A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Song 173: “All Along the Watchtower” Part Two, The Hour is Getting Late

Episode Date: April 14, 2024

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 (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs By Andrew Hig Song 173 All Along the Watchtower Part 2 The hour is getting late A few notes before I begin First, a slighter autumn for the last episode

I ended the episode saying that the Isle of White show was Jimmy 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 as 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. 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 60s and early 70s, 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 Hendricks not only repeated the 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 Jimmy 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 40 more because of the efforts of the management team than because of the record itself.

Mike Geoffrey, who co-managed the group with Chas Chandler and had previously managed the animals, knew that the way to get the chart hit was to bribe radio stations and to send people around to buy multiple copies from chart return record shops. but that hacked success soon became legitimate success and Geoffrey and Chandler took advantage of it

sending the group all over the country playing every tiny club that could be booked into sometimes causing trouble as when the group played a ballroom in Ilkley in Yorkshire which only had room for 250 people 600 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 Hays, starts with a dissonant chord. There's an interval called a tritone, which is the distance of a sharpened fourth or flattened fifth. That's a relatively common interval these days. For example, you can hear it as the first two notes in the Simpsons theme, and it turns up in things like diminished chords, which were showing up a lot in pop music at this point. They seem 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, followed by the E with the B flat on top. Put together that Hendrix may have got the idea to use tritones in his intro.

from Miles Davis' Walkin, which does something similar. 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 sharpened 9. A dominant seventh sharpened 9 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 sharp in it. A dominant seventh sharp in nine chord just makes that G note part of the chord, so the notes are E, G sharp, B, D, G. 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 7th-sharpened 9 in his solo one till there was you. And there are both G7-sharp 9 and D7-sharp 9 chords in Taxman. An E7-sharp 9 is also the very opening chord of I Feel Free by Cream. And both those latter two songs, only released a few months earlier, and both by people that Hendricks 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 Hendricks chord. Purple Hayes was one of Hendricks's early attempts at songwriting, written after Chas Chambler heard Hendricks playing around with a riff in the dressing room

and told him, That's your next single. It was also the start of the group's studio experimentation. Hay Joe had been recorded quickly, in a fairly standard way for pop singles of the time, as one might expect for something produced by Chaz Chandler, who had, of course, had a very successful pop career himself, and who, when they were making Hay Joe,

was very conscious that they were recording a track without yet having a deal. Purple Hayes, 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 of recording it at Delane Lee 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 Hendricks's experimentation as Jeff Emerick was for the Beatles. For the first time on record, Hendricks 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 lessee 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 Hendricks, by Roger Mayer, an electrical engineer Hendricks had met at a nightclub. This pedal allowed Hendricks to play a note and have it doubled at the octave, and he used it on the solo. Eddie Kramer was happy to work with Hendricks 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, realizing one didn't have to be a technically perfect singer to perform. Olympic Studios was also perfect for Hendricks 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 Hendricks, as Hendricks was using two martial stacks at full volume in the studio, which Chambor thought was a little excessive. Hendricks complained that he wasn't being allowed to record things his way, and Chandra 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 Hendricks' biggest lyrical influence other than Dylan, but it's also notable that it's the first time Hendricks 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. The lyric was a spell on you because of my things you do. The lyric was also, by all accounts, originally much, much longer than the released version,

so much so that Hendricks would later complain that the track as released was not really Purple Hayes. Chandler helped Hendricks 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 Hayes made number three on the chart, 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 Hendricks. They couldn't manage him, because Charles Chandler and Mike Jeffrey 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 a Lamerton 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 Jeffrey 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 Jimmy Hendricks 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 Jimmy Hendricks 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. 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 Miche's Brothers sounder-likes and four seasons covers like The Sun Ain't Going to Shine anymore.

