The Jimi Hendrix Experience made its first London appearance on Tuesday, October 25, at the Scotch of St. James. Noel, who knew nothing of Jimi’s impromptu performance at the club on his first night in London, was pleasantly surprised to be beginning in such a prestigious venue.
Any work at all was welcome, as far as Chas was concerned. The launch of the Experience was a hand-to-mouth operation, and he was under an immense financial strain. Wages and studio time had to be paid for; Mike Jefferies, his supposed partner in the enterprise, had made himself all but invisible; and without gigs there was no cash flow.
As yet the Experience had no act to speak of anyway, just about twenty minutes’ worth of cover versions that rode on the back of Jimi’s showmanship. The showmanship was exceptional enough for the time being. The week before their first London appearance, the Experience played at the bottom of the bill in a brief tour of France headlined by the French rock-and-roll singer Johnny Hallyday. As a warm-up act, Jimi drove the crowd at L’Olympia, Paris, wild by playing his guitar one-handed.
The week after the Experience’s night at the Scotch, they crossed the Channel again for a short residency at the Big Apple Club in Munich, a popular venue for U.S. servicemen. For Noel, this was a depressing return to a circuit he was trying to escape. These were also the dates that brought home to him what he had joined. During the course of auditions and rehearsals Noel had found nothing remarkable in Jimi’s playing. He was thus astonished, and a little frightened, to witness Jimi drive the audience at the Big Apple to a frenzy in such a confined space. From the stage, Noel felt that the audience was no longer in possession of itself and might reach out and tear the band to pieces. Noel suddenly realized that behind Jimi’s genial manner lurked something passionate and dangerous.
Both Jimi and Chas wanted more from the Experience than a novelty act, and both realized that the time for development was limited by the need to earn. Matters symbolically came to a head on the eve of the French tour, when Chas walked into Jimi’s room at the Hyde Park Towers and presented him with a blue mohair suit. Jimi knew the drain this gift was on Chas’s limited resources and accepted it with all the good grace he could muster. Privately he was dismayed and insulted. He had been forced to wear such outfits when he toured behind the big names of the R&B circuit, and the sight of it reminded him of past humiliations. Fortunately, the night at the Scotch was to change everything.
In the Scotch that night were Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers of the Who. Kit was the son of the composer Constant Lambert, who had written for the ballet and who had helped introduce the jazz idiom into the classical repertoire during the 1920s. Chris was the brother of the actor Terence Stamp, a rising working-class talent, and to be authentically working class was impossibly chic, so Terence had been interviewed at length for Time’s “Swinging London” article. Chris and Terence were the sons of a Thames waterman, a member of an artisanal brotherhood skilled in navigating London’s tricky tidal waterway, and whose family connections with the river stretched back to Shakespeare’s day and beyond.
Kit and Chris had become friends while working as production assistants at Shepperton Film Studios in the southwestern suburbs of London. Their involvement with music had begun when they decided to make a documentary about a pop group. With barely any idea how to begin the project, Kit happened to see a group known as the High Numbers playing in a pub. He introduced himself, and with his camp grandeur made a dazzling impression. He was equally taken by the High Numbers’ boisterous energy, and during the course of a boozy evening it was agreed that Kit would abandon his documentary, the High Numbers would abandon their manager, and Kit and Chris would manage the group. The next morning Kit went into Shepperton Studios hung-over to inform Chris of the interesting turn his career had taken in his absence.
Kit and Chris proved adroit managers, with a special flair for publicity. They renamed the High Numbers the Who; devised the finale in which the band apparently destroyed their equipment at the end of their set; and Kit in particular worked to associate the Who with the Mod movement in the minds of newspaper editors, all the better to generate scandalous headlines.
Actual Mods cared nothing for the Who and were, if anything, contemptuous of the band’s claim to be associated with them. The Mod movement had caught the public imagination through newspaper reports of violence between motor scooter-riding Mods and motorcycle-riding Rockers at seaside resorts on public holidays. This ready-made notoriety was a useful publicity lever for Kit Lambert to pull.
