When Jimi, Noel, and Mitch returned to London in January 1969, they had decided that it was time to bring the Experience to an end. The band was Chas’s creation and he was no longer involved. Noel and Mitch were recruits rather than members, and Noel was already involved with his own band, Fat Mattress.
Jimi had always preferred the idea of a larger ensemble that would play looser and more improvised sets. The more he fronted the Experience, the more he felt the need to jam, and the less opportunity he had to do so. The U.S. tour schedules had been frantic and intense, sometimes so intense as to cover thirty cities in as many days. In London Jimi had the (32) Flamingo Club, 33 Wardour Street, an afternoon club for musicians in Soho, where he could jam before he went to work, and the Speakeasy, where he could jam into the small hours.
Another influence on Jimi, Noel, and Mitch’s decision to separate was that Cream had split up. The Experience had exceeded everyone’s expectations, but had begun as a Cream imitation. It seemed to them pointless to continue as an imitation now that the original was no more.
On January 4, 1969, the Experience were guest stars on the Happening for Lulu show on BBC Television. Lulu, the show’s presenter, was only twenty years old but had an extraordinary range of experience. Born Marie Lawrie in Lennoxtown, Scotland, in November 1948, she had been barely more than a child with an unusually strong voice when she had had her first British hit, “Shout,” in her early teens. She had gone on to have hits in Europe (some recorded in German), and then appeared in the 1967 film To Sir with Love, playing a teenager, as she still was. She recorded the film’s theme song, which became an international hit.
She had more than enough personality to present her own show, which aired early on Saturday evenings.
Jimi and the Experience performed “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and then Lulu announced that they would play their first hit, “Hey Joe,” which, in the best tradition of TV presenters, “she loved.” They began “Hey Joe,” but after a lengthy intro, Jimi broke off and, with all good humor, told the studio audience that he was tired of “this shit” and would instead play a tribute to Cream. He then launched into “Sunshine of Your Love” (which Jack Bruce had written as a tribute to Jimi). When he finished, to polite applause, Jimi announced that they had been taken off the air because he had disrupted a tightly scheduled live show. The problem was that they hadn’t been. The BBC was not a network and could not switch whatever it was broadcasting at short notice. It was a few minutes of chaos for the studio production team, who could not allow the show to overrun, and the BBC was not pleased. (By chance, a recording of the show survives and is often posted on YouTube.)
A month’s tour of Scandinavia and Germany followed, and it was during this that Jimi very possibly had a brief fling with an ice skater named Monika Dannemann. If it took place it was a very fateful encounter. Jimi flew to New York to collect a Billboard award and returned quickly to London to prepare for two shows at the Royal Albert Hall a week apart. The venue was significant because it was where Cream had held their farewell concerts the previous November. Jimi, Noel, and Mitch thought of these gigs as the Experience’s farewell performances in London. There was no formal announcement or any expectation of this news among the audiences. Many close to the band considered the performances, on February 18 and 24, half-hearted. During a solo of “Sunshine of Your Love,” Jimi weaved in a few bars of “Strangers in the Night,” just as on Happening for Lulu he had begun to pick out the riff from the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” in his solo for “Voodoo Child.” He was, in a way, jamming with himself.
Chas came to the first of the Albert Hall concerts and was unimpressed. If he had still been in charge, he would say later, he would have sacked Noel and Mitch the following day. Between the two concerts, all four of them met up to discuss the future, such as it was. Chas made it plain that if he was to have anything more to do with the Experience it would only be without Mike Jeffries. He gave Jimi, Noel, and Mitch a Mike-or-me ultimatum. Noel came away from the meeting with the impression that he, Jimi, and Mitch had all agreed that they would return to Chas, and was surprised over the following weeks that Mike was still very much in their lives.
Jimi’s visions of his future were vague and sometimes grandiose. He sometimes foresaw himself presiding over a communecum-academy for musicians. At other times he considered putting his career to one side and going to college to study music. In practical terms Jimi’s future, with or without the Experience, depended on Mike, and Mike’s plans were very much wrapped around Jimi. Mike was eager to go into a business partnership with Jimi, and plans were evolving for a nightclub-cum-recording studio in New York City. This odd combination reflected the fact that nightclubs were the business Mike knew and a recording studio was what Jimi wanted. For the immediate future what counted was that plans for the project, which would be called Electric Lady whether it was a club or a studio or both, bound Jimi into a U.S. touring schedule that would be required to finance the project. Jimi hated to say the word “no” to anybody. Pressed by Chas to choose between him and Mike, Jimi would naturally choose whoever was in the room at the time. Noel and Mitch’s opinions were irrelevant.
