During the first two months of 1967 Jimi, Noel, and Mitch worked hard together in the highest of spirits. Success made little material difference to their lives; it just meant more time spent in the van on the road, a lifestyle with which all three young men were already familiar. In January they played twenty dates and in February twenty-four, criss-crossing England to perform wherever booking agencies sent them.
Sometimes they found themselves on the working-man’s club circuit, social clubs founded around industrial trades, where the band shared the bill with comedians and perhaps a stripper, and the audience wore their hair cropped short and dressed in a collar and tie for a night out. The arrival of these ambassadors from Swinging London in colored shirts, bell-bottom trousers, and a tangle of curls piled high on their heads was greeted with suspicion. The ambassadors themselves, several hundred miles from home and with no confidence that the local police would take their side should they be called to break up a fight, encountered an air of sullen intimidation when they arrived, and they contrived to depart just as soon as they could. One night in the Northeast of England they loaded the van particularly speedily as a menacing group of onlookers gathered in the parking lot. The largest member of them approached Jimi. “Oi Nigger Boy,” he shouted, “you’ve got magic fingers.”
Jimi enjoyed telling this story to his friend Sharon Lawrence, because he knew that her liberal Californian sensibilities would cause her to wince at the use of the N word. Compared with his experiences of traveling through a Deep South that was desegregated in theory but not in practice, traveling in provincial Britain was much easier. He was sometimes perplexed at the more casual racism that ran through, and still runs through, English culture. He was shocked to discover a pub and hotel in Kathy’s native Derbyshire that was named “The Black Boy.”
In the first days of February Jimi took delivery of his first 200 watt stack from Jim Marshall. This added further pressure to life on the road because the valves could barely stand the power of the output and frequently blew. Even if the musicians could stay overnight in a hotel between far-flung gigs, the blown amp had to be driven back to London, repaired, and brought back. The Experience now had a roadie to handle van and equipment, Gerry Stickells, a friend of Noel’s from Hastings.
Touring had its highs as well as its lows. An appearance Jimi made at Newbury, a country town in the rural county of Berkshire, in mid-February was very lighthearted. Jimi, Noel, and Mitch killed time back stage with a water-pistol fight, together with the brother of Gerry Stickells’ girlfriend. Afterwards everybody had dinner in a fish and chip shop, where Jimi signed autographs for a gaggle of fans who had gathered outside. And, of course, there were always the local girls, happy to get a brief private audience in Jimi’s dressing room.
Sexual magnetism over young women is part of the mystique of the electric guitar, and Jimi, the most exceptional of electric guitarists, exerted a very exceptional magnetism indeed. The menace of his performances and his playful charm backstage were compelling and inviting. Jimi took to the sexual opportunities of touring like a Scout troop given the run of a gun shop for the afternoon. Kathy was not happy with this, and began to lose her enthusiasm for traveling with Jimi to gigs when she caught him with a woman in the cubicle of a ladies room in a Manchester club. Jimi had the grace to try to keep this side of his life away from Kathy, but he also exerted a fierce double standard over her. Although she was not inclined to be unfaithful, she was not allowed to provoke even the suspicion of jealousy.
Busy as the Experience were, their sets were short, forty-five minutes at most. When they played within easy reach of London or at a London club, they went straight from the set to the recording studio, which was now (15) Olympic Studios, at 117 Church Street, Barnes.
Church Road, Barnes, is unlikely setting for a landmark of rock-and-roll history. A ten-minute drive south of the River Thames from the busy Hammersmith Broadway, Church Road is one of those London streets that look like they belong in a rural village. It is a winding lane of Victorian shops, with a church with eleventh- century brickwork and a fifteenth-century tower in the middle of it, set back from the road in a small churchyard with a traditional lychgate (as gateway covered with a roof). It ends with a small village green, complete with a duck pond.
Olympic Studios is at the other end of the road from the duck pond, in a building with a red brick facade that bears the date of its construction, 1906, displayed on a tablet. Sixty years later the building housed an experimental recording laboratory that produced sounds that transfixed the world. Jimi and the Experience’s switch to Olympic was partly dictated by the size of its studios. Olympic’s Studio A was vast enough to accommodate Jimi’s sound.
The other attraction was the expertise of the engineers at the studio, which was drawing in bands such as the Small Faces and the Kinks. Even George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, was known to stop by for advice.
By the standards of today, when musicians will spend months and sometimes years at work on an album, recording in the 1960s was a hasty business. The recording of Are You Experienced? was hastier still because Chas had a limited budget. The album was recorded and mixed within seventy-two hours of studio time.
That it was accomplished so swiftly was due to Jimi’s virtuosity in the studio. The apparent recklessness of his stage performances belied his skills as a musician. “Jimi probably played the guitar more than anyone else I’ve ever met,” recalls Roger Mayer. “Jimi used to play for hours and hours and hours—not practicing but just talking to you, and fooling round and having fun. That’s what he loved to do.” Jimi also had an excellent memory for music and could always repeat whatever he had played, note for note, or play it backwards if requested. He was extremely skilled at “dropping in”—that is, overdubbing a patch of a few notes onto a track he had already recorded, turning a good solo into a perfect solo.
