He never was man enough to make amends and apologise to me, or to give credit for the inspiration. Dealing with all that was also why I made the decision not to become a professional songwriter. It left a bad taste in my mouth. Pete Seeger, a friend of Millers, was outraged by the injustice,

and offered to testify on her behalf should you decide to take Roberts to court, but she never did. Sometime around this point, Roberts also played on that prison bill with Johnny Cash, and what happened next is hard to pin down. I've read several different versions of the story which changed the date and which prison this was in,

and none of the details in any story hanged together properly. Everything introduces weird inconsistencies and things which just make no sense at all. Something like this basic outline of the story seems to have happened, but the outline itself is weird, and we'll probably never know the truth. Roberts played his set, and one of the songs he played was Hey Joe, and at some point he got talking to one of the prisoners in the audience, Dino Valenti.

We've met Valenti before in the episode on Mr. Tambourine Man. He was a singer-songwriter himself, and would later be the lead singer of QuickSilver Messenger Service, but he's probably best known for having written Get Together. You hold the key to love and fear, all in your trembling hands. One key unlocks them both, you know, and it's at your command. Well, people now get together will smile on your brother, try to love one another right now.

All right now. As we heard in the Mr. Tambourine Man episode, Valenti actually sold off his rights to that song to pay for his bail at one point, but he was in and out of prison several times because of drug busts. At this point, or so the story goes, he was eligible for parole, but he needed to prove he had a possible income when he got out, and one way he wanted to do that was to show that he had written a song that could be a hit he could make money off, but he didn't have such a song. He talked about his predicament with Roberts,

who agreed to let him claim to have written Hey Joe so he could get out of prison. He did make that claim, and when he got out of prison, he continued making the claim, and registered the copyright to Hey Joe in his own name. even though Roberts had already registered it, and signed a publishing deal for it with third-story music, a company owned by Herb Cohen, the future manager of the Mothers of Invention, and Cohen's brother Mutt.

Valenti was a popular face on the folk scene, and he played his song to many people, but two in particular would influence the way the song would develop, both of them people we've seen relatively recently in episodes of the podcast. One of them, Vince Martin, we'll come back to later, but the other was David Crosby, and so let's talk about him and the birds a bit more. Crosby and Valenti had been friends long before the birds formed,

and indeed we heard in the Mr. Tambourine Man episode how the group had named themselves after Valenti's song, Birds'ers. And pears are free, two birds you see, so they never have to run away from bears. And Crosby loved Hey Joe, which he believed was another of Valenti's songs. He'd perform it every chance he got, playing it solo on guitar in an arrangement that other people have compared to Moes Allison. He'd tried to get it on the first two birds' albums, but had been turned down, mostly

because of their manager and uncredited co-producer Jim Dixon, who had strong opinions about it, saying later, some of the songs that David would bring in from the outside were perfectly valid songs for other people, but did not seem to be compatible with the bird's myth. And he may not have liked the bird's myth. He fought for Hey Joe, and he did it. As long as I could say no, I did. And when I couldn't anymore, they did it. He had to give him something somewhere. I just wish it was something else. Hey Joe, I was bitterly opposed to. A song about a guy who murders his girlfriend in a jealous rage and is on the way to Mexico with a gun in his hand. It was not what I saw as a bird's song. Indeed, Dixon was so opposed to this.

song that he would later say, one of the reasons David engineered my getting thrown out was because I would not let Hey Joe be on the Turn Turn album. Dixon was though still working with the band when they got round to recording it. That came during the recording of their fifth dimension album, the album which included Eight Miles High. That album was mostly recorded after the departure of Jean Clark, which was where we left the group at the end of the Eight Miles High episode, and the loss of their main songwriter meant that they were struggling from material, doubly so since they also decided they were going to move away from Dylan covers. This meant that they had to rely on original material from the group's less commercial songwriters

and on a few folk songs, mostly learned from Pete Seeger. The album ended up with only 11 songs on it, compared to the 12 that was normal for American albums at that time, and the singles on it after 8 miles high weren't particularly promising as to the group's ability to come up with commercial material. The next single, 5D, a song by Roger McGuin about the fifth dimension, was a waltz time song that both Crosby and Chris Hillman were enthused by. It featured organ by Van Dyke Parks, and McGuin said of the organ part, when he came into the studio I told him to think Bark. He was already thinking Bark before that anyway. While the group liked it, though, that didn't make the top 40.

The next single did, just about, a song that McGwin had written as an attempt at communicating with Alien Life. He hoped that it would be played on the radio, and that the radio waves would eventually reach aliens, who would hear it and respond. The fifth dimension album did significantly worse, both critically and commercially, than their previous albums, and the group would soon drop Alan Stanton, the producer, in favour of Gary Usher, Brian Wilson's old songwriting partner. But the desperation for material meant that the group agreed to record the song which they still thought at the time had been written by Crosby's friend, though nobody other than Crosby was happy with it. And even Crosby later said, it was a mistake, I shouldn't have done it, everybody makes mistakes. McGwin said later, the reason Crosby did lead on Hey Joe was because it was his song.

He didn't write it, but he was responsible for finding it. He'd wanted to do it for years, but we would never let him. Of course, that arrangement is very far from the Mose Allison-style version Crosby had been doing previously, and the reason for that could be found in the full version of that McGuing quote, because the full version continues, he'd wanted to do it for years, but we would never let him. Then both Love and the Leaves had a minor hit with it, and David got so angry that we had to let him do it. His version wasn't that hot because he wasn't a strong-reed vocalist.

The arrangement we just heard was the arrangement that by this point, almost every group on the sunset strip scene was playing, and the reason for that was because of another friend of Crosby's, someone who had been a roadie for the birds, Graham McLean. McLean and Crosby had been very close, because they were both from very similar backgrounds. They were both Hollywood brats with huge egos.

McLean later said, Crosby and I got on perfectly. I didn't understand what everybody was complaining about because he was just like me. McLean was, if anything, from an even more privileged background than Crosby's. His father was an architect who'd designed houses for Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin. His neighbour when growing up was Frederick Lowe, the composer of My Fair Lady.

He learned to swim in Elizabeth Taylor's private pool, and his first girlfriend was Liza Minnelly. Another early girlfriend was Jackie DeShannon, the singer-songwriter who did the original version of Needles and Pins, who he was introduced to by Sharon Shealy, whose name you will remember from many previous episodes. McLean had wanted to be an artist until his late teens. when he walked into a shop in Westwood, which sometimes sold his paintings, the sandal shop, and heard some people singing folk songs there. He decided he wanted to be a folk singer,

and soon started performing at the balladier, a club which would later be renamed the Troubadour, playing songs like Robert Johnson's Crossroads Blues, which had recently become a staple of the folk repertoire, after John Hammond put out the King of the Delta Blues singer's album. Reading interview, I believe I'm sinking down. Reading interviews with people who knew McLean at the time, the same phrase keeps coming up.

John Kay, later the lead singer of Steppenwolf, said, There was a young kid, Brian McLean, kind of cocky but nonetheless a nice kid, who hung around Crosby and McGuin, while Chris Hillman said, he was a pretty good kid, but a wee bit cocky. He was a fan of the various musicians who later formed the birds,

and was also an admirer of a young guitarist on the scene named Rylan Kuda, and of a blues singer on the scene named Taj Mahal. He apparently was briefly in a band with Taj Mahal, called Somer's Children, who as far as I can tell had no connection to the duo that Kurt Becher later formed of the same name, before Taj Mahal and Kuda formed The Rising Suns, a multiracial blues band, who were for a while the main rivals to the birds on the scene. McLean, though, firmly hitched himself to the birds, and particularly to Crosby.

