Monocled Alchemist

Article published in Rave magazine – June 1967

Alan Freeman meets Jimi Hendrix for a RAVE Heart-to-Heart interview

Jimi Hendrix’s Military Experience: I didn’t recognise the elegant uniform. No wonder.

“Royal Army Veterinary Corps,” said Jimi Hendrix, proudly flicking a bit of lint off his tunic sleeve. “Eighteen ninety-eight, I believe. Very good year for uniforms.”

On Jimi it looked . . . . well, interesting. Especially with a flowery shirt and a wispy scarf in his favourite red-purple.

As it happens, James Maurice Hendrix is one of the few younger people in pop who actually wore uniform as a serving soldier – the jump kit of the famous Screaming Eagles airborne division in the U.S. Army.

“I was bored at sixteen after I left school, and there wasn’t a lot doing in a town like Seattle, Washington. The legal age for joining was seventeen, so I stuck a year on and got in the army! And you know what? It was even more boring than being outside.

“They tried to make us tough. So we had to sleep in mud.”

I asked, “What for?”

Jimi shrugged. “To see if we could sleep in mud, I guess. We did push-ups in minus zero degrees. And we did jumping out of planes. That was about the best bit. But it scared me.”

An Experience

He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the chair. It was a clear, sunny afternoon. Jimi stretched luxuriously, appreciating the leisurely atmosphere like a person who has tried living the hard way and knows which he prefers.

“The other night I was about half a block away from the Cromwellian Club, wearing this gear,” he said. “Up comes this wagon with a blue light flashing and about five or six policemen jump out at me. They look into my face real close and severely and gather around. Then one of them points to my jacket and says, ‘That’s British, isn’t it?’

“So I said, Yeah, I think it is’. And they frowned and all that bit and they said, ‘You’re not supposed to be wearing that. Men fought and died in that uniform’.

Uniforms

“They guy’s eyes were so bad he couldn’t read the little print on the badges. So I said. ‘What, in the Veterinary Corps, 1898/ Anyway, I like uniforms. I wore one long enough in the United States Army’.

“They said, ‘What? What? You trying to get smart with us? Show us your passport’. So we did all that bit too. I had to convince them that my accent was really American. Then they asked what group I was with and I said the Experience. So they made fun of that as well and made cracks about roving minstrels.

“After they made a few more funnies, and when they’d finally got their kicks they said they didn’t want to see me with the gear on any more, and they let me go.

“Just as I was walking away, one of them said, ‘Hey, you said you’re in the Experience. What are you experiencing?’

“I said, ‘Harassment!’ And took off as quick as I could.”

Odd Gear

“While we’re on the subject of clothes” I said. “Explain one thing. According to the wise-heads, the craze for uniforms is supposed to show a masculine reaction to the kind of feminine influence that’s been getting into male gear.

“But here you are with a military jacket and a flowered shirt and a dolly scarf. I never saw one guy who could wreck everybody’s theories with one lot of clothes, like you do!”

Jimi roared with laughter, throwing back his mound of hair. “I’ll tell you Alan. I guess I had to conform so long in what other people wanted me to wear that now I just please myself.

“Pretty soon I wanted to get out of the army. One day I got my ankle caught in the sky-hook just as I was going to jump, and I broke it. I told them I’d hurt my back too. Every time they examined me I groaned, so they finally believed me and I got out.”

He stroked the stings of his guitar, thinking back. “I messed about on the guitar while I was in the service. Played occasional gigs out of town. Anyway, my discharge came through, and one morning I found myself standing outside the gate of Fort Campbell on the Tennessee-Kentucky border with my little duffel bag and three or four hundred dollars in my pocket.

Jimi Hendrix’s Military Experience

“I was going to go back to Seattle, which was a long way away, but there was this girl there I was kinda hung up on. Then I thought I’d just look in at Clarksville, which was near; stay there that night and go home next morning. That’s what I did – looked in at Clarksville.

I went in this jazz joint and had a drink. I liked it and I stayed. People tell me I get foolish good-natured sometimes. Anyway, I guess I felt real benevolent that day. I must have been handing out bills to anyone who asked me!

“I came out of that place with sixteen dollars left! And it takes a lot more than that to get from Tennessee to Seattle! So no going home, ‘cos it’s like two thousand miles.”

He chuckled again. “Two thousand miles. I thought first I’d call long-distance and ask my father to send me some money to get me out of there – he’s a garden designer and he does all right. But I could guess what he’d say if I told him I’d lost nearly four hundred dollars in just one day. Nope. That was out.

“All I can do, I thought, is get a guitar and try to find work here. Nashville was only twenty miles away – you know, big music scene. There had to be something doing there.

Jimi Hendrix’s Military Experience

“Then I remembered that just before I left the army I’d sold a guitar to a cat in my unit. So I went back to Fort Campbell and slept there on the sly that night. I found the guy and told him I just had to borrow the guitar back.

“I got in with this one-horse music agency. They used to come up on stage in the middle of a number, while we were playing, and slip the money for the gigs into our pockets.

“They knew we couldn’t knock off to count it then. By the time the number was over and I got a chance to look in the envelope it’s be maybe two dollars.

“Used to have to sleep in a big housing estate they were building around there. No roofs and sometimes they hadn’t put floors in yet. That was wild!”

Jimi put the guitar down and lit a cigarette.

In Nashville

“What were you doing besides the gigs?” I said. “Nashville used to be a pretty funny scene, with all those slick managers trying to sign up hillbilly singers who’d never been in a big town before.”

He nodded. “Wasn’t all that different when I was there. But when you learned the scene you knew it was like a game – you know, like one big put-on all the way. Everybody trying to take everyone else. Once you knew how to watch out for yourself it could be a lot of laughs.

“Every Sunday afternoon we used to go down town and watch the race riots. Take a picnic basket because they wouldn’t serve us in the restaurants. One group would stand on one side of the street and the rest on the other side.

“They’d shout names and talk about each other’s mothers. That’s go on for a couple of hours and then we’d all go home. Sometimes, if there was a good movie on that Sunday there wouldn’t be any race riot.”

He smoothed down his uniform jacket affectionately, “You were asking me about why I go for way-out gear, right/ Well, it wasn’t just the army. I had to conform when I was playing in groups too. The so-called grooming bit. You know, mohair suits.

Alan, how I hate mohair suits! I was playing with the Isley Brothers and we all had white mohair suits, patent leather shoes and patent leather hair-dos. We weren’t allowed to go on stage looking casual. If our shoelaces were two different types we’d get fined five dollars. Oh, man, did I get tired of that!

Music Scene

“Well, I went on thinking soon as I got a bit saved up I’d head off home to Seattle. But as time went on I got more interested in the music scene, and I thought less and less about going back. In the end I never did see home again. Five years or more now I’ve been away.”

After playing here and there a while longer with the Isley group, Jimi found himself back in Nashville. A big tour came through, headed by Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson and B. B. King. Jimi joined the show, travelled with them across the States, and learnt plenty about music.

“I’d have learnt more if they’d let Sam finish his act,” he said. “But they were always on their feet and cheering at the end, and I never heard him do the last bit.”

One day in Kansas City the misfortune that hits all touring musicians sooner or later descended on jumping Jimi Hendrix. He missed the tour coach and was stranded without a penny. A showgirl and her friend helped him, and soon he was able to make his way to the even deeper South – to the city of Atlanta, Georgia.

Hippy Gear

That dynamic pocket dictator of rock, Little Richard, made room in his show for Jimi. And once again he was living on wheels, two shows a night, pull out and head for the next town. But there too the Hendrix eye for hippy gear led to bother.

“Little Richard didn’t want anybody to look better than him,” he said. “I was the best of friends with Glyn Willings, another guy in the band, and we used to buy the same kind of stuff, and wear it on stage.

“After the show one night Little Richard said, ‘Brothers, we’ve got to have a meeting. I am Little Richard and I am the king of rock ‘n’ rhythm and I am the one who’s going to look pretty on stage. Glyn and Jimi, will you please turn in those shirts or else you will have to suffer the consequences of a fine’.

“He had another meeting over my hairstyle. I said I wasn’t going to cut my hair for anybody. Little Richard said, ‘Uh, what is this loud outburst? That will be a five dollar fine for you’. Everybody on the whole tour was brainwashed.”

But tours end, and spells of work alternated with weeks when Jimi and his friends nearly starved in New York. “We’d get a gig about once every twelfth of never,” he said. “We even tried eating orange peel and tomato paste. Sleeping outside them tall tenements was hell. Rats running all across your chest, cockroaches stealing your last candy bar out of your pocket.”

A Break

Then, one warm autumn evening last year, when Jimi landed a solo job with a backing band in Greenwich Village, his chance came at last. Chas Chandler, late of the Animals, and manager Mike Jeffery met him. They said, “Why not come to England?”

Jimi flew to London with Chas – and ran into a six-hour argument with immigration officials. “They didn’t want to let me in,” he said. “They carried on like I was going to make all the money in England and take it back to the States.”

Jimi’s Publicist who had come to the airport to meet the pair, got involved in the argument. He was amazed when the officials threatened to deport him too, seeing that he’s British! Eventually, he managed to get Jimi admitted to our shores of dazzling opportunity on the grounds that Jimi, as the writer of several songs, had come to Britain, among other reasons, to collect royalties owing to him!

Success!

Another hundred Hendrix songs are lying around in various American hotels that Jimi was thrown out of when he couldn’t find the money for his bill. He’d be glad to have them now. For, three days after London drummer Mitch Mitchell and Folkestone bass guitarist Noel Redding signed with Jimi to launch the Experience, the group were playing Paris Olympia with Johnny Halliday.

Never did a new group explode so fast into international acclaim – which was clinched in this country when Brian Epstein called them “the greatest talent to come along since the Rolling Stones”.

Lost Songs

Top groups need top numbers, and Jimi has an uneasy feeling that there could be a few world winners among the papers left in those cheap, cramped little hotels – if they haven’t been hurled in the dustbin.

Jimi crunched out his cigarette and stood up in the full glory of his Veterinary Corps regimentals. Tucking his guitar under his arm, he shook hands.

As long as there are guitars, I thought, there will always be other, better songs to be picked out and composed on them. And as long as Jimi has his guitar, they’ll be no more sleeping in the mud!

Till next month, pop-pickers – stay bright!

More Jimi Hendrix ephemera on The Monocled Alchemist