The riff that was to become “Purple Haze” first emerged in a dressing room in a remote corner of northeast London in mid-December. Forest Gate was and still is a crowded, noisy, and otherwise utterly unremarkable district crammed between London’s East End and Epping Forest, twelve miles of wild countryside saved from development at the end of the nineteenth century that has served as a Cockney retreat ever since. In the 1960s this bleak district enjoyed a splash of glamour in the shape of the (12) Upper Cut Club, Earlham Grove, set up in a converted cinema (the building has now been leveled to a car park) by local boxing champion Billy Walker. The neighborhood offered little in the way of distractions for visiting musicians, so when the Experience was booked into the Upper Cut, Jimi killed the time before going onstage by playing his guitar in the dressing room. It was Chas who saw the riff’s potential. “Keep that,” he said.
Jimi had nurtured the dream of becoming a songwriter ever since 1965 when he had heard Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Hendrix’s devotion to Dylan was intense—and highly unusual for a musician on the American R&B circuit of the early 1960s.
Jimi had been as baffled as anyone else from his background would be when he first encountered Dylan, and then delved further into the Minnesotan’s back catalogue: the reedy voice, the strummed guitar, the elliptical lyrics—it was all a long way from James Brown. But Jimi was eclectic in his tastes—Dean Martin had been his first musical hero—and he was persistent in the face of things he did not understand. He persevered until he grasped that the point was the words and then he marveled at their power. One of the few things he brought to London with him was a Bob Dylan songbook.
In New York Jimi had begun the habit of jotting down a line here or there on a napkin and storing these ideas in his guitar case. But nothing ever materialized from these scribbled thoughts, and periodically they vanished, along with his guitar case, when he had a guitar stolen. The source of the words of “Purple Haze” was a dream inspired by a sci-fi novel.
Moving into Montagu Square gave Jimi the run of Chas’s large collection of sci-fi fiction. At their first meeting at the Cafe Wha?, Chas had left Jimi with a copy of Earth Abides by Chuck D. Weiss. This pioneering story of eco-catastrophe, which tells of a group of people returning to the way of life of Native Americans after the collapse of industrial society, could not have been calculated better to appeal to Jimi, who felt his Native American ancestry very deeply, and he immediately became a devotee of the genre.
The idea of a purple haze came from the novella Night of Light by Philip Jose Farmer, which had been published that year. In Night of Light the purple haze is an atmospheric condition that affects a distant planet and causes those who dare to expose themselves to it to live their dreams in a fully waking state. In the purple haze, the book’s hero, Joe Dante, finds himself driven by compulsions that he is able to act upon as precisely as if they sprang from his rational will, all the while watching the consequences with his normal state of mind. The consequences of Joe’s actions in the purple haze are appalling because he finds himself driven to brutally murder his wife over and over again. As he does so he realizes that his compulsion springs from his desire to punish her for the neglect he suffered from his wayward mother.
Another stimulus to Jimi’s imagination was his engagement with British English, with its amazing variety of dialects for a small island, and the variety of accents it is spoken in. As many musicians are, Jimi was a skilful mimic, and he playfully set to work mastering the many different accents he heard around him, beginning with Chas’s very distinctive Geordie accent.
Even the orthodox usage of the BBC could take Jimi by surprise and stimulate his imagination. “I heard big impressive words spoken on telly,” he told his friend the American journalist Sharron Lawrence. “I’ll never forget watching the news and a reporter speaking of ‘unchartered waters.’ Ever since I have wanted to use ‘unchartered waters’ in a song. That’s life in a nutshell. Hearing English spoken in England was like opening a door.”
London was also, as always, alive with unorthodox and unofficial slang. London slang is fast changing, much influenced by fashion, and always popular in a crowded city full of communities such as immigrants, market traders, and, of course, criminals, who wish to talk among themselves without being understood by outsiders. Anything exclusive acquires glamour and attracts curiosity, and in London, where high life and low life often rub elbows and a good deal more besides, the transition is speedy and the turnover of slang swift.
In the 1960s the slang that was moving from the street to the parlor was Polari. Polari emerged among traveling show people, fairground workers, and actors at the end of the nineteenth century. Its origins are obscure but because many words in Polari appear to have their roots in Italian (bona for “good,” omi for “man”), it is assumed to have been spread by the Italian immigrants who wandered Britain as street entertainers.
By the middle of the twentieth century Polari had been adopted by gay men as a means of recognizing one another. Just as other gay signals such as pink shirts became a driving influence on mainstream men’s fashion, so Polari seeped into artistic circles and through to middle-class respectability. Given the rising public sympathy at the time for the decriminalization of homosexual acts, the use of the word palaver for “fuss,” say, had a liberal tinge. The general climate of liberalization also required words for ideas that had not been expressed openly before, and Polari was able to supply them. Drag, the Polari word for any glamorous outfit, came to be used for cross-dressing. And Polari supplied the two words that encapsulated the era, “dolly birds” (dolly is Polari for “pretty” and bird means “woman”).
Noel contributed a cultural element that opened new possibilities for Jimi to express himself: English nonsense humor. In January 1967, when the Experience returned to London from provincial gigs in the early hours, Jimi would go to Noel’s room in the Madison Hotel to smoke Moroccan hashish and listen to records, especially Noel’s favorite comedy records by the Goons. Spike Milligan, the principal writer and performer of the 1950’s BBC radio program The Goon Show, joined Jimi’s pantheon of great writers.
Spike was born Terence Allen Milligan in Ahmednarg in India in April 1918, a child of the British Empire and the son of an Irish-born army sergeant. In 1939, when war broke out with Germany, Spike was called up into the Royal Artillery. The army was to be the central experience of his life. It gave him the stability to catch up on his education through private reading, allowed him to form his own jazz band, and let his personality flourish in the role of company jester. Unfortunately, it also sent him into battle. Spike fought in Egypt and Italy until he was wounded at the battle of Monte Cassino. The wound may or may not have been the cause of the bipolar syndrome that tormented him for the rest of his life.
Beneath the nonsense of the Goons lay a bleaker strata from Spike’s depressive bouts, the perspective of the enlisted man for whom the world is a dangerous place run by unprincipled nincompoops. The show, said Spike, “represents the permanency of man, his ability to get through anything and survive, albeit through stupidity.”
Jimi had a gift for comedy himself. One of his favorite devices was the shaggy dog story, a tale that begins plausibly enough but that gradually grows more and more fantastic. Jimi would deliver his shaggy dog stories in a composed and matter-of-fact fashion until, just as his listeners began to doubt, he would shout “Woof, Woof!” as a signal that they had been had. He called this game “selling a woof ticket.”
Jimi displays his playful side at a record launch in December 1967.