He became a rowdy on their first tour, and Hillman said, He was a hard-working guy on our behalf, As I recall, he pretty much answered to Crosby and was David's assistant, to put it diplomatically. More like his gopher, in fact. But McLean wasn't cut out for the hard work that being a rody required, and after being the bird's rody for about 30 shows, he started making mistakes,

and when they went off on their UK tour, they decided not to keep employing him. He was heartbroken, but got back into trying his own musical career. He auditioned for the monkeys unsuccessfully, but shortly after that, Some sources say even the same day as the audition, though that seems a little too neat. He went to Ben Franks, the LA hangout that had actually been name-checked in the open call for monkeys' auditions, which said they wanted Ben Frank's types.

And there he met Arthur Lee and Johnny Eccles. Eccles would later remember he was this gadfly kind of character who knew everybody and was flitting from table to table. He wore striped pants and a scarf, and he had this long strawberry hair. All the girls loved him, for whatever reason, he came to. and sat at our table. Of course, Arthur and I were the only two black people there at the time. Lee and Eccles were both black musicians who had been born in Memphis. Lee's birth father, Chester Taylor, had been a cornet player with Jimmy Lunsford, whose Delta Rhythm

Boys had had a hit with The Honey Dipper, as we heard way back in the episode on Rocket 88. However, Taylor soon split from Lee is mother, a schoolteacher, and she married Clinton Lee, a stone mason, who doted on his adopted son, and they moved to California. They lived in a relatively prosperous area of L.A., a neighborhood that was almost all white, with a few Asian families, though the Boxer Sugar A. Robinson lived nearby. A year or so after Arthur and his mother moved to L.A., so did the Eccles family, who had known them in Memphis, and they happened to move only a couple of streets away. Eight-year-old Arthur Lee reconnected with seven-year-old Johnny Eccles, and the two became close friends from that point on.

Arthur Lee first started out playing music when his parents were talked into buying him an accordion, by a salesman who would go around with the donkey, give kids free donkey rides, and give the parents a sales pitch while they were riding the donkey. He soon gave up on the accordion and persuaded his parents to buy him an organ instead. He was a spoiled child, by all account, with a TV in his bedroom, which was almost unheard of in the late 50s. Johnny Eccles had a similar experience, which led to his parents buying him a guitar,

and the two were growing up in a musical environment generally. They attended Dorsey High School at the same time as both Billy Preston and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Ella Fitzgerald and her then husband, the great jazz bass player Ray Brown, lived in the same apartment building as the Eccles family for a while. Ornette Coleman, the free jazz saxophone player, lived next door to Eccles,

and Adolphus Jacobs, the guitarist with the Coasters, gave him guitar lessons. Arthur Lee also knew Johnny Otis, who ran a pigeon breeding club for local children which Arthur would attend. Eccles was the one who first suggested that he and Arthur should form a band, and they put together a group to play at a school talent show, performing last night, the instrumental that had been a hit for the Marquise on Stax Records. They soon became a regular group, naming themselves Arthur Lee and the LAGs. the LA group in imitation of Buccatea and the MGs, the Memphis group. At some point around this time, Lee decided to switch from playing organ to playing guitar.

He would say later that this was inspired by seeing Johnny Guitar Watson get out of a gold Cadillac, wearing a gold suit and with gold teeth in his mouth. The LAGs started playing a support act and backing bands for any blues and soul act that came through LA, performing with Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis, the OJs and more. Arthur and Johnny were both still underage, and there were pencil and fake mustaches to play the clubs, so they'd appear older. In the 50s and early 60s,

there were a number of great electric guitar players playing blues on the West Coast, Johnny Guitar Watson, T-bone Walker, Guitar Slim and others, and they would compete with each other not only to play well, but to put on a show. And so there was a whole bag of stage tricks that West Coast R&B guitarists picked up,

and Eccles learned all of them, playing his guitar behind his back, playing his guitar with his teeth, playing with his guitar between his legs. As well as playing their own shows, the LAGs also played gigs under other names. They had a corrupt agent who had booked them under the name of whatever black group had a hit at the time, in the belief that almost nobody knew what popular groups looked like anyway, so they would go out and perform as the drifters or the coasters or half a dozen other bands. But Arthur Lee in particular wanted to have success in his own right. He would later say,

When I was a little boy, I would listen to Nat King Cole, and I would look at that purple Capital Records logo. I wanted to be on Capital, that was my goal. Later I used to walk from Dorsey High School all the way up to the Capitol building in Hollywood, did that many times. I was determined to get a record deal with Capital, and I did, without the help of a fancy manager or anyone else. I talked to Adam Ross and Jack Levy at Ardmore Beachwood.

I talked to Kim Fowley, and then I talked to Capital. The record that the L.A.G.s released, though, was not very good, a track called Rumpel Stillskins. Lee later said, I was young and very inexperienced, and I was testing the record company. I figured if I gave them my worst stuff and they ripped me off, I wouldn't get hurt. But it didn't work, and after that I started giving my best, and I've been doing that ever since. The Lag's were dropped by capital after one single, and for the next little while, Arthur and Johnny did work for smaller labels, usually labels owned by Bob Keane, with Arthur writing and producing and Johnny playing guitar.

The Weckles has said more recently that a lot of the songs that were credited to Arthur's soul writer were actually joint compositions. Most of these records were attempts at copying the style of other people. There was, I've Been Trey, a full spectre sound-alike, released by Little Ray. And there were a few attempts at sounding like Curtis Mayfield, like Slow Jerk by Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals.

and My Diary by Rosa Lee Brooks Eccles was playing with a lot of other people and one of the musicians he was playing with his old school friend Billy Preston told him about a recent European tour he'd been on with Little Richard and the band from Liverpool he'd befriended while he was there who idolised Richard so when the Beatles hit America Arthur and Johnny had some small amount of context for them

they soon broke up the LAGs and formed another group the American Four, with two white musicians, bass player John Fleckenstein, and drummer Don Costa. Lee had them wear wigs so they seemed like they had longer hair, and started dressing more eccentricly. He would soon become known for wearing glasses with one blue lens and one red one, and, as he put it, wearing £40 pounds of beads, two coats, three shirts, and wearing two pairs of shoes on one foot. As well as the Beatles, the American Four were inspired by the other British invasion bands. Arthur was in the audience for the Tammy show and quite impressed by Mick Jagger.

And also by the Valentinos, Bobby Womack's group. They tried to get signed to SAR records, the label owned by Sam Cuck for which the Valentinos recorded. But SAR weren't interested. And they ended up recording for Bob Keane's Delphi Records, where they cut Lucy Baines,

a twist and shout knockoff with lyrics referencing the daughter of new US President Lyndon Johnson. But that didn't take off any more than the earlier records had. Another American 4 track, Stay Away, was recorded but went unreleased until 2006. Soon the American 4 were changing their sound and name again.

