The Wednesday morning of September 28, 1966, found Noel Redding on a train from the seaside resort of Hastings on the south coast of England. He was a scholarly looking boy of twenty, tall with wire spectacles resting on a long thin nose with a high bridge and a mad professor frizz of curls on top of his head. He was on his way to London to give his music career another throw of the dice.
Dressed casually in jeans on a weekday, he easily could have been mistaken for a college student. The copy of the Melody Maker he had in his hand would have reinforced that impression. It was a trade paper for the music industry, but its excellent standards of journalism and the sophistication of its jazz criticism brought it a much wider readership.
Noel was carrying the paper for its “Musicians Wanted” advertisements. He had abandoned his education four years earlier when he dropped out of art school with the ambition of becoming a professional guitarist. So far, however, he had known mostly the lows of musical life: broken-down vans on snowy nights, tens of miles from anywhere and hundreds of miles from home; long stints playing rock-and-roll covers to American servicemen in German clubs; and lately a record deal with the record label Pye that had faded to nothing through poor sales and a quarrel with his manager.
This morning his feelings were a mixture of resignation and reckless ambition. He had decided that competition was too tight among guitarists and that he should aim to become a drummer. Then, after buying the Melody Maker, he saw that a guitarist was required for Eric Burdon’s new band and decided to take a shot at the big time.
After his train had pulled in to Charing Cross Station, Noel went to the Regent Street address given in the advertisement, stopped someone in the lobby and sold himself as best he could. He was directed to the auditions next day at a club in Soho called the Telephone Box. Soho is a network of backstreets in the heart of London. In those days, Soho was a cosmopolitan village where delicatessens stood next to striptease clubs, excellent French restaurants sat close to all-day drinking dens, and poets and artists mingled with streetwalkers and unlicensed bookies in the pubs.
When Noel reached the Telephone Box, the club seemed uncomfortably exposed with its lights full on, revealing graffiti-covered walls. Noel felt somewhat exposed himself. After four hard and fruitless years, he had gate-crashed into a dream-zone where the famous and unknown stood around bored, idle, and tense as the audition process ground on. He did his audition piece and although he received no reaction, felt sure he had not made the grade. He hung around, however, and found himself in conversation with Chas Chandler.
Before that morning the closest Noel had been to stardom was the time he had talked his way into the dressing room of the rock and roller Johnny Kidd as a teenager. Choosing his words carefully, Noel managed to give Chas the impression that he had toured with Kidd. Chas said that he was putting together a band for a guitarist who had just come over from America. Would Noel like to try out for bassist? Noel, who had never picked up a bass before, said yes.
Noel had already noticed Jimi as a mysterious figure hanging around in the background. In the short time he had been in London, Jimi had managed to acquire a classic Burberry trench-coat, which he wore indoors, buttoned up. The combination with Jimi’s exotic perm was striking. Chas introduced them, and Jimi wasted no time in cross-examining Noel on his credentials. After introducing Noel to a drummer and a pianist, Jimi took Noel through the chords of “Hey Joe,” which they played together for over an hour. Chas, watching them, saw that they had a good rapport. Both were young men who took life lightly and liked to see the funny side of things.
Chas was also struck that Noel, with his natural frizz and gawkiness, could be Jimi’s white twin. At the end of the session he presented Noel with ten shillings for his travel expenses, and a chocolate bar, both welcome to a musician on the breadline, and invited him to come back the following day.
When the next day came, however, it appeared that the opportunity was about to join the list of Noel’s other lost hopes. He had been told come to the Birdland club close to Piccadilly Circus, but when he arrived it was empty. He ran all the way along Chas’s offices at 40 Gerrard Street. Inside he met a sharply dressed man and blurted out his troubles to him. The man asked Noel his name, and when he heard it, told him had nothing to worry about, he had the job. Noel had just met Mike Jeffries, the man he would come to consider the most malign influence on his life.
No aspect of Chandler’s management of Hendrix has been questioned as much as his decision to go into partnership with Mike Jeffries. The man was so elusive that there was some confusion over his real name. He was born Michael Jeffrey but was known to everybody in the music business as Jeffries. That he never attempted to correct this would be appear to be due to a fundamental slipperiness of character.
Jeffries had been the Animals’ manager, and it was due to Jeffries’ divisive management, which had enriched some members of the band and left others with nothing, that Chandler needed financial support for his ambitions to become a manager himself, having learned the bitter lesson that in music it is the managers who make the money. Like the Animals, Jeffries was from Newcastle, but unlike the band he had been born into the upper middle class and enjoyed a privileged British public school (i.e., private school) education. From the end of World War II until the beginning of the 1960s all British young men were required to complete eighteen months military service. Jeffries’ public school background eased him into an officer’s commission, and he performed what was known as his National Service in Military Intelligence in Egypt. This intelligence background, together with the air of mystery Jeffries liked to cultivate, often evokes comparisons with James Bond. Sgt. Bilko appears to be a better comparison, because Jeffries spent his time in Egypt enriching himself through black market scams. On being honorably discharged, he went to Newcastle University and became head of entertainment for the Student Union. The experience of promoting concerts and the considerable proceeds of his Middle East adventures allowed him to go into the nightclub business in Newcastle, where he encountered the Animals and steered them to the top of not only the British but also the U.S. charts.
