In the late spring of 1968 Chas came back from the United States unexpectedly early and alone. He arrived at Upper Berkeley Street and told Kathy that he and Jimi’s relationship was over. The immediate implication of this for Kathy was that she was homeless with no income of her own. In the heat of the moment, Chas gave her to understand that this was her problem.
With no idea of Jimi’s income to work with, Kathy approached rental agencies and found that central London landlords were reluctant to rent to Jimi Hendrix or any other pop star. To put pressure on her to move, Chas booked a double room for her and Jimi in a hotel in Earls Court. Kathy was crestfallen at the prospect of returning to the bed-sit land she had lived in as a teenager. She was horrified when she inspected the premises and found a bare, dirty room with two iron bedsteads, no bathroom, and a payphone in the hall.
She complained to her friend Carol, who was then living with Graham Edge, drummer for the Moody Blues, in a small Bayswater flat that they shared with the band’s guitarist, Justin Hayward.
Going through the London evening papers together, Kathy and Carol found a flat privately advertised at (30) 23 Brook Street, in Mayfair, above a restaurant called Mr. Love. The landlord was the restaurateur. When warned about who his tenants were, he smiled and said he did not care as long as the rent was paid. The rent was £30 a week, which Kathy felt was expensive, and it was twice what it would have cost to rent a bed-sit.
Kathy never found out either from Chas or from Jimi why they fell out. Both refused to discuss the subject with her. In a 1972 interview Chas claimed that Jimi had become rebellious, if not entirely out of control. “There were a few heavy incidents. He smashed up a hotel in Sweden and hit a girl in Los Angeles. He smashed up two cars in one week in LA. He went through a weird period. He wouldn’t listen to anybody. He was tearing himself apart for no apparent reason. I wasn’t wanted anymore so I split and flew back to England.”
Jimi had been arrested in Sweden for damage to his hotel room during a short tour in early 1968. It was only due to Lotta’s family connections that he did not get into serious trouble. He could, when drunk, be violent with women. His auto wrecks were due to his refusal to wear glasses when driving, rather than his being out of control.
The truth was not that Jimi was refusing to listen to anyone but that he had been listening carefully to Mike Jefferies.
It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that Jefferies’ interest in Jimi was entirely mercenary. As Jimi’s recording sessions became more crowded with hangers-on Mike was tempted to try and influence their artistic content, however ill equipped he was to make a contribution. He was at least interested in the music. Managing Jimi changed him and he came to believe that with Jimi he was on a mission to change human consciousness. This sense of higher purpose did nothing to alter his avaricious nature, but it did undermine his business judgment, to Jimi’s cost financially, physically, and emotionally.
Jimi for his part was gaining confidence in the studio and no longer felt the need for Chas’s assertive direction.
There is no doubt that Mike’s strongest card in his own game to prize Jimi away from Chas, and under his sole control, was his financial expertise. During the U.S. tour Mike took Jimi aside and presented him with an inventive financial strategy to maximize Jimi’s earnings, together with an ultimatum that Jimi must choose between Mike or Chas.
For Jimi the decision to reject Chas promised artistic independence in the short term and impossible riches in the long term. It is not surprising that he took it. Once he had, he lacked the moral courage to make a plain declaration and preferred to freeze Chas out. Like the adulterous partner in a marriage, Jimi worked to provoke Chas to leave him rather than walk out himself.
There was to be no clean break. Chas did not entirely give up on Jimi and the Experience until the end of 1968. His partnership with Mike was not formally dissolved until 1979, several years after Jefferies had died. He did feel, however, that he should claim the flat on Upper Berkeley Street for himself and thereby improve his relationship with Lotta.
The flat on Brook Street appealed to Kathy because it was on the top floor and to reach it one had to go through a narrow street door and up several flights of stairs. The arrangement would give Kathy the chance to vet visitors and keep out hangers-on and other nuisances without Jimi having to become involved.
Once she had agreed upon the rent, Kathy began to shop for furnishings for what would be her and Jimi’s first and only home together. Preparations were not complete when Jimi arrived back from America at the end of May, and for a while they moved into the newly built (31) Londonderry Hotel, 19 Park Lane, opposite Hyde Park.
Kathy shared Jimi’s love of patterned fabrics, and she fitted out the flat in the souk chic, carpets as wall hangings, and other patterned fabrics, that were fashionable at the time. A Melody Maker journalist who interviewed Jimi at Brook Street in early 1969 gave this description to his readers:
A lifelike rubber rat stared at the TV in Jimi Hen drix’s top floor flat just off London’s Bond Street.
