A few days before Christmas 1966, Chris Welch, features writer at Melody Maker, finally caught up with latest word-of-mouth sensation on the London club circuit. As always in the run up to Christmas, central London was awash with parties, and for Welch the days had merged into a blur. The evening he first saw Hendrix he had already seen the Who play a club date in Walthamstow in North London, before driving to (9) Blaises Club, 121 Queen’s Gate, Kensington. Like the Scotch, Blaises was a venue for insiders, “where musicians, agents, managers and writers allowed themselves to be deafened, whilst imbibing quantities of alcohol,” in Welch’s words. When he arrived that night, nobody was acting too cool to care, however.
The club was packed and the only way to see Jimi was to stand on tip-toe and crane the neck. In the squashed and steaming crush around the pocket-sized stage, I glimpsed my first sighting of Jimi Hendrix, and scribbled Jimmy Hendricks in my ink stained notebook.
Jimi stood crouched over his guitar, rocking back and forth in the few square feet normally reserved for boogalooing. When he lifted his guitar to his teeth and noises screeched from the amplifier it seemed almost frightening. It was expected that blood would fleck from his lips or volts of electricity would course though his body.
It was not quite Welch’s first sighting of Jimi. Chas had introduced them to each other earlier in the autumn. “The first faint recollection of meeting him was a nervous ‘Hello’ at a party in some long forgotten flat. Jimi sat on the floor in a corner and didn’t say anything. Nobody seemed to say much to him either.”
Chris Welch was not the only person to be taken by surprise by the difference between Jimi’s personality onstage and offstage. Pete Townshend had been underwhelmed when Jimi had introduced himself to the Who’s guitarist at De Lane Lea Studios. “I was very unimpressed with Jimi that day, he was wearing a beat up US Marines Jacket, and he looked scruffy, jetlagged and pock marked. I thought ‘Ugh’.”
Jimi had approached Pete for advice, something he was never ashamed to seek. When on tour through the South, he had always used his time off to seek out the best guitarist in town, pursuing both the famous and the unknown without guile or flattery but with a great deal of persistence and many direct questions. There was no keeping a technical secret from Jimi; if he wanted to know something, he followed you around until he found it out.
So when Pete Townshend was pointed out to him, Jimi seized the opportunity to question him about Marshall amplifiers, because nobody knew more about them than Pete. He knew Jim Marshall, the founder of the firm rather than the inventor of the amp, personally and had been involved in the development of the prototypes through voluble but constructive criticism. “In the old days I used to storm into Jim Marshall’s shop and swear at him. They’d run to build something new, and I’d come back the next day to say that it wasn’t loud enough, or it wasn’t good enough. In the end I got what I wanted,” he recalled in an interview in 2000.
Jimi went out of his way to make the amp-builder’s acquaintance too, going with Mitch to (10) Jim Marshall’s shop at 93 Uxbridge Road, Hanwell, on the road toward Ealing in late December. There, in an ordinary, if not even slightly dismal parade of shops, Jim Marshall kept a drum and guitar store that, together with the workingman’s cafe next door, had become one of the hubs of the London music scene.
The business had started in 1960, as the retail arm of Jim Marshall’s drum tuition business. Unlike other veteran musicians of the big band era, Marshall had not dismissed rock and roll as a cheap fad. A tough-minded entrepreneur from an extended family of boxers, he was happy to teach kids who wanted to learn rock-and-roll styles—provided they had the guinea an hour he charged for lessons.
Through his young pupils Marshall was plugged into the network of musicians in West London who were moving from rock, through pop, to blues. And once he started selling drum kits, it was natural to diversify into guitars and then into amps.
Mitch had been one of Marshall’s pupils and protégés, and the Saturday job he had in the drum shop as a schoolboy had given him his first contacts in music. When he took Jimi out to Shepherds Bush to meet Jim Marshall that December afternoon, Jimi became just one of several guitarists who had met Jim through his drummer.
