Episode 147: “Hey Joe” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

A History of Folk Music in 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 147

Hey Joe

by the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Just a quick note before we start.

This episode deals with a song whose basic subject is a man murdering a woman, and that song also contains references to guns and in some versions to cocaine use.

Some versions excerpted also contain misogynistic slurs.

If those things are likely to upset you, please skip this episode, as the whole episode focuses on that song.

I would hope it goes without saying that I don't approve of misogyny, intimate partner violence or murder.

And my discussing a song does not mean I condone acts depicted in its lyrics, and the episode itself deals with the writing and recording of the song rather than its subject matter.

But it would be impossible to talk about the record without excerpting the song.

The normalisation of violence against women in rock music lyrics is a subject I will come back to, but did not have room for in what is already a very long episode.

Anyway, on with the show.

Let's talk about the folk process, shall we?

We've talked before, like in the episodes on Stagger Lee and Ida Red, about how there are some songs that aren't really individual songs in themselves, but are instead collections of related songs that might happen to share a name, or a title, or a story, or a melody, but which might be different in other ways.

There are probably more songs that are like this than songs that aren't, and it doesn't just apply to folk songs, although that's where we see it most notably.

You only have to look at the way a song like Hound Dog changed from the Willie May Thornton version to the version by Elvis, which only shared a handful of words with the original.

Songs change and recombine, and everyone who sings them brings something different to them, until they change in ways ways that nobody could have predicted, like a game of telephone.

But there usually remains a core, an archetypal story or idea, which remains constant no matter how much the song changes, like Stagger Lee shooting Billy in a bar over a hat, or Frankie killing her man.

Sometimes the man is Al, sometimes he's Johnny, but he always done her wrong.

And one of those stories is about a man who shoots his cheating woman with a 44 and tries to escape, sometimes to a town town called Jericho and sometimes to Juarez, Mexico.

The first version of this song we have a recording of is by Clarence Ashley in 1929, a recording of an older folk song that was called, in his version, Little Sadie.

Without blessed Godfrey, take a little down, a middle senior bloater down, a none right home in the winter bed, a 44 smoke smoke list under my head.

I woke next morning at half a past nine.

The buggers in the hacks all swarmed in line.

The gents and the gamblers standing around.

A goin' take a stand at your burying ground.

At some point, somebody seems to have noticed that that song has a slight melodic similarity to another family of songs, the family known as Cocaine Blues or Take a Whiff on Me,

which was popular around the same time.

I went to Mr.

Leemon, then alone.

Saw a sign on the windows, there's no more door.

Honey, take a whiff on me.

And so the two songs became combined, and the protagonist of Little Sadie now had a reason to kill his woman, a reason other than her cheating, that is.

He had taken a shot of cocaine before shooting her.

The first recording of this version, under the name Cocaine Blues, seems to have been a Western swing version by W.A.

Nichols' Western Aces.

one morning while I'm making my round, took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down.

Went right home and I went to bed.

Stuck at loving 44 beneath my head.

Got up next morning and I grabbed that gun.

Took a shot of cocaine and away I run.

Made a good run, but I run too slow.

They overtook me down in Morris, Mexico.

Woody Guthrie recorded a version around the same time.

I've seen different dates, and so don't know for sure if it was before or after Nichols' version.

And his version had himself credited as songwriter, and included this last verse, which doesn't seem to appear on any earlier recordings of the song.

Cried, Lord, in heaven have some mercy on me.

I'll be here for the rest of my life.

All I've done was kill my wife.

That doesn't appear on many later recordings either, but it did clearly influence yet another song, Mose Allison's classic jazz number, Parchman Farm.

Well, I'm going to be here for the rest of my life.

And all I did was shoot my wife.

I'm sitting over here on parchment farm.

The most famous recordings of the song, though, were by Johnny Cash, who recorded it as both cocaine blues and as Transfusion Blues.

In Cash's version of the song, the murderer gets sentenced to 99 years in the Folsom Pen, so it made sense that Cash would perform that on his most famous album, the live album of his January 1968 concerts at Folsom Prison, which revitalized his career after several years of limited success.

The judge smiled as he picked up his pen.

99 years in the fulsome pen.

99 years underneath that ground.

I can't forget the day I shut that bad bitch down.

Come on, you gotta listen unto me.

Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.

Well, that was Cash's first live recording at a prison though, it wasn't the first show he played at a prison.

Ever since the success of his single False and Prison Blues, he'd been something of a hero to prisoners, and he had been doing shows in prisons for 11 years by the time of that recording.

And on one of those shows, he had as his support act a man named Billy Roberts, who performed his own song which followed the same broad outlines as Cocaine Blues.

A man with a 44 who goes out to shoot his woman and then escapes to Mexico.

Roberts was an obscure folk singer who never had much success but who was good with people.

He'd been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1950s, and at a gig at Gurdy's Folk City, he'd met a woman named Neela Miller, an aspiring songwriter, and had struck up a relationship with her.

Miller only ever wrote one song that got recorded by anyone else, a song called Mean World Blues that was recorded by Dave Van Ronk.

Oh,

tell me,

pretty baby,

what are

you thinking of

that makes you tremble and turn away from love?

Now, that's an original song, but it does bear a certain melodic resemblance to another old folk song, one known as Where Did You Sleep Last Night or In the Pines, or sometimes Black Girl.

My girl, my girl, don't lie to me.

Tell me, where did you sleep last night?

Come on, tell me, baby.

In the ponds,

in the pond,

where the sun don't ever shine, I've a shiv

all night too.

My girl, my girl,

where will

you go?

I'm gone where to go.

Miller was clearly familiar with the tradition from which Where Did You Sleep Last Night comes.

It's a type of folk song where someone asks a question and then someone else answers it, and this repeats, building up a story.

This is a very old folk song format, and you hear it, for example, in Lord Randall, the song on which Bob Dylan based A Hard Rains A Gonna Fall.

Here Ben, Lord Randall, my son,

oh for here ye been my bony young man

I've been to the wild wooden mother mark my bed soon

You may remember back in the episode on Eight Miles High, I talked about the circle of fifths, a chord progression which either increases or decreases by a fifth for every chord, so it might go C G D A E.

That's a common progression in pop and jazz, but not really so much in folk.

But it's the one that Miller had used for Baby Please Don't Go to Town, and she taught Roberts that song, which she only recorded much later.

I'm gonna sit in a bar with my feet tucked in.

Drinking all the beer and whiskey engine out.

I'm looking at the young man always hanging

After Roberts and Miller broke up, Roberts kept playing that melody, but he changed the lyrics.

The lyrics he added had several influences.

There was that question and answer folk song format.

There's the story of Cocaine Blues, with its protagonist getting a 44 to shoot his woman down before heading to Mexico.

And there's also a country hit from 1953.

Hey Joe was originally recorded by Carl Smith, one of the most popular country singers of the early 50s.

Now, listen,

That was written by Boodlow's Bryant a few years before the songs he co-wrote for the Everly Brothers and became a country number one, staying at the top for eight weeks.

It didn't make the pop chart, but a pop cover version of it by Frankie Lane made the top ten in the US.

you how I feel.

She's a honey, she's a sugar pie.

I'm warning you, I'm gonna try to steal her from you.

Hey,

Joe,

though, we've been the best of friends, this is where that friendship ends.

I gotta have that dolly for my own.

Lane's record did even better in the UK, where it made number one, at a point where Lane was the biggest star in music in Britain.

At the time, the UK charts only had a top 12, and at one point, four of the singles in the top 12 were by Lane, including that one.

There was also an answer record by Kitty Wells, which made the country top 10 later that year.

someone stole your pearly girly, walked off with your dolly dolly.

Maybe now you chance to dance with me.

Hey,

Joe,

I feel mighty love and lovey.

Let me be your new petuni.

Oddly, despite it being a very big hit, that hey Joe had almost no further cover versions for 20 years, though it did become part of the searchers' set list and was included on their live at the Star Club album in 1963 in an arrangement that owed a lot to What Did I Say?

We'll be friends until the end.

This is where the friendship ends.

I gotta have that

But that song was clearly on Roberts's mind when, as so many American folk musicians did, he travelled to the UK in the late 50s and became briefly involved in the burgeoning UK folk movement.

In particular, he spent some time with a 12-string guitar player from Edinburgh called Lem Partridge, who was also a mentor to Burt Yansch, and who was apparently an extraordinary musician, though I know of no recordings of his work.

Partridge helped Roberts finish up the song, though Partridge is about the only person in this story who didn't claim a writing credit for it at one time or another, saying that he just helped Roberts out, and that Roberts deserved all the credit.

The first known recording of the completed song is from 1962, a few years after Roberts had returned to the US, though it didn't surface until decades later.

I'm chasing the woman, she ran off with another man.

Hey Joe, what are you gonna do?

Roberts was performing this song regularly on the folk circuit, and around the time of that recording, he also finally got round to registering the copyright, several years after it was written.

When Muller heard the song, she was furious, and she later said, Imagine my surprise when I heard Hey Joe by Billy Roberts.

