In the middle of November Jimi set off on the biggest tour he would ever make in Britain. Less than six months after he had appeared toward the bottom of the bill on the Walker Brothers farewell tour, he was top of the bill of a roster of flower-power chart bands that included Pink Floyd and the Move. The tour began in London at the enormous Albert Hall.
Behind the scenes on that first night, Chas calmed the performers’ nerves with scotch and Coca-Cola. As the tour rolled out through the provinces, the backstage areas descended into hysterical bacchanalia, with the young women of Britain everywhere eager and obliging when they could talk their way past the stage door and ferociously predatory en masse outside the theatres.
Nick Mason, Pink Floyd’s drummer, was terrified and appalled. The year before, he had been an architecture student at London Central Polytechnic, one of the students who had jostled his way to see Cream’s debut concert there. He still considered Pink Floyd’s extraordinary success a sabbatical from college. The success had been extraordinary in every sense of the word, with a chart hit about an underwear fetishist (banned by the BBC), a short tour of the United States, and the still unrecognized psychotic breakdown of the band’s singer and guitarist, Syd Barrett (nicknamed Laughing Syd by Jimi for his near-catatonic gloom). None of these experiences shook Mason so much as the predatory female sexuality he encountered touring with the Experience. Nick Mason, engaged to his teenage sweetheart who he was to marry, fled, and still remembers the sound of a thunder of high heels as he was chased down a side street in a northern town.
Extreme crowd behavior generated extreme crowd control. The provincial cities of Britain have always been tougher than London, and provincial venues fielded some truly alarming security men. In Newcastle one security man took a blow to his head with an axe and still managed to knock down all eight of his assailants. Then he walked to the local hospital to have the wound treated.
The frantic sexual activity, which ended in an epidemic of gonorrhea, did not undermine Jimi’s relationship with Kathy. She understood that he depended on her for a sense of domestic security. She could not resist a sardonic satisfaction at the dismay Jimi felt when other women pursued him. Jimi hated to say no to anyone about anything, and his only strategy to escape groupies who hoped for more than a one-night stand was to change his telephone number.
Kathy had taken some lessons in cookery from Ronnie Money and mastered the Scottish dish of mince and tatties (ground beef and mashed or boiled potatoes). As a birthday surprise she brought Jimi a dog, a female basset hound who was named Ethel Floon but who Jimi always called the Queen of Ears. Itinerant and mostly homeless for all his adult life, Jimi had long dreamed of owning a dog. Clumsy and untrainable as bassets are, Ethel lived an indulged life, walked in Hyde Park by Kathy and forgiven for her lapses in toilet training.
Nightclubs were as much a part of Jimi and Kathy’s domestic life as ever, and the jazz club Ronnie Scott’s became a favorite hangout, not least for its opportunities for late-night jams. (28) Ronnie Scott’s Club, 47 Frith Street, was and still is London’s most prestigious jazz venue. This unpretentious nightclub has accommodated most of the major names in jazz over the past half-century. In the 1960s, musicians’ unions of both sides of the Atlantic restricted the number of foreign acts who could perform in their respective countries, but Ronnie Scott’s still brought over musicians who were making their mark on the history of jazz, such as the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and the pianist Cecil Taylor, pioneers, respectively, of bebop and free jazz.
In November 1967 Jimi met a fellow African American musician at Ronnie Scott’s who was to become an influence and a mentor. Like Jimi, Roland Kirk was a musician whose showmanship distracted audiences from his virtuosity, and his performances were often dismissed as gimmickry.
He was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1936 and became blind at the age of two. He set his heart on becoming a musician at the age of eight when he discovered the bugle at a Boy Scout camp. As a teenager he had a dream that he was playing three saxophones at once. He was determined to follow this inspiration up, and through the discovery of two obscure brass reed instruments, the manzello and the stritch, he made the dream a reality when he played both together with his tenor sax.
His approach to the flute was also radical as he adapted African techniques to the European instrument and hummed and groaned through it. In his recordings and his performances he incorporated nonmusical sounds such as sirens and police whistles. Part of Roland’s flute technique was to bring the instrument and the human voice closer together, so that the flute apparently mimicked phrases of human speech. This was an idea Jimi was to apply to his guitar, and he learned to make it sound a few phrases very close to “Thank you, thank you” in acknowledgement of applause.
As a blind performer, engaging with the audience was important to Kirk. He was not content with hearing applause, he appeared to feel the atmosphere he created. He liked audience participation and sometimes handed out whistles to all present. Like Jimi again, Kirk’s music was deeply rooted in the blues. With their mutual interest in electronic sounds, plus their shared conviction on the merits of LSD, a friendship was bound to spring up.
The last edition of Melody Maker for 1967 carried a special front cover illustrated by Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. At the hub of a circle of cartoons and scribbled in-jokes was a large image of Jimi gazing into a crystal ball. The implication was clear, and astonishingly coherent for anything that emerged from Stanshall’s unusual mind: As the kaleidoscopic year of 1967 receded, it was plain that it had belonged Jimi, and that if anybody understood what challenging mysteries 1968 would hold, it must be him.
Jimi’s thoughts of his immediate future were focused on the United States. Success in America was thought to be the natural progression for any successful British pop band. Jimi’s conquest of Britain was often seen as American retaliation for the British invasion of the Billboard charts. For Jimi, success in his own country was a far more meaningful quest than an attempt to follow the trail blazed by the Beatles.
On his way to Monterey, Jimi had looked up old friends in Harlem, who had taken his tales of his life in London as acid-fuelled fantasy. From the perspective of New York, and especially from that of Harlem, where there was no interest in British pop culture, Jimi’s success appeared illusory.
It seemed to Noel that as soon as Jimi returned to London after his triumphs in California, all his ambitions centered on the United States. Those ambitions were encouraged by Mike Jefferies, who had already conquered America once with the Animals and was eager to build on what he had learned. Once Axis was released, Jimi began building his American war party. Roger was invited to join—as a thank you for his unpaid work on the album—and accepted on condition that he didn’t have to carry any amps or deal with Jimi’s managers. Mark Boyle and Joan Hills were invited to take their light show on the road, but decided that their loyalties lay with Soft Machine
Underground London finished 1967 with a three-day celebration called Christmas on Earth held at the vast (29) Olympia Exhibition Hall, Hammersmith Road, near Earls Court in West London, originally built in the 1920s to stage circuses. Jimi and the Experience were a major attraction at what was a chaotic event. Noel carried away a vivid memory of the occasion. “I encountered strobe lights for the first time. I got lost in them, feeling far too detached, but I knew I had to play. All I could see were old-time movie flickers of Jimi laughing at me as I tried to keep in touch with the tempo. I still can’t handle strobes. Everything was designed to let it ‘flow’, but it was sometimes hard not just to melt away.”
An anti–Vietnam War protestor confronts a mounted policeman near the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square in 1968. Not everybody in London believed that all you need is love.