This time it was because of two bands who were becoming successful on the Sunset Strip. One was the birds, who to Lee's mind were making music like the stuff he heard in his head, and the other was their rivals The Rising Suns, the blues band we mentioned earlier with Taj Mahal and Maikuda. Lee was very impressed by them, as a multiracial band making aggressive loud guitar music,

though he would always make the point when talking about them that they were a blues band, not a rock band, and he had the first multiracial rock band. Whatever they were like live, though, in their recordings, produced by the birds' first producer Terry Maltier, the Rising Suns often had the same garage band Folk Punk sound, that Lee and Eccles would soon make their own. But while the Rising Suns recorded a full album's worth of material,

Only one single was released before they split up, and so the way was clear for Lee and Eccles' band, now renamed once again to the grassroots, to become the birds' new challengers. Lee later said, I named the group the grassroots behind a trip, or an album I heard that Malcolm X did, where he said,

The grassroots of the people are out in the street doing something about their problems, instead of sitting around talking about it. After seeing the Rolling Stones and the birds live, Lee wanted to get up front and move like make-joggle. and not be hindered by playing a guitar he wasn't especially good at. Both the Stones and the Birds had two guitarists and a frontman who just sang and played hand percussion, and these were the models that Lee was following for the group.

He also thought it would be a good idea commercially to get a good-looking white boy up front, so the group got in another guitarist, a white pretty boy who Lee soon fell out with and gave the nickname Bummer Bob, because he was unpleasant to be around. Those of you who know exactly why Bobby Bousselaeré later became famous, We'll probably agree that this was a more than reasonable nickname to give him, and those of you who don't, I'll be dealing with him when we get to 1969. So when Brian McLean introduced himself to Lee and Eccles, and they found out that not only was he also a good-looking white guitarist,

but he was also friends with the entire circle of hipsters who'd been going to birds' gigs, people like Vito and Franzoni, and he could get a massive crowd of them to come along to gigs for any band he was in and make them the talk of the sunset strip scene. he was soon in the grassroots, and bummer Bob was out. The grassroots soon had to change their name again, though. In 1965, Jan and Dean recorded their folk and roll album, which featured The Universal Coward.

Which I am not going to excerpt again. I only put that pause into Terrify Tilt, who edits these podcasts, and has very strong opinions about that song. But P.F. Sloan and Steve Barry, the songwriters who also performed as the Fantastic Baggies, had come up with the song for that album called Where Were You When You When I Needed You?

Sloan and Barry decided to cut their own version of that song under a fake band name and then put together a group of other musicians to tour as that band. They just needed a name and Lou Adler, the head of Dunhill Records, suggested they call themselves the grassroots and so that's what they did. Eccles would later claim that this was deliberate malice on Adler's part

that Adler had come into a grassroots show drunk and pretended to be interested in signing them to a contract, mostly to show off to a woman he brought with him. Eccles and Maclean had spoken to him, not known who he was, and he'd felt disrespected, and Eccles claims that he suggested the name to get back at them, and also to capitalise on their local success. The new grassroots soon started having hits,

and so the old band had to find another name, which they got as a joking reference to a day job Lee had had at one point. He'd apparently worked in a specialist bra shop, Love Brassiers, which the rest of the band found hilarious. The grassroots became Love. While Arthur Lee was the group's lead singer, Brian McLean would often sing harmonies, and would get a song or two to sing live himself.

And very early in the group's career, when they were playing a club called Bidolitos, he started making his big lead spot a version of Hay Joe, which he'd learned from his old friend David Crosby, and which soon became the highlight of the group's set. Their version was sped up, and included the riff which the searches had popularised in their cover version of needles and pins, the song originally recorded by Maclean's old girlfriend Jackie de Shannon.

That riff is a very simple one to play, and variants of it became very, very common among the LA bands, most notably on the birds, I'll feel a whole lot better. The riff was so ubiquitous in the LA scene that in the late 80s, Frank Zappa would still cite it as one of his main memories of the scene. I'm going to quote from his autobiography, where he's talking about the the differences between the LA scene he was part of, and the San Francisco scene he had no time for. The birds were the be-all and end-all of Los Angeles rock then. They were it, and then a group called Love was it.

There were a few psychedelic groups that never really got to be it, but they could still find work and get record deals, including the West Coast Pop-Heart Experimental Band, Sky Saxon and the Seeds, and the Leaves, noted for their cover version of Hey Joe. When we first went to San Francisco in the early days of the family dog It seemed that everybody was wearing the same costume A mixture of Barbary Coast and Old West Guys with handlebar moustaches

Girls in big bustle dresses with feathers in their hair etc By contrast the LA costumery was more random and outlandish Musically the northern bands had a little more country style In LA it was folk rock to death Everything had that And here Zappa uses the adjectival form of a four-letter word beginning with F, that the main podcast providers don't like you saying on non-adult-rated shows, D-cord down at the bottom of the neck, where you wiggle your finger around like needles and pins.

The reason Zappa describes it that way, and the reason it became so popular, is that if you play that riff in D, the chords are D, D, D-Sus 2 and D-Sus 4, which means you literally only wiggle one finger on your left hand. And so you get that on just a ton of records from that period, though Love, the birds and the searchers all actually play the riff on A rather than D. So that riff became the big thing in L.A. after the birds popularised the searchers sound there, and Love added it to their arrangement of Hey Joe.

In January 1966, the group would record their arrangement of it for their first album, which would come out in March. But that wouldn't be the first recording of the song, or of Love's arrangement of it, although other than the birds' version, it would be the only one to come out of LA with the original Billy Roberts' lyrics. Love's performances of the song at Bido Leto's had become the talk of the Sunset Strip scene,

and soon every band worth its salt was copying it, and it became one of those songs like Louis Louis before it that everyone would play. The first record ever made with the Hay-Joe melody actually had totally different lyrics. Kim Fowley had the idea of writing a sequel to Hay Joe titled Wanted Dead or Alive, about what happened after,

Joe shot his woman and went off. He produced the track for The Rokes, a group consisting of Michael Lloyd and Sean Harris, who later went on to form the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and Lloyd and Harris were accredited writers. The next version of the song to come out was the first by anyone to be released as Hey Joe, or at least as Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go,

which was how it was titled on its initial release. This was by a band called The Leaves, who were friends of love, and had picked up on Hey Joe, and was produced by Nick Venet. It was also the first to have the now-familiar opening line, Hey Joe, where are you going with that gun in your hand? Roberts's original lyric, as sung by both love and the birds,

had been, Where Are You Going With That Money in Your Hand? And had Joe headed off to buy the gun. But as Eccles later said, what happened was Bob Lee from the Leaves, who were friends of ours, asked me for the words to Hey Joe. I told him I would have the words the next day. I decided to write totally different lyrics.

The words you hear on their record are ones I wrote as a joke. The original words to Hey Joe are, Hey Joe, where are you going with that money in your hand? Well, I'm going downtown to buy me a blue steel 44. When I catch up with that woman, she won't be running around no more. It never says, hey Joe, where you're going with that good in your hand? Those were the words I wrote, just because I knew they were going to try and cover the song before we released it.

That was kind of a dirty trick that I played on the leaves, which turned out to be the words that everybody uses. That first release by The Leaves also contained an extra verse, a nod to Love's previous name. That original recording credited the song as public domain. Apparently Brian McLean had refused to tell the Leaves who had written the song, and so they assumed it was traditional. It came out in November 1965, but only as a promo single.

Even before The Leaves, though, another band had recorded Hey Joe, but it didn't get released. The Sons of Adam had started out as a surf group called The Fen. who made records like Malibu Run. Kim Fowley had suggested they changed their name to the Sons of Adam, and they were another group who were friends with Love. Their drummer, Michael Stuart Ware, would later go on to join Love, and Arthur Lee wrote the song Feathered Fish for them.

