TWO RIDERS WERE APPROACHING

The Life and Death of Jimi Hendrix

Mick Wall

Contents

TITLE PAGE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

EPILOGUE

NOTES & SOURCES

ALSO BY MICK WALL

COPYRIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

Two Riders

Said the joker to the thief . . .

Jimi drowning in cheap red wine. Red in his hair, his lungs, his eyes . . . Jimi washed clean in wine. Jimi swept away.

‘He’s done.’

‘Are you sure? Make fuckin’ sure.’

‘Naw, he’s fuckin’ done.’

The men, CIA, MI6, ex, current, part-time, London crims, New York mob, Geordie fixers, final scorers, English-sounding, American-sounding, very heavy trip. The two riders moved away from the bed, from the mess they had made of it. Red wine and cold blood, a tangle of sweaty sheets and bed-spin. Coughed up. Yucked out. Shitted up. Testing the witchiness of witches.

‘When’s blondie coming back?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘What you wanna do about that?’

‘Nothing. She knows what to do.’

Jimi limp – zedded-out. Jimi X-ed. The past no longer close behind.

Earlier . . .

Making the scene. Hanging with Posh Phillip, groovy son of Lord Harvey. Some chick in pearls and an English-money accent, others like that too: red-lipstick cigarettes, short skirts, look-see panties. Jimi smiling, high, coasting, showing good times; baby, you know I dig you special.

Jimi partying. Playing grab-ass with the bell-bottomed well-wishers. High fives. Low numbers. Just got back, you know, in town for a few days, catch up with some gooood friends. Cool on the outside, feverish on the inside. Jimi mouldering. Looking for a place to hide.

‘Didja see Monty Python the other night, man? So funny! The Ministry of Silly Walks.’ Jimi jiving his own version. ‘Oh man, so funny! We’d been smoking that Red Leb. Oh man, I nearly died!’

Everyone: HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

Smashed hippy cats kicking their legs, doing silly walks, Cleese-style. Jimi doubled over laughing, smoke pluming from him. Dunhill in hand, joint in hand, glass in hand. Nice pad. Laying back a cushioned kasbah vibe, all Saturn smoke rings and storied gold-thread rugs on the ceiling. On the record player, Smokey Robinson . . . ‘But don’t let my glad expression / Give you the wrong impression . . .’ Jimi the only black face, the only cat in the room really grooving on it. Jimi digging that too; Jimi comfortable in this scene. Groovy London white cats soft with daddy-money and cool class-connections, digging on the freaky minstrel nee-gro. The no-strings honorary white man.

Then the blonde chick hassling Jimi, a bringdown, crying that she wants to leave. The one with the heavy German accent, all whey face and train-track eyeliner. Jimi shaking her off but that chick losing it, running out, door slamming behind her.

Jimi going after her, vexed. ‘You fucking pig!’ she yells at him. Jimi yelling too, man, threatening to beat her ass. Posh Phil runs outside, begging them to stop, worried someone might summon the pigs. But Jimi has blood in his eyes. The blonde – Monika – has put it there. That chick is burning, man. After half an hour of this shit he gives in, apologises to everyone then leaves, taking Monika with him, hunting down a cab.

Back to the Samarkand – to Monika’s little pad, the place too small for Jimi to settle. Monika suggests a bath, something to eat. Jimi wants to use the phone. Tells her Pete Kameron needs to see him at his pad. Pete helped kick-start Track Records. Jimi likes talking to him about his problems. Biz stuff. Serious shit. Dig?

Jimi explains, acting plausible: Pete is having like a dinner party, private. Monika can drive Jimi, drop him off, but Monika can’t come in. It’s not that kind of scene. You understand, doncha, baby?

