Shortly after moving into Brook Street, Jimi discovered that he was not the first musician to live in the house. Over two hundred years before, it had been the home of George Frederick Handel.
Handel had come to London at the same age as Jimi had, though their backgrounds were very different. Handel had been born into an aspiring middle-class family in the German state of Saxony. His father was a surgeon who had hoped that his younger son would become a lawyer. Handel had had to keep his passion for music secret, studying by night on a clavier he kept hidden in the loft of the family home. When Handel’s talent became recognized outside the family, his father gave in and Handel began a career in church music, as an assistant organist. The son compromised with his father too, and enrolled at the university to study law.
In the early eighteenth century, London was becoming an important musical city. With much of Europe at war, many musicians from across the Continent had taken refuge in England’s capital city. Handel came to London on a sabbatical from his employment as court musician to George, the Elector of Hanover—and heir to the joint crowns of England and Scotland. Almost as soon as Handel arrived he began moonlighting—accepting commissions for the English court, then under Queen Anne, as well as writing for the opera house and familiarizing himself with the distinct traditions of English church music. When in 1715 George came to London as king, he initially snubbed Handel, but the new monarch could not ignore the composer’s genius for long, and the two were reconciled.
The connection with the past sparked Jimi’s interest in baroque music, and his flat soon rang with the music of Bach and Handel while he waited for couriers to bring tapes from Olympic studios. Always susceptible to occult ideas, and his imagination highly stimulated by regular LSD use, Jimi managed to persuade himself that he had seen a man in eighteenth-century dress walk through his bedroom wall one evening.
The two musicians would have found much in common. Handel was known to be temperamental when performances went awry. As a young man he had fought a duel on the steps of an opera house with a truculent violin player. Offstage he had a genial disposition and was fond of jokes.
By another coincidence, among Jimi’s and Frederick’s best-known works are their settings of the words of the prophet Isaiah.
On his return from the United States, Jimi had brought with him an advance copy of Bob Dylan’s new album, John Wesley Harding. By the middle of 1968 Dylan had not toured or recorded for two years. When he finally presented a new set of master tapes to CBS Records, the executives heard something very different to the sound of Blonde on Blonde, the double album around which Jimi had forged his friendship with Linda Keith.
The music on John Wesley Harding is spare folk blues, with Dylan’s guitar and harmonica filled out with only bass and drums. The lyrics are imagist in style, but the images are not the surreal and psychotically suggestive poetry of Blonde on Blonde. John Wesley Harding evokes icons of a mythical American landscape: outlaws, immigrants, hoboes, preachers, and whores. It is the work of a young artist (he was still only twenty-seven) brimming with self-confidence in his own judgment. After the unashamed sermonizing of “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” the album closes with two straight country songs, a deeply unfashionable genre at the time.
Jimi’s Harlem friends had dismissed Bob Dylan as a “cracker”—a very insulting word for a hillbilly. It was beginning to look as if they were right, to the dismay of the radical left, which had thought of Dylan as their spokesman, and to the alarm of CBS Records, which thought they had invested in an Elvis Presley with a high school diploma and a few comparative lit college credits.
With some foresight, CBS decided that if Jimi covered a song from John Wesley Harding it might pave the way to acceptance among rock fans of Dylan’s apparently perverse change of direction. It was arranged that Jimi should have an advance copy, and he duly took the hint. When he arrived back in London he had already made up his mind to cover the ballad “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”
When Kathy heard the record she thought differently. The song, she felt, was far too personal to Dylan. “All Along the Watchtower” seemed to her a better choice for Jimi.
Few would disagree with her now. Jimi’s treatment of the song is inspired: a dramatic sound picture that picks up on the apocalyptic lyrics and presents them without melodrama or bathos. The words, as in many of Dylan’s songs, are infused with biblical references; in this case the imagery comes from the Book of Isaiah. Jimi begins where Dylan’s understated presentation finishes. The last lines of the song are “the wind began to howl.” The wind is already rising in the opening bars of Jimi’s cover, and the essence of rock and roll—a rising crescendo that never reaches a climax—is perfect for creating the suspenseful atmosphere of a cataclysmic prophecy about to be fulfilled.
