Jimi’s last journey across the Atlantic was to play at the Isle of Wight Festival.
The Isle of Wight seemed an incongruous location for a pop festival. The island, off the south coast of England, had been untouched by the excitements of the 1960s. Nor had the 1950s or even the war years of the 1940s made much of an impact on the island’s way of life: seaside resorts on the coast and farming inland. In the event, however, the first great Isle of Wight Festival of 1969 had been a friendly affair on both sides. The islanders and the more conventional holidaymakers enjoyed the novelty of the picturesque invasion. They had seen newspaper stories about boys who wore their hair like girls, and youngsters who preferred to go barefoot even if they could afford shoes, but they had never seen these people, and tens of thousands of them had turned up all at once. As for festival-goers, what Tolkien-reading hippy could fail to love an island where the major art form is the garden gnome?
The first festival had been held in 1968, as a very small affair, but the second, held in August 1969, had pulled off a great coup by persuading Bob Dylan to top the bill. The organizers of the now legendary Woodstock Festival of 1969 chose Woodstock as the venue because it was the home of Bob Dylan, and they hoped—forlornly, as it turned out—that the event would lure the Jester from the sidelines to claim the thorny crown of the Woodstock generation. The Isle of Wight prevailed where Woodstock had failed. At the end of August 1969 Dylan brought his family to stay in a farmhouse outside the yachting resort of Bembridge, and he played a short set to a crowd of 200,000 on Wootoon Down, his first public paid appearance in four years and almost his last for another four.
To rub Woodstock’s nose even deeper into the mud, the Isle of Wight booked Jimi, the hero of Woodstock, to play at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival.
Jimi arrived in London directly from the party on August 26 for the opening night of the ill-considered Electric Lady Studios in New York City. The young Patti Smith had attempted to gatecrash the party but lost her nerve. “I was too shy to go in, so I sat on the steps,” she told the journalist Ed Vulliamy in an interview in 2005. “And out came Hendrix; he asked me what I was doing and he said, ‘Hey, I’m kind of shy too.’ So we sat on the steps and he talked about what he was going to do when he got back from London; how he was going to create a new language of rock ‘n’ roll; I was so excited. And then he was gone. He never came back.”
Ed Vulliamy was at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. The mood he found there had little do with Woodstock, and was attuned to his own mind. “I was rather a severe young man, quite political,” he recalls now. “These were the days when the left was quite heavy, in the slipstream of May 1968 and the Paris riots. I wasn’t interested in hippies but I found Yippies quite interesting. So I was quite gratified when some French anarchists decide to tear down the fences because they didn’t think there should be tickets.”
Ed Vulliamy was at the front of the crowd when Jimi came on stage in a flowing orange costume:
I couldn’t tell you if he played for an hour, two hours, or three hours. It seemed like a goddamn eternity. It was incredibly loud, overwhelming. It is a shame that contemporary language has now destroyed the word “awesome.”
I remember it finishing. I remember my ears hurting. I was sitting down with some people I’d met. I don’t think any of us said very much. It took a long time to de-rig.
I don’t remember any specific song, just this barrage. This may sound pretentious but I had begun to like Wagner then and it was like Wagner—dangerous. It plays to a place inside you, not necessarily a place you want to go.
Just before Jimi set off for the Isle of Wight, an interview session had been arranged at the Londonderry Hotel. Norman Joplin was then editor of the magazine Music Now, and was notified of the opportunity at the last minute. There were no other journalists in the office, so he went and did the interview himself.
“Jimi must have been talking for hours to dozens of reporters and posing for photographers,” he recalls now,
but when my turn came for the interview—I was last—he was relaxed, energetic, laughing, seeming like he was having a good time. When I suggested he might be stressed out with all the interviews, he was adamant he was fine with it all: “But a few months ago, no way,” he said. “You know, if I even thought anyone was coming into the room, I’d go and hide in the wardrobe. Now I’m OK again.”
He seemed extremely together; wasn’t on drugs (and there was no residual drugginess about him), he was thoughtful, he was very intelligent, and he was warm. But most strikingly he was also physically very attractive, more so than in photographs or on film.
