Jimi crossed the threshold from musician’s musician to public sensation at the end of March at the (17) Astoria Theatre, 232 Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park. The theatre was also a cinema, a 1930s’ “Picture Palace,” one of the grand movie theatres built in the first half of the twentieth century, set among streets of low, Victorian terrace houses that had grown up around the railway as homes for clerks and other lowly employees of the banks and stockbrokers of the mighty City of London.
The occasion was the launch of what was announced as the Walker Brothers farewell tour, before the trio of Californian musicians went their separate ways. The bill was eclectic: between the Experience at the bottom and the Walker Brothers at the top were the tuneful singer-songwriter Cat Stevens and the torch singer Engelbert Humperdinck.
It is almost needless to say that this was not the torch singer’s real name. He had been born Arnold George Dorsey in Madras, India, a child of the Raj, in 1936. When he was taken on by Gordon Mills, who managed Tom Jones, another torch singer, Mills renamed Dorsey Engelbert Humperdinck after the Austrian operatic composer, on the sound grounds that once heard it was impossible to forget, and found a record deal with Decca. Overnight both Engelbert Humperdincks became household names; there was even new public interest in the original Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel.
The opportunity to make a mark on such a tour was not to be missed. There was much discussion of what would make a good stunt. Keith Altham, a journalist from the New Musical Express, came up with the suggestion that Jimi set his guitar alight during “Fire.” This proved easier said than done, however. A can of lighter fuel was sent for, and Chas sprayed it onto Jimi’s guitar before he went on stage. When the moment came, the unrehearsed stunt was more trouble to accomplish than had been anticipated. Jimi spent several minutes on his back, striking matches before the fuel would ignite.
Then things went more dramatically than expected. From the auditorium the climax appeared to be more of a catastrophe than a stunt. “Hendrix was lying on his back playing the guitar with his teeth, when it suddenly burst into flames,” Chris Welch reported in Melody Maker the following week. “Jimi leapt backwards and ran off stage, followed by his group. The guitar was left burning dangerously near the closed curtain and compere Nick Jones ran and tried to pick it up, burning his hands in the act. An attendant rushed on stage with a fire extinguisher and put out the flames which were rising ten feet in the air.”
Backstage tempers ignited much more swiftly than Jimi’s guitar had done. The theatre manager attempted to impound Jimi’s guitar as evidence. From then on Jimi and the Experience were the official bad boys of the tour, and Chas suspected that their sets were deliberately sabotaged. Stage lights malfunctioned and house lights came up with a greater frequency than one might have expected during Jimi’s sets. Jimi’s guitar would be found to have a broken string or be badly out of tune just before he was due on stage.
John Walker made a point of visiting the Experience dressing room to warn them against stealing the show. “Don’t you dare upstage us, who do you think you are?”
Relationships were not made smoother by Noel and Mitch’s mutual love of practical jokes. They stocked up with stink bombs and smoke bombs from joke shops en route, and one evening Mitch set a small clockwork robot to whirr, waddle, and spark across the stage during Engelbert Humperdinck’s act.
By now Jimi, Chas, Lotta, and Kathy had moved to a flat in a modern building overlooking Hyde Park across the busy Edgware Road. To Ringo Starr’s embarrassment, the household had worn out their welcome among their staid neighbors in Montagu Square. One of the major influences on the choice of the new address was that it was near enough for the four of them to carry their belongings without having to hire a van—a short walk away, along a terrace of narrow early nineteenth-century houses to where the apartment building was located at the end, at (18) 43 Upper Berkeley Street.
There was not a great deal to be carried, just clothes, guitars, and records, and the move was accomplished in a few return trips. When he visited the flat in early April, Chris Welch noted that in spite of the splendid location, the flat itself was very sparsely furnished. The television was thick with dust from lack of use, but there was a gleaming hi-fi system.
The hi-fi system was a bit of a sore point. Noel, who had been asked to help install it, noted in his diary that it had cost £330. Even if there had been no budget for moving house, money had been found for the hi-fi. Noel and Mitch were sharing a cramped flat in Bayswater. A hierarchy was emerging, and as it emerged, it became open to question. “Once again, it was taken for granted that Chas and Lotta would have the best room and Jimi and I would get what was left,” Kathy recalls in her memoirs. “Managers were often thought of being the more senior in pop partnerships in those days.”
Of more concern to Noel and Mitch was that they often arrived at theatres to find promoters had billed the act as “Jimi Hendrix” with no mention of “The Experience” at all. The rising success of the Experience gave them leverage to renegotiate their pay, but they were aware they were being sidelined. Noel was under instructions from Chas to do no more on stage than sway in time.