Monika is down with that. She sees, she says. Around midnight she drops Jimi off. Jimi mighty relieved to be away from her, that bummer German chick, man, too goddamn much! Jimi needs to breathe. Besides, Devon Wilson – Dolly Dagger – is at Pete’s, acting junkie coy. Stella Douglas and Angie Burdon too – chicks that know Jimi. Know his scene. Don’t come on to it all so heavy. Dig?

It’s a cool vibe. Jimi is happy to see Devon. He’d bitched and moaned when she told him she was coming all the way from New York. ‘Christ’s sake, Devon – get off my fucking back!’

But that was when he was still with Kirsten. Now Kirsten is gone, and the heavy German chick is on the scene, all of them claiming to be Jimi’s bride to be. All of them pretending not to know when Jimi is just jiving, just saying love words, man, can’t you see?

Now here in this place in the flesh, Jimi is digging on Devon again, drinking blood from the jagged edge. Only now Devon is the one playing it coool. On a Jagger trip still; knowing it smokes Jimi’s mind.

But Stella is here – Alan Douglas’s old lady. Alan is Jimi’s new best friend. The one who’s going to help lead him out of the sea of shit he is swimming in, towards the promised land of million-dollar smiles and other bullshit friends of mine.

Jimi trusts Alan. Jimi doesn’t trust anyone. So he trusts his old lady too. Stella with her bindi and ultra-cool threads, her wise face and features open. Stella is not just another rock ’n’ roll hang chick. You can talk to Stella. Stella knows the scene. No sex trips. Just love, l-u-v.

Same for Angie – Eric’s old lady – only different in that Angie is on a smack trip. Angie and Devon. White-horse witches. Angie has had Jimi before, plenty of times. Like Devon, except Devon felt like a keeper; Angie was a one-off, repeat to fade. But now that chick don’t wanna know ’less you got that sweet-brown-sugar jive.

Mainline time. Next stop: nowhere.

Jimi swerves Angie, fixes on Devon, fast-chats Stella. There is Chinese food on the table. He swallows a couple of black bombers and rolls another joint. Has a little taste of the chicken and rice.

Then the intercom buzzing . . . Jimi flinching. ‘Oh, man, please, you gotta tell that chick. Man, you know, leave me alone . . .’

Stella, taking charge, picking up the intercom, telling the put-upon blonde, ‘Come back later.’

‘But I am Jimi’s fiancée. You understand, ja?’

No tea and sympathy here, though. ‘Go home.’

‘Nein. No. You must understand—’

Stella hangs up.

Monika left standing alone outside. Monika crying. Monika freaking out.

Ten minutes later, the buzzer again. Shit . . . Jimi losing it now. Stella, uptight, back on the phone telling the chick, ‘No, man.’

Monika crying, yelling, noises off. Jimi apologising to the room, embarrassed. Jimi outside on the street again, so tired of this scene.

Taxi ride back to the Samarkand. Jimi bugged-out, vibing, bad-scene motherfucking chick, man. Monika silent, lights a cigarette. London skidding past, pre-dawn, yellow tobacco eyes watching from the Jag idling outside, waiting for them to return.

Mike stubs out his ciggie and pushes open the car door. The others follow. Big lads, Get Carter extras, Mob imports. Laughing and joking: under order of the thief.

Straight in behind the unhappy couple as they push open the door, straight into the cunt before he knows what’s hit him. Knee him in the balls. He goes down gasping. Tell the blonde slag, ‘Fuck off while we talk to your boyfriend.’

Give her the look. Fuck – off – now.

‘I get cigarettes, Jimi, okay? From the garage I get cigarettes . . .’

The lads smile. Shove her out the door.

‘Hey, Mike, what the hell, you know?’

Mike silent, his mind’s eye hovering. Jimi pleading. ‘Mike, come on, man—’

Then the lads are on him. Force the head down onto the pillow. Swing a couple of good ones to the gut. Jimi on all fours gasping, yowling, spluttering, Jimi frightened now, really hurt, man . . .