Joplin asked Jimi about the Electric Lady Studios. “It’s a very relaxing studio and it doesn’t have that studio atmosphere,” Jimi said. “There are lots of cushions and pillows and soft lights. You can have any kind of light combination you want. I’m into this combination of music and color—it’s an extra area of awareness. I’m thinking about a film using those techniques.” Meanwhile, Jimi told Joplin, there would be a new LP in October and a double album after that.
In fact the immediate future was not as rosy as Jimi made out. The new album was still boxes and boxes of tapes of chaotic jam sessions that Eddie Kramer was attempting to mix into shape back in New York.
The splendors of Electric Lady remained unpaid for, and Jimi was heavily in debt. Jimi was not a free man. The only means of servicing, let alone paying, his debts was touring. “I wanted to come back [to England],” Jimi told Joplin that evening, “but the people said well you’re playing in Boston on so and so day and all that.” Jimi did not mention the flying visit he had made to London six months earlier to try to recover Kathy’s heart.
Touring was a constraint not only on his time but also on his artistic development. Jimi’s U.S. appearances were heralded on the new FM radio networks with advertisements based around “Purple Haze.” Jimi had tried to leave the Experience behind at the Royal Albert Hall eighteen months before, but it was the Experience that the public wanted to see.
“When it was the Experience there was more room for ego-tripping you know?” he told Joplin. “All I had to blast off stage were a drummer and a bass! But now I want to step back and let other things come forward. This is the idea of my getting a band together, a big band to develop new ideas. I don’t know what my music will be like, I don’t know if I’m playing differently now.”
To add to these complications Jimi had been followed over the Atlantic by a law suit. In 1965, while still a sideman and session man, Jimi had signed a loose and unadvised contract with a New York record producer called Ed Chalpin. When in early 1967 Mike Jeffries had sent an emissary to track down and buy out any contract Jimi might have signed, the arrangement with Chalpin had slipped Jimi’s mind.
Chalpin was in no mood to be bought off. His pride was wounded; he considered Jimi his discovery, stolen from him by Frank Sinatra’s label Warner Brothers. Chalpin saw himself as a black David oppressed by the Goliath of white big business. By 1970 a legal settlement had been arrived at between Warner Brothers and Chalpin, but a still aggrieved Chalpin had begun a legal action in the High Court in London against Polydor, the distributor for Track Records.
Behind the bold face Jimi presented to the press, the strain of his many problems gnawed away at him, and his attempts to escape them through reckless living undermined his health and mental stability further. On the night of his press interviews, Kathy got a call from a friend who was at the Londonderry Hotel in Jimi’s suite. She and another girl had been with Jimi in his bedroom when he had turned on them and pushed them out. Now they were naked and stranded. Kathy went to the Londonderry and talked her way into his bedroom. It was a warm sunny evening but the heating was on, and as Kathy gathered up the girls’ clothes, Jimi was rolled up tight in his bed, silent and shivering.
Whatever Jimi’s plans for the future, he had brought a three-piece band with him to play the Isle of Wight and the short tour of Scandinavia and Northern Europe that was to take place immediately afterward. Mitch Mitchell was on the drums and Noel’s role was taken by Billy Cox, Jimi’s best friend from the army.
Cox was a shy man and the tour was his first trip out of the United States. He felt out of his depth as a musician and was afraid that he would let Jimi down. Both Jimi and Mitch shared a “blast ‘em off the stage” attitude and gave little leeway to each other or Billy. In Sweden somebody spiked Billy’s drink with LSD. He had no experience of acid and was plunged into paranoid delusions over a plot to kill him and Jimi.
In Copenhagen Jimi had an attack of nervous exhaustion, which caused him to cut the show short. It is possible that somebody had slipped him LSD backstage.
The tour moved on to another festival, at Freham Island in Germany. The festival site had been taken over by warring gangs of outlaw motorcyclists. The band had to take shelter in a trailer with a shooting war going on outside. By the time the tour reached Amsterdam it was plain that it would have to be abandoned and that Billy, who was in a state of complete mental breakdown, would have to be sent home.
