“It was my idea to light my guitar on fire. . . . Nobody else’s.”
Lunch with Jimi? How could I ever have thought that possible? He’d been gone a long time; then again, our whole connection had always seemed strangely otherworldly to me.
Amazingly enough, I almost forgot the first time I met Jimi. It was 1967; I was fourteen and studying rhythm guitar with Hal Waters. I began hanging around this little smoky basement dive called Steve Paul’s Scene on Forty-Sixth Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan a few nights a week to watch Hal. On one particular night, I heard there was going to be a jam session, and rumor had it Jimi Hendrix was going to play. Damn! Jimi Hendrix was God. There is no contemporary equivalent to the position he held in the music world. He played the guitar upside down and backward. Axis Bold as Love is one of the only records I ever actually bought.
That night, the Buddy Guy Trio was the headline act and a great performer. But, Buddy was no Hendrix. No comparison. Hal played an acoustic second set, I sat in with him on “Water Boy,” and then BAM! The backroom door opened. Out walked Jimi, and surprisingly, he joined us onstage, dropping right into the groove. About halfway through the song, he leaned over, quietly asking me, “Am I playing too loud?”
I was fourteen years old and suddenly playing with Jimi Hendrix, and he asked me if he was playing too loud!
After Hal’s set, roadies rearranged the stage, tweaked the massive columns of Marshall amplifiers and house drum gear in preparation for the jam session. The scene immediately packed with some of the best musicians in town. They started with a scorching up-tempo twelve-bar blues. But when Jimi stepped up, the music exploded in his presence; and his solo was so loud it shook your dental fillings loose. He didn’t just play the guitar; he became the guitar.
That night, Jimi had transported us somewhere into the cosmos and then suddenly, he blacked out and fell off the stage. Quickly, the house bouncers untangled him from the crowd and carried him to a small round table in the back corner. I thought, here’s my chance, slowly threaded my way over to his table, pulled up a chair, and in no time, we were face-to-face. He was slouched down and leaning heavily to the side with his hair and face picking up colors from the room’s psychedelic lighting. I got down closer to the table and said, “Jimi, can you tell me just one secret of the universe?” His eyes were blurred and crossed, but he managed to raise up a bit and looked me squarely in the face. He began to speak, and then vomited all over me.
I was fourteen years old, and Jimi Hendrix had just vomited on me.
His handlers rushed over, cleaned him up, and spirited him out of the club. Occasionally after that, when he was in town, precocious, music-possessed kid that I was, we’d bump into each other at parties, in one of the rock clubs, or performance venues like the Fillmore East, Nite Owl, or Cafe Wha?. When we did, he’d always give me a nod, a wink, or a slap on the back. On September 17, 1970, Jimi Hendrix died—three years after that jam session at the Steve Paul’s Scene. Since then, rarely a day goes by that I don’t think about something Jimi, especially his music; a potent elixir that continues to improve as the years pass.
And now, here we were, about to lunch at Robert, a fancy minimalist American restaurant, on the top floor of the Museum of Arts and Design, high above Columbus Circle. It had wide, expansive views of Central Park. It was just a few short blocks from the formally elegant Wellington Hotel on Seventh Avenue, where he used to ensconce himself. With a big smile, we met in the museum’s lobby. “Joe!” he said. Guitar in hand, he was attired in his signature style, sporting a tailored, royal blue velvet jacket edged with gold ribbing and buttons, boisterous silk paisley shirt and scarf, large gold chain belt, with pointy snakeskin boots and a wide-brimmed hat dramatically perched on top of his giant Afro. Jimi never disappointed. Looking around he said, “I love the street sounds of this city!”
The hues of his vibrant couture accentuated the sleek modernist overtones of the restaurant’s deep purple and maroon décor. We caused quite a stir among the people power-lunching. Just imagine Jimi, the flower-powered-dandy, juxtaposed with the stiff, tieless, single-button executive crowd.
Arthur, the maître d’ and an old friend, seated us front and center with an uninterrupted view of the park and uptown Manhattan. Almost immediately, a score of men seated close to us started snickering, loudly parsing thinly veiled bigoted comments and primitive innuendos our way. I thought Robert was the perfect setting for us to talk about changes and innovations in music, but this interaction momentarily blurred my vision. Jimi was a lot statelier than I and said with an effortless smirk, “I guess things haven’t changed that much, now, have they?” Arthur was aghast at the table’s behavior and apologized profusely to us after diplomatically excoriating the suits.