There was my tune, my code progression, my question-answer format.

He dropped the bridge that was in my song, and changed it enough so that the copyright did not protect me from his plagiarism.

I decided not to go through with all the complications of dealing with him.

He never contacted me about it or gave me any credit.

He knows he committed a morally reprehensible act.

He never was man enough to make amends and apologise to me, or to give credit for the inspiration.

Dealing with all that was also why I made the decision not to become a professional songwriter.

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

Pete Seeger, a friend of Miller's, was outraged by the injustice, and offered to testify on her behalf should she decide to take Roberts to court, but she never did.

Sometime around this point, Roberts also played on that prison bill with Johnny Cash, and what happened next is hard to pin down.

I've read several different versions of the story, which changed the date and which prison this was in, and none of the details in any story hang together properly.

Everything introduces weird inconsistencies and things which just make no sense at all.

Something like this basic outline of the story seems to have happened, but the outline itself is weird, and we'll probably never know the truth.

Roberts played his set, and one of the songs he played was Hey Joe, and at some point he got talking to one of the prisoners in the audience, Dino Valenti.

We've met Valenti before in the episode on Mr.

Tambourine Man.

He was a singer-songwriter himself and would later be the lead singer of Quicksilver Messenger Service, but he's probably best known for having written Get Together.

You hold the key to love and fear

all in your trembling hand.

One key unlocks them both, you know,

and it's at your command.

Well, people now, get together, we'll smile on you, brother.

Try to love one another right now.

As we heard in the Mr.

Tambourine Man episode, Valenti actually sold off his rights to that song to pay for his bail at one point, but he was in and out of prison several times because of drug busts.

At this point, or so the story goes, he was eligible for parole, but he needed to prove he had a possible income when he got out, and one way he wanted to do that was to show that he had written a song that could be a hit he could make money off, but he didn't have such a song.

He talked about his predicament with Roberts, who agreed to let him claim to have written Hey Joe so he could get out of prison.

He did make that claim, and when he got out of prison he continued making the claim and registered the copyright to Hey Joe in his own name, even though Roberts had already registered it, and signed a publishing deal for it with Third Story Music, a company owned by Herb Cohen, the future manager of the Mothers of Invention, and Cohen's brother Mutt.

Valenti was a popular face on the folk scene, and he played his song to many people, but two in particular would influence the way the song would develop, both of them people we've seen relatively recently in episodes of the podcast.

One of them, Vince Martin, we'll come back to later, but the other was David Crosby, and so let's talk about him and the birds a bit more.

Crosby and Valenti had been friends long before the birds formed, and indeed we heard in the Mr.

Tambourine Man episode how the group had named themselves after Valenti's song Birdsers.

And pairs are free.

Two birds you see

So they never

have to run

Away from their

little

And Crosby loved Hey Joe, which he believed was another of Valenti's songs.

He'd perform it every chance he got, playing it solo on guitar, in an arrangement that other people have compared to Mose Allison.

He'd tried to get it on the first two Birds albums, but had been turned down, mostly because of their manager and uncredited co producer Jim Dixon, who had strong opinions about it, saying later, Some of the songs that David would bring in from the outside were perfectly valid songs for other people, but did not seem to be compatible with the Birds' myth.

And he may not have liked the Birds' myth.

He fought for Hey Joe, and he did it.

As long as I could say no, I

Dixon was, though, still working with the band when they got round to recording it.

That came during the recording of their fifth dimension album, the album which included Eight Miles High.

That album was mostly recorded after the departure of Gene Clark, which was where we left the group at the end of the Eight Miles High episode, and the loss of their main songwriter meant that they were struggling for material, doubly so since they also decided they were going to move away from Dylan covers.

This meant that they had to rely on original material from the group's less commercial songwriters, and on a few folk songs, mostly learned from Pete Seeger.

The album ended up with only 11 songs on it, compared to the twelve that was normal for American albums at that time, and the singles on it after 8 Miles High weren't particularly promising as to the group's ability to come up with commercial material.

The next single, 5D, a song by Roger McGuinn about the fifth dimension, was a waltz-time song that both Crosby and Chris Hillman were enthused by.

It featured organ by Van Dyke Parks, and McGuinness said of the organ part, When he came into the studio, I told him to think Bach.

He was already thinking Bach before that, anyway.

I saw the great blunder my teachers had made, scientific delirium madness.

I will

While the group liked it though, that didn't make the top 40.

The next single did, just about, a song that McGuinn had written as an attempt at communicating with alien life.

He hoped that it would be played on the radio, and that the radio waves would eventually reach aliens, who would hear it and respond.

The Fifth Dimension album did significantly worse, both critically and commercially, than their previous albums, and the group would soon drop Alan Stanton, the producer, in favour of Gary Usher, Brian Wilson's old songwriting partner.

But the desperation for material meant that the group agreed to record the song which they still thought at the time had been written by Crosby's friend, though nobody other than Crosby was happy with it.

And even Crosby later said, it was a mistake.

I shouldn't have done it.

Everybody makes mistakes.

McGuinn said later, the reason Crosby did lead on Hey Joe was because it was his song.

He didn't write it, but he was responsible for finding it.

He'd wanted to do it for years, but we would never let him.

I'm gonna find my boy and she's running around with some other man.

I'm gonna go downtown,

find that blue steel forty-four.

Of course, that arrangement is very far from the Moz Allison-style version Crosby had been doing previously, and the reason for that can be found in the full version of that McGuin quote, because the full version continues, He'd wanted to do it for years, but we would never let him.

Then both Love and the Leaves had a minor hit with it, and David got so angry that we had to let him do it.

His version wasn't that hot because he wasn't a strong lead vocalist.

The arrangement we just heard was the arrangement that by this point almost every group on the Sunset Strip scene was playing, and the reason for that was because of another friend of Crosby's, someone who had been a roadie for the birds, Brian McLean.

McLean and Crosby had been very close, because they were both from very similar backgrounds.

They were both Hollywood brats with huge egos.

McLean later said, Crosby and I got on perfectly.

I didn't understand what everybody was complaining about because he was just like me.

McLean was, if anything, from an even more privileged background than Crosby.

His father was an architect who'd designed houses for Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin.

His neighbour when growing up was Frederick Lowe, the composer of My Fair Lady.

He learned to swim in Elizabeth Taylor's private pool, and his first girlfriend was Liza Minelli.

Another early girlfriend was Jackie DeShannon, the singer-songwriter who did the original version of Needles and Pins, who he was introduced to by Sharon Shealy, whose name you will remember from many previous episodes.

MacLean had wanted to be an artist until his late teens, when he walked into a shop in Westwood which sometimes sold his paintings, the Sandal Shop, and heard some people singing folk songs there.

He decided he wanted to be a folk singer, and soon started performing at the Balladier, a club which would later be renamed the Troubadour, playing songs like Robert Johnson's Crossroads Blues, which had recently become a staple of the folk repertoire after John Hammond put out the King of the Delta Blues singers album.

I believe I'm sinking down

Reading interviews with people who knew McLean at the time, the same phrase keeps coming up.

John Kay, later the lead singer of Steppenwolf, said, There was a young kid, Brian McLean, kind of cocky but nonetheless a nice kid, who hung around Crosby and McGuinn, while Chris Hillman said, he was a pretty good kid, but a wee bit cocky.

He was a fan of the various musicians who later formed the birds, and was also an admirer of a young guitarist on the scene named Ryland Kuda, and of a blues singer on the scene named Taj Mahal.

He apparently was briefly in a band with Taj Mahal, called Summer's Children, who, as far as I can tell, had no connection to the duo that Kurt Becher later formed of the same name, before Taj Mahal and Kuda formed the Rising Suns, a multiracial blues band, who were for a while the main rivals to the birds on the scene.

McLean, though, firmly hitched himself to the birds, and particularly to Crosby.

He became a roadie on their first tour, and Hillman said, He was a hard-working guy on our behalf.

As I recall, he pretty much answered to Crosby and was David's assistant, to put it diplomatically.

More like his gopher, in fact.

But MacLean wasn't cut out for the hard work that being a roadie required, and after being the birds' roadie for about thirty shows, he started making mistakes, and when they went off on their UK tour, they decided not to keep employing him.

He was heartbroken, but got back into trying his own musical career.

He auditioned for the monkeys unsuccessfully, but shortly after that, some sources say even the same day as the audition, though that seems a little too neat, he went to Ben Franks, the LA Hangout that had actually been name-checked in the Open Call for Monkeys auditions, which said they wanted Ben Franks types.

And there he met Arthur Lee and Johnny Eccles.

Eccles would later remember, he was this gadfly kind of character who knew everybody and was flitting from table to table.

He wore striped pants and a scarf, and he had this long strawberry hair.

All the girls loved him.

For whatever reason, he came and sat at our table.

Of course, Arthur and I were the only two black people there at the time.

Lee and Eccles were both black musicians who had been born in Memphis.

