Jimi Hendrix arrived at Heathrow Airport at 9 a.m. on September 24, 1966, a Saturday morning. He had set off from New York City under another name entirely. For the past year or so his professional name had been Jimmy James. The exotic spelling Jimi was decided on during the flight over the Atlantic.
Interviewed five years later, Jimi’s manager Chas Chandler was not sure whether they had agreed to convert to Hendrix from Hendricks at the same time. In fact, although the origin of Jimi’s surname probably is the English “Hendricks,” his paternal ancestors had been using the spelling “Hendrix” for at least three generations. There had been much to talk about on the plane; the journey was a flight into the unknown for both young men.
Chas, twenty-eight years old to Jimi’s twenty-three, with a career as bass player in an internationally successful pop group behind him, was the leader of the expedition. He was full of ideas but had little substance to back them up.
Chas had made up his mind to bring Jimi to London as soon as he had heard him play. That had been in the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, six weeks previously in early August, where Chas had been taken by Linda Keith, the person who has the best claim to have discovered Jimi Hendrix. Linda, a Londoner and a fashion model, had come to New York City to await the arrival of her boyfriend, Keith Richards. She had spotted Jimi in a nightclub playing guitar with R&B singer Curtis Knight, and been struck by his musicianship and his physical charisma. She had invited him first to her table and then to her hotel room, where they had sat up all night listening to Linda’s collection of blues 78s and to Bob Dylan’s newly released double album Blonde on Blonde. Jimi had been grateful for an occasion to unburden himself of his passion for Bob Dylan. Apart from his excursions to the Village, his base in NYC was Harlem, and his friends there had no interest in white pop music. The night was the beginning of an intense friendship, and Linda became Jimi’s patron. Since he had arrived in NYC in 1964 Jimi had depended on female patronage for survival, but in Linda he found a patron with ambition and influence. She turned first to the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who came to listen but passed on the option. Then she ran into Chas.
Chas told her that his band, the Animals, were falling apart and that he planned to go into management. She took him to see Jimi play at the eccentric Café Wha? and introduced them during a break in the set. Chas’s only doubt, as Jimi took the stage again after their introduction, was why Jimi had not been signed before. These doubts were blown away by an astonishing coincidence. Without knowing what kind of act he would discover as he turned to management, Chas had already determined that its first single would be “Hey Joe” (then a recent minor hit for the Leaves). Without any prompting, Jimi’s first number of his second set was “Hey Joe.” Through either destiny or serendipity, the Jimi Hendrix Experience had come into being.
Jimi and Chas made a striking impression when they presented themselves at Immigration at Heathrow. Chas was six feet three inches tall, with a barrel chest, blond hair, and blue eyes. Before becoming a professional musician, he had worked as a docker in his native Newcastle and, an assertive man, he used his imposing physical presence to emphasize his point of view in any dispute. Jimi was the slighter but more conspicuous of the two. Five feet ten inches tall, he appeared much taller due to the explosion of hair piled on the top of his head, a highly idiosyncratic hairstyle he had devised and coiffed himself with the aid of Bayliss hair rollers, a homage to and an extraordinary imitation of Bob Dylan’s loose white-afro curls. He was slender but big boned, as evidenced not only by the magnetic cheekbones that made him so photogenic but also by a pair of large, strong hands. The size of his feet was emphasized by boots with long pointed toes, which would have struck any fashion-conscious spectator as passé. Nobody would have known that the soles of Jimi’s boots were worn through, and that in one of them there was a dollar bill concealed. Jimi had taken up the habit of always having a dollar that only he knew about after he had been left stranded when he missed a tour bus while traveling through the rural South as a sideman to one of the many R&B stars he worked for during his years of apprenticeship. The single bill had talismanic significance as well as practical use. Three years later, when he was the best-paid concert performer in the world, he still traveled with a dollar bill tucked into his hat band to ward off the poverty that had oppressed him all his life.
Jimi moved like a taller man than he was, too, with the incline of the head and shoulders known as a “scholar’s stoop,” and with a clumsy, uncoordinated gait that one might associate with an absent-minded professor. He was by the far the quieter of the two men, inclined to hang back, listen, or even appear uninvolved in what was going on around him. It was a manner often mistaken for shyness. But when drawn into conversation Jimi quickly revealed a playful geniality and a readiness for intimacy that women, and many men, found seductive. That geniality was to be tested on arrival at Heathrow because it took Chas and Jimi three hours to clear Customs.