Jimi was not shy when he was introduced to Jim. He announced himself as the greatest guitarist in the world. Jim, who knew both Pete Townshend and Jeff Beck well, preferred to reserve his judgment on this. As a business man before anything else, he was wary that Jimi and Mitch had come to try and talk him into an endorsement deal. Even if Jimi Hendrix was the greatest guitarist in the world, as far as Jim was concerned he would pay cash like everyone else.
Jimi’s claims may have reinforced Jim’s prejudice that all Americans were arrogant, but Jimi’s charm won the day. Jimi made much of the coincidence that they shared the same name, they were both James Marshalls. Jim was left with the impression of a serious-minded and knowledgeable young man. Jimi for his part was determined to work with Marshall amps as soon as he could afford them.
That Jimi had never come across Marshall amps before he arrived in London was hardly surprising. They were constructed in the backroom of Jim’s shop. The first proper assembly line had been set up only in June 1964, and it was a modest affair. Before that, all Marshall amps had been built by two teenage electronics enthusiasts, Kevin Bran and Dudley Craven, with valves salvaged from army surplus stores. The wooden housings for the amps and the speaker cabinets were built by Jim Marshall in his home, from which he also ran a poultry business.
PA systems in London in the 1960s were primitive and carried only the vocals. Even internationally successful beat bands such as the Beatles did not work with monitors, the small amps that relay a band’s performance back to the players onstage. Mixing desks were unheard of. All the audience heard of the guitarists was what came through the guitar amp. This was usually more than the guitarist himself heard. Standing with an amp and a rowdy crowd in front of him and a full drum kit behind him, the guitarist could barely hear himself play. As often as not, the drummer could hear nothing of what the rest of the band were doing.
It was a problem Jim Marshall understood very well. As a young man, exempt from military service for health reasons, he had been a musician during the Blitz, singing as a crooner while simultaneously playing the drums. Although he had had a limited education, Marshall had taught himself electronic engineering during his day job, and had built his own PA system to carry his soft vocals over his snare drum and cymbals. Now a middle-aged business man, he was shrewd enough to make way for youth, and left the development of the amp that has made his name world famous to Kevin, originally hired as a repairman, and Dudley, who had been lured away from a job at the record label EMI for a salary of £15 a week, an extraordinary one for an eighteen-year-old.
Marshall and his team’s success was built on an important technical insight. Historically, amplifiers had been built to eliminate as much surplus noise as possible. This is because amplifiers had been made chiefly to deliver the human voice. Marshall’s team recognized that an amplifier valve, driven to just below the point it explodes, vibrates and adds harmonics to the notes, giving a truer reproduction of a plucked string. The pursuit of power alone produced a much richer tone.
In December Jimi and Kathy left the Hyde Park Towers Hotel to move to (11) 34 Montagu Square with Chas and Lotta. Kathy had negotiated the move. The property was under lease to Ringo Starr, and when Kathy ran into him one night and mentioned that she and Jimi were looking for somewhere more permanent, he offered to sublet the house to them.
The London square is a form of residential architecture that flourished between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The facades of the terraced houses on all four sides of a London square face each other across communal gardens in the center. Although each side of the square is built as one continuous block, it is divided into tall private houses rather than apartments. Luxurious in their use of space, and secluded and exclusive in their architecture, the squares were built for the wealthy. The inward-looking design discourages through traffic, and the communal gardens are enclosed with iron railings and padlocked, so only residents can use them.
Ringo had fitted the place out with James Bond–style opulence, although certain period features could not help but obtrude. As Kathy recalls in her memoirs: “It consisted of the ground and lower-ground floors of a converted town house in a smart square near Marble Arch. Chas and Lotta had a white-carpeted bedroom on the ground floor, opposite the sitting room, while Jimi and I were downstairs in a room opposite the kitchen. Upstairs had an en-suite bathroom with a pink sunken bath, which seemed very exotic to us, and Jimi and I had a bathroom with doors off the kitchen, and a dressing room. Our bedroom had a horrible old fireplace at one end and a lot of paneling on the walls but it was still the best place I had ever lived and seemed a fitting home for a rising pop star.”