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. Engelbert Humperdink. As you might imagine, the group didn't feel particularly comfortable on a bill with these acts, and Hendricks in particular was looking for some way for the group to stand out. And on the opening night, the journalist Keith Altham suggested that Hendricks could set his guitar on fire on stage. According to Altham, he only meant it as a joke, but Charles Chandler latched onto the idea. And that night, Hendrix poured lighter fluid over his guitar and set it alight,

drawing, of course, Fire. While the Burning Not 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 Hendricks had used on Purple Hays, the basic feel of the song comes from the land of a thousand dancers.

The hit by Wilson Pickett, who Hendricks had been a backing musician for in at least one show in 1966. 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 Hendricks visiting the mother of Noel Redding, the experience as bass player and at that point the band member Hendricks was closest to. Hendricks 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 and over let Jimmy 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 was apparently inspired by this one. According to Cathy 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 Ina Sharples, who we've actually heard in an earlier episode, as in 1961 her grandson was played by Davy Jones, later of the Monkeys. 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. After all the chats are in the boxes You can hear happiness Staggering on down the street But the live And the wind Whispers

Failing Mayfield may have been the musical inspiration And Hendricks 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 Hendricks and adamantly insist that he was never physically violent with her.

Sadly, stories abound of Hendricks 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 should know better than anyone. They did, however, still have a fractious relationship, and after one hour 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 Hendricks sweeping up the broken crockery while she was out. Somewhere a queen is weeping Somewhere a king has no wife And the wind

It cries The single made number six on the chart 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 16 sessions spread over five more. months, but Chas Chandler later calculated that they had only spent 72 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 side men rather than equals, Hendricks had done everything he could to make the group seem like an actual group, and had particularly become good friends with Reading, and encouraged the other two to speak up in interviews, and stood up for them in arguments with Geoffrey 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 banned 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, Hendricks 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. Charles Chandler estimated that the total time to record

The Wind Cries Mary, from Hendricks bringing the song into the studio to the completed track was 20 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 Sergeant Pepper album, which kept RU experienced off the number one slot on the UK album charts. Hendricks 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.

Paul McCartney still talks about seeing that show, and Hendricks 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 Hendricks learning his song in three days. Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell learned it in half an hour. At the time of that show, the Jimmy Hendrix experience was still primarily a UK phenomenon. In May, Reprise Records released Hay Joe as a single in the US,

largely on the recommendation of Mick Jagger, though it hadn't been much of a success and Hendricks was still largely unknown over there but that was all about to change 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 Giles Choplin we've already done episodes on we'll be covering how the Who's career changed at Monterey in a future episode, but the Jimmy 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 Hendricks, had called him a savage, and while Pete Townsend was always impressed by Hendricks, and later became friendly with him, he had been one of those people who had been intimidated by Hendricks pushing all the top tier of London guitarists off their pinnacle, and resented Hendrix for what he thought of as Hendricks stealing his act by destroying

instruments, though Townsend was always careful to distinguish what the two did, saying of Hendricks. We're talking crass show business nonsense here. My guitar smashing started as a serious art school concept with a clear manifesto. Townsend had very, very complex feelings about Hendricks, 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 Hendricks as the new kid, partly from sexual jealousy,

like almost all straightened by women in the London scene, Townsend's then-girlfriend, later his first wife, found Hendricks extraordinarily attractive, and partly because he saw Hendricks 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 Hendricks's virtuosity, In a very real sense, Hendricks was treading more around Townsend's toes than theirs. According to Charles Shaw Murray, Hendricks 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 learn from Albert King or Elmore James Records,

or doing long psychedelic freakouts. But only John Lennon, Keith Richards and Townsend were really solid, rhythm guitar players. Hendricks, like Townsend, was playing both rhythm and lead parts, because he'd come up through the Chitlin circuit backing people like Don Covey, 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, Townsend was thus maybe the closest stylistically to Hendricks, 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. Hendricks had brought his own martial stacks from the UK, but the Hoo's management had insisted they rent some cheap Fox amplifiers, which meant that not only could they not play as loud 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 line-up order, neither of them wanted to follow the other. There was a tense standoff between the two bands until finally Hendricks suggested flipping a coin. The Who won and got to go on first. They ended the set with a version of My Generation, which ended with Townsend smashing his guitar and Keith Moon kicking over his drums.

Hendricks 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 in when down badly. The Jimmy 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 Hayes and the Wind Cries Mary, was released in the US a couple of days after Monterey to

capitalize on the performance, with the cover versions that were normally in their set, like Killing Floor, the Howling 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. Al Cooper, who are you're You used to play Al Cooper, who had played the organ on Dylan's original of that, was backstead of that, and Hendrix had asked him to replicate his organ part with them, them, but Cooper, not knowing how good Hendricks 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 trowelow arm on his strats 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 Hayes more or less fighting his instrument. But it was the last song that sealed the legend of Jimmy Hendrick. forever. 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 Hendricks ended the song. Remembering what he'd done at the beginning of the Engelbert Humperdink 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. 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 Jimmy 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's show. He used a racialised term about him, which I am not going to repeat, but which is easy to find if you Google, Chris Gow and Hendricks together. Quoted someone else using an actual racial slurve about Hendricks, 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 Hendricks'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. Chris Gow's assessment of Hendricks'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. Jan 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 Townsend bumped into Hendricks at the airport after the show and in an attempt at bridge building apologised to Hendricks for the pre-show tension

and offered to buy part of the destroyed guitar. Hendricks responded by calling Townsend either a honky 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 film or 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 Whiskey or Go-Go,

where they didn't take advantage of the prestigious booking, as Hendricks 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 Engelbert tour had been, though it was also obviously a fantastic opportunity. The monkeys were at this point arguably the biggest band in the world other than the Beatles, and Mickey Dolans and Peter Talk had both been at Monterey,

and Dolans in particular had been hugely impressed by Hendricks' performance. They decided to offer Hendricks a support slot on their upcoming tour. Hendricks didn't like the idea. He detested the Monkey's music and had said so publicly, though he ended up getting on rather well with the actual band members. But Mike Jeffrey, who wanted to start making some meal money from his client, thought it was an excellent idea. Mickey Dolan still shows exactly what the problem was with this bill

in his solo performances to this day. The Monkey's audience simply didn't want Hendrix, and while the monkeys themselves relished the opportunity to stand at the side of the stage every night and watch Hendricks play, it soon became clear that the combination just wouldn't work. To save everyone's face, a story was concocted that Hendricks had been dropped from the tour after a campaign by the daughters of the American Revolution, who were allegedly complaining that Hendricks's act was simply too erotic for the children of America. Jeffrey quickly put together a string of club dates to fill the gap,

and Hendricks found himself back in New York, playing some of the same clubs he had been playing before Charles Chandler had discovered him, though this time as the star. At the same time, the experience were playing in New York, the Mothers of Invention had a residency at the Garrick Theatre there. Hendricks and the Mothers would become quite friendly, and Hendricks would pose for the cover of their album

were only in it for the money, where they parodied the cover of Sergeant Pepper. And it was around this time that Frank Zappa introduced him to something that would change his style forever. Hendricks 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 Allington's band.

Williams got that unique tone by moving a plunger mute in and out of the bell of his trumpet, and Hendricks 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 Hendricks 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 whack-a-wacker-wacker noise, Zepa 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 tells a brave Ulysses. Hendricks immediately took to the Wawa which took over from the octave pedal is his new favourite guitar pedal. The time in New York also, though, led to one of the odder side steps in Hendricks's career. Hendricks was returning to Greenwich Village as a star, but not as a star with a lot of money.

Hendricks 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 licence or anywhere to park it. Partly, many, many people who Mike Geoffrey managed have suggested, in so many words, that Geoffrey was at the very least of 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 $40 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 played a couple of years previously, he wanted to take Knight out for dinner but was short of cash. Knight suggested that they go around and visit Ed Halpin, the owner of the record label for which the Squires had recorded,

and borrow some money off him. What Hendricks 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 Halpin, less than two years earlier, for the Prince of the advance of one dollar. Helping was indeed very happy to meet up with his old acquaintance, Jimmy,

and to take him and Knight out for a meeting. and why didn't they come back to his studio for a jam session? They did, and Halpin made a plan. He was going to take those jam tracks, and the recordings they'd made earlier, and put out a new Jimmy Hendricks album. Halpin started suing everyone involved with Hendricks' career, pointing out that he did actually have a valid contract with Hendricks

that had another 15 months on it. Four days after Halpin sued Hendricks' labels, Hendricks actually went back into the studio with Halpin in a night, though he did show a little bit of awareness of the legal situation. Unsurprisingly, Ed Halpin did not pay attention to any Pinky 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 Julie came out, licensed by Halpin to Capital Records, credited to Jimmy Hendrix and Curtis Knight,

with a big photo of Hendrix at Monterey on the cover. The legal squabbles between Halpin and Hendrix's British associates would last for years. The group's time in New York also brought home to Hendricks 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 Hendricks 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 name-dropping 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 band leaders of all time, he was yesterday's news. By the mid-60s, the only major blues artists who were still making a living on the Chitlin circuit were people like BB 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. Hendricks 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 Howling Wolf's 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 60s, 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 that was in the process of signing in the late 60s

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 Hendricks' band didn't help in that respect. As Hendricks' friend Robert Wyatt later said, it would have been hard to imagine any of Hendricks'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 audience has 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 music 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 70s work of Curtis Mayfield or Bobby Womack, or Parliament Funkadelic, or Prince, or Miles Davis's fusion records, without the influence of Hendricks. But all that was to come, at the time, all Hendricks 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, Hendricks 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 Dudar band, a group who Hendrix was a big fan of. That track, with its depressed mood and odd sound, didn't chart as highly as the group's earlier singles, only reaching number

18 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 RU experienced album, which, as was often the case in the US, dropped central 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 reprieze 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 Jeffrey 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 Geoffrey and Chandler managed, like Hendricks's friend Eric Burden, 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 Floating. Roy Wood and Trevor Burton of the Move joined Graham Nash of the Hollies on backing vocals. There was a lot of while who, much for a while shared a flat with Mitch Mitchell, also appeared along with Gary Leeds of the Walker Brothers, providing footsteps sound effects on another track on the album, if six was nine. 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 McGeeer so he couldn't be accused of capitalising on his brother's fame, and the poet Roger McGoff, who was McGee's collaborator in their group The Scaffold,

on their duo album, McGuff and McGee, which was produced by McCartney and former Yard, Bird Paul, Samwell Smith. There are no credits for individual tracks, but it's known that Tendrix and probably also Noel Redding appeared on at least the tracks

so much and ex-art students, the latter of which also featured Dave Mason of Traffic on Sittar. The sessions for the second album, titled Axis Boulders Love, stretched out far longer than for the first album, starting even before RU Experienced was released and finishing five months later, interspersed with all the groups touring. And the record ended up costing £10,000 to make, rather than a few hundred RU experienced cost.

The record might be the definition of difficult second album, the relationship between Hendricks and Chandler started to deteriorate, as Hendricks 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 an old Reading original, which Redding also sang read 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. And Redding was also increasingly starting to resent the way that Hendricks 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, Hendricks accidentally left the only copy of the master tape

for side one in a taxi, and after all that work getting the album perfect, Hendricks, Chandler and Kramer had to redo the whole mix overnight to get it out on time. Axis Boulder's Love is generally considered the weakest of the three Jimmy Hendricks experience albums and contains few of the songs it gets cited as all-time classics, though it does have its defenders, and Little Wing is generally considered among Hendricks's best songs.

