Jimi Hendrix 1945-1970: May You Never Hear Surf Music Again

We were at the press party for him, Eric Burdon and the Soft Machine. They were supposed to come in by helicopter but they didn’t ‘cause it was raining or foggy so they came in from the airport by car and Eric Burdon didn’t make it because he missed the plane in England to begin with. Jimi Hendrix (that’s his name) finally got there and Ken Greenberg later stole the camera he was shooting with as he walked in, real good party entrance and Ken Greenberg later stole his camera. It was a couple months since the article I writ on him for Crawdaddy and I shook his hand and he said he read it and liked it and was I stoned when I wrote it? He thought I was. I said I was and I wasn’t lyin’. This party I got real drunk and it was so good that now I’m already an alcoholic. I said hello to Ernie Graham of Eire Apparent (they came in on the plane too) what he thought of the Zombies and he said they were musically respected in England (that’s where he was from) but he didn’t remember the Searchers or the D.C. Five. He said they didn’t think much of the Yardbirds anymore (that’s what he said). Roni and Dale Lewis came back from the bathroom after smoking hash and we and them and Ken Greenberg left the party. We got to the bottom of the escalator (there was no stairs) and Ken Greenberg took out the camera he just stole and said “Isn’t it a real good one?” He mighta even said “It is a good one,” he was a photog man so he knew. We said “Give the thing back you and he

didn’t wanna but he did and he had to walk up the down escalator to do it.

The two best dressed men at Monterey both died. Who were they? They were Brian and him. David Getz of Big Brother once had a shirt with a turtle on the back of it (not a real turtle but a picture of one), it was a great shirt but it was NOTHING compared to Jimi’s jacket on the cover of the first album. It had eyeballs and the eyeballs each had TWO CORNEAS!! Or irises or whatever the dark round part of the eye is called. He wore a feather boa too and nobody except for Rosalind (you don’t pronounce the d) Russell wore one (the jacket was more of a vest than a jacket but it was some vest and his shirt underneath was good enough so he didn’t have to wear a jacket over it so the sleeves could show out of it) before that. It was the first band where all three of them had the same hair except for the Beatles and that kind of hair. And that wasn’t easy at all. Growing hair was once like growing trees.

He was a “better guitarist than Donald,” as Pearlman would say. In fact when the Underbelly played their City College concert (a full 6-7 months after the first album) Don was just getting into “Third Stone from the Sun,” one big hell of a treat because on it Jimi just played (no singing) and his guitar did a lot of talking (it didn’t sing either once in a while) and he did too. Once upon a time somebody invented bottleneck guitar. Maybe 630 people did it independently and it eventually emerged as a style with all sorts of different guys doing their own unique version of it. What Jimi Hendrix did was the only original move on the lousy stringed instrument that only one man did for sure. He was the first man to do any moves whatever on guitar up to that point in other words. The Dead was just another Autosalvage (and the Airplane thought of “Pooneil” as the be-all and end-all) until Hendrix came around. He came around from England, it was his mother country, he went back there to die, it’s where he died.

Was it smack or was it pills? If it was pills artists all need their sleep so. they take them. If one doesn’t work he takes another, then another and so on. Sometimes it’s real hard to get to sleep and the sandman is no help at all. So there oughta be an alarm mechanism on the bottle so you don’t take too many. Or they could have a lock on it that goes into action after you take out the maximum number you’re allowed to take. That way you’d have to want to kill yourself and you’d have to buy 2 or more bottles to do it so one wouldn’t be enough and you’d be safe and sound if you had just one. That way Jimi’d still be with us. If it was pills that is.

If it was smack there should be needles issued to you by your body weight and stuff like that so they could never hold an overdose quantity and that way Jimi’d be with us too. Unless he didn’t wanna be and a smack OD is more of a drag than a pill OD so it etc.

Here’s the way Bobby (last name Abrams) wanted to write this obit: have an interview with the chickie who woke up in the morning to discover she’d been sleeping with a corpse and she says “It was still stiff but when there was no climax I realized it was rigor mortis setting in so I stopped sucking.” He was the only black man in music to be created by chemicals (one or two in particular), except for Arthur Lee and there wasn’t enough methedrine to go around for him (Bobby said that too).

