to fucking do a double-somersault and come
playing it behind his neck, fucking biting it!
I watched him many nights and he wasn’t just
pretending, playing it with his fingers. He was
playing it with his teeth! And he used to fuck the
amplifiers and drag it around the floor. Lighting
it on fire...”
Ian was still wondering how to go about finding
his own pad when, out of the blue, Neville
mentioned they were looking for a second roadie
for the next Hendrix tour. Luck! “I hired on for £10
a week and all your meals and whatever. It was
madness. Two shows a night. Just do your hits.
Bang, bang, bang. Great fun.”
His job was simple enough. “Neville took care of
all the electrics, I just humped all Hendrix’s gear.
When he was playing I’d watch him on stage from
a chair in the wings. You could never tell how he
did it. He loved to fuck off all the guitar players inthe audience. Graham Nash sitting
backstage with his ear on the stacks all
night – none of this glad-handing you
get backstage now with the fucking
canapés. In those days people wanted to
learn and improve.”
Even being around Hendrix off stage
was a lesson. “He had this old Epiphone
guitar – it was a twelve-string, strung as
a six-string – and he used to stand up on
a chair backstage and play it.”
Jimi was “a prince, a really good guy – old-
fashioned. Get up when a lady enters the room.
Pulling chairs out for chicks.”
Jimi had superman stamina.
“If you wanted to see some athletic fucking, Jimi
was the boy for it. I’d never seen anything like it- there were always lines of chicks going nuts
outside his dressing room. It was like, “Take
a number and wait.” I used to score acid for him,
and his dope. I’d get him ten hits of acid and he’d
take seven and give me three. They say acid doesn’t
work two days in a row, but we found out if you
double the dose it does.”
After Monterey, Owsley had gifted Jimi
thousands of tabs of his triple-strength White
Lightning. The ones with the little owl faces
stamped on them. They weren’t illegal yet. But
what he hadn’t swallowed in handfuls he’d given
away like candy, or simply ditched when he got on
the plane back to London. Now he felt like he
needed to do acid every time he played.hen the tour ended in Glasgow, just before
Christmas, Ian was bereft. Jimi’s next stop
was Scandinavia followed by a three-
month tour of the US. No need for any English
roadies. Ian left Hendrix determined to get his own
like-minded band together. A lot of people who
saw Jimi on that tour felt the same way.
Jimi in a wide-brimmed hat with a feather and
crushed red flares. “A lot of the guys were getting
stoned,” recalled Bev Bevan, drummer with The
Move. “It was a very peaceful tour.”
“It was like a huge school trip,” Keith Emerson of
The Nice said. Keith carried knives onstage: driving
huge hunting daggers into his keyboards; throwing
them into the side-mounted speakers; whipping
them with an actual whip. The man had a whip.
Bored, Jimi bought a home-movie camera. One
night Keith is doing his knife act, throwing them
towards the speakers, when at the last moment he
sees Jimi poking his camera between the speakers.
“I kind of froze mid-throw. Jimi had his tongue out
and was beckoning me to actually throw them at
the speakers while he was in the middle, while he
filmed it. I thought, I don’t want to be the one who
puts him in the history books.”
But Jimi is already in the history books.
“I remember Newcastle City Hall,” breezedALA
MYHendrix (with hat) on the 1967
Christmas Olympia Tour with,
among others, Pink Floyd,
Amen Corner and The Move.70 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM