In the middle of January Jimi and the Experience returned to the Bag O’Nails. It was not two months since they had held their press launch there. This Wednesday evening the club was filled not by hype but word of mouth. The audience was made up of musicians, not critics, here to see if everything they had heard was true.
The music journalist Penny Valentine recorded the evening in her diary:
Hendrix appears at The Bag O’Nails in Kingly Street. We go along. Pete Townshend is there and Eric Clapton is almost unrecognizable. Just back from Paris, he looks like a slender French mod with a cropped haircut and tight-fitting pastel cashmere sweater. By the time Hendrix comes on stage, this club is so hot and full that condensation is running down the walls. Sweat is running down my back as Hendrix starts the stamping, heaving introduction to “Purple Haze”. “I can’t see him,” I wail. I am beginning to feel faint in the crush and wish that I had not had three virulently coloured tequila sunrises. Someone lifts me up onto their shoulders so I can see the stage. Young, skinny, black with a halo of curls, Hendrix holds his guitar slung low and slightly away from his body but makes it roar defiantly, even though it doesn’t look like his fingers are moving. He finishes by getting on his knees, and playing with his teeth. We are stunned. I have a momentary panic that Hendrix will electrocute himself. Pete and Eric have their mouths open but say nothing and Hendrix finishes with a flourish of feedback and wailing anger. When he comes offstage to talk to Townshend and Clapton he is so shy and deferential we all feel bewildered.
The same week saw “Hey Joe” make the top thirty, a month after its release. The industry buzz surrounding Jimi had woken Mike Jeffries’ interest in his partnership with Chas. One of his first actions was to take the record plugging out of Kathy’s hands and to put some serious investment behind the single. This included buying airtime on the offshore pirate radio stations. The BBC was resolutely and incorruptibly uncommercial. The pirate stations, which broadcast constant pop music from ships off the British coast, happily swapped airtime for cash.
Among those eager to introduce themselves to Jimi at the Bag O’Nails was a young man named Roger Mayer. A maker and inventor of electronic sound effects, he was only a few days past his twenty-first birthday but had already heard sounds he had created on number one records.
The son of an electrical engineer, he had been born in Sutton, Surrey, a small town on the edge of Southwest London. In 1967 he was a civilian employee of the Royal Navy, based at the Admiralty Research Laboratories in Teddington, a Southwest London suburb beside the River Thames, where he was conducting research into submarine warfare.
Roger had begun experimenting with guitar effects as a schoolboy and built his first fuzz box at the age of fifteen. He made it for his school friends, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. Roger’s guitar laboratory was very much a bedroom operation, with the welding done at his father’s factory. Jimmy Page repaid the favor by introducing Roger to his blues collection. It was a typical teenage friendship, with Jimmy, Jeff, and Roger dropping in on each other’s houses after school to play records and experiment with guitars. As Jimmy and Jeff began to perform in public, Roger met other musicians on Southwest London’s remarkable teen music scene, such as Eric Clapton, who attended a neighboring school, and the boys who were forming themselves into what would become the Rolling Stones, farther up the river in Richmond on Thames. Roger’s sister was a student at St. Martin’s College of Art in the West End of London, and he introduced him to the soul records that were played in fashionable clubs such as the Scene in Soho’s Ham Yard. Together they went to the first Rolling Stones’ gigs on Eel Pie Island, in the Thames at Twickenham.
A short, vivacious man with an outgoing personality, Roger had nothing of the geek about him and plunged into conversation with Jimi. They had much to talk about, in particular Roger’s latest invention, the Octavia pedal.
The basic function of an Octavia is to play a note from an electric guitar one octave higher than it would naturally sound. This simple idea requires complex execution. In the natural world of acoustic instruments it is easy to add a lower octave to a guitar: you just lengthen the neck. This is why bass guitars are taller than ordinary guitars. Producing a higher octave is another matter. On a bass guitar the first octave is about the length of a man’s shoulder to his wrist. The second is about the width of his out stretched hand. The third, hypothetical higher octave would be about the span of two fingers. It is like folding a piece of paper in half eight times: easy to conceive, but physically impossible to accomplish.