Hendrix was also starting to feel constrained by the format of the small group I'm burned out by the constant fresher to record and tour. He told Melodymaker, 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 pliatory 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. Hendricks would also talk in interviews at this point about wanting to do stage shows that incorporated a dramatic element and maybe touring with vocal 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 band barely ever played anything from Axis on stage and then complained that they weren't doing anything new Hendricks seemed to believe, whether correctly or otherwise, that all the audiences wanted from him was Purple Hayes and Hay Joe, and so that's what he gave them, over and over, later often writing in his diaries after shows, SOS,

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 Hendricks and Medding, also grew higher after a Scandinavian tour in early 1968, when according to Reading, we all got rotten drunk. Jimmy had been hanging out with this gay Swedish journalist. Perhaps he was putting ideas in Jimmy's head,

but Jimmy suggested we should have a forsome. Redding, who was straight, wasn't interested in having a gay forsome, and Hendricks, 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 fine for it.

After the Scandinavian tour, it was back off to America. Mike Geoffrey sent both the Jimmy Hendricks experience and Eric Burden's new animals on separate, though sometimes overlapping, tours of the state, promoted with the joint press conference announcing the British are coming. Along with them came two other bands Geoffrey and Chandler managed, who had acted support for both bands, swapping places occasionally. The first of these was a band called Air Appellation.

parent, who originally featured guitarist Henry McCulloch, 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. Hendricks actually took Aera Parenthood into the studio while they were on tour and produced a single for them. Hendricks 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 Hendricks playing guitar. 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 Hendricks, but by Chas Chandler and Tom Wilson. The 1968 tour was one that caused Hendricks 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 Hendricks 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, Hendricks 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 a 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 on mass. 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 Hendricks become steadily more aggressive inevitable. 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 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 Hendricks 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 by not going into detail about these things is not meant to be that kind of minimisation and Hendricks'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 there must be some kind of way out of here said a joke The group Before much

Confuciary And like The group had started work on all along the watchtower in January 1968 Before the stress started to get to Hendricks And like many of the recordings he was involved in at that point It was a collaboration with many of his favorite musicians And those favorite musicians did not include Noel Redding

At first it wasn't even necessarily all along the watchtower that Hendricks wanted to record after he heard John Wesley Harding for the first time. The song he latched onto 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 Sergeant Papas 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 Hendricks and a 12 string played by his friend Dave Mason of Traffic

and Mitchell on drums Hendricks 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 Hendricks'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 Hendricks liked to have his friends around him and jam and explore ideas while the clock was running. This is sometimes portrayed as an art versus commerce thing, and there is an element of that. Obviously Chandler didn't want to waste money, but it is important to remember that Chandler

had been a musician himself, in one of the most respected bands of the mid-60s, 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 recognized Jimmy's talent, and then he was able to corral that raw talents

and develop it and encourage it. He would sit with Jimmy 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 Jimmy, with his strong vision, just allowed things to happen in a very casual way. After getting rid of Jones, Hendricks, Mason and Mitchell went through several more takes. Mason had difficulty getting the rhythm down the way Hendricks wanted it, and then Hendricks

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 The Unusual Percussion Instruments at the start. 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 12 and then to 16, a revelation for Hendricks 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 Hendricks' sessions. The new studio had only been settled 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 Burden,

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 Caldron Engineering, and Chandler had booked the studio solid for six weeks to make the next Jimmy Hendricks 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 Kelvin doing a couple while Kramer was moving over.

But the whole reason that the record plant had been built was that Kelvin wanted to build a studio that went against all Chandler's instinct. 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

till 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 Geoffrey's attitude to financial probity, he decided to get Geoffrey to buy him out of his contract.

Geoffrey paid £300,000 to become Hendricks's sole manager, and Hendrix took over production. In some ways, Chanda got out at the right time. All along the Watchtower would be the Jimmy Hendrix's last major hit single. Cross Town Traffic, the follow-up, only scraped the bottom of the UK top 40, and didn't get any higher than 52 in the US,

while Watchtower made the top 20 in the US and number 5 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 sub-genre that has been labelled Apocalypse Rock, and which is indelibly associated with the Vietnam War. Even though Hendricks 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 arrangements in live performances on Hendricks's, rather than his own original version. 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.

