Jimi Hendrix
Saturday, 18th September 2010 is the fortieth anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death in London. He was just twenty seven, and on the threshold of a ground-breaking career. Lesley-Ann Jones looks back on the legend.
For forty years they have been rock and roll’s answer to the Loch Ness Monster: mythical, uncharted, precise whereabouts unknown. Many doubted they even existed in the first place. This year’s launch, four decades after his death, of ‘Valleys of Neptune’, the first in a series of never-previously-released recordings to mark the 40th anniversary of rock’s greatest guitar legend, is said to answer a question which has long confounded the music industry: whatever happened to the ‘Lost Jimi Hendrix Tapes’?
Contrary to speculation, however, that the bulk of Hendrix’s hugely prolific output has now been tracked down, catalogued and packaged for drip-feed release this year, the mystery may not in fact be solved. Despite millions of dollars and years of effort, the most important recordings of the star’s tragically short career could still be missing.
It is news which will perplex the fiercely controlling family-run empire Experience Hendrix, led by Hendrix’s step-sister Janie, who has jealously overseen the acquisition of a vast number of tapes, many from auctions and private collections all over the world. Together with her brother’s long-time technician Eddie Kramer, she co-produced the album of ‘lost tracks’. Much of Hendrix’s unreleased music has been re-mastered and digitally-enhanced, and has been going on sale all year under lucrative new licensing deals with Sony Music Entertainment’s Legacy Recordings. But Experience Hendrix could have a long way to go to recover everything.
So believes Tony Bramwell, former road manager of the Beatles, who got to know Hendrix well during the 1960s when he managed Shaftsbury Avenue’s Saville Theatre for its then owner, Fab Four manager Brian Epstein. Bramwell, who also ran Apple Records and Apple Films, was a close personal friend of Chas Chandler, the hulking former Animals bassist who had discovered a penniless Hendrix in New
York’s Greenwich Village, and brought him to England to manage him, create his band The Jimi Hendrix Experience (with Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass), and make him a star. Bramwell and Hendrix struck up a close personal friendship, which led to Bramwell staging many of Hendrix’s concerts at the Saville Theatre.
‘It was his favourite venue, the perfect little place for him to play’, Bramwell recalls.
‘Jimi called me from Ronnie Scott’s on 16th September 1970. He had been out with Eric Burdon (also an Animal), and he was bored and restless. It had been a while, and he wanted to talk to me about putting him on at the Saville again. But I told him I couldn’t. Epstein had died in August 1967, and the venue had already been sold. Jimi was really fed up about that. We planned to meet and discuss alternatives, but that meeting never happened. Two days later, at the age of 27, Jimi was dead.’
Bramwell, now based in Devon, famously documented his mop-top years in his book ‘Magical Mystery Tour: My Life With The Beatles’, recommended by Sir Paul McCartney himself:
‘If you want to know anything about the Beatles, ask Tony, he remembers it more than I do’.
Bramwell also launched songbird Eva Cassidy, selling nine million albums after her death. But he never wondered much, he now says, about any so-called lost Hendrix recordings. Until now.
‘The music business is rife with that kind of mythology’, he explains, ‘it’s nothing new.‘
But then fifteen years ago, the old Olympic Studios in Barnes was being stripped out, having been bought by Virgin Records. Many of the greats had worked there. The Stones recorded six consecutive albums at Olympic; the Beatles, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Jimi Hendrix Experience had all recorded there. The new owners got all the old master tapes together, then contacted a few people to come down and pick them up. Those which were not collected were thrown into a skip out the front. I lived only 100 yards from the studio, and happened to be passing one day. I saw all this stuff lying in the skip, and went inside to enquire. One of the engineers said that no one had claimed it, so they were chucking it away. I rooted around, and found a whole pile of Hendrix stuff, some Rolling Stones, some Beatles, various other things. I knew all those people, they were my friends, so I thought I’d return it. I took a lot of the stuff away, most of which was Jimi’s. I went round to see Chas with about twenty master tapes, a bunch of multi-tracks, some titles I’d never even heard of, and gave them all to him. I didn’t want anything for it, of course, I was just being a nice chap. Allen Klein, who was by then managing the Beatles, got hold of me and demanded their stuff. I’d also found some Led Zeppelin and Yardbirds recordings, and I gave those to Percy (Robert) Plant.
‘A few months later, Chas himself was dead. I never knew what became of all those tapes. But I’m pretty sure that most of it will still be out there. Maybe some of it has already fallen into the hands of the Hendrix family. But not all.’
Even though a number of the tracks on Valleys of Neptune were recorded at Olympic Studios, a lot more were laid down at Record Plant Studios in New York.
'There have been so many batches of ‘long-lost tapes’’, Bramwell points out.
In 1998, the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle announce its acquisition at international auction of 19 newly-discovered audio tapes of rare Hendrix recordings made between 1969 and 1970, from Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys period.
‘They weren’t the ones I found either!’ laughs Bramwell.
And in April last year, another clutch of unheard recordings made by Hendrix in New York in 1968 went on sale. These tapes featured 14 tracks; a Bob Dylan cover, plus ‘softer’ versions of numbers from the rock legend’s Electric Ladyland album. Hendrix had given these to a friend, Carl Niekirk, who worked in a studio beneath Jimi’s London flat. Niekirk later sold them ‘for a pittance’ in a bar, and they were eventually put up for auction after a drawn-out legal battle with Hendrix’s estate.
Reports that Hendrix’s tapes for a concept album Black Gold were stolen from his London apartment and then lost have been disproved. Hendrix himself gave those tapes to Mitch Mitchell at the Isle of Wight Festival, three weeks before he died. These tapes are now in the possession of Experience Hendrix.
‘As for the rumours that Jimi bequeathed a fortune to various British charities in his will, I don’t reckon they’ll ever see it, remarks Bramwell.
‘The Hendrix family are notoriously mean, they wouldn’t give away threepence.
They have been arguing among themselves for years as to who it all belongs to and who should get what. But what I do know is that the tapes I took round to his house that day basically belonged to Chas Chandler. I hope the bulk of them are still out there, waiting to be ‘discovered’, and that the family never get their hands on them at all!’