Jimi was indeed a rising pop star, even if, according to Chas, he, Jimi, Kathy, and Lotta had no more than thirty shillings (less than £2) between them. “Hey Joe” was released in early December and became a club hit. It failed to make much radio penetration, however, either on the BBC or the “pirate stations” such as Radio Luxembourg. Radio playlists were largely based on chart success, and an initial chart entry required chicanery that lay beyond Chas’s means.
There were several influential pop charts—including the BBC’s, Melody Maker’s, and Radio Luxembourg’s—and all were based on extrapolations from sales in a handful of “chart return” record shops. These stores, their identity supposedly a secret, logged and reported their sales to the chart compilers, and these figures were then blown up to reflect a supposed national picture. In the careless 1960s the roster of chart return shops was seldom changed, and every self-respecting record promoter had a copy of it. Some individuals made a freelance living by going around the chart return shops buying up singles on behalf of the artist’s management. Too short of money to pay for such services, Chas sent Kathy out to do this.
“Hey Joe” was boosted by a television appearance on the pop program Ready Steady Go! in the middle of December. In the 1960s Britain television played an especially important role in bringing what was developing in the subculture of clubs and discotheques to a wider public. Radio was pop music’s natural medium, but in the early 1960s very little airtime was given over to it. The BBC had a national monopoly over radio, and until the 1970s there were no commercial radio stations in Britain. In addition to the natural conservatism of a public broadcasting company with a remit to please everybody, the BBC was limited to how much needle time it could give to pop music by a longstanding agreement with the Musicians’ Union.
The BBC, which had half a dozen full orchestras on its payroll, was the largest employer of musicians in the country, if not the world. This gave the Musicians’ Union a lot of leverage in its battle with the professional musician’s natural enemy, the gramophone record. The union used this leverage to limit the number of hours of recorded music the BBC could broadcast, and insisted that the hits of the day be played live by the BBC’s own musicians. During the big band era there was not much to distinguish between the Glen Miller Orchestra’s “In The Mood” and the BBC Dance Orchestra’s version. With the beat group revolution, the agreement became absurd. Melodious as Lennon and McCartney tunes can be, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” loses something of its urgency when arranged for strings.
It was left to television to satisfy the national hunger for pop music. The BBC had introduced the weekly program Top of the Pops in 1964, which was based around artists miming to their records surrounded by an audience free to dance in a studio designed to look like a disco. Top of the Pops’ strength and weakness was that it was based strictly around the BBC’s top thirty with the emphasis on the top ten. Consequently, the Rolling Stones might appear alongside an artist such as Val Doonican, an Irishman given to performing sentimental songs from a rocking chair.
The BBC had no monopoly over television. A commercial network had been introduced in the 1950s, and independent television countered Top of the Pops with the more adventurous Ready Steady Go! The show had the same open studio format but the musicians played live to the audience (the show itself was recorded). Ready Steady Go! was dedicated to pop music, and its independence from the charts gave the producers freedom to showcase acts that were as yet no more than a metropolitan buzz. One of the producers, Vicki Warham, had seen Jimi and the Experience at their Scotch appearance and had been as excited as Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp.
The show drew an enormous audience—in the 1960s most television shows did, because there were only two channels to choose between. For provincial Britain, Ready Steady Go! and Top of the Pops were windows into Swinging London—and provincial Britain was not always enchanted with what it saw. As someone signing themselves “Disgusted Viewer, Newcastle on Tyne” wrote to a Sunday newspaper the following year:
I have been watching Top Of The Pops, and believe me if I had to give a cup to the leading nitwits of the programme it would be between The Move and Jimi Hendricks Group [sic]. The first lot were absolutely stupid. I am sure the drummer must have suffered from the itch or something. As for the Hendrick’s group, I hope I never meet any of them in the dark, with their hair sticking out like huge mops. Hendricks himself looks awful because of the way he dresses. Heaven preserve us from such. I know it takes all sorts to make a world, but do they ever take a long look at themselves?