White Bicycles (32 page)

The interviews with Jimi’s brother and cousins that tell this story were great on paper, but didn’t play well enough on screen to make the final cut of the film. My stay at Warner Brothers had become a great deal more interesting since I was commissioned to assemble a feature-length documentary about the recently deceased Hendrix.

Mike Jeffreys always encouraged film-makers to shoot Hendrix’s shows. He would grant them access, plug in their lights for them, give them backstage passes and avoid signing the release. Later he would offer them a contract giving him a controlling interest in the film. All refused to sign, with the result that there was a lot of unseen footage gathering dust. After Jimi’s death, his father hired a veteran civil rights and show business attorney named Leo Branton (previous clients: Nat ‘King’ Cole and Dorothy Dandridge) to represent the estate. Jeffreys fumed, but the death of his client put an end to his managerial control. For three months after the fatal night, he was bent double, his back muscles in spasm. Jeffreys’ friends said it showed how much he cared; Jimi’s claimed it was a combination of guilt and despair over lost earnings.

As Warner Brothers was Jimi’s American label, Leo came to meet with Mo. Mo and Leo crossed the road to see Ted Ashley, Ted rang me to join the meeting and an hour later I was a film-maker. Since I was part-owner of some wonderful Hendrix footage myself (the clip of him on a stool with an acoustic twelve-string singing ‘Hear My Train A-Comin’ ), I could talk to other producers as a fellow sufferer at the hands of Jeffreys. I brought on board John Head, an Englishman with production experience who instantly inspired trust. Friends of Jimi’s horrified at the idea of a big corporation exploiting its deceased asset were reassured by his understated manner and easy grasp of their feelings.

John introduced me in turn to Gary Weis, a southern Californian who had been a member of the American volleyball team at the Maccabiah Games (the Jewish Olympics). His photo, in full spike a foot above the net, hung behind the bar at the Sorrento Grill on Will Rogers Beach in Santa Monica. He had studied photography at UCLA, then dropped out to do some surfing. One day, a girl gave him a lift as he hitch-hiked up the Pacific Coast Highway. Gary in those days was pretty irresistible, looking both athletic and artistic, plus being one of the funniest men I’ve ever met. The driver, Sharon Peckinpah (Sam’s daughter), fell for him, as did so many others before and since.

Sam was making
The Ballad of Cable Hogue
for Warner Brothers. There was a new fashion for ‘featurettes’ – films about making films – so Ted Ashley wanted a crew to follow the director around on the set. Peckinpah loathed the idea, but finally agreed on condition that Gary be the one to make it. He did such a great job that the producer hired him on his next movie, a Gene Hackman dud called
Prime Cut
. The best things about this piece of trash are Gary’s featurette and the screen debut of Sissy Spacek (who also fell for Gary). Gary lived in a garage in Santa Monica next door to photographer William Wegman and his immortal Weimaraner, Man Ray, with whom we all had the honour of playing chase-the-tennis-ball.

I tackled the research and rights clearances, John rounded up people we wanted to talk to, Gary filmed the interviews and took charge of the editing and we made all creative decisions collectively. We secured footage from the Woodstock, Monterey Pop, Atlanta and Isle of Wight festivals, a video of the Band of Gypsies from the Fillmore East, the Berkeley concert, guest appearances on the
Dick Cavett
Show
,
Ready Steady Go!
and German TV’s
Beat Club
, plus my clip with the twelve-string. We found a few filmed interviews of Hendrix, plus some radio material for voice-overs.

Interviewees included his family in Seattle, his army buddy Billy Cox in Nashville, his old friends from Harlem, many of his girlfriends and rock gods Jagger, Clapton, Townshend and Little Richard. Fayne Pridgin, who was living with Jimi in a cold-water walk-up in Harlem when he was scraping by on gigs with the Isley Brothers, told of his return home one day carrying a newly purchased LP. She demanded to know what it was, but he tried to hide it. Finally she grabbed it and looked uncomprehendingly at the cover: ‘Bob Dylan? Who the fuck is
Bob Dylan
? You spent our food money on
Bob Dylan
?’ Little Richard described watching Jimi play: ‘He used to make my
big toe
shoot up in my
boot
!’