The delay at Heathrow was due to doubts over Jimi’s visa. There had not been time to apply for a full work permit, and getting the paperwork in order had taken longer than expected. But Chas had booked the flights and could not afford to cancel them, so Jimi entered the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a visitor; because he was traveling with barely enough luggage for a weekend’s stay, the Immigration officials became suspicious. Their doubts were not allayed until Chas persuaded a publicist from the Animals’ management company to come out to the airport and finesse Jimi through with a story that he was an American soul singer who had come to Britain to spend his UK royalties, a plausible tale in an era of tight foreign exchange controls and that also accounted for the fact that Jimi had only $40 with him.
The baby who would become Jimi Hendrix was born on November 27, 1942, in Seattle. His mother, Lucille, was seventeen years old and his father, Al, was away in the military. Lucille’s unexpected pregnancy and Al’s impending call up to serve in World War II had been the catalysts that had turned a dance hall romance into an unpromising marriage. Nevertheless, Al and Lucille’s relationship was to hold together for as long as Lucille’s short life lasted, through many stormy partings and one visit to the divorce court. That it did so was due to Al’s determination to hold on to his son. Even with the support of an extended family, Lucille struggled with motherhood, and the infant Jimi was fostered to a family in California. Jimi was three years old, and on the point being adopted by his foster family, when Al, who had just been demobilized, arrived to reclaim him. Al took Jimi back to Seattle, where Al also reclaimed Lucille, who had formed another relationship while Al had been serving in the military.
Between 1948 and 1953, Al and Lucille had five more children together: Leon, Joe, Kathy, Pamela, and Alfred. The latter four were all born with such severe developmental difficulties that Lucille had no other realistic alternative than to put them in the care of the City of Seattle. Even in the 1950s it was suspected that these developmental difficulties were linked to Lucille’s heavy drinking, a suspicion that added to Lucille’s burden of guilt over her inadequacies as a mother.
Al’s mother was a full-blooded Cherokee; Lucille’s family roots were in Tennessee and Arkansas, and it is very likely that she too had Native American ancestry. Always as indifferent to race as society allowed him to be, when asked to identify himself, Jimi Hendrix considered himself to be Cherokee rather than African American.
Lucille was a semi-detached presence in the family home. Al was the constant presence in his sons’ lives, and, torn between being both provider and parent, his household was usually both chaotic and impoverished. The Hendrix boys depended on the generosity of neighbors for such basic needs as regular meals. Lucille’s tarantella of a life ended in February 1958, when she died, alone, in hospital of a ruptured spleen brought on by a fall. She was thirty-two years old, five years older than her eldest son would be when he died, and already suffering from hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver. Jimi Hendrix was fifteen. Even before kindergarten he had been noted as a child of inner resources, and his mother’s death pushed him further into his own imagination and bequeathed to him a reckless disregard for the future.
Once clear of Immigration, Chas’s first move was to plunge Jimi into London’s music scene. To this end he diverted the taxi from the main route into London, to (1) 53 Gunterston Road, Hammersmith. All that most first-time visitors to London see of Hammersmith is its grey slate roofs, as the elevated motorway from Heathrow dips and dives through a complicated intersection and speeds them on to the center of the city. Hammersmith is a late-Victorian suburb, a maze of streets of terrace houses, each two or three stories high and fronting almost straight on to the sidewalk apart from a small yard with enough room for a couple of trash cans and grandiosely referred to as the “front garden.” 53 Gunterston Road, as undistinguished as its neighbors, was the home of Zoot Money, a rumbustious bandleader, and his Scottish wife Ronnie. With Zoot’s band already assembling for that evening’s gig, the door was wide open to the two unexpected guests. Jimi, who loved to jam more than anything else, walked in, grabbed an unplugged electric guitar, and took the floor.
Upstairs twenty-year-old Kathy Etchingham was still asleep after a late night clubbing. A reluctant apprentice hairdresser by day, she had a reputation as a disc jockey by night. Ronnie Money went up to wake her, and told her that she must come down and see this amazing visitor who looked “like the Wild Man of Borneo” (an expression that referred to Jimi’s hair, not his race). Kathy refused to stir, but sleepily she did agree to meet Ronnie, as well as Chas and his funny American friend, later on at the Scotch of St. James club.
For more than three hundred years, the St. James district has been the place where London’s most influential citizens have met for leisure and gossip. It begins at Piccadilly Circus, famous for its huge electronic advertising displays, and follows a gentle slope down to the Mall, the long front drive of Buckingham Palace. St. James has always been a place of intrigue, where secrets have been swapped, alliances formed, and deals struck in intimate places of entertainment. Over the centuries, the nature of those places of entertainment has changed. In the early eighteenth century the district was the home of the London coffee houses, where young men gathered to show off their wit to one another. Later in that century it became the base of the dining clubs that formed around political factions and evolved into gentleman’s clubs, where politicians and other men of influence could conspire. In the 1960s, London had a new, youthful elite, an ostensibly more democratic one, composed of television producers, pop stars, actors, and photographers, although it mingled closely with the children of the old elite. It was natural that this elite should convene where the London elite always has, and equally natural that St. James should offer it the entertainment it craved: the discotheque. The (2) Scotch of St. James, 13 Mason’s Yard, Mayfair, was set in a secluded yard entered beneath an arch. Outrageously decorated with plaid to resemble a Scottish hunting lodge, the Scotch was a place where London’s class barrier had become invisible, although it remained tangible enough for anyone who attempted to cross it without belonging to either the aristocratic or the artistic incrowd.