The album for which all along the Watchtower was the advanced single, Electric Ladyland, would end up being the last studio album Jimmy Hendrix would complete, and the only one where Hendricks was the credited producer, chandah having left after recording something like a quarter of the album. It was also an album that wasn't really by the Jimmy Hendrix experience, despite the credits. Of the 16 tracks on the album, less than half actually featured all three members of the band. Seven had someone other than Reading 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, Str, that while it was produced by Hendricks, had a band consisting of Reading on guitar, Steve Stills on bass, and Miles on drums, with Hendricks and Mitchell not on the track. Part of the reason seems to have been that Hendricks was getting ever more interested and 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 Hendricks and Mitchell, is his most blatant homage to Curtis Mayfield yet.

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 Patway. Take a stroll out of house. Take our stroll out there. Take a stroll out west. It's a blues standard. There's a version of it by Lightning Hopkins, for example.

You know I wish I was a catfish. Swimming in there, deep blue sea. I'd have all these good-looking women now, boy. 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 sung, and a magazine. Well, I wish I would a cat pee-wimming in a whole deep. The Jimmy Hendricksin' after me, Sean up after me.

Shorned up after me. The Jimmy 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. And so when Jack Cassidy of the Jefferson Airplane and Steve Winwood came into the studio,

Hendricks and Mitchell jammed with them and without reading, as Hendricks sang some new lyrics which combine Waters' voodoo related lyrics from songs like Hootie Coochie Man, with Hendricks' own interest in science fiction, becoming the 15-minute blues jam Voodoo Child. That wasn't the end of the voodoo child concept though. The next day, film cameras were in the studio, and Hendricks 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's slight return,

probably the last of Hendricks's most well-known songs to be completed during his lifetime. As you might imagine, Noel Redding constantly being left out of recordings and having to play exactly what Hendricks 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 Hendricks 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 Jimmy Hendrix experience, so Redding would end up playing both halves of the show. Their music was very different from the experiences, showing Redding's wish to make music that was more like the move or the small faces.

For now, Redding continued in both bands, although by early 1969 nobody was happy in the Jimmy Hendricks experience anymore. Hendricks was getting more ambitious for his own music. He was still technically living in London, though the experience as 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 like 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. Hendricks 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 anymore. Then Hendricks, 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 anymore, Redding quit the band and flew back to London to work on Pat Mattress's first album instead.

Billy Cox joined Hendricks and Mitchell for some TV appearances, and then Hendricks moved to Woodstock, to a house Mike Jeffrey had arranged for him in the hope that he could basically copy Dylan and get a new band together there. Hendricks 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 Casuals years earlier,

on rhythm guitar, plus drummer Juma Sultan and Congo player Gerardo Velaz, 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 Chiplin Circuit R&B players while Sultan and Valets were jazzers, and they didn't mesh at all well.

And by this point Hendricks was also not getting on with Geoffrey, 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. Sir Hendricks 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 Jimmy simply wanted to get through the gig and start again. The Woodstock gig was, in most respect, a massive anti-climax. 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 9 the next morning,

after almost everyone had already gone home. But there was one performance that Hendricks gave that morning that became legendary. Hendricks 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 is all along the watchtower, to be his comment on everything that was going wrong in Vietnam.

It would be Jimmy Hendrix's last major cultural impact on the world. For the last year of his life Hendricks 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 Jeffrey had mob connections and somehow in a way that has never been conclusively settled This led to Hendricks getting kidnapped by gangsters and held for ransom. Different people have said either that this was done to get money out of Geoffrey,

or at Geoffrey's instigation to show Hendricks who had the real power in their relationship. Whatever the cause, Hendricks was soon freed. It turned out there were some advantages to being on Frank Sinatra's record label. Gypsy's son and rainbows split up very quickly, and for the next year Hendricks would be constantly trying to pull together a supergroup with 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 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 Hendricks joined Love for a session that produced the track The Everlasting First, not a highlight of either's discography. 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 McClockland, one of the few guitarists of a similar level of technical skill to Hendricks, 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's Bitches Brew. McLaughlin knew Mitch Mitchell from before either had become successful, and he introduced Davis to Hendricks,

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 Hendricks knew who the perfect bass player would be. Unfortunately, what Hendricks 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, Hendricks did another album altogether, a live album with a new group he called Band of Gypsies. The Band of Gypsies album, and possibly the band itself, only existed to fulfill a contractual obligation. As part of the ongoing lawsuits with Halpin, he had agreed to give help in one new album of new material that he could release in return for dropping his suits against Warner's.