The relaxed nature of the interviews was down to John’s calm approach in asking the questions and Gary’s ability to get the subjects pissing themselves with laughter between takes. Our biggest crisis arrived after the first round of filming in London. We sent the 16mm film to Burbank while we flew to New York for more interviews. The shipping room at Warner Brothers is a very busy place, with hundreds of octagonal metal cans of 35mm film arriving daily. A few cardboard boxes of 16mm must have been an anomaly no one knew what to do with. When we arrived back a week later, they had disappeared.

After some detective work, I concluded that the boxes had been placed near the trash bin and were almost certainly now buried under a layer of dirt in the disused quarry that serves as Burbank’s city dump. We hired a bulldozer and a mechanical shovel and, with the help of the dump manager, tried to locate the spot where the trash from seven days previous would be buried. We spent a surreal and fetid afternoon with hoe and pitchfork searching for our interviews. As the sun set, we gave up and booked flights to London to reshoot.

The girlfriends and road managers were happy to do whatever was necessary for their moment in the limelight. But our best interview had been Pete Townshend and I dreaded making that call. As I feared, he was on a family holiday in Wales and did not wish to be disturbed by our crazy problem; he had only done the interview as a favour in the first place. He left me one window: the Who were going to film a promo clip for their next single at the old
Ready
Steady Go!
studios in Wembley. That was his one working day all summer. If we were standing by, ready to shoot as soon as the filming finished, he would grant us another interview.

We watched as the indefatigable group played for over an hour in front of about a hundred kids on a hot August afternoon, promising them
another
hour after the shoot to make sure they all stuck around. Then, during one of his windmill strums, Pete impaled his right palm on the Telecaster’s switch. He was rushed to a nearby casualty unit for stitches while everyone held their breath.

He came back looking pale but finished the shoot, then played another hour of furious guitar to reward the kids for their patience. By the end, his bandaged hand was soaked with blood. Pete disappeared into the dressing room as the technicians started dismantling the stage. We bribed the lighting crew to keep a couple of spots lit as the clock ticked away. When I poked my head into the dressing room, Pete looked daggers at me: ‘I said I’d do it and I will. I’ll be there when I’m ready.’

When he turned up, he looked at the magazine of film and asked how long it was. ‘Eleven minutes,’ said Gary. ‘That’s how long you’ve got. Let’s go.’ He looked awful, the light was poor, I was in despair. The lost interview had been shot behind Pete’s house in Twickenham on a beautiful afternoon by the Thames and had been one of the most insightful we did. He had told a great story about Eric Clapton ringing him up to go to the movies and how, in the darkness, they confessed their mutual intimidation by the new guy in town.

The instant the camera started rolling, Pete was transformed. He did an almost identical interview, told the same anecdotes and acted as if he was vaguely enjoying himself. When it was over, I asked how he did it. He told me that early in his career Kit Lambert had introduced him to a hypnotist who gave him the trance-state suggestion that the minute he stepped onstage, whatever was bothering him would evaporate and he would perform to the maximum of his abilities. I saw The Who many times and there was never a bad show. When Pete came to Sound Techniques to play with Keith Moon and Ronnie Lane on Mike Heron’s solo album (under the
nom de guerre
of ‘Tommy and the Bijoux’), I never had to monitor his track: we just listened to the drums and bass and stopped when they made a mistake. Pete was always note-perfect.

There were conspicuous absences among the interviewees. One was Jeffreys: every time we tried to pin down a date, he would disappear, or postpone, or say he wanted to think about it some more. He remained cordial but wary, jealous of my power over the footage and worried about what the other interviewees were saying about him. Finally, we went ahead without him.

He was a strange man, a bridge between eras. From owning a nightclub in Newcastle to managing the Animals to dealing with mind-blown stars like Hendrix and the post-Haight–Ashbury Eric Burdon was clearly a journey that had bewildered him. His attempts to control his environment amid the chaos included always changing his plane reservations at the last minute. He had a premonition that he would die in an air crash, so he saw it as a means of outguessing fate. He built a retreat for himself and his artists in Majorca and was constantly flying back and forth from London. Just before our film was released, he switched flights at the last minute in Palma during a French air traffic controllers’ strike. His new plane collided with a military jet over Nantes, killing everyone on board.