A stuffed Panda sat on the floor wearing a green hat and what seemed to be a teddy bear in the last stages of malnutrition hung from a nail in the wall. Over the bed a Persian rug served as a canopy, giving the effect of a four poster. A large Roland Kirk type gong stood near the bed and most available surfaces were covered with guitars, assorted electronic equipment, transistor radios, a cine projector and a vase full of feathers.
Kathy and Jimi’s sitting room doubled as a sound laboratory where Jimi worked with Roger, while Kathy passed the time reading magazines and keeping the world at bay.
Brook Street is just a few minutes’ walk away from the United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square, which in 1968 was the center of much hostile attention. In March that year a ten thousand–strong protest march had ended with an unusually violent confrontation with the police. Two hundred protestors were arrested and fifty people injured seriously enough to require hospital treatment; half of these were police officers.
1968 was turning out to be an edgier year than 1967. Flower power had considered itself a devastating challenge to the status quo but had been taken as nothing more than a bizarre carnival by its onlookers. Now the underground was allying itself with traditional radicals and campaigning on concrete political issues. In March an international anarchist group set off several small bombs simultaneously in the capitals of Europe. (The London attempt, aimed at a U.S. officers’ club in Lancaster Gate, failed to detonate.) In May the French government collapsed beneath a general strike and student protest in Paris. In another sign of the times, the more radical Oz magazine replaced the International Times as the house journal of the underground.
Oz magazine had originally been founded in Australia in 1963 as a provocative irritant to a conservative society still in thrall to its colonial ties with Britain. When editors Richard Neville and Martin Sharp decided to transfer their activities to London, they were disappointed to find no radical press to speak of in the mother country. With no obvious collaborators to be found, Neville and Sharp decided to strike out on their own. Meanwhile they had discovered LSD. The discovery had its most profound effect on Sharp’s role as art editor. Oz became an explosion of colorful graphics driven by an editorial line dedicated to hard-headed left-wing politics.
The major grievance against the United States and its embassy was the war in Vietnam. This was not an entirely vicarious cause for British youth. President Lyndon Johnson and the U.S. State Department were applying diplomatic pressure on Britain to involve itself in the war. There was already a contingent of Australian troops in Vietnam, and because Australia was still closely tied to Britain politically as well as culturally, it was not inconceivable that British troops would be deployed in Southeast Asia as they had been in Korea in the previous decade. Although Washington wanted no more than a token British force, the specter of conscription to fight an unjustified war inspired numerous demonstrations.
The protests commanded little widespread public support. The protestors were believed to be mostly students, and British students enjoyed a privileged life in the 1960s. University education was expanding, and British students suffered from none of the provocations that had inflamed student activism in Continental Europe: overcrowded classes, inadequate accommodation, and suffocating dorm rules.
It was also thought that the protests were orchestrated by Communists. There was some truth in this. The British Communist Party was a small organization, but it punched above its weight through its influence on the trade union movement, which was very strong in Britain in the 1960s. One of the leaders of the anti-Vietnam war movement was Hugh Scanlon, general secretary of the Electricians Union and a member of the Communist Party.
But most of the young people marching in the streets had no sympathy for a party that was little more than a lobby group for the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. After all, the stern-faced Soviet leaders were even more hostile to the spirit of youth than the most conservative old guards of Western Europe, as was proved when they crushed the liberalizing reform movement that emerged in Czechoslovakia.
Tucked away in their second-floor flat, Jimi and Kathy cared little about the political battles being fought below. “Sometimes the journalists would ask him questions about politics and race relations because Vietnam and the civil rights movement were in the news,” Kathy recalls in her memoirs. “We hardly ever thought about these things. Jimi didn’t seem to have any clear-cut political ideas, just a vague belief that everyone should try to get along with each other.”
The ideas that Jimi did have about Vietnam were wildly out of step with the antiwar movement. Eric Burdon recalls being with Jimi in Brook Street on Sunday, July 22, 1968, when a protest march against the war was shut out of Grosvenor Square and vented its anger against the Hilton Hotel in nearby Park Lane. Jimi defended the war like the former paratrooper he was: “Listen man, when the Red Chinese come screaming down over the borders of Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam, and take over the whole of the Far East of Asia, you’ll understand why the US is trying so hard in Vietnam.”