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One of the more bizarre pairings in pop music history (perhaps surpassed only by David Bowie's performing a duet of The Little Drummer Boy with Bing Crosby on the latter's Merrie Olde Christmas Show in 1977) occurred in the summer of 1967, when guitar great Jimi Hendrix served as one of the supporting acts on the Monkees' American tour. Yes, that Jimi Hendrix. As late as mid-1967, Jimi Hendrix still wasn't a household name in America. The Seattle-born guitarist was known to music's inner world as a touring musician and session player, and he had developed a strong following as a performer and a recording artist in England, but stardom in America still eluded him. His electric and fiery performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 (which he ended by lighting his guitar on fire and holding it over his head) brought him a great deal of notoriety, but he still lacked the chart hit (and the attendant radio airplay and media exposure) necessary to make the breakthrough to pop music's upper echelon. Into this breach stepped the most unlikely of benefactors: the Monkees. A couple of members of the pre-fab four were already familiar with Jimi Hendrix and his music, as Micky Dolenz later recalled: Mike Nesmith remembered when he first heard of Hendrix as well: When Dolenz and fellow Monkee Peter Tork caught up with Hendrix again at the Monterey Pop Festival, the idea of a Hendrix-Monkees tour was born: What could have possessed the Monkees to make such an offer, or Jimi Hendrix to accept it? After all, although the Monkees had moved away from merely providing vocals for pre-recorded teenybopper pop songs cranked out by professional songwriters to creating their own more sophisticated and relevant music, their concert audience was still largely composed of prepubescent white girls (and their mothers, stuck with the thankless task of chaperoning them). Hendrix's target audience, on the other hand, was a bit more mature, more heavily male, and more racially diverse — a difference underscored by a comment Hendrix had made about the Monkees to Melody Maker several months earlier: All of this makes it sound as though Jimi Hendrix would have been the last musician to agree to tour as a supporting act for the Monkees. Nonetheless, Hendrix had pragmatic reasons for accepting an offer from promoter Dick Clark to join The Sundowners and Australian singer Lynn Randell on the Monkees tour: For their part, the Monkees just wanted the opportunity to watch Hendrix up close. To Monkees producer and songwriter Tommy Boyce, it was A personal trip. They wanted to watch Jimi Hendrix every night; they didn't care if he didn't fit. As Mike Nesmith admitted: Peter Tork was more candid, and more on the mark: As everyone should have expected, things went badly right from the start; precious few of the anxiously screaming Monkees fans cared to sit through an act they could neither comprehend nor appreciate. Micky Dolenz noted: And Mike Nesmith observed: To make a bad situation even worse, Hendrix joined the tour in progress in Jacksonville, Florida on 8 July 1967, just before the Monkees were scheduled to play a couple of shows in North Carolina. One would have been hard pressed to have found a part of America less likely to appreciate what Micky Dolenz described as this Black guy in a psychedelic Day-Glo blouse, playing music from hell, holding his guitar like he was f**king it, then lighting it on fire and what Eric Lefcowitz termed the cacophonic strains of Hendrix's feedback orgies mixed with his lascivious sexuality. Matters came to head a few days later as the Monkees played a trio of dates in New York: Hendrix had had enough: Purple Haze was starting to dent the American record charts, and it was time for him to head out on his own and play for audiences who wanted to see him. He asked to be let out of his contract, and he and the Monkees amicably parted ways. But one last bit of Monkee business turned an unforgettable experience into a legendary one. Music critic Lillian Roxon, who was tagging along on the tour with her friend Lynne Randell, crafted a mischievous press release to explain Hendrix's abrupt departure. She wrote, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, that the right wing group Daughters of the American Revolution had complained that Hendrix's stage act was too erotic and he was corrupting the morals of America's youth, and the DAR had pressured the promoters to dismiss him from the tour. The put-on went over the heads of most of the establishment and was duly printed as a straight news story, creating a fact that would continue to be cited for years to come. Hendrix, of course, went on to achieve superstardom before dying only three years later, leaving behind a legacy of classic rock music and one quirky little legend.
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