Hendrix biographers revile Jeffreys’s reluctance to let Jimi play with his black American peers instead of the English-boy rhythm section. There were questions over his accounting practices and (unfounded) whispers about dark goings-on connected with Jimi’s death, linked to his star’s threat to change managers. We interviewed Alan Douglas, the new manager Jimi was flirting with when he died. Douglas was a friend of Danny Halperin’s, an old-school hipster who kept pace. He made some ground-breaking records (the Last Poets, for one) and recorded a number of jam sessions with Jimi. Alan understood Jimi’s urge to make more adventurous, soulful music and encouraged it. Jeffreys saw Alan as the Devil incarnate, luring Jimi away into a dark – and uncommercial – world.

Douglas talked to us in his Greenwich Village apartment, the afternoon sun beaming through the skylight like a spotlight. He claimed Jimi had asked him to take over his management and that he was getting ready to board a plane for London with the contracts in his briefcase when he learned of Jimi’s death. As we edited the film, trying to get it down under two hours, we dropped first one then another of Alan’s soundbites until only one remained. He looks quizzically up at John’s question: ‘Drugs? Sure, Jimi was into whatever was going around’ (pause). ‘Of course, I used to’ (short, violent nasal inhale) ‘check it out for him first.’ We were never certain whether Alan meant the snort as a meaningful emphasis or whether he just needed to take a breath at that moment, but it made for good cinema. When I looked at the final cut, I realized that my brief friendship with Alan would probably end when he saw it.

Leo Branton was pondering what to do with the various unreleased Hendrix masters. He wanted nothing to do with Jeffreys – the two were sworn enemies – and Eddie Kramer, engineer on most of Jimi’s albums, was tainted by his connection to the past. Branton didn’t like the sound of Douglas and was suspicious of his reluctance to give the estate access to his many hours of Hendrix recordings. I resolved to break the logjam, partly as a gesture to Alan prior to his viewing the film, but mainly to help my employers. I invited Leo, Alan and Mo Ostin to lunch in Burbank. There, the three of them sealed the deal that put Hendrix’s posthumous recording career in the hands of Alan Douglas and began the partnership between Leo and Alan that would survive into the ’90s. Gratitude has a short memory: it was years after the release of the film before Alan spoke to me again, and he tried on several occasions to have it taken out of circulation.

On my flight to London ahead of our first interview shoot, I saw a tall, striking black girl struggling with a huge clothes bag. I helped her put it in the overhead compartment and we exchanged smiles as I headed for my seat. When we arrived at Heathrow the next morning, I came across her again, still wrestling with her luggage. We divided it up and chatted as we made our way through immigration and customs. I gave her a lift in a taxi and we were almost at her destination when she asked what brought me to London. She nearly fainted when I told her of my mission. She was Devon Wilson, the legendary ‘Dolly Dagger’, the girl Jimi had left to stay with Monica Dannerman just before he died. She had heard about our documentary and had wanted no part of it. My gallantry seemed to reassure her: we exchanged phone numbers and agreed to arrange an interview.

The first time I called, a guarded and suspicious woman said that Devon couldn’t come to the phone. I tried again and finally spoke to her. She sounded completely out of it, complaining of jet lag, but clearly stoned. All that week I tried to get through, but she never returned calls and the atmosphere in the flat whenever someone answered was completely narcotized. Any interview we might have done, of course, would have ended up as San Fernando Valley landfill. By the time we came back for our second try, Devon was dead of an overdose.

Arranging an interview with Monica Dannerman, on the other hand, wasn’t hard at all. The difficult part was keeping awake during it. We couldn’t see what had drawn Jimi to the gloomy, self-justifying, rather plain German ex-figure-skater.

There was no dozing off around Leo Branton. His work for the Hendrix estate was a minor distraction from his primary task that year as chief defence counsel for Angela Davis. Davis, a radical professor, had befriended a group of imprisoned Black Power activists and was accused of supplying guns for their bloody break-out attempt. She became a hate figure for the Nixon administration and a symbol of everything white America loathed and feared about black radicalism. Leo would visit our editing room on Fridays, the weekly recess day in the trial taking place in Marin County.