The summer of 1967 in London blazes in the memory of those who can recall it. Memory notoriously colors the past, but those who remember it is as a literally brilliant summer are not deceiving themselves. When Joe Orton returned from a summer holiday in Morocco he noted in his diary that London felt hotter than Marrakesh.
Within a week of Jimi’s return to London in August, the Flower-Power Generation suffered its first trace of blight. While Jimi and the Experience were performing at the Saville Theatre on the last Sunday of August, news came that Brian Epstein had been found dead from a barbiturate overdose at his country house. It was a public holiday weekend. The Beatles were away together in Wales on a meditation retreat led by Mahesh Yogi, who styled himself the “Maharishi.” From LSD to Indian mysticism in a few short months—the Beatles’ experience personified the challenges that were arising to society’s understanding of reality itself, and the pace with which they were arriving. These spiritual and cultural caprices came and then went, as fads do in a city hungry for novelty, yet each seemed potentially earth-shattering.
The two months Jimi had been away from London had been fast-paced too. In the short term, his excursion to California had been timely. “Jimi’s work permit was on its last legs” Noel recalls. In the long term, the trip made musical history. At the now legendary Monterey Festival, the Experience, together with the Who, had introduced the audience to the anarchic and Dionysian side of Swinging London. The Who smashed television sets; Jimi set light to his guitar. Both performances were a gift to the movie cameras recording the event, and the subsequent movie introduced Jimi to audiences across the United States—and created certain expectations of him, too.
From Monterey, the Experience went to San Francisco, initially to support Jefferson Airport at the Fillmore Theater. When the Airplane discovered that they could not play to an audience whipped up into a state of excitement by Jimi, the Experience took over as the main act.
Then, to their astonishment and dismay, the Experience were booked to support the Monkees on an East Coast tour. The Monkees’ audience had little patience with experimental rock music, and indeed little time for any band that was not the Monkees. Even if they had been more open-minded, Jimi would have made little impression on them, because the Experience, very likely the loudest band in the world at that time, could not make themselves heard above the roar of a stadium packed with excited teenage girls.
When Jimi returned to London that summer, the struggle to establish himself was over. The Experience no longer lived a hand-to-mouth existence that depended on constant gigging to keep going financially. Success in London with the promise of more success in the United States had prompted Mike Jeffries to muscle his way back into his partnership with Chas. One consequence was that Jimi, Noel, and Mitch were able to draw petty cash from Mike’s offices in Gerrard Street as they pleased.
With more time on his hands than before, Jimi had the chance to delve deeper into the counterculture scene that had co-opted him as a figurehead. He began with a club that was literally underground. (27) UFO, 31 Tottenham Court Road, always pronounced you-foe, had opened its doors at the very end of 1966. It had been founded by John Hopkins, who earned his living as a freelance photographer but devoted his energies to connecting up the various threads—political, utopian, psychedelic—that were weaving together to form underground London, and Joe Boyd, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who had come to London as an A&R man for Elektra Records and was striking out on his own as an independent record producer.
At the junction where Tottenham Court Road meets Oxford Street, the multistoried mausoleum-like Centre Point was rising, an office block built of white concrete and glass. London’s most striking tall building, the thin, round GPO Tower, was visible over the rooftops, but much of Tottenham Court Road was made up of two-or three-story buildings, many fronted by modest shops selling electrical equipment. It was here that Joe Boyd found the Blarney Club, an Irish dance hall, in basement premises between two cinemas. Its proprietor, Joe Gannon, was prepared to let it out overnight on Fridays to Saturdays provided he kept the soft drink concession. Beneath the mirrored lights that passed for formal elegance in the 1960s, underground London found its first public meeting place.
Mark Boyle, who ran light shows at UFO with his wife, Joan Hills, has left this account of the nights there:
A typical evening at UFO would begin around 10.30 to 11.00 with Vivaldi very loud on the sound system and our light environment all around the room. Then, when the place was full, the first rock group would appear. Then you might get a theatre group from the Royal Court Theatre doing mime, followed by the Soft Machine or the Pink Floyd.
Then I might be asked to make yellow projections while the current hit Mellow Yellow would be played and David Medalla and a group of dancers would fill an arena with more and more yellow objects, yellow cloth, yellow confetti, yellow paint etc. A folk group would follow, then a clown, more rock, more Bach, a theatre group called the People’s Show and then at about 7 a.m. a jazz group called the Sun Trolley would play. Most people would be sleeping against the pillars or in little piles on the floor by now. Usually it was just the Sun Trolley and Joan and I who were awake. Then we would go away and get some breakfast.
UFO was more than a nightclub; it brought a sense of community to people who believed themselves to be spiritual and social pioneers, discovering new ways of being for themselves as individuals or for society at large. It also became the meeting place for anyone who wanted to influence that community. The corridor between the bar and the dance floor became cluttered with tables displaying leaflets for radical causes, the most prominent cause being reform of the drug laws. John Hopkins became a cause in his own right when he was jailed for possession of cannabis in June.
The original house band at UFO was Pink Floyd. Joe Boyd had produced their first single “Arnold Layne” before they were signed to EMI and taken out of his hands. As Pink Floyd’s touring schedule took off on the back of the improbable chart success of “Arnold Layne,” they were replaced by the Soft Machine, a Kent-based, art school band committed to the then unlikely project of rock and jazz fusion. Taking their name from a William S. Burroughs novel, there was little danger of them being sucked away into the mainstream.
Jimi was impressed, and came to jam with them several times during the autumn of 1967. He also was deeply impressed by the Boyle family’s light show. Generally, the Boyles were secretive about their techniques; imitations of their work were springing up across Europe. But whenever they played the Speakeasy, which was only a few streets away from UFO, Jimi was allowed to sit beside Joan at the control panel and watch her work.
Jimi was very interested in the relationship between music and color. With little or no formal education in music to speak of (he had got an F in the subject at high school), Jimi thought about music in terms of colors. “He talked in colors when it came to sounds,” says Roger Mayer, “when it came to the emotions and the sounds. Most of the people who are involved in sound that I know of . . . tend to talk in colors, because if you can’t form in your own mind a visual picture of it, what can you do? Talking about sound is a paradox in itself so you have to use visual terms.”
Synaesthetic experiences, where sounds acquire vivid and specific associations with colors, are common occurrences during LSD trips. Jimi was taking a good deal of LSD during the autumn of 1967. Chas subsequently discovered he was dropping a tab a day at this time. One of the curious properties of LSD is that, above a certain level, an increase of the dose will have no further effect on the user. As small a dose as 250 micrograms is enough for a mild acid trip, a dose double that will be stronger, but tripling the dose will barely have any effect beyond that. Frequent LSD use will create resistance to the drug, but it is not like the cumulative resistance built up by heroin use that can be overcome by larger and larger doses.
Daily LSD use is unlikely to have much if any physical effect, but LSD is a drug of the mind and the environment, and in a suitable environment the mind can be trained to revisit episodes of LSD experience (so called “flashbacks”). Re-encountering LSD experiences is apt to encourage the idea that synaesthetic connections between color and sound are not personal associations but glimpses into an underlying reality. In the rush of academic excitement that surrounded the emergence of LSD, far better educated minds’ than Jimi’s allowed themselves to be seduced by this proposition. Jimi, who was barely educated, would be fascinated by the relationship between sound and color for the rest of his short life.
Jeremy Thorpe, a member of Parliament, tries out Jimi’s Flying V backstage at the Royal Festival Hall. The BBC had only recently relaxed the rule that its radio presenters must change into evening dress after 6 p.m., so formal conventions such as evening dress accompanied the experimental excesses of Swinging London.