That album was a live recording by a new trio in the same format as the experience, consisting of Hendricks and his old friend's Billy Cox and Buddy Miles, and with Miles taking as many lead vocals as Hendricks and writing two of the songs. The album was generally considered weak. Hendricks 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 grisly. The thing is, 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 Hendricks's best. Machine Gun. A month later, though, on January the 28th, 1969, the band of gypsies played their last gig. By this point, fences have been more or less mended between the members of the experience. And Mitchell and Medding came along to see Band of Gypsies 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 Hendricks 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 Jeffrey spike Hendricks with acid before he came on stage, and Jeffrey used the debacle as an excuse to sack Miles and Cox and to announce the reformation of the Jimmy Hendrix experience. But it was a new Jimmy Hendricks experience. Very quickly after Hendricks 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 sack. this time without being told to his face. A tour was arranged for the new experience, with Buddy Miles' band as a 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.

But things weren't going well at all for Hendricks. According to Miles, Hendricks 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 Hendricks was dragged into being involved in a semi-infraised 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 artie 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 Hendricks.

He asked what I was doing and said, Hey, I'm kind of shy too. So he 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 and mole. I was so excited, and then he was gone. He never came back. So Jimmy never got to record an electric lady,

but I did. Patti Smith's first record was indeed made at Electric Lady and was a version of Hey Joe. Hendricks 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 Hendricks's compositions and have Hendricks solo over them, and they were going to do an album together.

But first Hendricks flew over to play the Isle of White Festival, the same place that his idol Dylan had played the year before, and gave what might be his last actually good performance. They followed an utterly disastrous tour of Europe, which started with a mere bad performance, was followed by Billy Cox, who didn't indulge in illegal drugs, getting spanked with acid and having a psychotic break as a result, Hendricks getting an infection that made him feverish,

riots by fascists, and gales preventing outdoor shows. A few days into 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. Hendricks 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 10th 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 Monkeys, who was delighted to meet up with his old friend. a girl who's there to pick me up before I fall. So if in the end we should go, Both are separate ways, I know the lesson I've learned here is worth it all. He went to a club and tried to jam with Eric Burden 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. Hendricks's last two days are shrouded in mystery. If he 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, Monica Danneman, has claimed that they were engaged, but has been described by others who knew Hendricks as delusional and a stalker. She died by suicide in the 90s,

and she told different stories on the day, at the inquest and in later years, none of which seemed to properly match the facts that can otherwise be established. Eric Burden, who was the first person Danaman called when she found Hendricks dead, and was one of his closest friends, says he believes that Hendricks killed himself deliberately. Other people point to Mike Geoffrey, saying he somehow murdered Hendricks, Jeffrey 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 Danaman, 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 Jimmy Hendricks

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 her death on his own vomit and his sleep. The time between his first single with the experience coming out and the release of his last studio album, Electric Ladyland, was 22 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 margarial problems,

and vainly trying to get in snatches of recording time to record tracks he would never be able to finish, was 23 months. Literally half 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 they were not going to be any more releases so they might as well just take a payoff. Both are now all so dead. The recording Hendricks was going to do with Gil Evans eventually happened though. We worked as a tribute to Hendricks, 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.

A history of rock music in 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. Games People Play by Joe South. 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 favourite online bookstore, or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey. Hickey and produced by me and tilt ariser. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5.00 the numbers, songs.com, to read transcripts and liner notes,

and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for listening.