I wanted to laugh, but the menu snagged my attention. Arthur intervened, “Mr. Hendrix, may I suggest, for starters, the Papaya and Goat Cheese Salad—arugula based with Crottin de Chavignol, radishes, and Key lime drizzled vinaigrette; and for your main course, Tiger Shrimp Stew in a rosemary-fennel butter base. And for you, Joe, your usual?” “Yep, Lobster and Steak Frites, black and blue.” Just like Jimi’s music, I thought; seared black on the outside and cold and raw in the middle. Greco di Tufo, a fresh, unoaked white wine freely flowed into Jimi’s glass as I drowned myself in Arnold Palmers. The wine loosened Jimi up; he was notoriously tight-lipped—unless you were female, and then he had the gift of gab—always with guitar in hand. And sure enough, as our meal progressed, he was besieged by female corporate types with iPhones. They gathered around our table after finishing their lunches, asking him if he wouldn’t mind taking a picture with them. They didn’t look old enough even to know who he was; I guessed they sensed, unlike their male counterparts, that he was a very famous somebody. Then he’d flash that famous smile—the broadest grin I’d ever seen.
It took a while for the amalgam of their flowery and musky perfume base notes to dissipate; then, we became the last patrons in the restaurant on top of the architect Edward Durell Stone’s controversial trapezoidal bonbon, anchoring the southernmost corner of Columbus Circle. An architecturally designed building ahead of its time, hosting a musician the future was still trying to catch up to.
Jimi was blown away by all the gadgets performers used to generate the sounds he created by twisting the volume or tone switches back and forth with his pinky while playing his Fender Stratocaster, upside down and backward to boot. While gazing devotedly at his guitar perched on our table, he said, “And it was my idea to light my guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival. Nobody else’s.” Just as I’d always thought.
I had already decided, feeling nostalgic for those long-ago days, not to remind him of how we’d first met. “What do you think about the business of music, Jimi? There are a lot of stories about how your management tried to control you by sabotaging various band configurations, messing with your money and copyrights.” “All true,” Jimi said. “The business was truly evil. Dangerous, backstabbing, and greedy.” I interrupted, “My dad had an office in the Brill Building and published music, as a Black man, during the 1960s in Tin Pan Alley. Even as a child, I knew you could get your legs broken in the music industry.” “Your dad published music in the Brill Building! Damn. Then you know . . .” “Yep,” I said. Jimi carried on, “All I ever wanted to do was make music. I built Electric Lady Studios to capture all the stuff going on in my head. I had plans but never got to implement them. I hated touring and the constant requests for certain compositions; playing the same song over and over. Man, I never understood why people couldn’t just come and hear me play like they did for, you know, Coltrane, Monk, Parker.”
I so wanted to ask him to kick out a few riffs from my favorite songs—“Spanish Castle Magic” or “Little Wing”—but his candor quickly made me realize I would take those requests to my grave. So I switched gears. “You know, your music changed the DNA of everyone who listened to it; especially me.” I gave him a copy of my first CD. “Cool cover art,” he said. “Hey, you play left-handed, too?”
Arthur came by again, and I said, “We’re just about to leave.” “Oh, no, take as much time as you like.” And magically, two Upside-Down Peach Cakes with Rhubarb Caviar and Almond Tuiles appeared on our table. “I am so embarrassed by that table’s behavior this afternoon, please, lunch is on me.” I said, “Arthur . . .” “No, no no. It’s all right, Joe. Indeed, my pleasure.” I asked Arthur to join us.
Jimi focused on the unusual amorphous shapes of the Tuiles adorning the tops of our desserts. We sat drinking cappuccinos, and he savored some Hennessy X.O for another hour or so, telling stories about our life’s many foibles, covered in high-decibel, side-splitting laughter about them. (Given its own space, failure can be kind of funny at times.) Jimi’s laugh was a full-bodied, light-headed eruption that left him seeming unexpectedly helpless and vulnerable. The waitstaff began setting up for dinner. Jimi and I thanked Arthur for an unforgettable lunch. He told us that his restaurant was our restaurant, to come back anytime.
When we got outside, Jimi jumped into a yellow cab. But before it screeched down Central Park South, he opened the window and said, “Joe, man, I’m really sorry I threw up on you that time. Definitely not cool.” And off he sped. Then it hit me: I hadn’t taken a breath all afternoon. As the taxi’s image blurrily vanished in the distance, I remembered that I had forgotten to ask him the most critical question: What is it like being a god?
A few months later, I was in London on business and found myself standing in front of 23 Brook Street, the building where Jimi died. Did you know that a single wall separated his apartment from George Frideric Handel’s?
Some people think Jimi was the reincarnation of Handel.
Not me. I know that gods never die.
Joe Lewis is a nationally known artist, educator, author, musician, and professor of art at the University of California, Irvine, where he served as dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts from 2010 to 2014. He was also the dean at Alfred University and FIT in New York, and co-founding director of Fashion Moda. Currently, he is the president of the Noah Purifoy Foundation, Los Angeles/Joshua Tree, California. He has written for Art in America, Artforum, and LA Weekly and was a contributing editor for Artspace and a correspondent for Contemporanea, an international arts magazine. His essays regarding art, technology, and society have appeared in anthologies and peer-reviewed journals.