But while they were the first to record Hey Joe, their version has still to this day not been released. Their version was recorded for Decker with producer Gary Usher, but before it was released, another Decker artist also recorded the song. and the label weren't sure which one to release. And then the label decided to press Usher to record a version with yet another act, this time with the Surfares,

the surf group who had had a hit with wipeout. Coincidentally, the Surfarees had just changed bass players. Their most recent bass player, Ken Forsey, had quit and joined Love, whose own bass player, John Fleckenstein, had gone off to join the Standells, who would also record a version of Hey Joe in 1966. Osher thought that the Sons of Adam were much better musicians than the safaris,

who he was recording with more or less under protest, but their version, using Love's arrangement and the Gun-in-Yar-Han lyrics, became the first version to come out on a major label. They believed the song was in the public domain, and so the songwriting credits on the record are split between Gabby Usher, a W. Hale, who nobody has been able to identify, and Tony Cost, a pseudonym for Nick Venet. Usher said later, I got writer's credit on it because I was told, or I assumed at the time,

the song was public domain, meaning a non-copyrighted song. It had already been cut two or three times, and on each occasion the writing credit had been different. On a traditional song, whoever arranges it takes the songwriting credit, I may have changed a few words and arranged and produced it, but I certainly did not co-write it. The public domain credit also appeared on the Leave's second attempt to cut the song, which was actually given a general release but flopped. But when the leaves cut the song for a third time, still for the same tiny label, Meera,

the track became a hit in May 1966, reaching number 31. And that version had what they thought was the correct songwriting credit to Dino Valenti, which came as news to Billy Roberts, who had registered the copyright to the song back in 1962 and had no idea that it had become a staple of LA garage rock until he heard his song in the top 40 with someone else's name on the credits. He angrily confronted third-story music, who agreed to a compromise.

They would stop giving Valenti's songwriting royalties and start giving them to Roberts instead, so long as he didn't sue them and let them keep the publishing rights. Roberts was indignant about this. He deserved all the money, not just half of it, but he went along with it to avoid a lawsuit he might not win. So Roberts was now the credited songwriter on the versions coming out of the LA scene. But of course, Dino Valenti had been playing his song to other people too. One of those other people was Vince Martin.

Martin had been a member of a folk pop group called The Tarriers, whose members also included the future film star Alan Arkin, and who had had a hit in the 1950s with Cindy O Cindy. Cindy O Cindy pursue. I joined the Navy to see the world, but nowhere could I. But as we heard in the episode on The Lovin' Spoonful, he had become a Greenwich Village Fokie, in a duo with Fred Neal,

and recorded an album with him, tear down the walls. Walk me out in... Can't walk you out. That song we just heard, Morning Dew, was another question and answer folk song. It was written by the Canadian folk singer Bonnie Dobson, but after Martin and Neil recorded it, it was picked up on by Martin's friend Tim Rose, who stuck his own name on the credits as well, without Dobson's permission, for a version which made the song into a rock standard,

for which he continued to collect royalties. This was something that Rose seems to have made a habit of doing, though to be fair to him it went both ways. We heard about him in the Love and Spoonful episode two, when he was in a band named The Big Three with Cass Elliott, and her coincidentally named future husband Jim Hendrix, who recorded this song, with Rose putting new music to the lyrics of the old public domain song,

O Susanna. The band Shocking Blue used that melody for their 1969 number one hit, Venus, and didn't give Rose any credit. But another song that Rose picked up from Fyanna, Vince Martin was Hey Joe. Martin had picked the song up from Valenti, but didn't know who had written it or who was claiming to have written it, and told Rose he thought it might be an old Appalachian murder ballad or something. Rose took the song and claimed writing credit in his own name. He would always, for the rest of his life, claim it was an old folk tune he'd heard in Florida,

and that he'd rewritten it substantially himself. But no evidence of the song has ever shown up from prior to Roberts's copyright registration, and Rose's version is basically identical to Roberts's in melody and lyrics. But Rose takes his version at a much slower pace, and his version would be the model for the most successful versions going forward, though those other versions would use the lyrics Johnny Eccles had rewritten, rather than the ones Rose used.

Rose's version got heard across the Atlantic as well, and in particular it was heard by Chas Chandler, the bass player of the animals. Some sources seem to suggest that Chandler heard the song performed by a group called The Creation. But in a biography I've read of that group, they clearly state that they didn't start playing the song until 1967. But however he came across it,

when Chandler heard Rose's recording, he knew that the song could be a big hit for someone, but he didn't know who. And then he bummed until Linda Keith, Keith Richards' girlfriend, who took him to see someone whose guitar we've already heard in this episode. The Curtis Mayfield impression on guitar there was, at least according to many sources,

the first recording session ever played on by a guitarist then calling himself Morris, or possibly Maurice, James. We'll see later in the story that it possibly wasn't his first. There are conflicting accounts, as there are about a lot of things, and it was recorded either in very early 1964, in which case it was his first, or, as seems more likely, and as I tell the story later, a year later, in which case he played on maybe half a dozen tracks in the studio by that point.

but it was still a very early one, and by late 1966 that guitarist had reverted to the name by which he was brought up and was calling himself Jimmy Hendricks. Hendricks and Arthur Lee had become close, and Lee would later claim that Hendricks had copied much of Lee's dress style and attitude, though many of Hendricks's other colleagues and employers, including Little Richard, would make similar claims, and most of them had an element of truth, as Lees did.

Hendricks was a sponge. But Lee did influence him, Indeed, one of Hendrix's last sessions in March 1970 was guesting on an album by love. Hendrix's name at birth was Johnny Alan Hendricks, which made his father, James Alan Hendricks, known as Al, who was away at war when his son was born, worried that he'd been named after another man, who might possibly be the real father, so the family just referred to the child as Buster to avoid the issue. When Al Hendricks came back from the war, the child was renamed James Marshall Hendricks, James after Al's first name, Marshall after Al's dead brother,

though the family continued calling him Buster. Little James Hendricks Jr. didn't have anything like a stable home life. Both his parents were alcoholics, and Al Hendricks was frequently convinced that Jimmy's mother Lucille was having affairs and became abusive about it. They had six children, four of whom were born disabled, and Jimmy was the only one to remain with his parents. the rest were either fostered or adopted at birth, fostered later on because the parents weren't providing a decent home life, or in one case made a ward of state because the Hendricks couldn't afford to pay for a life-saving operation for him.

The only one that Jimmy had any kind of regular contact with was the second brother, Leon, his parents' favourite, who stayed with them for several years before being fostered by a family only a few blocks away. Alan Lucille Hendricks frequently split and reconciled, and while they were ostensibly raising Jimmy, and for a few years Leon, he was shuttled between them

and various family members and friends, living sometimes in Seattle where his parents lived, and sometimes in Vancouver with his paternal grandmother. He was frequently malnourished, and often survived because friends' families fed him. Al Hendricks was also often physically and emotionally abusive of the son he wasn't sure was his. Jimmy grew up introverted and stuttering,

and only a couple of things seemed to bring him out of his shell. One was science fiction. he always thought that his nickname, Buster, came from Buster Crabb, the star of the Flash Gordon serials he loved to watch, though in fact he got the nickname even before that interest developed, and he was fascinated with ideas about aliens and UFOs. And the other was music. Growing up in Seattle in the 40s and 50s,

most of the music he was exposed to as a child, and in his early teens, was music made by and for white people. There wasn't a very large black community in the area at the time compared to most major American cities, and so there were no prominent R&B stations. As a kid, he loved the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and when he was 13, Jimmy's favorite record was Dean Martin's Memories Are Made of This.