Whoever was playing at the Scotch, the background noise was usually a conspiratorial hum, so Kathy was surprised to find the audience silent when she caught up with Ronnie Money. Everyone was listening to a young man hunched over a guitar on stage.
The seed of Hendrix’s success in London had been planted fifteen years earlier, when another African American guitarist had made his debut in London. In 1951 Big Bill Broozny had played a solo concert at the Kingsway Hall. Interest in the blues was very limited at the time, and Broozny drew an audience of around forty people to the large Methodist chapel. Knowledge of the blues was limited too, and probably none of the audience was aware that Broozny was not a bluesman, at least not by the strictest standards.
Before World War II, Broozny had enjoyed a prosperous musical career in Chicago as a bandleader, composer, and night-club proprietor. He had also been one of the pioneers of electric guitar. Left behind as a jazz musician by the emergence of bebop, he shrewdly acquired an acoustic guitar and began to see what “folk blues” could offer. The war had cut off British jazz musicians from the new developments that the music went through in the first half of the 1940s in the after-hours sessions in the clubs of New York City. When communications between British and American musicians were finally restored, the British were bewildered by the bebop sound created by musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell, as well as challenged by the virtuosity required to play it. The few British bebop enthusiasts were kept at arms length by the mainstream, which turned back to the jazz of the 1920s.
One of the early traditions of jazz that was revived in the London of the 1950s was “skiffle.” Skiffle or “scuffle” was an African American word used to describe performances on homemade or cheap instruments, such as tin whistles and harmonicas. In London the word came to be used for performances during the intervals at jazz concerts that showcased the talents (or lack thereof) of the players such as guitarists and string bassists who were drowned out by brass players in full concert. Then a young man who called himself Lonnie Donnegan made skiffle a household word throughout the British Isles.
In the mid 1950s he began to cut records loosely based on the style of Huddie Leadbetter, known as Leadbelly. Donnegan took on Leadbetter’s driving, powerful playing style but adapted his traditional material to be more comprehensible to British ears. For example, the old cocaine blues “Honey Take a Whiff on Me” became the far more gregarious “Come on Have Drink on Me.” Loud but light-hearted, and somewhat reminiscent of the working-class music hall acts of the Victorian vaudeville, which was only just fading away, Donnegan achieved what the jazz purists could not: he made the conservative BBC playlist, and as a result his records were massive hits.
His style was also very easy to imitate. Just as punk rock would do twenty years later, skiffle blurred the line between audience and performers, allowed enthusiasm to count for as much as skill, and put music-making into the hands of the young. By the late 1950s journalists would claim that half the young men and teenage boys in Britain were members of a skiffle band. John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met in a Liverpool schoolboy skiffle outfit called the Quarrymen.
In the Scotch of St. James that night, Jimi was playing something a lot more sophisticated than skiffle. As Kathy discovered, the crowd seemed enthralled—all except Chas, who was in a state of agitation. Even unpaid, Jimi’s public performance was in violation of his tourist’s visa. It was not long before Chas hustled Jimi off stage and introduced him to Kathy. She was immediately attracted to him. He seemed utterly outlandish, and at the same time gentle and sincere. When another young woman at the table went to the bathroom, Jimi took the opportunity to draw Kathy nearer to him. “I think you’re beautiful,” he whispered to her.
“It was a corny line,” Kathy recalls in her memoirs, “but there was something sweet and innocent about the way he said it.” She was disarmed and tried to disguise her feelings with small talk. Small talk became more difficult when the girl she had displaced returned and sat next to Ronnie. The atmosphere quickly soured, and then it erupted after the girl whispered something unpleasant about Kathy to Ronnie and Ronnie loudly took Kathy’s side. The girl seized Ronnie’s hair and Ronnie smashed a bottle on the table and threatened to push the jagged end into the girl’s throat. Already nervous, Chas came close to panic at the prospect of the police being called. He thrust Jimi at Kathy and told her to take him to his hotel.
A motor scooter is parked outside the building that once housed the Scotch of St. James, where the Experience first performed in London.
On a street of tailors’ shops, 17 Savile Row is woven into the tapestry of rock-and-roll history as the first place where the Experience rehearsed.