Jimi drove the musicians who worked on “Watchtower” hard, insisting on take after take until they arrived at the sound he heard in his head. Kathy thought Jimi exhausted far too much studio time in pursuit of sounds that floated across his mind during acid trips but had little meaning to most listeners.
There is a strong tradition of mimetic sounds in African American music. Jimi himself turns in a good train impression in “Can You See Me?” on Are You Experienced? “All Along the Watchtower” conjures not only a tempest, but subtly, with the acoustic guitar, the rhythms of the horsemen already on their way to deliver their portentous message.
Kathy’s gate-keeping could not stop Jimi from rolling home with friends and hangers-on. Carl Niekirk, who had a photography studio on the floor beneath the flat, recalls that he often answered the door to a keyless Jimi, and found him accompanied by famous faces. Niekirk recalls seeing George Harrison arrive on one occasion. Graham Nash was another visitor.
The same gregarious crowd followed Jimi to Olympic Studios, where Electric Ladyland was completed. Recording had begun earlier in the year at the Record Plant in New York City, which, apart from excellent engineering offered the novelty of twelve-track recording. As Jimi devoted more time to experimenting with the possibilities of the new technology, Mitch and Noel were pushed a little further into the background, and the long hiatuses in recording allowed the studio to fill up with hangers-on.
The London sessions for Electric Ladyland were equally crowded. The end of the long blues number “Voodoo Child” opens the microphone to the background noise in the studio, and above the hubbub of conversation a woman with an upper-class but piercing English accent is heard to inquire, “Is the bar still open?” The Rolling Stones were at work on Beggars’ Banquet at Olympic, and Brian Jones brought his sitar to one session for Electric Ladyland. Jimi experimented with the instrument, but quickly became frustrated with it.
Jimi’s lyric writing remained a private activity. He wrote “1983 A Merman I Should Turn to Be” lying on the bed in Brook Street with Kathy beside him. When he read the words to her, including the line about going beneath the sea with his love Catherina, Kathy replied that she had no intention of living beneath the sea under any circumstances.
There was pressure for new material. The nine-month gap since the release of Axis seemed a long one by the standards of the time. Kit Lambert assembled and released a “best of ” album as a potboiler. Jimi was also under pressure from Mike Jefferies to return to the United States, to begin the multicity tours that were to generate a small fortune. This was the pressure that prevailed, and Jimi, Noel, and Mitch flew to New York on July 27.
Electric Ladyland was released in London in November while Jimi was on the road. Jimi had had a very clear idea for the cover artwork and had sent rough sketches of his proposed layout. Kit Lambert took no notice of Jimi’s ideas. He put the cover art into the hands of David King, the art editor of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine. He commissioned the photographer David Montgomery to photograph a studio of naked women, recumbent like odalisques in an Ingres harem. The women in the photograph were not professional models. They were assembled from the passersby outside Montgomery’s Chelsea studio. The cornucopia of voluptuous female flesh, apparently as unretouched as it is unadorned, still has a powerful visceral impact in the age of instantly downloadable pornography. The women stare back at the viewer with a self-confidence that conveys as much threat as erotic promise. In Britain the LP was sold in a plain brown wrapper. There was no question of using it for the U.S. release, for fear it would offend traditional puritan sensitivities. No doubt it would have offended the nascent feminist movement too, but with the barricades barely dismantled on the Parisian boulevards the disappointments of the revolutionaries had yet to harden into the grievances of political correctness, and nobody on either side of the Atlantic considered the possibility that women might have an opinion about anything.
Jimi discovered what Kit had done only when he returned to London in January 1969, by which time all he could do was shrug the cover off.