The last person to believe the illusion that the Experience was a band rather than a star vehicle was Jimi himself. Asked by a journalist if his was a New York sound, he asserted it was pure London and had evolved with Mitch and Noel. Yet, as he recognized that he carried the show, he began to assert his authority on stage. Off stage he remained as sweet natured as ever, with a kind word for everyone and everything, including Engelbert Humperdinck’s set. His onstage persona was becoming beset with frustrations that could turn the fury of his performance into rage against anything that interrupted it. As well as dealing with backstage sabotage, he had to contend with unreliable equipment, which even when it worked was not always powerful enough to overcome the roar of the crowd. A Jimi Hendrix performance was often mixture of wonder followed by disappointment as it was interrupted by technical difficulties, the disappointment felt all the more because everyone present had seen what Jimi was capable of. And nobody was more conscious of what he was capable of than Jimi. At these moments of frustration, the only physical presences he could direct his rage at or assert any control over were Mitch and Noel. When he felt Mitch was going over the top, he would bang the rim of the drum kit with his guitar.
Ambivalent as Jimi felt about being anything other than a guitarist, he was a gift to publicists. “He wasn’t someone who was comfortable strutting around like a peacock,” Kathy recalls. He wanted to be much cooler, although his clothes made him seem flamboyant and his highly charged sexuality was obvious to anyone who met him. “Right from the beginning he had a style of his own, wearing satin shirts with voluminous sleeves, army jackets, and bell bottoms with scarves tied around the legs long before anyone else. Even Brian Jones was still wearing suits when Jimi first arrived in London. Jimi was original in his style.”
Original as it was, Jimi’s taste was in synchronicity with a dramatic shift in style in London that was to go the whole world round. London’s fashion houses had created the great female fashion statement of the 1960s, the miniskirt. But London’s originality as a fashion center lay in the attention it gave to men’s fashions, which had been stifled by convention for a hundred years.
Carnaby Street had grown up around male boutiques, catering to men who wanted to add a more exquisite touch to conventional male attire. In 1967 this dandyism exploded into Technicolor peacockery that melted the divisions between male and female fashions, and it centered on the designers who sold through the boutique Granny Takes a Trip.
(19) Granny Takes a Trip had opened at the very end of 1966 at the wrong end of King’s Road in Chelsea, at number 488 opposite (20) World’s End pub, and at the very unfashionable end of the street. To open a boutique there was the equivalent of raising a pirate flag.
Granny Takes a Trip was founded by John Pearse, who had completed a formal apprenticeship as a tailor in Savile Row, and Nigel Waymouth, a graduate of Winchester College of Art. The shop was an experience as much as a retail space, an anti-boutique in which the merchandise was carelessly displayed in an environment too dark to see it properly in any case. The shop assistants were at best offhand and at worst rude. In many ways the enterprise had more in common with punk rock than the Summer of Love (the cradle of punk rock, Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood’s SEX boutique, was established at World’s End, nearly a decade later). But it also encouraged the imagination and allowed young designers such as Ossie Clarke and Celia Birtwhistle a freedom to experiment that no other outlet would have given them.
Jimi had a very sensuous relationship to cloth. He traveled with a bag of ladies’ silk scarves, warm to the touch and still bearing the scent of the donor. When he arrived in a hotel room, he would draw the curtains and drape scarves over the lamps until he felt at home. Noel and Mitch nick named him “the Bat” for his love of living in twilight.
For three days the Walker Brothers’ tour was joined by June Southworth, a journalist for the teenybopper magazine Fabulous 208, which during the first half of 1967 dedicated almost its entire editorial content to the Monkees, a synthetic pop group brought together for a television sitcom that aped the madcap style of the Beatles’ first two movies. The first notice Fabulous took of Jimi was in its April 1 issue, which, by coincidence, came out the day before the conflagration at Finsbury Park.
Fabulous, which devoted much space to pinups, ran a full-page portrait of Jimi stretched out on a sofa in a fairly conservative green suit. This was accompanied with a short paean of praise written by Steve Marriott, the lead singer of the Mod group the Small Faces. While Fabulous regularly ran ghost-written pieces from individual Monkees, it was unusual for a pop star to write anything for the magazine himself. For a pop star to demand editorial space to promote someone else’s career was unprecedented.
Southworth was charmed by Jimi. “He was so wild on stage,” she recalls, “but offstage he was gentle, quiet, warm, articulate, sensuous, and funny. Everyone who met him loved him. He was just so likeable.” She was fascinated too, and in her published account of the tour (which did not appear until late June) described him lost in thought on the tour bus. “On the journey, Jimi thoughtfully chewed matchsticks and fiddled with a red rubber rose from which a Can Can dancer’s shapely leg spasmodically kicked. But mostly, he looked through the window and let ideas run through his mind. These are the precious moments when an artist has time to think.”
“He was an immediate sensation here,” she remembers. “The image grabbed attention, but the musicianship lifted him way above his contemporaries and ensured he was here to stay. When musicians were jamming together you might get Clapton, Beck, and Page combining to produce something like the Hendrix sound, but not one of them could do it on his own. His back-to-front fingering was unique and the power was phenomenal. Theatres seemed to glow and shake when he played.”
Outrageous window dressing at Granny Takes a Trip. The street environment officers of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea were not happy about this display.