Robin Trower released a brilliant blues rock album in 1974 called Bridge of Sighs [TBB 5.10], full of Hendrix style guitar noises. Poz and I wig out to this in the car on the way to nursery. It wasn’t until years after I first got into it that I realised Trower himself wasn’t the singer. Voice and guitar were always the same man in my mind and it was a bit of a struggle to divorce them after years of listening, and to then accept the beardy bass man who was the true source of that gravelly voice.
If YouTube had existed, this wouldn’t have happened and it made me wonder what else I’d misinterpreted. Then I remembered thinking Jimi Hendrix was a white man for the first month I had him on tape.
At the the end of summer 2010 I read an article about Hendrix which was notable in being mercifully devoid of all the usual platitudes, possibly because it came out of an interview with his girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham, who eschewed publicity after his death. The article cast some moving vignettes of Jimi’s lifestyle in London.
I read the article on the train into London and went find the blue plaque they finally put up for him in Brook Street - near the one for Handel, who had the crib next door and down one. I stood there in the dusk and just imagined what it must have been like back then, fluid and uncertain, with all of grubby London at their feet. There’s a powerful moment to be had in this, even though Kathy and Jimi's flat is now an admin office for the Handel Museum. Nice to imagine them setting off from here, arm in arm, for a night out in the West End.
A scant 20 years after his death I often visited cramped and lopsided offices in Soho, as a courier, where promoters and porn barons sat like fat ticks on the back of some heaving beast. There are only so many buildings in that square half kilometre and I must have been in most of them. Somewhere there, years before, I surely would have crossed the path of Jimi and his peers, maybe sharing coffee and ciggies over fresh album artwork, discussing fees, dates, The Scene.
Given the state of some of these places you could be pretty sure that there had been little or no refurbishment since then. Did Jimi once place a big hand against this flock wallpaper? I used to think. Dropping his head and smiling while Chas Chandler explained the problems they would have with Polydor if they did an album sleeve covered in naked girls? I'm probably well wide of the mark, Electric Ladyland was a New York thing, but it was fun to think that some of their day-to-day business was acted out in these same grotty spaces.
It's also the small details that give the best clues about the nature of things. In a historical context, they're more likely to be overlooked by power brokers and myth makers and provided they're not lost in the mix, or forgotten, they remain as lonely signposts to the truth. Apparently, Hendrix played cheap Hofner guitars on his first tour round the UK, it's all he could afford. This didn't stop him from achieving iconic status in rock and that's an inspiration for anyone like him who can't afford a Fender Strat.
The Custom Shop Les Paul I bought is a trophy and the realisation of a dream. One day it will get played, properly, and I won't mind it getting knocked about, I tell myself. Provided it is fulfilling its real purpose. A beautiful instrument needs to be played.
