The Grail Guitar by Chris Adams

Author:Chris Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Last Rays

In a book called Rock Roadie published in 2009, one of Jimi Hendrix’s former roadies, James Tappy Wright, made the sensational accusation that Mike Jeffery had murdered Hendrix by stuffing sleeping pills in his mouth and pouring red wine down his gullet. According to Tappy, the motive for this was simple. Hendrix was about to break away from Jeffery’s stranglehold, and there were far too many skeletons in the company cupboard for this to be allowed to happen. And, oh yes, Jeffery had taken out an insurance policy on Jimi’s life that stood to earn him two million pounds. This is not the place to dissect conspiracy theories, but the story loses some of its gravitas when we discover that Jeffery was in Majorca at the time of Hendrix’s death, and he never received a penny on any alleged insurance policy.

The fact is, whatever Jeffery’s shortcomings as an artist manager, Jimi’s gypsy nature never allowed him to properly engage in the “uncool” process of dealing with the tacky business affairs and the huge sums of money his music was generating. Seemingly, he never asked for or ever received royalty statements or checks from Jeffery’s company, Yameta. He just bought what he wanted and sent them the bill. This could be a car, in his case Corvettes, an apartment, or guitars—these, as we have seen, on a serial basis. This way Jimi could have all the trappings of rock star wealth without ever having to dirty himself spiritually with the subject of filthy lucre. It’s what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.”

Of course, there is another reason he may have wanted to ignore the sordid details, because by mid-1968, Hendrix was spending faster than he was earning. As early as ’67, the dispute with Ed Chalpin over the notorious PPX contract had gone to court, a territory inhabited by the vampires of the music biz, who would be feasting on this particular legal bloodletting for years to come. As we’ve seen, the settlement they reached meant that Hendrix had to deliver a new album for PPX (Band of Gypsys), from which neither he nor his American label, Reprise, would earn a brass farthing, while Chalpin would also receive 2 percent of the full Jimi Hendrix Experience (JHE) catalog to date, plus one million dollars. Now if you combine this with the bill for a three-month booking at the Record Plant for the Electric Ladyland album and the massively overbudget project to build Electric Lady Studios, you soon arrive at a point where even Mike Jeffery’s eyes would start to water. The fact is, by now Jimi Hendrix was the conductor of one huge train-crash choir!

At the time he was using the Record Plant in 1968, their sixteen-track studio rate after midnight peaked at $160 per hour, and with multitrack tapes then costing $120 a time, that would normally have run up a bill of $2,500 for an all-night session. Obviously block booking would reduce that kind of figure substantially, but set against that, you have to remember that Jimi wasn’t just recording there.

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