Back in London, Jimi paid a visit to Chas. He and Lotta were married now, and Jimi met their infant son for the first time. There was a game of Risk, for old time’s sake, then some talk of the future when Jimi asked Chas if we would take over as producer of the album due in October. It was an acknowledgement on Jimi’s part that his best studio work had been accomplished under Chas’s direction.
Chas did agree that if Jimi brought the tapes and Eddie Kramer over from New York, he would book studio time at Olympic. When Jimi called New York, Eddie Kramer misunderstood, and thought he was on the end of peremptory and prima donna-ish summons to London, a futile expedition when Jimi was due back in New York within a week, so he ignored the request.
On the night of Tuesday, September 15, Jimi turned up at Ronnie Scott’s, where Eric Burdon had a week’s residency to launch his new band, War. Jimi wanted to jam but was clearly in no condition to play. He cut a strange, gothic figure in a black cape and broad-brimmed hat, and he was accompanied by a tall and forbiddingly silent blonde in heavy make-up. His friend Sharon Lawrence, a UPI agency journalist, was appalled at how distant he seemed. Although their paths had crossed days ago in Copenhagen, he did not recognize her at first. The following night, Wednesday, Jimi returned to Ronnie Scott’s and played brilliantly. Nevertheless, Sharron Lawrence was still worried enough to phone him at the Cumberland Hotel in Marble Arch the following morning. Jimi recited a litany of his troubles to her. The law suit made him miserable, and some of his entourage from New York had arrived and begun making demands on him. Lawrence promised she would phone later.
That afternoon Mitch had a phone call from Jimi. Sly Stone was due to fly into Heathrow that evening, and Jimi suggested to Mitch that the three of them meet up at the Speakeasy that night. Mitch waited for the phone call that would confirm this arrangement, but it never came.
Instead, Jimi struck up a friendship with a pair of complete strangers in Park Lane and went to a party at their house. He was collected by two women, a blonde and a black woman, in the early hours of September 18. His hosts heard a quarrel outside on the pavement. These two women were the last to see Jimi alive.
On the sunny afternoon of Friday, September 18, Ed Vulliamy was on his way home to Holland Park from his school in Hampstead. The boards for London’s evening newspapers were out and carried the news that Jimi Hendrix had been found dead. For the first time in his life Ed bought an evening paper. On his way home he read that Jimi had been found dead at the (33) Samarkand Hotel, 21-22 Lansdowne Crescent, which was almost directly at the end of the street where Ed lived. Locally, the Samarkand had an exotic reputation. It did not advertise itself as a hotel at all—its only sign was an esoteric stained-glass Tibetan symbol—but it was known as a haunt of visiting American rock stars.
When he got home, Ed changed out of his school uniform, and went, dressed all in white on a personal pilgrimage. Lansdowne Crescent is a curved street of nineteenth-century houses with white stucco fronts and imposing porticoes. It leads nowhere, and when Ed arrived that evening it was deserted. He had some chalk with him and he drew a personal memorial to Jimi on the pavement outside the Samarkand. Among the words he wrote were “Moon Turn the Tides Gently, Gently Away,” a tune from Electric Ladyland that Ed personally felt expressed the shift from life to death. Then he crossed the street and kept vigil alone. Dusk fell and then darkness, and a janitor came up from the basement of the Samarkand with a mop and bucket and washed the chalk marks away.
For all anybody knew at the time, all the traces of Jimi Hendrix would be washed away once the sensation of his death died down. Along Fleet Street, which was then the heart of London’s newspaper industry, journalists reached for their cuttings files to find out the “who?” as much as the “what?” and the “why?” British journalists do not regard themselves as history’s stenographers, as many U.S. journalists do, but as her handmaids, always ready to put beauty before truth. By Sunday, the day traditionally reserved for the most scandalous journalism, one such enterprising soul had typed an account of Jimi’s supposed last phone call to his manager, livened up with the sort of hip slang found in public information films about drug abuse.
Those who knew Jimi, most of whom learned of his death through news reports, felt shock more than grief, and sadness for times lost. None of them expected him to be turned into a god.