Lee's birth father, Chester Taylor, had been a cornet player with Jimmy Lunsford, whose Delta Rhythm Boys had had a hit with The Honey Dripper, as we heard way back in the episode on Rocket 88.

Boy,

the honeydripper.

He's a girl.

The honeydripper.

Soft, sweet, hot, he's a silent old cat.

However, Taylor soon split from Lee's mother, a school teacher, and she married Clinton Lee, a stonemason, who doted on his adopted son, and they moved to California.

They lived in a relatively prosperous area of LA, a neighborhood that was almost all white with a few Asian families, though the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson lived nearby.

A year or so after Arthur and his mother moved to LA, so did the Eccles family, who had known them in Memphis, and they happened to move only a couple of streets away.

Eight year old Arthur Lee reconnected with seven year old Johnny Eccles,

and the two became close friends from that point on.

Arthur Lee first started out playing music when his parents were talked into buying him an accordion, by a salesman who would go around with the donkey, give kids free donkey rides, and give the parents a sales pitch while they were riding the donkey.

He soon gave up on the accordion and persuaded his parents to buy him an organ instead.

He was a spoiled child by all accounts, with a T V in his bedroom, which was almost unheard of in the late fifties.

Johnny Eccles had a similar experience which led to his parents buying him a guitar, and the two were growing up in a musical environment generally.

They attended Dorsey High School at the same time as both Billy Preston and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Ella Fitzgerald and her then-husband, the great jazz bass player Ray Brown, lived in the same apartment building as the Eccles family for a while.

Hornette Coleman, the free jazz saxophone player, lived next door to Eccles, and Adolphus Jacobs, the guitarist with the coasters, gave him guitar lessons.

Arthur Lee also knew Johnny Otis, who ran a pigeon breeding club for local children, which Arthur would attend.

Eccles was the one who first suggested that he and Arthur should form a band, and they put together a group to play at a school talent show, performing Last Night, the instrumental that had been a hit for the marquees on Stacks Records.

They soon became a regular group, naming themselves Arthur Lee and the LA Gs,

the LA Group, in imitation of Bucket T and the MGs, the Memphis Group.

At some point around this time, Lee decided to switch from playing organ to playing guitar.

He would say later that this was inspired by seeing Johnny Guitar Watson get out of a gold Cadillac wearing a gold suit and with gold teeth in his mouth.

The LAGs started playing as support acts and backing bands for any blues and soul act that came through LA, performing with Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis, the OJs and more.

Arthur and Johnny were both still underage, and they were penciling fake moustaches to play the clubs, so they'd appear older.

In the fifties and early sixties, there were a number of great electric guitar players playing blues on the west coast, Johnny Guitar Watson, T-Bone Walker, Guitar Slim, and others, and they would compete with each other not only to play well, but to put on a show.

And so there was a whole bag of stage tricks that West Coast RB guitarists picked up, and Eccles learned all of them, playing his guitar behind his back, playing his guitar with his teeth, playing with his guitar between his legs.

As well as playing their own shows, the LAGs also played gigs under other names.

They had a corrupt agent who would book them under the name of whatever black group had a hit at the time, in the belief that almost nobody knew what popular groups looked like anyway.

So they would go out and perform as the Drifters or the Coasters or half a dozen other bands.

But Arthur Lee in particular wanted to have success in his own right.

He would later say, When I was a little boy, I would listen to Nat King Cole, and I would look at that purple Capital Records logo.

I wanted to be on Capital, that was my goal.

Later, I used to walk from Dorsey High School all the way up to the Capitol building in Hollywood, did that many times.

I was determined to get a record deal with Capital, and I did, without the help of a fancy manager or anyone else.

I talked to Adam Ross and Jack Levy at Ardmore Beechwood.

I talked to Kim Fowley.

And then I talked to Capital.

The record that the LAGs released though was not very good.

A track called Rumple Stillskins.

Lee later said, I was young and very inexperienced, and I was testing the record company.

I figured if I gave them my worst stuff and they ripped me off, I wouldn't get hurt.

But it didn't work.

And after that, I started giving my best, and I've been doing that ever since.

The LAGs were dropped by Capital after one single, and for the next little while, Arthur and Johnny did work for smaller labels, usually labels owned by Bob Keane, with Arthur writing and producing and Johnny playing guitar.

Though Eccles has said more recently, that a lot of the songs that were credited to Arthur as sole writer were actually joint compositions.

Most of these records were attempts at copying the style of other people.

There was I've been Traying, a full specter soundalike released by Little Ray.

Cause we

died.

But I wake up from the morning I'm crying,

yeah, yeah.

When so outside.

And there were a few attempts at sounding like Curtis Mayfield, like Slow Jerk by Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals.

I've been

trying

the life looks awful better

for you

for you.

But

I've got to try,

try

I've got to try,

yeah

all of my life

I've tried

and my diary by Rosalie Brooks

Remember the things

we used to do

Remember the nights I

Eccles was playing with a lot of other people and one of the musicians he was playing with, his old school friend Billy Preston, told him about a recent European tour he'd been on with Little Richard, and the band from Liverpool he'd befriended while he was there who idolised Richard.

So when the Beatles hit America, Arthur and Johnny had some small amount of context for them.

They soon broke up the LAGs and formed another group, the American Four, with two white musicians, bass player John Fleckenstein, and drummer Don Costa.

Lee had them wear wigs so they seemed like they had longer hair, and started dressing more eccentrically.

He would soon become known for wearing glasses with one blue lens and one red red one, and, as he put it, wearing forty pounds of beads, two coats, three shirts, and wearing two pairs of shoes on one foot.

As well as the Beatles, the American Four were inspired by the other British invasion bands.

Arthur was in the audience for the Tammy Show and quite impressed by Mick Jagger, and also by the Valentinos, Bobby Wilmack's group.

They tried to get signed to SAR Records, the label owned by Sam Cook for which the Valentinos recorded, but SAR weren't interested, and they ended up recording for Bob Keene's Delphi Records, where they caught Lucy Baines, a twist-and-shout knockoff with lyrics referencing the daughter of new US President Lyndon Johnson.

But that didn't take off any more than the earlier records had.

Another American four track, Stay Away, was recorded but went unreleased until 2006.

Now you want me back again.

You know, I never put you down,

put you down,

put you down.

I'll fix her,

I'll fix her,

I'll fix her.

Stay away.

I'm through with it.

Soon, the American Four were changing their sound and name again.

This time, it was because of two bands bands who were becoming successful on the Sunset Strip.

One was the Byrds, who to Lee's mind were making music like the stuff he heard in his head, and the other was their rivals the Rising Suns, the blues band we mentioned earlier with Taj Mahal and Mai Kuda.

Lee was very impressed by them, as a multiracial band making aggressive loud guitar music, though he would always make the point when talking about them that they were a blues band, not a rock band, and he had the first multiracial rock band.

Whatever they were like live, though, in their recordings, produced by the Birds' first producer Terry Melcher, the Rising Suns often had the same garage band folk punk sound that Lee and Eccles would soon make their own.

You got to leave your yesterday behind

But while the Rising Suns recorded a full album's worth of material, only one single was released before they split up, and so the way was clear for Lee and Eccles's band, now renamed once again to the Grassroots, to become the Birds' New Challengers.

Lee later said, I named the group the grassroots behind a trip, or an album I heard that Malcolm X did, where he said, the grassroots of the people are out in the street doing something about their problems, instead of sitting around talking about it.

After seeing the Rolling Stones and the Birds live, Lee wanted to get up front and move like Make Jagger, and not be hindered by playing a guitar he wasn't especially good at.

Both the Stones and the Birds had two guitarists and a frontman who just sang and played hand percussion, and these were the models that Lee was following for the group.

He also thought it would be a good idea commercially to get a good-looking white boy up front, so the group got in another guitarist, a white pretty boy who Lee soon fell out with and gave the nickname Bummer Bob because he was unpleasant to be around.

Those of you who know exactly why Bobby Beausoleil later became famous will probably agree that this was a more than reasonable nickname to give him, and those of you who don't, I'll be dealing with him when we get to 1969.

So when Brian McLean introduced himself to Lee and Eccles, and they found out that not only was he also a good-looking white guitarist, but he was also friends with the entire circle of hipsters who'd been going to birds gigs, people like Vito and Franzoni, and he could get a massive crowd of them to come along to gigs for any band he was in and make them the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, he was soon in the grassroots, and Bummer Bob was out.

The grassroots soon had to change their name again, though.

In 1965, Jan and Dean recorded their folk and roll album, which featured The Universal Coward.

which I am not going to excerpt again.

I only put that pause into Terrify Tilt, who edits these podcasts and has very strong opinions about that song.

But P.F.

Sloan and Steve Barry, the songwriters who also performed as the Fantastic Baggies,

had come up with the song for that album called Where Were You When I Needed You?

Don't bother crying, don't bother crawling.

It's all over now, no use installing the love I once felt.

I don't feel anymore for you.

This time I'll even

open the door for you.

You walked out when I was down.

Well, now I'm well off, and look

who's coming round.