Jimi understood his position very well. In March he was interviewed by the Melody Maker and told the journalist Bob Dawbarn: “That’s the trouble with this business. People see a fast buck and have you up there being a slave to the public. They keep you at it until you’re exhausted and so is the public, then they move off to other things. That’s why groups break up, they just get worn out. Musicians want to pull away after a time, or they get lost in the whirlpool.” With an unhappy prescience he went on: “It’s funny the way most people love the dead. Once you are dead you are made for life. You have to die before they think you are worth anything.”
Jimi would be dead in eighteen months.
The pace of Jimi’s life slowed briefly in the early spring of 1969, and he spent much time in Brook Street with Kathy, sometimes doing little more than watching television.
In early April Jimi, Noel, and Mitch flew back to the United States for their last tour together. Noel left when the tour ended at the end of June. Mitch joined Jimi at a farmhouse in upstate New York for what was part vacation and partly an experiment with Jimi’s ideal for a musical commune. It was from there that Jimi arrived belatedly to close the Woodstock Festival, embellishing his reputation in the process.
For once, Kathy also attracted some media attention. The glossy magazine Queen ran a feature on rock stars’ girlfriends and interviewed and photographed her. The feature was tied to the newly published novel Groupie by Jenny Fabian and Johnny Byrne.
Kathy was not a groupie; she was a hanger-out with musicians but not a hanger-on. The life of a groupie had no appeal to her, and when she was asked to live it, it marked the beginning of the end of her relationship with Jimi. He had flown to America to resume touring at the beginning of April, but it was not until September that Kathy flew out to join him in New York. She was appalled by what she found there. She hated the cocaine use that was widespread among Jimi’s New York circle, and she feared the criminals who supplied it. And while some of her London friends happily adapted to the luxuries of hotel life, she hated that too. When she was not frightened, she was lonely and bored, and she soon flew home to London, never to return.
London moved on in Jimi’s absence. The Beatles remained highly newsworthy, but interest was now focused on persistent rumors that they were on verge of splitting up. Yoko Ono had emerged from the avant-garde into the public eye that viewed her, unjustly, as an exotic vampirella who had sunk her fangs into a loveable mop-top and turned him peculiar. She had been a skillful self-publicist before she met John Lennon. When she turned the press harassment that surrounded her marriage to Lennon into conceptual art, journalists seized the photo opportunities greedily, and then, with cheerful hypocrisy, accused her of leeching off her husband’s fame to enhance her artistic reputation. The public, disappointed that the cheekiest Beatle had lost his sense of humor, sided with the press.
Chas was beginning to work with a new act, a band from the Midlands called Ambrose Slade. Eventually he was to shorten their name to Slade and turn them into a very successful pop group, and their Christmas single, “Merry Xmas Everyone,” a number one in 1973, is still heard in British stores throughout December as part of the seasonal background. Chas first tried to emulate Kit Lambert’s strategy of associating the Who with the Mod movement by trying to associate Ambrose Slade with Skinheads. The Skinhead movement was largely made up of working-class boys who—eager to distance themselves from hippies—wore steel-capped boots, button-down shirts, pressed Levis, and close-cropped hair. They quickly earned a reputation for violence and racism.
And things moved on for Kathy when, in late 1969, she fell in love with another man and agreed to his proposal of marriage.
Jimi assumed that she was waiting in London for him, and went on assuming that until January of 1970, when he received a letter from her telling him that she was getting married and vacating their flat. It was far from welcome news at a point when Jimi was feeling frustrated with life on the road. He flew across the Atlantic to meet her at the beginning of February. Kathy was moved because it was the first time since he had become famous that she had ever known him to travel anywhere without his entourage. She was not moved enough to change her mind, however. Jimi stayed for a week in the Cumberland Hotel at Marble Arch, and by the time he returned to New York Kathy felt that he had accepted that their relationship, while not over, was now a friendship.
For over three years, home for Jimi had been wherever Kathy was, although he had spent less and less time there. Now he was homeless.
Not that Jimi would have had much use for a home during the closing months of his life. The summer of 1970 was spent on tour in the United States. It was a way of life he came to increasingly resent, yet had no escape from. The debts incurred for the Electric Lady project kept him bound to an exhausting schedule. The mountainous rages he had exhibited at the frustrations of broken equipment became ineffectual tantrums against the cold logic of the balance sheet, which he was complicit with. So he began to turn his hostility on the audiences, who still called for “Fire” and “Purple Haze.” Whereas once he had made his guitar intone “thank you,” now it said “fuck you.”
Some respite came with another Mike Jefferies project, the ill-conceived, or rather barely conceived, Rainbow Bridge, a rambling psychedelic movie that was intended to change the consciousness of the entire world. Jimi’s role in it was small, but it did allow him to kill several weeks in a hotel in Hawaii, waiting to film his contribution. The only bankable performer in the project, he was at the same time the project’s banker because once more the money was raised against Jimi’s future earnings.