Dislike of Jeffries is not limited to those like Chandler and Eric Burdon who had reason to believe that he had swindled them. The American agency journalist Sharron Lawrence, who was a close friend of Hendrix, recalls that she would feel physically ill in Jeffries’ presence. A more flattering portrait is painted by the British music journalist Norman Joplin, who met Jeffries in New York in the early 1970s and judged him to be a sincere believer in the values of the counterculture, far more excited by the artistic rather than the financial side of the music business. Jeffries also gave Joplin a much-needed loan, which turned out to be closer to a gift.
The Monday of the same week, Mitch Mitchell had been called into the management offices for Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames and had learned that his services were no longer required as drummer. Mitch had no reason to be depressed over the loss of his job. An elfin-looking boy from the working-class west London suburb of Ealing, he was at twenty already a veteran of show business. A stage school pupil, he had been a child actor in the successful television series Jennings, in which he played a boy at an English boarding school. He had been a professional drummer, playing in bands and as a session player, since his teens. He owned his own car, an impressive achievement for a young Londoner not yet legally an adult.
Rumors of the shake-up of the Blue Flames lineup rippled out across Soho and reached Chas Chandler. That evening Chas telephoned Mitch and invited him to come down to the auditions. Mitch arrived the next day in a take-it-or-leave-it spirit. He had become frustrated with the repetitive life of touring, and had ambitions to stretch his musical talents. He spent a couple of hours jamming “In the Midnight Hour” with Jimi. Mitch knew the song—a hit for Wilson Pickett the year before—as a club standard, and Jimi had briefly been Pickett’s guitarist.
There was no faulting Mitch’s abilities, but Chas was indecisive. He had doubts about Mitch’s cockiness. Mitch had all the mannerisms of a British actor of that time, including the fruity, slightly camp stage voice that was then standard among drama school graduates but that sounded grand and overbearing to people who were not used to actors. Kathy assumed he must be a member of the upper classes. Another drummer, Aynsley Dunbar, who had come to audition for Eric Burdon, had been equally impressive, and his journeyman background on the Northern club circuit was more comfortably familiar to Chas. The decision was made by tossing a coin in the taxi home. The coin came down in Mitch’s favor.
Home for Hendrix during his first months in London was the (3) Hyde Park Towers Hotel, 41–51 Inverness Terrace, a converted private house in a terrace of early nineteenth-century houses that runs north from Hyde Park in the district known as Bayswater.
In the autumn of 1966 the Hyde Park Towers Hotel was in a decrepit state. “The hotel had been having problems with dry rot,” Kathy Echingham recalls in her memoirs. “The first we knew of it was when one of our bed legs went through the floor as I jumped on the bed. The management more or less evacuated us and closed down that part of the building, moving us to another floor at the back. As more and more rooms became dangerous and uninhabitable we had the place almost to ourselves, so the fact that the bathrooms had to be shared with other people didn’t matter much. Most of the time, it was like living in a rather large and run-down private house.”
Kathy moved in with Hendrix almost the day after she met him at the Scotch. Their ardent affair began when Kathy had seen Jimi back to his hotel. It was Kathy’s first serious sexual relationship. Before Jimi, sex had been an extension of friendship for her, something that arose and then trailed off in the course of the close relationships she had formed first with Keith Moon, the drummer of the Who, and then with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.
The passionate foundation of Jimi’s and Kathy’s life together often broke to the surface in the form of loud and even violent quarrels in private and in public. Kathy was no stranger to turbulence, however, and the couple shared strong bonds that held them together.
Kathy’s childhood had been almost as unsettled and uncertain as Jimi’s own. She had been born just after the end of World War II in Derby, a town in the center of England that grew prosperous during the Industrial Revolution on the lead extracted from the bleak, granite moorland that surrounds it. Kathy’s home life, for as long as it lasted, was more bleak than prosperous. The modest house into which she was born had no indoor bathroom, and the family bathed in a tin bath in front of the kitchen fire. This was not an unusual arrangement in the industrial towns of mid-twentieth-century Britain, but neither of her parents was emotionally equipped to seize the opportunities of the postwar boom. Her father was the dissolute son of an Anglo-Irish family whose fortunes had taken a turn for the worse during the Irish Civil War in the 1920s. He was not well prepared to earn a living, even without his tendency to alcoholic depression, so the family depended on the resourcefulness of Kathy’s mother, Lil.
Lil was a restless, impatient, and frustrated woman of Gypsy descent, who began on motherhood in early middle age. Always looking to improve the family’s finances, Lil decided to take in a young Irish laborer as a lodger. When Kathy was ten, Lil ran off with him. Kathy and her younger brother were sent to live with several eccentric relatives in Ireland before Kathy was placed as a permanent boarder at a convent school in Dublin. Just as she began to settle there, Lil reappeared and swept her away back to England to live.
Kathy made several attempts to run away to London during her teenage years, until at sixteen years old, she was legally of age to leave home and the authorities could not force her to return. In her early years in London she supported herself by waitressing in fast food restaurants and lived in bed-sit land. One night, at a party in St. John’s Wood, near Regent’s Park Zoo, she struck up a lasting friendship with another teenage girl, Angela King. Angie was the girlfriend of Eric Burdon and introduced Kathy to the inner circle of London’s music scene. Jimi arrived in London with the musical talent to place himself at the center of London’s rock world but without the social skills to get himself accepted by rock’s aristocracy. It was through Kathy’s network of friends, which included the Beatles, that he was able to mix with his peers. In return, as Kathy later wrote, “Jimi opened the door for me that allowed me to become myself.”
Jimi and Kathy in their Mayfair flat, which was above a restaurant called Mr. Love.