Sloan and Barry decided to cut their own version of that song under a fake band name and then put together a group of other musicians to tour as that band.

They just needed a name.

And Lou Adler, the head of Dunhill Records, suggested they call themselves the Grassroots.

And so that's what they did.

Eccles would later claim that this was deliberate malice on Adler's part, that Adler had come into a grassroots show drunk, and pretended to be interested in signing them to a contract, mostly to show off to a woman he'd brought with him.

Eccles and McLean had spoken to him, not known who he was, and he'd felt disrespected, and Eccles claims that he suggested the name to get back at them, and also to capitalise on their local success.

The new grassroots soon started having hits, and so the old band had to find another name, which they got as a joking reference to a day job Lee had had at one point.

He'd apparently worked in a specialist bra shop, Love Brazieres, which the rest of the band found hilarious.

The grassroots became Love.

While Arthur Lee was the group's lead singer, Brian McLean would often sing harmonies, and would get a song or two to sing live himself.

And very early in the group's career, when they were playing a club called Beado Litos, he started making his big lead spot a version of Hey Joe, which he'd learned from his old friend David Crosby, and which soon became the highlight of the group's set.

Their version was sped up and included the riff which the searchers had popularized in their cover version of Needles and Pins, the song originally recorded by McLean's old girlfriend Jackie Deshannon.

I saw her face, was a face I loved,

and I knew I had to run away, yay

and get down on my knees and pray, yay.

That they'd go away, but still they begin

needles and pens

because of all my pride.

That myth is a very simple one to play, and variants of it became very, very common among the LA bands.

Most notably on the birds, I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better.

And right away

after what you did,

I can't stay off,

and

The rift was so ubiquitous in the LA scene that in the late 80s Frank Zappa would still cite it as one of his main memories of the scene.

I'm going to quote from his autobiography, where he's talking about the differences between the LA scene he was part of and the San Francisco scene he had no time for.

The birds were the be-all and end-all of Los Angeles rock then.

They were it, and then a group called Love was it.

There were a few psychedelic groups that never really got to be it, but they could still find work and get record deals, including the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Sky Saxon and the Seeds, and The Leaves, noted for their cover version of Hey Joe.

When we first went to San Francisco in the early days of the Family Dog, it seemed that everybody was wearing the same costume, a mixture of Barbary Coast and Old West, guys with handlebar moustaches, girls in big bustle dresses with feathers in their hair, etc.

By contrast, the LA costumery was more random and outlandish.

Musically, the northern bands had a little more country style.

In LA, it was folk rock to death.

Everything had that, and here Zappa uses the adjectival form of a four-letter word beginning with F, that the main podcast providers don't like you saying on non-adult-rated shows, D chord down at the bottom of the neck.

where you wiggle your finger around like needles and pins.

The reason Zappa describes it that way, and the reason it became so popular, is that if you play that riff in D, the chords are D, D sus 2, and D sus4, which means you literally only wiggle one finger on your left hand.

And so you get that on just a ton of records from that period, though Love, the Birds and The Searchers all actually play the riff on A rather than D.

So that riff became the big thing in LA after the Birds popularised the searchers sound there, and Love added it to their arrangement of Hey Joe.

In January 1966, the group would record their arrangement of it for their first album, which would come out in March.

Well, I'm gonna go downtown, I'm gonna buy me some new steel party bars.

But that wouldn't be the the first recording of the song, or of Love's arrangement of it, although other than the Birds version, it would be the only one to come out of LA with the original Billy Roberts lyrics.

Love's performances of the song at Beado Lito's had become the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, and soon every band worth its salt was copying it, and it became one of those songs like Louie Louie Before It that everyone would play.

The first record ever made with the Hey Joe melody actually had totally different lyrics.

Kim Fowley had the idea of writing a sequel to Hey Joe titled Wanted Dead or Alive about what happened after Joe shot his woman and went off.

He produced the track for the Rogues, a group consisting of Michael Lloyd and Sean Harris, who later went on to form the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

And Lloyd and Harris were the credited writers.

why you got me

done,

girl, we're all over the sun.

Now you're gonna get it, you're gonna get it, know what I've done.

The next version of the song to come out was the first by anyone to be released as Hey Joe, or at least as Hey Joe, where you gonna go?

Which was how it was titled on its initial release.

This was by a band called The Leaves, who were friends of Love, and had picked up on Hey Joe, and was produced by Nick Fennett.

It was also the first to have the now familiar opening line, Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?

Roberts's original lyric, as sung by both Love and the Birds, had been, Where are you going with that money in your hand?

and had Joe headed off to buy the gun.

But as Eccles later said, what happened was Bob Lee from the Leaves, who were friends of ours, asked me for the words to Hey Joe.

I told him I would have the words the next day.

I decided to write totally different lyrics.

The words you hear on their record are ones I wrote as a joke.

The original words to Hey Joe are, Hey Joe, where you going with that money in your hand?

Well, I'm going downtown to buy me a Blue Steel 44.

When I catch up with that woman, she won't be running round no more.

It never says, Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?

Those were the words I wrote, just because I knew they were going to try and cover the song before we released it.

That was kind of a dirty trick that I played on the leaves, which turned out to be the words that everybody uses.

That first release by the leaves also contained an extra verse.

A nod to Love's previous name.

That original recording credited the song as public domain.

Apparently, Brian McLean had refused to tell the leaves who had written the song, and so they assumed it was traditional.

It came out in November 1965, but only as a promo single.

Even before the Leaves, though, another band had recorded Hey Joe, but it didn't get released.

The Sons of Adam had started out as a surf group called The Fender Four, who made records like Malibu Run.

Kim Fowley had suggested they change their name to the Sons of Adam, and they were another group who were friends with Love.

Their drummer, Michael Stewart Ware, would later go on to join Love, and Arthur Lee wrote the song Feathered Fish for them.

I don't know.

There I go.

But while they were the first to record Hey Joe, their version has still to this day not been released.

Their version was recorded for Decca, with producer Gary Usher, but before it was released, another Decca artist also recorded the song, and the label weren't sure which one to release.

And then the label decided to press Usher to record a version with yet another act, this time with the Surfaris,

the surf group who had had a hit with Wipeout.

Coincidentally, the Safaris had just changed bass players.

Their most recent bass player, Ken Forsey, had quit and joined Love, whose own bass player, John Fleckenstein, had gone off to join the Standells, who would also record a version of Hey Joe in 1966.

Usher thought that the Sons of Adam were much better musicians than the Safaris, who he was recording with more or less under protest.

But their version, using Love's arrangement and the gun-in-your-hand lyrics, became the first version to come out on a major label.

They believed the song was in the public domain, and so the songwriting credits on the record are split between Gary Usher, a W.

Hale who nobody has been able to identify, and Tony Cost, a pseudonym for Nick Vennett.

Usher said later, I got writer's credit on it because I was told, or I assumed at the time, the song was public domain, meaning a non-copyrighted song.

It had already been cut two or three times, and on each occasion the writing credit had been different.

On a traditional song, whoever arranges it takes the songwriting credit.

I may have changed a few words and arranged and produced it, but I certainly did not co-write it.

The public domain credit also appeared on the Leaves' second attempt to cut the song, which was actually given a general release, but flopped.

But when the Leaves cut the song for a third time, still for the same tiny label, Mira, the track became a hit in May 1966, reaching number 31.

free,

and there ain't gonna be no hand and throws gonna be put around me.

And that version had what they thought was the correct songwriting credit, to Dino Valenti, which came as news to Billy Roberts, who had registered the copyright to the song back in 1962, and had no idea that it had become a staple of LA garage rock until he heard his song in the top 40 with someone else's name on the credits.

He angrily confronted Third Story Music, who agreed to a compromise.

They would stop giving Valenti songwriting royalties and start giving them to Roberts instead, so long as he didn't sue them and let them keep the publishing rights.

Roberts was indignant about this.

He deserved all the money, not just half of it, but he went along with it to avoid a lawsuit he might not win.

So Roberts was now the credited songwriter on the versions coming out of the LA scene.

But of course, Dino Valenti had been playing his song to other people too.

One of those other people was Vince Martin.

Martin had been a member of a folk pop group called the Terriers, whose members also included the future film star Alan Arkin, and who had had a hit in the 1950s with Cindy Cindy.

Write me a letter soon, and I'll be homeward bound.

I joined the Navy to see the world,

but nowhere could I find

a girl as sweet as Cindy,

But as we heard in the episode on the loving spoonful, he had become a Greenwich Village folky in a duo with Fred Neal and recorded an album with him, Tear Down the Walls.

Walk me out in the morning, do

today

That song we just heard, Morning Dew, was another question and answer folk song.

It was written by the Canadian folk singer Bonnie Dobson, but after Martin and Neil recorded it, it was picked up on by Martin's friend Tim Rose.

who stuck his own name on the credits as well, without Dobson's permission, for a version which made the song into a rock standard, for which he continued to collect royalties.

Can't walk you out in the morning, do at all.

This was something that Rose seems to have made a habit of doing, though to be fair to him, it went both ways.

