On the evening of Saturday, October 1, exactly one week after Jimi arrived in London, the supergroup Cream were due to make their onstage debut at the (4) Central Polytechnic in Little Titchfield Street, off Regent Street. The concert was eagerly anticipated and the scramble for tickets among the student body had been ferocious. At the center of Cream was Eric Clapton. Born in a rural village in Surrey in 1944, the child of a wartime liaison between a teenage girl and a married Canadian Air Force officer, Clapton had been raised by his grandparents. Through art school, he had been drawn into South West London’s blues scene as a teenager. By the time Jimi arrived in England, Clapton had become the country’s most celebrated blues guitarist.
No jazz purist despised the skiffle craze more than Alexis Korner, who wrote several hostile articles about it in the music press. Korner, born in Paris in 1928, the son of a Russian émigré and his much younger Greek wife, supported a bohemian lifestyle working as a producer for the BBC World Service, played guitar, and had been principally responsible for reviving skiffle at the 100 Club in Oxford Street. Once skiffle became a household word, he sneered at its vulgar success, perhaps a little galled that Lonnie Donnegan, who had sat in on the same sessions, had taken all the credit.
Nevertheless, as young skiffle players began to explore African American music and to take their own musical skills more seriously, they naturally gravitated to Korner. In 1963 Korner opened a club in the basement of a bakery opposite the Ealing Broadway underground station. By day the space was used as a drinking club, in the evening, when the pubs opened their doors, the space was vacant. The club became the home of Korner’s own blues band, Blues Incorporated. Every member of the Rolling Stones passed through Blues Incorporated at one time or another. The club was a magnet for all young musicians interested in the blues—Eric Burdon had hitchhiked all the way from Newcastle to visit it.
Coming to prominence in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and then the Yardbirds, Clapton created the concept of the guitarist as virtuoso, a musician to be listened to, rather than danced to. Clapton made guitar playing a gladiatorial affair, and was at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of British guitar players, the undisputed champion of London. Nobody in the long line outside the Central Polytechnic jostling for admission could have guessed that Clapton’s nemesis was in the building with a backstage pass.
Eric Clapton’s reputation had reached New York, and Jimi had naturally been intrigued by it. Chas had held out the promise of an introduction to Clapton as an incentive for Jimi to come to London. Cream’s debut was an opportunity to deliver on that promise and to launch the first phase of Chas’s strategy to make Jimi a star. Jimi’s work permit had come through, and Chas was eager to bring Jimi before the public. To accomplish this as quickly as possible, Chas decided to look for opportunities for Jimi to sit in with established acts, beginning with the tallest poppy.
Apart from seeing Clapton, audience members in the know were interested to find out if Cream’s bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker could remain onstage together without coming to blows. The two men had developed a well-known animosity when they had both worked in a jazz outfit known as the Graham Bond Organisation. Bruce, the younger of the two, had been born in 1944, in Glasgow, Scotland’s second city, known for its shipyards and a culture that produces formidably abrasive men and women. As a boy, Bruce took up the cello, because the Glasgow Education Authority loaned cellos out free of charge to keep up the numbers of this unpopular instrument in the city’s youth orchestras—otherwise, a musical instrument would have been beyond the Bruce family’s means. Bruce proved skilful enough to win an education at the Scottish Academy of Music but gave it up to pursue a jazz career.
Baker had had no formal musical education at all. Born in 1939 in London, his father was killed in action in World War II, and he had grown up together with his sister in an impoverished single-parent household. In his teens he had discovered an affinity with the drums, and had learned his craft while he earned a living as a session player.
Notwithstanding their mutual antipathy, Bruce and Baker were of one mind as to the direction Cream should take. They wanted to follow the example of the Ornette Coleman Trio.
Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1930, and from his teens had played saxophone on the local R&B circuit, before traveling to Los Angeles, where he began to develop the idea of “free jazz.” Coleman, and like-minded musicians such as Don Cherry, began to abandon not only structure but even melody and harmony. These ideas did not always receive a warm reception in American jazz circles, so in 1965 Coleman had moved to London, with the bassist David Izenzon and the drummer Charlie Moffet, and used the city as a base to introduce his music to Europe.
Without embracing all of Coleman’s ideas, both Bruce and Baker were separately interested in forming a trio that would emphasize the musicality of all three performers through free-flowing interaction between each other, putting solo breaks before song structure. Clapton was the obvious choice for such a venture, because of his virtuosity. Baker was the first to approach him, but Clapton would agree to form the band only if Bruce was to be the bassist. So Bruce and Baker agreed to sink their differences as best they could, and accept that Clapton would work with both of them or neither of them.
The atmosphere in Cream’s dressing room before the show was thick with this long-running antagonism and first-night nerves, and the arrival of Chas’s forceful personality did nothing to sweeten the mood. Baker was against the idea of Jimi playing a number, which made Bruce in favor of it. Jimi meanwhile appeared to be above it all, if not out of it. He said nothing but fiddled with his exotic hairstyle and studied his reflection in the large mirror on the other side of the room.