Sweet, sweet, memories you gave a me, you can't beat, The memories you gave a me Take one fresh and tender kid I had one stolen night of blitz. One girl, one boy, some grief, some joy, men. Sweet, sweet, memories you gave me. He also, like every teenager, became a fan of rock and roll music. When Elvis played at a local stadium when Jimmy was 15,

He couldn't afford a ticket, but he went and sat on top of a nearby hill and watched the show from the distance. Jimmy's first exposure to the Blues also came around this time when his father briefly took in lodgers, Cornell and Ernestine Benson, and Ernestine had a record collection that included records by Lightning Hopkins, Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters, all of whom Jimmy became a big fan of, especially Muddy Waters. The Benson's most vivid memory of Jimmy and later years was in

picking up a broom and pretending to play guitar along with these records. Shortly after this, it would be Ernestine Benson who would get Jimmy his very first guitar. By this time, Jimmy and Al had lost their home and moved into a boarding house, and the owner's son had an acoustic guitar with only one string that he was planning to throw out. When Jimmy asked if he could have it instead of it being thrown out, the owner told him he could have it for five dollars. Al Hendricks refused to pay that much for it, but Ernestine Benson bought Jimmy the guitar. She said, later, he only had one string, but he could really make that string talk. He started carrying the guitar on his back everywhere he went in imitation of Stirling Hayden in the western Johnny

guitar, and eventually got some more strings for it and learned to play. He would play at left-handed until his father came in. His father had forced him to write with his right hand, and was convinced that left-handedness was the work of the devil, so Jimmy would play left-handed while his father was somewhere else. But as soon as Al came in, he would flip the guitar the other way up, and continue playing the song he had been playing, now right-handed. Jimmy's mother died when he was 15, after having been ill for a long time with drink-related problems, and Jimmy and his brother didn't get to go to the funeral.

Depending on who you believe, either Al gave Jimmy the bus fare and told him to go by himself, and Jimmy was too embarrassed to go to the funeral alone on the bus, or Al actually forbade Jimmy and Leon from going. After this, he became even more introverted than he was before, and he also developed a fascination with the idea of, of angels, convinced his mother now was one. Jimmy started to hang around with a friend called Pernel Alexander, who also had a guitar, and they would play along together with Elmore James

records. The two also went to see Little Richard and Bill Doggett perform live, and while Jimmy was hugely introverted, he did start to build more friendships in the small Seattle music scene, including with Ron Holden, the man we talked about in the episode on Louis-Louis, who introduced that song to Seattle, and who would go on to record with Bruce Johnston for Bob Keane. Eventually, Ernestine Benson persuaded Al Hendricks to buy Jimmy a decent electric guitar on credit. Al also bought himself a saxophone at the same time, thinking he might play music with his son, but sent it back once the next payment became due.

As well as blues and R&B, Jimmy was soaking up the guitar instrumentals and garage rock that would soon turn into surf music. The first song he learned to play was Tall Cool One by the Fabulous Whalers, the local group who popularised a version of Louis-Louis based on Holden's one. As we talked about in the Louis-Louis episode, the fabulous whalers used to play at a venue called the Spanish Castle,

and Jimmy was a regular in the audience, later writing his song Spanish Castle Magic about those shows. He was also a big fan of Dwayne Eddy, and soon learned Eddie's big hits, 40 miles of Bad Road, because they're young, and Peter Gunn, a song he would return to much later in his life. His career as a guitarist didn't get off to a great start.

The first night he played with his first band, he was meant to play two set, but he was fired after the first set because he was playing in too flashier manner and showing off too much on stage. His girlfriend suggested that he might want to turn it down a little, but he said, that's not my style. This would be a common story for the next several years.

After that false start, the first real band he was in was the Velvetones with his friend Penel Alexander. There were four guitarists, two piano players, horns and drums, and they dressed up with glitter stuck to their pants. They played Duane Eddy songs, old jazz numbers, and honky-tong by Bill Doggett, which became Hendricks's signature song with the band.

His father was unsupportive of his music career, and he left his guitar at Alexander's house because he was scared that his dad would smash it if he took it home. At the same time he was with the Velvet Tones, he was also playing with another band called the Rocking Kings, who got gigs around the Seattle area, including at the Spanish Castle. But as they left school, most of Hendricks's friends were joining the army in order to make a steady living, and so did he,

although not entirely by choice. He was arrested twice for riding in stolen cars, and he was given a choice, either go to prison or sign up for the army for three years. He chose the latter. At first the army seemed to suit him. He was accepted into the 101st Airborne Division, the famous screaming eagles whose actions at D-Day made them legendary in the US

and he was proud to be a member of the division. They were based out of Fort Campbell, the base near Clarksville we talked about a couple of episodes ago, and while he was there he met a bass player, Billy Cox, who he started playing with. As Cox and Hendricks were black, and as Fort Campbell straddled the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, they had to deal with segregation and play to only black audiences,

and Hendricks quickly discovered that black. audiences in the southern states weren't interested in Louis Louis, Dwayne Eddy and surf music, the stuff he'd been playing in Seattle. He had to instead switch to playing Albert King and Slim Harpo songs, but luckily he loved that music too. He also started singing at this point, when Hendricks and Cox started playing together in a trio called The Casuals, they had no singer. And while Hendricks never liked his own voice, Cox was worse, and so Hendricks was stuck as the singer. The casuals started gigging around Clarksville and occasionally further afield,

places like Nashville, where Arthur Alexander would occasionally sit in with them. But Cox was about to leave the army, and Hendricks had another two-in-abate years to go, having enlisted for three years. They couldn't play any further away unless Hendricks got out of the army, which he was increasingly unhappy in anyway,

and so he did the only thing he could. He pretended to be gay, and got discharged on medical grounds for homosexuality. In later years he would always pretend he'd broken his ankle parachuting from a plane. For the next few years he would be a full-time guitarist and spend the periods when he wasn't earning enough money from that, leaching off women he lived with, moving from one to another as they got sick of him or ran out of money.

The casuals expanded their line-up, adding a second guitarist, Alfonso Young, who would show off on stage by playing guitar with his teeth. Hendricks didn't like being upstaged by another guitarist and quickly learned to do the same. One biography I've used as a source for this says that at this point, Billy Cox played on a session for King Records for Frank Howard and the Commanders

and brought Hendricks along, but the producer thought that Hendricks's guitar was too frantic and turned his mic off. But other sources say the session Hendricks and Cox played on for the commanders wasn't until three years later. And the record sounds like a 1965 one, not a 1962 one, and his guitar is very audible.

and the record isn't on King. But we've not had any music to break up the narration for a little while, and it's a good track, which later became a Northern Soul favourite. So I'll play a section here, as either way it was certainly an early Hendricks session. This illustrates a general problem with Hendricks' life at this point. He would flip between bands playing with the same people at multiple points.