We heard about him in the Love and Spoonful episode 2, when he was in a band named The Big Three with Cass Elliott and her coincidentally named future husband Jim Hendricks, who recorded this song, with Rose putting new music to the lyrics of the old public domain song, Oh Susanna.

Don't you cry for me

because I'm going to Louisiana with a V A and J O on my knee.

The band Shocking Blue used that melody for their 1969 number one hit, Venus, and didn't give Rose any credit.

She's got it,

yeah, baby, she's got it.

Well, I'm your Venus,

But another song that Rose picked up from Vince Martin was Hey Joe.

Martin had picked the song up from Valenti, but didn't know who had written it or who was claiming to have written it, and told Rose he thought it might be an old Appalachian murder ballad or something.

Rose took the song and claimed writing credit in his own name.

He would always, for the rest of his life, claim it was an old folk tune he'd heard in Florida, and that he'd rewritten it substantially himself.

But no evidence of the song has ever shown up from prior to Roberts's copyright registration, and Rose's version is basically identical to Roberts's in melody and lyrics.

But Rose takes his version at a much slower pace, and his version would be the model for the most successful versions going forward, though those other versions would use the lyrics Johnny Eccles had rewritten, rather than the ones Rose used.

I'm going south,

I'm going south when I know I can't be free.

You know, you know, I shot my woman,

cause she wasn't no good to me.

Yeah, I sacked my woman.

Rosa's version got heard across the Atlantic as well, and in particular, it was heard by Charles Chandler, the bass player of the Animals.

Some sources seem to suggest that Chandler first heard the song performed by a group called The Creation, but in a biography I've read of that group, they clearly state that they didn't start playing the song until 1967.

But however, he came across it, when Chandler heard Rose's recording, he knew that the song could be a big hit for someone, but he didn't know who.

And then he bummed it to Linda Keith, Keith Richards' girlfriend, who took him to see someone whose whose guitar we've already heard in this episode.

I know that I will never love again.

I know that I will be my only friend.

But if I could, I'd like for you to see

the love sick and image

The Curtis Mayfield impression on guitar there was, at least according to many sources, the first recording session ever played on by a guitarist then calling himself Maurice, or possibly Maurice James.

We'll see later in the story that it possibly wasn't his first.

There are conflicting accounts, as there are about a lot of things.

And it was recorded either in very early 1964, in which case it was his first, or, as seems more likely, and as I tell the story later, a year later, in which case he'd played on maybe half a dozen tracks in the studio by that point, but it was still a very early one.

And by late 1966, that guitarist had reverted to the name by which he was brought up, and was calling himself Jimi Hendrix.

Hendrix and Arthur Lee had become close, and Lee would later claim that Hendrix had copied much of Lee's dress style and attitude, though many of Hendrix's other colleagues and employers, including Little Richard, would make similar claims, and most of them had an element of truth, as Lee's did.

Hendricks was a sponge.

But Lee did influence him.

Indeed, one of Hendrix's last sessions in March 1970 was guesting on an album by Love.

Hendricks' name at birth was Johnny Alan Hendrix, which made his father, James Alan Hendricks, known as Al, who was away at war when his son was born, worried that he'd been named after another man, who might possibly be the real father, so the family just referred to the child as Buster to avoid the issue.

When Al Hendrix came back from the war, the child was renamed James Marshall Hendrix, James after Al's first name, Marshall after Al's dead brother, though the family continued calling him Buster.

Little James Hendrix Jr.

didn't have anything like a stable home life.

Both his parents were alcoholics, and Al Hendrix was frequently convinced that Jimmy's mother Lucille was having affairs, and became abusive about it.

They They had six children, four of whom were born disabled, and Jimmy was the only one to remain with his parents.

The rest were either fostered or adopted at birth, fostered later on because the parents weren't providing a decent home life, or in one case made a ward of state because the Hendrixes couldn't afford to pay for a life-saving operation for him.

The only one that Jimmy had any kind of regular contact with was the second brother, Leon, his parents' favourite, who stayed with them for several years before being fostered by a family only a few blocks away.

Al and and Lucille Hendrix frequently split and reconciled, and while they were ostensibly raising Jimmy, and for a few years Leon, he was shuttled between them and various family members and friends, living sometimes in Seattle where his parents lived, and sometimes in Vancouver with his paternal grandmother.

He was frequently malnourished, and often survived because friends' families fed him.

Al Hendricks was also often physically and emotionally abusive of the son he wasn't sure was his.

Jimmy grew up introverted and stuttering, and only a couple of of things seemed to bring him out of his shell.

One was science fiction.

He always thought that his nickname, Buster, came from Buster Crabb, the star of the Flash Gordon serials he loved to watch, though in fact he got the nickname even before that interest developed, and he was fascinated with ideas about aliens and UFOs.

And the other was music.

Growing up in Seattle in the 40s and 50s, Most of the music he was exposed to as a child and in his early teens was music made by and for white people.

There wasn't a very very large black community in the area at the time, compared to most major American cities, and so there were no prominent RB stations.

As a kid, he loved the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and when he was 13, Jimmy's favourite record was Dean Martin's Memories Are Made of This.

Sweet, sweet, memories you gave of me.

You can't beat the memories you gave of me to

sweet one fresh

tender kiss.

You can't beat the memories you gave of me.

One girl,

one boy,

some grief,

some joy,

sweet, sweet,

memories you gave of this.

He also, like every teenager, became a fan of rock and roll music.

When Elvis played at a local stadium when Jimmy was 15, he couldn't afford a ticket, but he went and sat on top of a nearby hill and watched the show from the distance.

Jimmy's first exposure to the blues also came around this time, when his father briefly took in lodgers, Cornell and Ernestine Benson, and Ernestine had a record collection that included records by Lightning Hopkins, Harlan Wolfe and Muddy Waters, all of whom Jimmy became a big fan of, especially Muddy Waters.

The Benson's most vivid memory of Jimmy in later years was him picking up a broom and pretending to play guitar along with these records.

Baby, please don't go

Baby, please don't go

Baby, please don't go down and you owe

you so

Shortly after this, it would be Ernestine Benson who would get Jimmy his very first guitar.

By this time, Jimmy and Al had lost their home and moved into a boarding house, and the owner's son had an acoustic guitar with only one string that he was planning to throw out.

When Jimmy asked if he could have it instead of it being thrown out, the owner told him he could have it for five dollars.

Al Hendrix refused to pay that much for it, but Ernestine Benson bought Jimmy the guitar.

She said later, He only had one string, but he could really make that string talk.

He started carrying the guitar on his back everywhere he went, in imitation of Sterling Hayden in the Western Johnny Guitar, and eventually got some more strings for it and learned to play.

He would play it left-handed until his father came in.

His father had forced him to write with his right hand, and was convinced that left-handedness was the work of the devil, so Jimmy would play left-handed while his father was somewhere else.

But as soon as Al came in, he would flip the guitar the other way up and continue playing the song he had been playing, now right-handed.

Jimmy's mother died when he was 15, after having been ill for a long time with drink-related problems, and Jimmy and his brother didn't get to go to the funeral.

Depending on who you believe, either Al gave Jimmy the bus fare and told him to go by himself, and Jimmy was too embarrassed to go to the funeral alone on the bus, or Al actually forbade Jimmy and Leon from going.

After this, he became even more introverted than he was before, and he also developed a fascination with the idea of angels, convinced his mother now was one.

Jimmy started to hang around with a friend called Pinell Alexander, who also had a guitar, and they would play along together with Elmore James Records.

The two also went to see Little Richard and Bill Doggett perform live, and while Jimmy was hugely introverted, he did start to build more friendships in the small Seattle music scene, including with Ron Holden, the man we talked about in the episode on Louie Louie, who introduced that song to Seattle, and who would go on to record with Bruce Johnston for Bob Keene.

But I'm lonesome

lonesome because

you don't love me.

What do

I guess?

I'll just wait and see.

Eventually, Ernestine Benson persuaded Al Hendricks to buy Jimmy a decent electric guitar on credit.

Al also bought himself a saxophone at the same time, thinking he might play music with his son, but sent it back once the next payment became due.

As well as blues and RB, Jimmy was soaking up the guitar instrumentals and garage rock that would soon turn into surf music.

The first song he learned to play was Tall Cool One by the Fabulous Whalers, the local group who popularised a version of Louie Louie based on Holden's one.

As we talked about in the Louie Louie episode, the fabulous whalers used to play at a venue called the Spanish Castle, and Jimmy was a regular in the audience, later writing his song Spanish Castle Magic about those shows.

He was also a big fan of Dwayne Eddie, and soon learned Eddie's big hits, 40 Miles of Bad Road, Because They're Young, and Peter Gun, a song he would return to much later in his life.

His career as a guitarist didn't get off to a great start.

The first night he played with this first band, he was meant to play two sets, but he was fired after the first set because he was playing in too flashy a manner and showing off too much on stage.

His girlfriend suggested that he might want to tone it down a little, but he said, that's not my style.