Baker then insisted that Clapton should remain onstage for Jimi’s brief appearance. When the time came, however, Clapton took the opportunity to step back and have a cigarette break. He did not take many puffs. Hendrix played the blues standard “Killing Floor,” and pulled out his whole range of tricks, playing the guitar with one hand and behind his back. Clapton was the person in the theatre best qualified to see beyond the showmanship and recognize the quality of the musicianship behind it. The folklore of the American South had it that gifted bluesmen acquired their talents through communing with the spirit world at crossroads at midnight. Clapton had spent his life in pursuit of the essence of the blues; now, at his hour of triumph, it seemed as if some restless crossroads spirit from the Mississippi Delta had risen among the red double-decker buses at the busy intersection of Oxford Circus and come and claimed it back.
The following week the Experience began rehearsing in the offices of the Animals’ music publishers, (5) Clarins, 17 Savile Row. This narrow, even gloomy street that runs behind Regent Street is famous for its world-class tailoring businesses. It is a place of industry rather than trade. The wealthy clientele drop in for fittings, but the life of the street is the skilled tailors who sew and stitch by hand on the premises.
It is an unlikely address from which to begin a rock band, and an unsuitable one. Even tucked away at the end of a corridor, the Experience could be heard throughout Clarins’ offices. One afternoon an exasperated visitor put his head around the door and asked them to keep the noise down. They later found out he was Henry Mancini, the film composer still remembered for the Pink Panther theme.
On the first day of rehearsals Mitch Mitchell asserted himself. “In the Midnight Hour” had been fine as an audition piece, but when Hendrix suggested they begin with it, Mitchell refused. As far as he was concerned, he had enough of bashing out soul covers.
Mitchell’s hero of the time was Elvin Jones, the drummer with the John Coltrane Quartet, and Mitchell wanted to use the sparseness of the Experience’s lineup as a space in which to experiment and stretch himself as a musician. Chandler was ready to sack Mitchell on the spot for his insubordination, but Hendrix welcomed the challenge. For the time being “In the Midnight Hour” remained in the set, however, because there was as yet no original material.
Also in the repertoire was “Hey Joe,” which Chandler was still determined would be the first single. The Experience began to record demo material in (6) Regent Studios, 4 Denmark Street, a small studio on what is known as London’s Tin Pan Alley.
During time off from rehearsals Jimi and Kathy wandered the streets of London, relatively poor but very happy. Chas had put Jimi on a salary of £25 per week, £10 more than he paid Noel and Mitch, whom he considered hired musicians. It was the first steady income Jimi had earned since he had left the U.S. Army. (As a teenager he had enlisted in the 101st Airborne to escape Seattle, and then had himself discharged to escape the Army.) Given the weak state of Chas’s finances, Jimi’s income was hardly secure.
Still, it was the most Jimi had ever earned, and after the hotel bills were paid, Jimi and Kathy had enough money to amuse themselves. In the first flush of a love affair, and for Jimi the constant novelty of London, they were easily entertained. Among other things, they loved playing board games such as the London version of Monopoly, Risk, and even Twister.
They played the games with Chas and his Swedish fiancée, Lotta. The two couples socialized together intensely and shared everything. Kathy and Lotta attended the Experience’s rehearsals and recording sessions, and even any business meetings Chas could arrange. Noel and Mitch sometimes tagged along to meetings too. The glue of this tight social knot was Chas’s fierce possessiveness of Lotta, but the consequence was that before he had so much as a record deal or a whisper of a reputation, Jimi Hendrix had an entourage, filing in and out of the offices of A&R men together and sitting around a table in the lounge of the Hyde Park Towers laughing into the small hours. For good or ill, Jimi was to operate from the center of an entourage for the rest of his career. Even as a boy Jimi had an intense and private inner life; as his fame took off, he surrounded himself with a close circle to keep the outer world at a distance.
On one excursion, Jimi took Kathy along to meet Little Richard, who was in London. Jimi, who had toured briefly with Little Richard in the States, hoped he might collect a few dollars he felt he was owed. Little Richard gave the couple a hospitable welcome in his hotel suite but was adamant that he was not handing over any money. British publicists were to make much of Jimi’s apprenticeship touring the American South as a guitar for hire behind the biggest names on the R&B circuit. Many of those names—such as the Isley Brothers, James Brown, and Wilson Pickett—enjoyed enormous reputations in the British Isles, and it was assumed their lead guitarists must be equally prestigious, just as Pete Townsend all but overshadowed Roger Daltry in the Who, and Hank Marvin, lead guitar to the “British Elvis,” Cliff Richard, was a star in his own right.
The truth is that for most musicians, working the R&B circuit was a miserable existence. Wages were barely at subsistence level, and were severely diminished by the arbitrary fines the star of the show felt entitled to impose on the hired help. The show was strictly a vehicle for the star, and individual musicians were given a minute at most to showcase their own talents. A minute is not a lot of time to display the extent of one’s musical virtuosity, and several guitarists on the circuit had developed more immediately crowd-pleasing tricks, such as playing their guitars behind their backs. Jimi had seen and learned them all, and would use them to astonish London.
Ringo Starr’s house, 34 Montagu Square, where Jimi, Kathy, Chas, and Lotta lived together. John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived there briefly a few years later.
The Hyde Park Towers Hotel, now in much better shape than when Jimi lived there with Kathy.