You can talk about your Space Cowboys, but Jimi Hendrix was the Space Cowjie chewed on the cosmic cud, he was a Taurus (so were Kant and Plato) and he didn’t have a Jupiter in Virgo to tie him up to mere empiricality.

Was he ever in Ratner’s? Jeff Beck was.

He did the only good version of “All Along the Watch tower,” the author of which wasn’t missed when he died on his motorcycle in 1966 and whose WORST album is the one that contained' (the worst version of) “All along the Watchtower.” Joe Cocker still hasn’t done the only good version of “Let It Be” and it could be he never will. It once mattered and Jimi was on the spot when it did. It doesn’t anymore but if it did we ought to (we really ought to) freeze his body JUST IN CASE so he’ll be there when we need him because he’d be just the man to call upon, just the man. His casket oughta be wheeled on stage for the Band of Gypsies and his lines oughta be played over a tape and everybody else would follow. He once wished everybody a happy new year when he did the Fillmore with those Gypsies. Many people were having bad parties at such places as Great Neck and Thomaston and he was wishin’ everbody many happy returns and they couldn’t hear him ‘cause the PA couldn’t carry that far. If it only could’ve!

I don’t feel like telling you the whole story (I wanna listen to some of his stuff on the Victrola) so if you wanna know other stuff about \yhat he did go read “Pythagoras the Cave Painter” by Nadj Overby in the issue of Crawdaddy where they changed the logo (no it was the second issue with the new unreadable logo designed by David Flooke) and had Paul McCartney on the cover in green and black. Also read the part of Boz Scaggs’ The Aesthetics of Rock that he wrote for the NY Times on Jimi’s second album the day the review copies came out and the Times rejected and he put in the book. It’s in a part of the book that Jerry Wexler (and you know who he is) didn’t like (the part about black music and if Eric Burdon mentions him in “Down in Monterey” he must be black, no that was the reference to Hugh Masakela, in other words Eric is a dodo). You know what song’s playing right now? “I Don’t Live Today.” He doesn’t, but he said it then, do you think anybody in the world was playing that cut at the moment (the exact moment ) that HE DIED? Did he die at a time that was between one day and another or was it the property of one day exclusively? Or was it a night? Was it the day before when it was almost and he had to wait till tomorrow for it to happen? What was he dreaming? Was he dreaming? Was he dreaming about cars? Boats? Sheep? Goats? Dobros? Delgy and the cicotte? Was he dreaming? Was anybody dreaming about him?

Was his lady friend dreaming about him? Was his father? I BET LESS THAN 40 PEOPLE IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD WERE DREAMING ABOUT HIM WHEN HE DIED and I bet he was dreaming about less than 40 people too. On the other hand the number was between 1 and 2 million. Unless it was zero but I don’t think it was. If it was none that were dreaming about him then why the fuckin’ shit all this fuss about him kicking the bucket? / wasn’t dreaming about him. But what's the difference I ask. What’s the diff? After all, dreams are

eternal and if you’ve dreamed it once you’ve dreamed it twice and you’ve dreamed it forever. Period. So you were dreamin’ it when he was dying. Unless you never dreamed it and if you didn’t then you probably never understood the Byrds. Or the Doors. Or the Pigeons. Or Chubby Checker. Or Happy Jack. Or your own That’s all you’d be worth, scumbo. If you never dreamed about him.

He had some of the David Crosby in him but it wasn’t lethal, it was for some people, it was for Crosby for instance. He was tough, he had endurance. If you’ve heard of jazz you’ve heard of him. If you havn’t heard of jazz and you’ve heard of him that’s okay. But if you’ve heard his bootleg without consulting the dictionary of jazz then you’re up shit’s creek unless you have a trick up your sleeve. The Dead has a trick with disappearing cards but after all they’re DEAD and GRATEFUL about it or they wouldn’t be so affirmative about it. When was the last time Jimi Hendrix was dead, was it in 1965 or 1970?

Adios, amigo! See you in the Electric Ladyland in the Sky. Brian’s been waiting for you to play lead in his band. He’s been playing rhythm on the heavenly harp and he’s waiting all this time for somebody to play lead, it’s you and he couldn’t have chosed better , it certainly couldn’t have been A1 Wilson. His gain will be our loss and the third stone from the sun is sure gonna miss you!

R. Meltzer