Nobody was taking detailed notes, and later, once he became famous, everyone wanted to exaggerate their own importance in his life. meaning that while the broad outlines of his life are fairly clear, any detail before late 1966 might be hopelessly wrong. But all the time Hendricks was learning his craft. One story from around this time sums up both Hendrix's attitude to his playing. He saw himself almost as much as a scientist as a musician,

and his slightly formal manner of speech. He challenged the best blues guitarist in Nashville to a guitar duel, and the audience actually laughed at Hendrix's playing, as he was totally outclassed. When asked what he was doing, he replied, I was simply trying to get that BB King toned down, and my experiment failed. Buckings for the King Casuals dried up, and he went to Vancouver, where he spent a couple of months playing in a covers band,

Bobby Taylor and the Vancouver's, whose lead guitarist was Tommy Chong, later to find fame as one half of Cheech and Chong. But he got depressed at how white Vancouver was, and travelled back down south to join a reconfigured King Casuals, who now had a horn section. The new line-up of King Casuals were playing the Chitlin Circuit

and had to put on a proper show, and so Hendricks started using all the techniques he'd seen other guitarists on the circuit use, playing with his teeth like Alfonso Young, the other guitarist in the band, playing with his guitar behind his back like T-bone Walker, and playing with a 50-foot chord that allowed them to walk into the crowd

and out of the venue still playing, like guitar still amused to. As well as playing with the King Casuals, he started playing the circuit as a side man. He got short stints with many of the second-tier acts on the circuit. People who had had one or two hits or were crowd-pleasers, but weren't massive stars, like Carla Thomas or Jerry Butler or Slim Harpo.

The first really big name he played with was Solomon Burke, who when Hendricks joined his band and just released just out of reach of my two empty arms. too far away from you and all your charms just out of mine but he lacked discipline five dates would go beautifully

Burke later said and then at the next show he'd go into this wild stuff that wasn't part of the song I just couldn't handle it anymore Burke traded him to Otis Redding who was on the same tour for two horn players but then Redding fired him a week later

and they left him on the side of the road. He played in the backing band for the Marvelette on a tour with Curtis Mayfield, who would be another of Hendricks's biggest influencers, but he accidentally blew up Mayfield's amp and got sacked. On another tour, Cecil Womack threw Hendricks's guitar off the bus while he slept. In February 1964, he joined the band of the Isley brothers,

and he had watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with them during his first days with the group, assuming he hadn't already played the Rosalie Brooks session, and I think there's good reason to believe he hadn't, then the first record Hendricks played on was their single, Testify. While he was with them, he also moonlighted on Don Covey's big hit, Mercy Mercy. After leaving the eyes these, Hendricks joined the minor soul singer Gorgeous George, and on a break from Gorgeous George's tour in Memphis,

he went to Stax Studios in the hope of meeting Steve Cropper, one of his idols. When he was told that Cropa was busy in the studio, He waited around all day until Cropa finished and introduced himself. Hendricks was amazed to discover that Cropa was white. He'd assumed that he must be black, and Cropa was delighted to meet the guitarist who had played on Mercy Mercy, one of his favourite records. The two spent hours showing each other guitar licks,

Hendricks playing Cropa's right-handed guitar, as he hadn't wrote along his own. Shortly after this, he joined Little Richard's band, and once again came into conflict with the star of the show by trying to upstage him. For one show he wore a satin shirt. And after the show, Richard screamed at him, I am the only little Richard, I am the king of rock and roll,

and I am the only one allowed to be pretty. Take that shirt off. While he was with Richard, Hendricks played on his I don't know what you've got, but it's got me, which like Mercy Mercy, was written by Don Covey, who had started out as Richard's chauffeur. Man, you don't know what's going on. You don't know what?

And look what my friend tell me. This is what you say to me. According to the most likely version of events I've read, it was while he was working for Richard that Hendricks met Rosa Lee Brooks on New Year's Eve, 1964. At this point he was using the name Morris James, apparently in tribute to the blues guitarist Elmore James, and he used various names including Jimmy James

for most of his pre-fame performances. Rosalie Brooks was an R&B singer who had been mentored by Jenny Guitar Watson, and when she met Hendricks, she was singing in a girl group who were one of the support acts for Ike and Tina Turner, who Hendricks went to see on his night off. Hendricks met Brooks afterwards and told her she looked like his mother, a line he used on a lot of women, but which was true in her case, if photos had anything to go by. The two got into a relationship and were soon talking about becoming a duo, like Ike and Tina or Mickey and Sylvia.

Love is Strange was one of Hendrix's favourite records. But the only recording they're made together was the My Diary single. Brooks always claimed that she actually wrote that song, but the label credit is for Arthur Lee, and it sounds like his work to me, albeit him trying hard to write like Curtis Mayfield, just as Hendricks is trying to play like him. Brooks and Hendricks had a very intense relationship for a short period.

Brooks would later recall Little Richard trying to persuade them to have sex while he watched, which they refused to do, and Hendricks soon quit playing for Little Richard and joined Ike and Tina Turner's band. But then Ike Turner fired him for being too flashy, and he rejoined Little Richard, quitting or being fired again, when the tour hit New York. Hendricks soon ran out of money and sent Brooks a letter from New York saying he'd had to pour on his guitar, a line he used on women he was asking for money all the time.

She sent him $40 in a photo, but never heard from him again. Brooks would go on to have a minor career as a singer, but would never have any great success. You can get an idea of the kind of thing she did from one of the oddest records she made. It was still normal at this time for hits to be covered for different markets, though it wasn't anything like as common as it had been even a few years earlier.

And so in 1966, a few weeks after the original came out, Brooks recorded what was publicised as the R&B version of They're Coming to Take Me Away, ha-ha, the song that had been a hit for Napoleon the fourth. Sadly, sadly she died. In New York, Hendricks hit, and when they do they'll put you in the ASPCA, you'll mangy much, and they're coming to take me a while. Sadly, she died in December last year. In New York, Hendricks hit the lowest point of his professional career.

After having played with some of the best performers on the circuit, he was reduced to playing with a local band, Curtis Knight and the Squires, whose lead singer was actually just a pimp who sang a bit on the side. The one advantage of the Squires was that they allowed Hendricks to show off a bit with no real star and not even really any particularly good musicians in the band other than him.

He was given the space to play what he wanted, at least on stage. Knight had a contract with a record producer Ed Chalpin, who made knock-off cover versions for overseas markets and other exploitation records, and Chalpin signed Hendricks to a recording contract, mostly to work as a sideman. At this time he played on such terrible records

as Curtis Knight's How Do You Feel? A rip-off of Like a Rolling Stone. He also played bass on As the Clouds Drift by, by the Fading Film star Jane Mansfield. In all, he recorded 33 sides with Chalpin, none of them of any worth, and which would be endlessly repackaged under Hendrix's name later. His career picked up slightly when he joined Joey D. and the Starlighters,

the group who'd had a hit a couple of years earlier with peppermint. twist and were still getting reasonably good bookings. And this was his first experience of playing in a multiracial band since his early days playing around Seattle. He moved on from Joey D to King Curtis, the great saxophone player who played on so many hits on Atlantic Records and played with Curtis on Instant Groove. We want everybody to come on out here and do your thing. We want you to come on out here and do it now. Because that's what everybody is doing their own thing. That's what I want to see you do right now.

But soon he was back playing with Curtis Knight again, and it was when he was playing with Curtis Knight that he met the person who would change his life. Linda Keith was, at this time, Keith Richards' girlfriend. She was a model, she was 20 years old, and she shared Richard's massive love of the blues. She'd flown over to New York a month before the Stones were due to tour the US, so she could spend some time exploring the clubs.