This would be a common story for the next several years.

After that false start, the first real band he was in was the Velvetones, with his friend Pernell Alexander.

There were four guitarists, two piano players, horns and drums, and they dressed up with glitter stuck to their pants.

They played Dwayne Eddy songs, Old Jazz Numbers, and Honky Tonk by Bill Doggett, which became Hendrix's signature song with the band.

His father was unsupportive of his music career, and he left his guitar at Alexander's house because he was scared that his dad would smash it if he took it home.

At the same time he was with the Velvetones, he was also playing with another band called the Rocking Kings, who got gigs around the Seattle area, including at the Spanish Castle.

But as they left school, most of Hendrix's friends were joining the army in order to make a steady living, and so did he, although not entirely by choice.

He was arrested twice for riding in stolen cars, and he was given a choice, either go to prison or sign up for the army for three years.

He chose the latter.

At first, the army seemed to suit him.

He was accepted into the 101st Airborne Division, the famous Screaming Eagles, whose actions at D-Day made them legendary in the US, and he was proud to be a member of the division.

They were based out of Fort Campbell, the base near Clarksville we talked about a couple of episodes ago, and while he was there he met a bass player, Billy Cox, who he started playing with.

As Cox and Hendricks were black, and as Fort Campbell straddled the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, they had to deal with segregation and play to only black audiences, and Hendrix quickly discovered that black audiences in the southern states weren't interested in Louie Louie, Dwayne Eddie, and surf music, the stuff he'd been playing in Seattle.

He had to instead switch to playing Albert King and Slim Harpo songs, but luckily he loved that music too.

He also started singing at this point, when Hendrix and Cox started playing together in a trio called The Casuals.

They had no singer, and while Hendrix never liked his own voice, Cox was worse, and so Hendrix was stuck as the singer.

The Casuals started gigging around Clarksville, and occasionally further afield, places like Nashville, where Arthur Alexander would occasionally sit in with them.

But Cox was about to leave the army, and Hendrix had another two and a bait years to go, having enlisted for three years.

They couldn't play any further away unless Hendrix got out of the army, which he was increasingly unhappy in anyway, and so he did the only thing he could.

He pretended to be gay, and got discharged on medical grounds for homosexuality.

In later years he would always pretend he'd broken his ankle parachuting from a plane.

For the next few years he would be a full-time guitarist, and spend the periods when he wasn't earning enough money from that, leeching off women he lived with, moving from one to another as they got sick of him or ran out of money.

The Casuals expanded their line-up, adding a second guitarist, Alfonso Young, who would show off on stage by playing guitar with his teeth.

Hendricks didn't like being upstaged by another guitarist, and quickly learned to do the same.

One biography I've used as a source for this says that at this point Billy Cox played on a session for King Records, for Frank Howard and the Commanders, and brought Hendrix along, but the producer thought that Hendrix's guitar was too frantic and turned his mic off.

But other sources say the session Hendricks and Cox played on for the Commanders wasn't until three years later, and the record sounds like a 1965 one, not a 1962 one, and his guitar is very audible, and the record isn't on King.

But we've not had any music to break up the narration for a little while, and it's a good track, which later became a Northern Soul favourite.

So I'll play a section here, as either way, it was certainly an early Hendrix session.

This illustrates a general problem with Hendrix's life at this point.

He would flip between bands, playing with the same people at multiple points.

Nobody was taking detailed notes, and later, once he became famous, everyone wanted to exaggerate their own importance in his life, meaning that while the broad outlines of his life are fairly clear, any detail before late 1966 might be hopelessly wrong.

But all the time, Hendrix was learning his craft.

One story from around this time sums up both Hendrix's attitude to his playing, he saw himself almost as much as a scientist as a musician, and his slightly formal manner of speech.

He challenged the best blues guitarist in Nashville to a guitar duel, and the audience actually laughed at Hendrix's playing, as he was totally outclassed.

When asked what he was doing, he replied, I was simply trying to get that BB King tone down, and my experiment failed.

Bookings for the King casuals dried up, and he went to Vancouver, where he spent a couple of months playing in a covers band, Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, whose lead guitarist was Tommy Chung, later to find fame as one half of Cheech and Chong.

But he got depressed at how white Vancouver was, and travelled back down south to join a reconfigured King Casuals, who now had a horn section.

The new lineup of King Casuals were playing the Chitlin circuit and had to put on a proper show, and so Hendrix started using all the techniques he'd seen other guitarists on the circuit use.

Playing with his teeth like Alfonso Young, the other guitarist in the band, playing with his guitar behind his back like T-Bone Walker, and playing with a 50-foot chord that allowed him to walk into the crowd and out of the venue still playing, like guitar Slim used to.

As well as playing with the king casuals, he started playing the circuit as a sideman.

He got short stints with many of the second tier acts on the circuit, people who had had one or two hits or were crowd pleasers, but weren't massive stars.

like Carla Thomas or Jerry Butler or Slim Harpo.

The first really big name he played with was Solomon Burke, who when Hendrix joined his band had just released just out of reach of my two empty arms.

Just

But he lacked discipline.

Five dates would go beautifully, Burke later said, and then at the next show he'd go into this wild stuff that wasn't part of the song.

I just couldn't handle it anymore.

Burke traded him to Otis Redding, who was on the same tour, for two horn players, but then Redding fired him a week later, and they left him on the side of the road.

He played in the backing band for the Marvellette, on a tour with Curtis Mayfield, who would be another of Hendrix's biggest influences, but he accidentally blew up Mayfield's amp and got sacked.

On another tour, Cecil Womack threw Hendrix's guitar off the bus while he slept.

In February 1964, he joined the band of the Isley Brothers, and he would watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with them during his first days with the group.

Assuming he hadn't already played the Rosalie Brooks session, and I think there's good reason to believe he hadn't, then the first record Hendricks played on was their single Testify.

Music,

blowing my mind.

Music.

Don't you know I'm so glad?

I'm so glad.

I'm I'm so glad.

I'm so glad.

While he was with them, he also moonlighted on Don Cove's big hit, Mercy, Mercy.

I said a gift to steal, baby.

I tell you what I'm gonna

do.

I'm gonna

After leaving the Islees, Hendricks joined the minor soul singer Gorgeous George, and on a break from Gorgeous George's tour in Memphis, he went to Stack's studios in the hope of meeting Steve Cropper, one of his idols.

When he was told that Cropper was busy in the studio, he waited around all day until Cropper finished and introduced himself.

Hendrix was amazed to discover that Cropper was white.

He'd assumed that he must be black, and Cropper was delighted to meet the guitarist who had played on Mercy Mercy, one of his favourite records.

The two spent hours showing each other guitar licks, Hendrix playing Cropper's right-handed guitar, as he hadn't voted along his own.

Shortly after this, he joined Little Richard's band, and once again came into conflict with the star of the show by trying to upstage him.

For one show, he wore a satin shirt, and after the show, Richard screamed at him, I am the only little Richard.

I am the king of rock and roll, and I am the only one allowed to be pretty.

Take that shirt off.

While he was with Richard, Hendrix played on his I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me, which, like Mercy Mercy, was written by Don Covey, who had started out as Richard's chauffeur.

Sometime my best friend

comes to me on my job, and he looks at me, and he said, Richard,

man,

According to the most likely version of events I've read, it was while he was working for Richard that Hendrix met Rosalie Brooks on New Year's Eve 1964.

At this point he was using the name Maurice James, apparently in tribute to the blues guitarist Elmore James, and he used various names including Jimmy James for most of his pre-fame performances.

Rosalie Brooks was an RB singer who had been mentored by Johnny Guitar Watson and when she met Hendrix she was singing in a girl group who were one of the support acts for Icantina Turner, who Hendrix went to see on his night off.

Hendrix met Brooks afterwards and told her she looked like his mother, a line he used on a lot of women, but which was true in her case if photos are anything to go by.

The two got into a relationship and were soon talking about becoming a duo, like I Cantina or Mickey and Sylvia.

Love is Strange was one of Hendrix's favourite records, but the only recording they made together was the My Diary single.

Brooks always claimed that she actually wrote that song, but the label credit is for Arthur Lee, and it sounds like his work to me, albeit him trying hard to write like Curtis Mayfield, just as Hendrix is trying to play like him.

Brooks and Hendrix had a very intense relationship for a short period.

Brooks would later recall Little Richard trying to persuade them to have sex while he watched, which they refused to do.

And Hendrix soon quit playing for Little Richard and joined Ike and Tina Turner's band.

But then Ike Turner fired him for being too flashy, and he rejoined Little Richard, quitting or being fired, again.

when the tour hit New York.

Hendrix soon ran out of money and sent Brooks a letter from New York saying he'd had to pawn his guitar, a line he used on women he was asking for money all the time.

She sent him $40 in a photo, but never heard from him again.

Brooks would go on to have a minor career as a singer, but would never have any great success.

You can get an idea of the kind of thing she did from one of the oddest records she made.

It was still normal at this time for hits to be covered for different markets.

though it wasn't anything like as common as it had been even a few years earlier.