“Mod” was a newspaper label, and the young men around which the term was shaped had no interest in violence for its own sake and a very limited interest in motor scooters. Mod was not a tribal movement at all; to the contrary, it celebrated individualism to the point of narcissism. Mods were working-class dandies.
In Britain’s industrial North, working-class communities were built around attachments to large enterprises such as cotton mills, shipyards, and coal mines. Dependence on one available source of employment created a warm mutuality in working-class culture, but also a fierce conformity and a suspicion of anyone who made too much of themselves. In London, where there was much more economic variety—with unskilled workers able to find causal work with small enterprises or in the freewheeling street markets—there was a stronger tradition of self-reliance and independence of mind in working-class life.
Elements of Mod style—such as the bell-bottom trousers and the peaked cap—can be traced back to the original Hooligans, the young men who worked as barrow boys in London’s street markets at the end of the nineteenth century and outraged the Victorian middle class with their insolence.
“Mod” was an abbreviation for “modernist,” however, and the Mods took inspiration from the modern world, which offered them a garden of earthly delights such as no generation of working-class youth had seen before. Mods took a disdainful view not only of the Who but of mass culture in general. Socially, they danced to Motown and Stax at clubs such as the Scene in Soho. Privately, they listened to the modern jazz of Dave Brubeck, Stan Kenton, and John Coltrane. Mods looked for new ideas not only over the Atlantic but over the English Channel too. They ignored the prêt-à-porter of Carnaby Street, and ordered their own bespoke designs from the local tailors, taking their ideas from the Italian styles they had seen in Fellini movies. The more sophisticated explored existentialism through the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.
Kit and Chris were as spontaneously excited by the potential of the Experience as they had been by the High Numbers. “They all but knocked over the tables, that night in The Scotch, in their rush to get to me,” Chas recalled. Once they realized that Chas was not going to allow them to prize the management of Jimi away from him, Kit had another, very welcome proposition. Kit and Chris were setting up an independent record label, Track Records, to help the Who escape the conservatism of the major labels. Would Chas be interested in a record deal?
Even before this invitation, the Experience had begun recording their first single, and moved their activities to the (7) De Lane Lea Studios, 129 Kingsway, where the business district of the City of London begins to melt into the shops and restaurants of London’s West End. De Lane Lea shared a building on the corner of Kingsway and Great Queen Street with a bank, and there was some tension when the bank alleged that the vibrations of Experience rehearsals were disrupting its experiments with an early computing system.
Chas had been in negotiation with executives at the major label Decca, but after they heard the tape of “Hey Joe” they turned it down, just as they had turned down the Beatles four years previously. Kit Lambert pounced on the opportunity, understanding the urgent need for success of some kind. Track Records was not due to launch until March 1967, but he used his influence to persuade Polydor, who were to act as Track’s distributor, to release “Hey Joe” on their own label as a one-off. Polydor was a German record company that had recently opened a London office, staffed by just one A&R man, to see if they grab a corner in the British beat market.
Meanwhile the band’s straitened circumstances and an uncertain future were breeding an esprit de corps. Noel, a bassist now, sold his guitar amp to generate extra cash. Chas sank his masculine pride and allowed Lotta to take a part-time job as a cloakroom attendant at a club, and then changed his mind when a fight broke out there on her first Saturday night. Kathy was terrified that Jimi would have to go back to New York.
With no support from Jefferies, barely any record deal to speak of, and no imminent work, Chas decided to make something happen. He sold a couple of his own bass guitars to fund a press launch. The venue was the (8) Bag O’Nails, 10–11 Kingly Street, a narrow road between Carnaby Street and Regent Street barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other. The event was held at lunchtime on the last Wednesday of November, and to generate enough buzz to attract London’s large music press every string was pulled to pack the basement with famous faces. The cellar club was a regular haunt of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, both of whom turned up to the launch.
The brief performance did not get off to the best of starts. Few there knew what to expect, and the sheer noise when the band played caused some people to flee the building. After a short set, the Experience retreated to their dressing room to await judgment. There was a knock at the door and John Lennon burst in, Paul McCartney close behind him. A few days short of his twenty-fourth birthday, Jimi had the much-mobbed Beatles mobbing him.