And when she walked into the tiny club that Curtis Knight and the Squires were playing, she was astonished to see one of the greatest blues guitarists she'd ever heard, playing with a terrible band. She struck up a conversation with the guitarist, who was calling himself Jimmy James, and invited him back to a party with her friends. At the party, someone offered him acid,

and it says everything about the difference between the white and black music scenes in New York at this point, that his reply was, in all sincerity. No, I don't want any of that, but I'd love to try some of that LSD stuff. He had no idea that acid and LSD were the same thing, as among the musicians he was playing with,

LSD was regarded as a white drug, and some of Hendricks's friends would seriously try to talk him out of taking it in future, by saying that it made you think like a white man. While he was on acid, he saw himself in the mirror and was convinced he looked just like Marilyn Monroe. And then Linda Keith put on what he became convinced was the greatest album ever.

Bob Dylan's new album, Blonde on Blonde. Hendricks was already a big fan of Dylan. He'd even taken to styling his hair in imitation of what he called Dylan's white afro, putting it in curlers to get the same look. But he thought Blonde on Blonde was even better than anything else he'd heard from Dylan and became obsessed with the record. Hendricks bonded with Linda Keith over their shared love of both Dylan and Blues. Their relationship remained platonic, a rarity among Hendricks's relationships with women,

but Keith became determined she would use her contacts to make this guitarist a star. Shortly after this meeting, after playing a gig with another bad R&B band, Hendricks was approached by a member of the audience, a black folk musician named Richie Havens who loved Hendricks's playing. They got talking and they too bonded over love for Dylan. Havens mentioned that he would often perform his own version of Just Like a Woman from Dylan's new album. Hendricks said he'd like to listen to that, and so Havens told him about the Greenwich Village folk clubs where he played. Hendricks went down to see Havens and then started hanging around the village a lot.

especially a place called the Café War, where Tim Rose used to play, and it was there that he picked up on Rose's slow version of Hey Joe. Hendricks decided that he was going to start playing the Greenwich Village scene, and he put together a band called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, named after the band that backed Junior Parker, the blues musician who did the original version of Mystery Train. The band had a revolving line-up that at various times included Randy California, later to become famous in the band Spirit,

and Jeff Skunk Baxter, who would go on to play with Steely Dan and the Doobie brothers, and Hendricks absolutely blew the Greenwich Village crowds away. You see, you'll notice there are roughly three types of story that successful musicians have for the beginning of their career, three broad shapes they fall into. The first is the one that say the Beach Boys or Elvis had. Someone who has literally never played a gig in their lives

goes into a small record label and cuts a local hit, then gets picked up by a major label, In the case of the Beach Boys and Elvis, that obviously led to substantial careers with huge artistic and commercial success. But that's also the story behind a hell of a lot of one-hit wonders. Then there's the one that most of the Greenwich Village folk scene, the British trad and skiffle scenes, and the British blues bands mostly fall into. People with some live experience, but not that much. Playing odd gigs for six months or a year or so, mostly as a kind of gentleman amateur. playing in front of your friends from art school or the local left-wing activist group,

half of whom were also musicians playing those same venues, and who are willing to put up with a bit of sloppiness if you're enthusiastic enough, and you know the catalogue number of the original issue of Jim Jackson's Kansas City Blues on the Vocalian label. Those scenes would often produce great songwriters, but usually rather mediocre musicians, and when they did produce a genuinely good musician, it was usually someone who played in a very scholarly fashion,

expertly reproducing someone else's sound in a rather clinical way, rather than innovating. But then there's the people who played the Chitlin Circuit and the equivalent white working class country venues, places where you were playing multiple shows a day, every day, for audiences of poor people who insist on value for money if they're spending some of what little they have on a night out after a hard week of working,

and who will throw fruit at best and bottles at worst. at you if you weren't putting on a good show. To survive playing those venues, you had to be an exceptional musician and an exceptional entertainer. You had to be able to put on a show while you were playing expertly. And if you couldn't play your guitar behind your head perfectly in tune, while you were also doing the synchronised dance routine for the lead singer's latest single they only recorded the day before, well, there were plenty of other musicians out there who wanted the gig. and the crowds at the Café War, where Jimmy James and the Blue Flames were playing, were crowds whose experience of music was almost entirely from type 2,

and they were now watching a performer of type 3. On the Chitlin circuit, Hendricks had been one of the best players around, but not so far ahead of everyone else that he couldn't be replaced if he started thinking himself more important than the star. On the Greenwich Village folk scene, though, he was unlike anything anyone had seen. Ritchie Haven sent Mike Bloomfield, the guitarist with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who played on several Dylan sessions and was widely regarded as the best rock guitarist in New York,

to see the Blue Flames, and he said, Hendricks knew who I was, and that day, in front of my eyes, he burned me to death. H-bombs were going off, guided missiles were flying. I can't tell you the sounds he was getting out of his instrument. He was getting every sound I was ever to hear him get, right there in that room with the stratocaster. how he did this I wish I understood. The Blue Flames set was mostly covers of contemporary hit,

but they also did Hey Joe at the same speed that Tim Rose played it, but with the lyrics as rewritten by Johnny Eccles, though without the grassroots verse. As well as playing with the Blue Flames, Hendricks was also playing with other artists on the Greenwich Village scene, like John Hammond Jr, who brought his father along to see Hendricks. Hammond Sr. was unimpressed, but one of the people who worked at the cafe where they played later said

he just blew everybody away. He played behind his back, all that stuff he had stolen from T-Bone Walker. We thought he invented it. No one there realised there was a black tradition that went back to the 1920s. Meanwhile, Linda Keith was trying to get other people interested. She wasn't helped by the fact that when the Rolling Stones came over, Keith Richards became convinced that she was having an affair with Hendricks and became very jealous of him,

which put Andrew Oldham off from San Diego. him to immediate records, though Keith also says that Hendricks' music was fundamentally not to Oldham's taste, as Oldham was far more interested in Phil Spector and the Beach Boys than in blues-based guitar rock. But then she bumped into Chas Chandler, the bass player of the Animals. The Animals were going to split up at the end of the tour, and Chandler was planning on going into management and production in partnership with Mike Jeffrey, the Animal's manager, who seemed to have a variety of dodgy underworld connections. Chanda had even decided on what record he was going to produce.

He was convinced that Tim Rose's arrangement of Hey Joe could be a hit if he could find someone good to play it. Keith told him to come and see Jimmy James in the Blue Flames, and when they opened their set with Hey Joe, Chandler got so excited he spilled his milkshake all over himself. Chandler had to finish his tour, and in the meantime Linda Keith split up with Keith Richards, who took revenge on her by telling her father she was dating a black junkie.

Her father had a maid of the court as she was not yet 21, flew over from England, and dragged her back with him. But when the animals tour finished, Chandler returned to New York, tracked Hendricks down, and persuaded him to come over to the UK. When he left New York, Jimmy had $40 in his pocket, borrowed from John Hammond Jr's drummer, and his only other possessions in the world were his guitar, a single change of clothes, his hair curlers, and a jar of cream for his acne. In the UK, Hendricks was an immediate sensation. At the time, the biggest guitar hero in the country was Eric Clapton, who had recently formed a group Cream. We'll be dealing with Cream, so I won't talk too much about them now.

But the important thing here is that Clapton was considered so great that Clapton is God was a popular graffito in London at the time. Chandler prevailed upon his acquaintance with the band to get them to let Hendricks get on stage with them and Jan Howling Wolf's killing floor, and Hendricks started doing things on guitar that clapped and found unimaginable, his jaw dropping on stage.