For all his skills, Jimi was indecisive in the studio. He already had some studio experience from New York, and was a quick learner when it came to absorbing technological skills. What he lacked was both the confidence and the personality to assert himself. Jimi’s London recordings are an ensemble work, rather than bearing the stamp of one dominating personality. Jimi looked to Chas for final approval of the mixes, and relied on Roger to act as his go-between in negotiations between the studio, where the musicians play, and the control room, where the sound technicians record. “I was the one who went into the studio and played with him, and went back into the control room to listen, and backwards and forwards to talk to Jimi and reassure him and be sure what we were getting in the control room was correct,” Roger recalls.
Because what we were trying to do is make a bloody record. There’s two different scenarios: one’s playing live and the other’s making a record. And they’re completely different and you have to understand that. It’s a big difference making a sound that’s going to be played in someone’s living room or car or whatever, that has to be universally acceptable for many, many different environments, a very different set of parameters than if you were playing live.
The move to Olympic Studios introduced the team to engineer Eddie Kramer, who has made the mastering and remastering of Jimi’s studio performances his life’s work. Born in South Africa and trained as a classical musician, Kramer became as much producer (making a creative contribution to recording) as engineer (operating the mixing desk to get the sound right). He also took charge of studio discipline. Eddie would take it on himself to tell the hangers-on to shut up or get out when things got out of hand. Jimi hated to hurt anyone’s feelings.
What sapped Jimi’s confidence in the studio more than anything was the attention recording drew to his singing. Jimi never, ever became reconciled to his voice; it was a source of constant frustration to him. If he could have had his way he would not have sung at all, except that he was the Experience and it was inconceivable that a front man would not sing. The perfectionist in him could hear the shortcomings of his voice and knew there was nothing he could do to bring it up to the ideal he set for himself. He felt this most acutely in the recording studio, where he had to put his guitar aside to record the vocal tracks and lay his voice bare before whoever was standing around at the time. Eddie’s solution was to build a small cubicle of sound screens in the studio in which Jimi could stand to sing and pretend to himself that he was alone.
After a passionate honeymoon period at the Hyde Park Towers, Jimi and Kathy, like most young couples, found cohabitation a period of disagreements and makings up. When he lost his temper, Jimi was capable of pushing and hitting Kathy. Kathy, physically defenseless as she might be, was equally violent when in a fury and threatened to take her rage out on Jimi’s guitars with her high heels.
A further source of tension was Chas’s attitude to Kathy. He was not happy with Jimi being in a relationship of any kind. The conventions of show-business journalism insisted that pop stars were eligible young bachelors. Managers assumed that female fans would lose interest in any pop star who was known to be spoken for.
Chas was not very happy with Kathy herself. If Jimi had to be in a relationship, Chas would have preferred it to be with somebody more biddable. The sounds of discord that rose from the basement of Montagu Square perplexed him. His own relationship with Lotta followed the traditional working-class paternalism of the Northeast of England: the man was the head of the household, and the woman knew her place. Dismayed by what appeared to him to be an unhappy relationship, Chas would take Kathy aside and suggest she should move out. Kathy stood her ground.
A frequent cause of quarrels was Kathy’s cooking. Jimi was uncomfortable with the British diet, in any case—as were most visitors to London during the 1960s—and with good cause. The food was appalling.
English cuisine has never enjoyed a high international reputation, and during the 1960s the tastes acquired during wartime rationing, begun in 1939 and not fully lifted until 1954, still cast a long shadow over both domestic and restaurant kitchens. Habits of thrift still caused even first-class restaurants to serve dishes based around offal. Pigs’ trotters and wild rabbits were sold in the butchers’ shops. Fruit and sugar shortages had left the British people with an exceptionally sweet tooth, and they found fruit tinned in syrup an exquisite delicacy. The young and university-educated attempted to break free from this past by experimenting with French provincial cookery, inspired by popular recipe books by authors such as Elizabeth David. Experiments were limited, however, by the difficulty of obtaining the ingredients—olive oil, for instance, was only available in pharmacies, sold as a cure for earache.
Kathy had no inclination to explore French or any other cuisine. An itinerant youth, some of it spent in institutions, had left her with limited domestic skills, and she was not interested in acquiring more. One night in early spring Jimi’s criticism of her cooking caused Kathy to hurl his plate to the floor and run out of the house to her friend Angie’s flat to calm down. Jimi, alone in the basement lit with eerie orange flashes from a traffic signal outside, put his feelings for her into words. On her return the following morning Kathy was presented with the lyrics for “The Wind Cries Mary,” her middle name. “I was not appeased” Kathy recalls. It almost diminishes the power of the song, once one knows that “the broken pieces of yesterday’s life” are in fact a smashed plate and some lumpy mashed potato.
For relaxation Jimi frequented the (16) Speakeasy club, 48 Margaret Street, which opened in January 1967 on one of the upper floors of an anonymous office building off Regent Street. The Speakeasy was an intimate, hippified space, darkly lit, low ceilinged, and furnished with old church pews and other antique furniture.
The discreet atmosphere made it attractive to stars. The Beatles were regulars. A permanent fixture at the club was a star-struck teenager called Freddie Bulsari, who was to become Freddie Mercury in the 1970s. Jimi loved the Speakeasy as a place where he could jam for as long as he wanted on the small stage while Kathy gossiped with friends. It became their second home.
The ceiling of the Ricky Tick Club on the second floor of this modest building on Hounslow High Street was so low that Jimi put his guitar through it. Nine months later he headlined at the mighty Royal Albert Hall.