And so in 1966, a few weeks after the original came out, Vooks recorded what was publicized as the RB version of They're Coming to Take Me Away, ha ha,

the song that had been a hit for Napoleon XIV.

And

then they're coming to take me away, ha ha, they're coming to take me away, ho-hee, ha-ha, to the sunlight barn where life is beautiful all the time.

And I'll

Sadly, she died in December last year.

In New York, Hendrix hit the lowest point of his professional career.

After having played with some of the best performers on the circuit, he was reduced to playing with a local band, Curtis Knight and the Squires, whose lead singer was actually just a pimp who sang a bit on the side.

The one one advantage of the Squires was that they allowed Hendrix to show off a bit, with no real star, and not even really any particularly good musicians in the band other than him.

He was given the space to play what he wanted, at least on stage.

Knight had a contract with a record producer, Ed Chalpin, who made knock-off cover versions for Overseas Markets and other exploitation records, and Chalpin signed Hendrix to a recording contract, mostly to work as a sideman.

At this time, he played on such terrible records as Curtis Knight's How Do You Feel?

A rip-off of Like a Rolling Stone.

yeah.

Oh,

how would you feel?

He also played bass on As the Clouds Drift By by the fading film star Jane Mansfield.

As I watch the sky,

I think of you,

how you let

In all, he recorded 33 sides with Chalpin, none of them of any worth, and which would be endlessly repackaged under Hendrix's name later.

His career picked up slightly when he joined Joey D and the Starlighters, the group who'd had a hit a couple of years earlier with Peppermint Twist, and was still getting reasonably good bookings.

And this was his first experience of playing in a multiracial band since his early days playing around Seattle.

He moved on from Joey D to King Curtis, the great saxophone player who played on so many hits on Atlantic Records, and played with Curtis on Instant Groove.

This is called Instant Groove.

Now, while we start to whip up the groove,

we want everybody to come on out here and do your thing.

Now everybody got a thing.

We want you to come on out here and do it now.

Because that's what everybody is doing, their own thing.

That's what I want to see you do right now.

But soon he was back playing with Curtis Knight again.

And it was when he was playing with Curtis Knight that he met the person who would change his life.

Linda Keith was, at this time, Keith Richards' girlfriend.

She was a model.

She was 20 years old, and she shared Richards' massive love of the blues.

She'd flown over to New York a month before the Stones were due to tour the US, so she could spend some time exploring the clubs, and when she walked into the tiny club that Curtis Knight and the Squires were playing, she was astonished to see one of the greatest blues guitarists she'd ever heard, playing with a terrible band.

She struck up a conversation with the guitarist, who was calling himself Jimmy James, and invited him back to a party with her friends.

At the party, someone offered him acid, and it says everything about the difference between the white and black music scenes in New York at this point, that his reply was, in all sincerity, no, I don't want any of that, but I'd love to try some of that LSD stuff.

He had no idea that acid and LSD were the same thing, as among the musicians he was playing with, LSD was regarded as a white drug, and some of Hendrix's friends would seriously try to talk him out of taking it in future, by saying that it made you think like a white man.

While he was on Acid, he saw himself in the mirror, and was convinced he looked just like Marilyn Monroe.

And then Linda Keith put on what he became convinced was the greatest album ever: Bob Dylan's new album, Blonde on Blonde.

Hendrix was already a big fan of Dylan.

He'd even taken to styling his hair in imitation of what he called Dylan's white afro, putting it in curlers to get the same look.

But he thought Blonde on Blonde was even better than anything else he'd heard from Dylan, and became obsessed with the record.

Hendricks bonded with Linda Keith over their shared love of both Dylan and Blues.

Their relationship remained platonic, a rarity among Hendrix's relationships with women, but Keith became determined she would use her contacts to make this guitarist a star.

Shortly after this meeting, after playing a gig with another bad RB band, Hendrix was approached by a member of the audience, a black folk musician named Richie Havens, who loved Hendrix's playing.

They got talking and they too bonded over love for Dylan.

Havens mentioned that he would often perform his own version of Just Like a Woman from Dylan's new album.

as friends,

please don't let on

that you knew me when

I was hungry

and it was your world.

Oh,

you fake

just like a woman.

Yes, you do, and you make

love

just like a woman.

Hendrix said he'd like to listen to that, and so Havens told him about the Greenwich Village folk clubs where he played.

Hendrix went down to see Havens, and then started hanging around the village a lot, especially a place called the Cafe Wire, where Tim Mose used to play, and it was there that he picked up on Mose's slow version of Hey Joe.

Hendrix decided that he was going to start playing the Greenwich Village scene, and he put together a band called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, named after the band that backed Junior Parker, the blues musician who did the original version of Mystery Train.

The band had a revolving line up that at various times included Randy California, later to become famous in the band Spirit, and Jeff Skunk Baxter, who had gone to play with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, and Hendricks absolutely blew the Greenwich Village crowds away.

You see, you'll notice there are roughly three types of story that successful musicians have for the beginning of their career, three broad shapes they fall into.

The first is the one that say the Beach Boys or Elvis had.

Someone who has literally never played a gig in their lives goes into a small record label and cuts a local hit, then gets picked up by a major label.

In the case of the Beach Boys and Elvis, that obviously led to substantial careers with huge artistic and commercial success, but that's also the story behind a hell of a lot of one-hit wonders.

Then there's the one that most of the Greenwich Village folks seen.

the British Trad and Skiffle scenes and the British Blues Bands mostly fall into.

People with some life experience but not that much.

Playing odd gigs for six months or a year or so, mostly as a kind of gentleman amateur, playing in front of your friends from art school or the local left-wing activist group, half of whom are also musicians playing those same venues, and who are willing to put up with a bit of sloppiness if you're enthusiastic enough, and you know the catalogue number of the original issue of Jim Jackson's Kansas City Blues on the Vocalion label.

Those scenes would often produce great songwriters, but usually rather mediocre musicians, and when they did produce a genuinely good musician, musician, it was usually someone who played in a very scholarly fashion, expertly reproducing someone else's sound in a rather clinical way, rather than innovating.

But then there's the people who played the Chitlin circuit, and the equivalent white working class country venues, places where you are playing multiple shows a day, every day, for audiences of poor people who insist on value for money if they're spending some of what little they have on a night out after a hard week of working, and who will throw fruit at best and bottles at worst worst at you if you weren't putting on a good show.

To survive playing those venues, you had to be an exceptional musician and an exceptional entertainer.

You had to be able to put on a show while you were playing expertly, and if you couldn't play your guitar behind your head perfectly in tune, while you were also doing the synchronised dance routine for the lead singer's latest single they only recorded the day before, well, there were plenty of other musicians out there who wanted the gig.

And the crowds at the Cafe Wire, where Jimmy James and the Blue Flames were playing, were crowds whose experience of music was almost entirely from Type Two, and they were now watching a performer of Type Three.

On the Chitlin circuit, Hendricks had been one of the best players around, but not so far ahead of everyone else that he couldn't be replaced if he started thinking himself more important than the star.

On the Greenwich Village folk scene, though, he was unlike anything anyone had seen.

Richie Haven sent Mike Bloomfield, the guitarist with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who played on several Dillon sessions and was widely regarded as the best rock guitarist in New York, to see the Blue Flames.

And he said, Hendrix knew who I was, and that day, in front of my eyes, he burned me to death.

H-bombs were going off, guided missiles were flying.

I can't tell you the sounds he was getting out of his instrument.

He was getting every sound I was ever to hear him get, right there in that room with the Stratocaster.

How he did this, I wish I understood.

The Blue Flames set was mostly covers of contemporary hit, but they also did Hey Joe at the same speed that Tim Rose played it, but with the lyrics as rewritten by Johnny Eccles, though without the grassroots verse.

As well as playing with the blue flames, Hendrix was also playing with other artists on the Greenwich Village scene, like John Hammond Jr., who brought his father along to see Hendrix.

Hammond Sr.

was unimpressed, but one of the people who worked at the cafe where they played later said, he just blew everybody away.

He played behind his back all that stuff he had stolen from T-Bone Walker.

We thought he invented it.

No one there realised there was a black tradition that went back to the 1920s.

Meanwhile, Linda Keith was trying to get other people interested.

She wasn't helped by the fact that when the Rolling Stones came over, Keith Richards became convinced that she was having an affair with Hendrix and became very jealous of him, which put Andrew Oldham off from signing him to Immediate Records, though Keith also says that Hendrix's music was fundamentally not to Oldham's taste, as Oldham was far more interested in Phil Spectre and the Beach Boys than in Blues-bass guitar rock.

But then she bumped into Chars Chandler, the bass player of the Animals.

The Animals were going to split up at the end of the tour, and Chandler was planning on going into management and production, in partnership with Mike Jeffrey, the Animals manager, who seemed to have a variety of dodgy underworld connections.

Chandler had even decided on what record he was going to produce.

He was convinced that Tim Rose's arrangement of Hey Joe could be a hit.

if he could find someone good to play it.