Jimi invited Roger to bring the device along to a gig, and it was agreed that they would meet up when the Experience played in the (13) Chislehurst Caves, Caveside Close, Chislehurst, Kent, ten days later. There, in an extraordinary venue set in a network of tunnels, some of which date back to the Stone Age, Jimi tried out the Octavia and was enthusiastic. They next met a few days later at the (14) Ricky Tick Club, 1-1A, High Street, Hounslow, a low-ceilinged space above a shop in a boxlike, red brick arcade of shops in Hounslow, a district of London that had grown up after World War II to fill in the space between London and Heathrow Airport. Jimi had studio time booked for after the gig, but proceedings were delayed when he put his Stratocaster through the Ricky Tick’s ceiling and bent a couple of machine heads out of shape. Noel went out into the night to borrow a Telecaster, and it was this, together with Roger’s Octavia, that was used to overdub two solos in the small hours: “Purple Haze” and “Fire.” As Roger recently recalled: “That was the beginning. In the four or five weeks since I’d met him we’d produced the definitive second record of his.”
It was a beginning. From then on Roger was a fixture at every recording session and went to as many Experience gigs as he was able to, between eighty or ninety in his estimation, as well as being present at countless after-hours jams.
Roger also became a frequent visitor to Montagu Square, sitting in on the games of Risk that were often set up for days on end, and becoming one of the few visitors to ever catch a glimpse of Jimi in his hair rollers, a sight kept well guarded from the public view and that Jimi was embarrassed about even among close friends.
Another enthusiasm Roger shared with Jimi was science fiction. All the young scientists at the Admiralty read science fiction as a form of mental relaxation when a scientific problem appeared to have reached a dead end. In Roger, Jimi found a friend with boundless energy for experimentation and a perfectionist by nature, and also someone with whom he could articulate his ideas about what music was and what it could accomplish.
Their friendship gave further cause for concern to London’s established guitarists, already taken aback by the Bag O’Nails performance. Jimi was a formidable threat to their reputations on his own; with Roger by his side, Jimi would dazzle as never before.
The onstage Jimi who frightened Penny Valentine was just as competitive as his rivals. The offstage Jimi took a more casual attitude that could be far more embarrassing to a guitarist who cherished his reputation. “He was so open to play with anybody, musically he scared a lot of people who didn’t want to play with him,” Roger remembers.
A lot of people were put off but if you were round there and he was playing he’d hand you a guitar. “Come on Roger, let’s jam. Oh it’s upside down, don’t worry about that!” He was very keen for people to participate and have fun and play with him. He didn’t care, he’d go to a club, he’d play the bass, he’d play the guitar upside down, this way round, just have a bit of fun, you know. He was always up for it. Not like some people, and we won’t mention names, but some people who play the guitar and are very well known, it doesn’t come easy for them and consequently if they haven’t practiced their little solo, if they’re not in their own environment, they’re not going to get up and jam. They’re not going to show you how good they’re not. And Jimi, like, blew those guys apart. It was like: “Christ is he really that good?” “You want to know? Yes he is that good. Any day of week, any time of the day, in any condition, he’s one hot guitar player.”
A stimulus to Jimi’s imagination was the discovery of Gustav Holst’s Planet Suite. The move to Montagu Square gave Jimi access to a record player, in the form of a large stereo radiogram, and, with income coming in from gigs, he began to build a record collection. The Planet Suite was an impulse buy—Jimi was simply attracted to the cover—but the work soon appealed to deeper sympathies. Holst, a prolific composer, had been music master at St. Paul’s Girls School in Hammersmith from 1905 until he retired in the 1920s, and had lived a short walk from where Jimi was now recording. The Planet Suite, a musical portrait of the solar system, had been inspired by astrological lore. Jimi was also intrigued by the idea of the musical voyage, of a journey on which music could take the listener into new spaces and different places. “We were interested, Jimi and I, in taking someone on a space journey, it would take them out, the sound of the guitars,” Roger recalled. Just like NASA, Jimi and Roger had their sights set on outer space, but they thought they could accomplish a moonshot with a Stratocaster rather than a Saturn V.