Jack Bruce, Cream's bassist, later said, it must have been difficult for Eric to handle, because he was God, and this unknown person comes along and burns. Also in the audience was Jeff Beck, the other great guitar hero in Britain, and he was similarly impressed. Everyone knew that there was a new best guitarist in town.

Now all he needed was a band and a record. The question of a band caused some conflict between Hendricks and Chandler. Hendricks wanted a big band of the kind he was used to playing with, with a horn section, but Chandler was insistent that what he needed was a small rock group without too many other instruments. Chandler at first tried to get Brian Ogre and the Trinity to drop their guitarist and install Hendrix's guitarist and frontman,

but Auger quite rightly refused to do so, and so Chander decided to put together a band for Hendricks. Orga did, though, let Hendricks sit in with the group one night, which gave Hendricks' first experience of playing through a martial amp, which quickly became his favourite equipment. The first person they took on was Noel Redding, who Chandler discovered in the auditions for Eric Burden's New Animals, which Chandler was attending.

Redding was a guitarist, but Chandler persuaded him, to change the base, and Hendricks liked him because he had hair like Bob Dylan's, so he was in the group. Chandler's connections were paying off for Hendricks in ways that he couldn't have imagined even a few months earlier. Hendricks got a girlfriend, Cathy Etchingham, who was part of the London scene, and they happened to bump into Ringo Starr in a club. Etchingham complained that they were living in a rather cramped hotel room, and Starr had a spare two-bedroom flat in one of the most expensive parts of central London he wasn't using, so he let it to them for third. £30 a month, and Hendricks and Etchingham moved into one bedroom, while Chandler and his

girlfriend took the other. Hendricks was, for the most part, just going to clubs, getting on stage with more famous musicians, and playing a couple of songs using all the tricks he learned on the Chitlin circuit, blowing the other musicians off stage. At one of these events, Johnny Halliaday was in the audience. Halli Day was known as the French Elvis, but he had recently started trying to update his music, making records with psychedelic and soul elements. with Brian Ogre on keyboards and Mick Jones, later of foreigner, on guitar, and covering recent hits from other countries in French. Halliday was impressed by Hendricks and invited him to be a support act on a residency at the Paris Olympia

and a couple of warm-up gigs before that, at the bottom of the bill with Brian Ogre between Hendricks and the main attraction. The very first gigs for the Jimmy Hendricks experience, a name chosen by Mike Jeffrey, would be supporting France's biggest ever rock star. Of course, that meant that they needed a drummer, and the one they chose was actually the ex-drummer of the Blue Flames, but not Hendrix's old band of Blue Flames, nor Junior Parker's band of that name, but rather the band that backed the British R&B keyboardist and Moes Allison sound alike, Georgie Fame.

Mitch Mitchell had been given drum lessons by Jim Marshall and had played briefly with The Who when they were finding a drummer to replace Doug Sandham and with the pretty things, but was best known as a child actor, having appeared in the film Bottoms Up with Jimmy Edwards, Melvin Hayes and Richard Breyers. You look very pleased with yourself, Wendellar.

Yes, sir. The gay abandon of a clear conscience. Exactly, sir, you can't whack it. I can whack anything. Open up. Please, sir, take my word for it. You won't find anything in there that you like. Open up.

Please, sir, for your sake, I beg of... Open up! All right, sir. Could this be the double bluff? Don't open it, and then he knows I will. Snap! Did you honestly think I was born yesterday, went over? Yes, sir.

He had also starred as the schoolboy Jennings in the TV series based on the series of school novels by Anthony Bookeridge. Mitchell was chosen as a result of a contest. The other option being gains the Dunbar But he turned out to be perfect for the group And after fairly rough tryout shows By the time the group hit the Olympia They were receiving an overwhelming reception

So much so that in early 1967 Johnny Holliday recorded this Hey Joe Cour not like that D, there's not the fire She to Hey Joe Come, say good-jour

T'emour ha'n't moor-ha-ha-ha A week after I'm in the time I'm even I'm even no more de Montre I've all a week

after the Olympia show a month after Hendricks first arrived in the UK with no money and no possessions

the group were in the studio to record their first single for a B-side Hendricks wanted

to re-record Mercy Mercy the Don Covey song he played on but Chandle

explained to him that the real money was in song so he should write a

song and Hendrix came up with Stone Free The A side, of course, was going to be Hey Joe, and while they were going to use Hendrix's bluesy guitar part and the Eccles version of the lyrics,

Chandler also wanted to have the same kind of build that Tim Rose's version had. Rose had block backing vocals, so Chandler brought in Britain's top session singing girl group, The Breakaways. The breakaways had started out as part of the Vernon's girls, a 16-piece female choir formed from staff at Vernon's Football Pools Company in Liverpool,

who had come to fame on over. Oh Boy. After O'Boy, the Vernon's Girls had split into several smaller groups, one keeping the name the Vernon's Girls, and going on to make some rather fun girl group records, often written by future Vicar of Dibli star Trevor Peacock. Another of the small groups formed from the large one had gone on to become the Fordettes, backing Emil Ford. The singer who was one of Britain's first black pop stars and had the first UK number one of the 60s, with the record produced by Joe Meek. Then one of them had become engaged to Joe Brown,

so they'd broken away from Ford and become the breakaways, backing Brown. They'd made some singles of their own, like, That's How It Goes. But they'd become best known as session singers, providing backing vocals for Cilla Black, Cliff Richard, Lulu, and Petula Clark. That's them singing on Downtown.

So Chandler brought them in to sing the backing vocals, which became a crucial part of the record, providing the blocked cordal support that might otherwise be provided by a keyboard or rhythm guitar, allowing the members of the experience to improvise over their solid backing. But while they'd recorded their first single, they had no label yet. Chandler and Jeffries had sunk their own money into the sessions, just knowing that the single would be a head. a hit. The first few labels they took it to turned them down, but while that was going on,

the press grew steadily more interested in Hendricks, though there was a problem for his publicist when writing his first press biography, because Hendricks had played with so many great musicians, they were actually worried he would look like he was lying if they named them all. Hendricks was now making some money, but was living off a £15 a week's salary he was being paid by Chandler and Jeffries as an advance against future royalties, and was short enough on cash that when Little Richard appeared in London, Hendricks went backstage to see if he could get $50 at Richard owed him in unpaid salary from his time with the band.

Richard countered that Hendricks had missed the band bus, and so he'd been fined that $50, and Hendricks left empty-handed. Eventually, the Jimmy Hendricks experience was signed to track records, the new label being set up by Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the whose managers, partly on the recommendation of Pete Townsend, who after being unimpressed with Hendricks on first meeting him, was wowed by seeing him live and became one of his biggest admirers. The new label got the group in appearance on Ready Steady Go,

the biggest music TV show in Britain, for the same day that the record came out, and it quickly entered the top ten. Jimmy Hendricks had started 1966 living penniless in New York, playing for a band that nobody liked, facing eviction and going hungry. He entered the year a pop star, living in a luxury flat owned by another pop star,

with every important guitarist in Britain worshipping him. For Jimmy Hendricks, as for the music world generally, 1966 had been a revolutionary year that had changed everything. And as we head into 1967, we're going to see how the ripples from those changes spread out and change the whole of society. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon.

Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Making Time by the Creation. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey, 500 songs on your favorite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me Andrew Hickey and produced by me and Tilt Ariser.

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