Keith told him to come and see Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, and when they opened their set with Hey Joe, Chandler got so excited he spilled his milkshake all over himself.

Chanda had to finish his tour, and in the meantime, Linda Keith split up with Keith Richards, who took revenge on her by telling her father she was dating a black junkie.

Her father had her made a ward of the court as she was not yet 21, flew over from England, and dragged her back with him.

But when the animals tour finished, Chandler returned to New York, tracked Hendrix down, and persuaded him to come over to the the UK.

When he left New York, Jimmy had $40 in his pocket, borrowed from John Hammond Jr.'s drummer, and his only other possessions in the world were his guitar, a single change of clothes, his hair curlers, and a jar of cream for his acne.

In the UK, Hendrix was an immediate sensation.

At the time, the biggest guitar hero in the country was Eric Clapton, who had recently formed a group Cream.

I can walk down the street, there's no one there, throw the pavement to one huge crowd.

I can drive down the road, my eyes don't see.

Though my mind wants to cry out loud.

We'll be dealing with cream in a future episode, so I won't talk too much about them now.

But the important thing here is that Clapton was considered so great that Clapton is God was a popular graffito in London at the time.

Chandler prevailed upon his acquaintance with the band to get them to let Hendrix get on stage with them and jowl on Howling Wolf's killing floor.

And Hendrix started doing things on guitar that Clapton found unimaginable, his jaw dropping on stage.

Jack Bruce, Cream's bassist, later said, It must have been difficult for Eric to handle, because he was God, and this unknown person person comes along and burns.

Also in the audience was Jeff Beck, the other great guitar hero in Britain, and he was similarly impressed.

Everyone knew that there was a new best guitarist in town.

Now all he needed was a band and a record.

The question of a band caused some conflict between Hendrix and Chandler.

Hendrix wanted a big band of the kind he was used to playing with, with a horn section, but Chandler was insistent that what he needed was a small rock group without too many other instruments.

Chandler at first tried to get Brian Orger and the Trinity to drop their guitarist and install Hendrix's guitarist and frontman, but Orger quite rightly refused to do so, and so Chanda decided to put together a band for Hendrix.

Orger did though let Hendrix sit in with the group one night, which gave Hendrix his first experience of playing through a martial amp, which quickly became his favourite equipment.

The first person they took on was Noel Redding.

who Chandler discovered in the auditions for Eric Burden's New Animals, which Chander was attending.

Redding was a guitarist, but Chandler persuaded him to change to bass, and Hendricks liked him because he had hair like Bob Dylan's, so he was in the group.

Chandler's connections were paying off for Hendrix in ways that he couldn't have imagined even a few months earlier.

Hendricks got a girlfriend, Cathy Etchingham, who was part of the London scene, and they happened to bump into Ringo Starr in a club.

Etchingham complained that they were living in a rather cramped hotel room, and Starr had a spare two-bedroom flat in one of the most expensive parts of central London he wasn't using, so he let it to them for £30 a month, and Hendrix and Etchingham moved into one bedroom, while Chandler and his girlfriend took the other.

Hendrix was for the most part just going to clubs, getting on stage with more famous musicians, and playing a couple of songs using all the tricks he learned on the Chitlin circuit, blowing the other musicians off stage.

At one of these events, Johnny Halliday was in the audience.

Halliday was known as the French Elvis, but he had recently started trying to update his music, making records with psychedelic and solo elements, with Brian Orger on keyboards and Mick Jones, later a foreigner, on guitar, and covering recent hits from other countries in French.

Halliday was impressed by Hendrix and invited him to be a support act on a residency at the Paris Olympia, and a couple of warm-up gigs before that, at the bottom of the bill with Brian Auger, between Hendrix and the main attraction.

The very first gigs for the Jimi Hendrix experience, a name chosen by Mike Jeffrey, would be supporting France's biggest ever rock star.

Of course, that meant that they needed a drummer, and the one they chose was actually the ex-drummer of the Blue Flames, but not Hendrix's old band of Blue Flames, nor Junior Parker's band of that name, but rather the band that backed the British RB keyboardist and Moz Allison soundalike, Georgie Fame.

me up down

all around like a seesaw

so can you tell me

i'm your sweet cannon man

sometimes you hurt me so bad

i just never know where i stand

call you lift me up

mitch mitchell had been given drum lessons by jim marshall and had played briefly with the who when they were finding a drummer to replace doug sandam and with the pretty things Things, but was best known as a child actor, having appeared in the film Bottoms Up with Jimmy Edwards, Melvin Hayes, and Richard Bryers.

I can whack anything.

Open up.

Please, sir, take my word for it.

You won't find anything in there that you like.

Open up.

Please, sir, for your sake, I beg of you.

Open up!

All right, sir.

Could this be the double bluff?

Don't open it, and then he knows I will.

He had also starred as the schoolboy Jennings, in the TV series based on the series of school novels by Anthony Bookeridge.

Mitchell was chosen as a result of a coin toss.

the other option being Ainsley Dunbar.

But he turned out to be perfect for the group, and after fairly rough tryout shows, by the time the group hit the Olympia, they were receiving an overwhelming reception, so much so that in early 1967, Johnny Holliday recorded this.

A week after the Olympia show, a month after Hendrix first arrived in the UK with no money and no possessions, the group were in the studio to record their first single.

For a B-side, Hendrix wanted to re-record Mercy Mercy, the Don Cove song he played on, but Chandler explained to him that the real money was in songwriting, so he he should write a song.

And Hendrix came up with Stone Free.

Stone free,

could do what I free.

Stone free,

ride a breeze.

Stone free,

I can't stay off.

The A-side of course was going to be Hey Joe, and while they were going to use Hendrix's bluesy guitar part and the Eccles version of the lyrics, Chandler also wanted to have the same kind of build that Tim Rose's version had.

Rose had had block backing vocals, so Chandler brought in Britain's top session singing girl group, the Breakaways.

The Breakaways had started out as part of the Vernon's Girls, a 16-piece female choir formed from staff at Vernon's Football Pools Company in Liverpool, who had come to fame on O Boy.

After Oh Boy, the Vernons Girls had split into several smaller groups, one keeping the name the Vernons Girls, and going on to make some rather fun girl group records, often written by future vicar of Dibley star Trevor Peacock.

next on his list.

Wackah.

Well, you know what I mean.

Well, you can't get home for a thing like that.

You know what I mean?

So I said to him early like, I said, listen here, a third.

I said, what do you think you're doing?

But he went on twisting.

Another of the small groups formed from the large one had gone on to become the Fordettes, backing Emile Ford, the singer who was one of Britain's first black pop stars and had the first UK number one of the 60s with a record produced by Joe Meek.

Then one of them had become engaged to Joe Brown, so they'd broken away from Ford and become The Breakaways, backing Brown.

They'd made some singles of their own, like That's How It Goes.

goes.

A boy and girl with a love so fine, and that's how it goes.

Baby, how could we tell?

Love would come on so well.

Cause all you want and a tempest fell, and that's how it goes.

But they've become best known as session singers, providing backing vocals for Scylla Black, Cliff Richard, Lulu, and Petulo Clark.

That's them singing on downtown.

No final place for sure.

Downtown,

everything's waiting for you

downtown.

Don't hang around.

So, Chandler brought them in to sing the backing vocals, which became a crucial part of the record, providing the block chordal support that might otherwise be provided by a keyboard or rhythm guitar, allowing the members of the experience to improvise over their solid backing.

But while they'd recorded their first single, they had no label yet.

Chandler and Jeffries had sunk their own money into the sessions, just knowing that the single would be a hit.

The first few labels they took it to turned them down, but while that was going on, the press grew steadily more interested in Hendrix, though there was a problem for his publicist when writing his first press biography, because Hendrix had played with so many great musicians, they were actually worried he would look like he was lying if they named them all.

Hendrix was now making some money, but was living off a £15 a week salary he was being paid by Chandler and Jeffries as an advance against future royalties, and was short enough on cash that when Little Richard appeared in London, Hendrix went backstage to see if he could get $50 that Richard owed him in unpaid salary from his time with the band.

Richard counted that Hendrix had missed the band bus, and so he'd been fined that $50,

and Hendrix left empty-handed.

Eventually, the Jimi Hendrix experience was signed to Track Records, the new label being set up by Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the Who's Managers, partly on the recommendation of Pete Townsend, who after being unimpressed with Hendrix on first meeting him, was wowed by seeing him live and became one of his biggest admirers.

The new label got the the group an appearance on Ready Steady Go, the biggest music TV show in Britain, for the same day that the record came out, and it quickly entered the top ten.

Jimi Hendrix had started 1966 living penniless in New York, playing for a band that nobody liked, facing eviction and going hungry.

He entered the year a pop star, living in a luxury flat owned by another pop star, with every important guitarist in Britain worshipping him.

For Jimi Hendrix, as for the music world generally, 1966 had been a revolutionary year that had changed everything.

And as we head into 1967, we're going to see how the ripples from those changes spread out and change the whole of society.

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