Another couple. Fold him over onto his back, yank his head back by the corkscrew hair; two hold him, another sets down the shopping bag, pulls out the first couple of bottles, pushes in the cork with his thumb. Tough guy. The wine sloshes over his hand. He wipes it on the golliwog’s shirt. Then forces the bottle into his mouth. Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug . . .

‘The boy’s thirsty,’ says one. The others jeer. ‘Good job we brought more,’ says one. The boys jeer.

Thumbs the cork. Wipes his hand. Forces the bottle in.

Wine everywhere. Jimi’s eyes popping out, hands grasping, unable to breathe, wine pouring from his nose, into his hair, onto the bed, over the hands holding him down.

Thumbs the cork. Wipes his hand. Forces the bottle in.

Over his chest and arms, his mouth, his eyes. This scene is real. Impossible. This shit is happening. No way. The boys jeer.

Then the screen shuts off, little white dot . . . quickly then slowly . . . slowly . . . shrinking into . . .

Nothing. Deep, black, heavy . . .

Nothing.

CHAPTER TWO

Lucille and Al

The night he was born, the moon was in shadow, on the wane, slipping from Cancer to Leo, stomach to heart, mucus to blood.

Mama was sugar-sweet, just turned seventeen. Daddy was all snafued, in army jail.

Lucille Jeter had married twenty-three-year-old US Army private James Allen Ross Hendrix eight months before. Three days later Al had shipped out to Fort Rucker, Alabama. When the baby was born, Al had been denied paternity leave and imprisoned. The CO said it was for his own good, knowing the boy would likely go AWOL instead. Al was pissed. All the white grunt fathers were given leave.

Like all Americans, the bloodlines were tangled, chewed up, faithfully ignored. African slaves, white slave owners, Red Indian tribes, the long line products of rape, murder, race hate, religious perversion, expulsion of expectation and the unsought prevailing of tough field grass in the cracks of centuries-hardened rockface.

On Lucille’s side a white slave-owner grandfather and a black slave grandmother. Captain and concubine, odd couples made complete in the nineteenth-century Deep South. From them a boy, Preston Jeter: born 1875, classic mulatto. Fled Virginia after witnessing a lynching, headed for the Northwest where blacks were said to have it easier.

Yeah-yeah-yeah.

Mining in Roslyn, Washington, then Newcastle, anyplace a young black could earn a dollar. In his forties by the time he reached Seattle – but above ground in sunlight at least now, working in gardens – where he met Lucille’s mama, Clarice Lawson. From Confederate, segregated Arkansas, Clarice came from the Cherokee, who’d been cattle-rounded there under the Indian Removal Act of the 1830s. Sheltered by slaves, intermarried, poor, Clarice was nineteen years younger than Preston and already pregnant after being raped in the cotton fields of the Louisiana Delta.

When her older sisters offered Preston the loot to marry Clarice, he called bullshit and made a run for it. She had the child, put it up for adoption and nearly died of grief. So the sisters went back to Preston, upped their offer, and this time he said, ‘I do.’ They were married in 1915 and stayed married until the old man died thirty years later. Though never truly happy, who is?

They lived in Seattle’s Central District – four square miles of black street ghetto, home to jigs, chinks, redskins, nips, krauts, wops, kikes, flips – all the unwanted white negated trampled underfoot. Give ’em their own newspapers, schools, storefronts, juke joints and barrelhouses. Give ’em anything they want, just don’t put ’em next door to good God-fearing white folks like us.

Jackson Street was where the action was, the mainline to the good-times night-time. The daylight hours mainly given over to cleaning up after the rich folks living high outside the District.

Preston and Clarice had eight kids, six of whom survived childhood. Lucille was the baby. Preston was old by then, past fifty, and Clarice was diagnosed with a tumour. She survived but was a long time gone in hospital. Lucille’s sisters raised her. When things got too bad they were all fostered out to a good-hearted German family on a farm in the whites-only area of Greenlake, where the gun-toting locals assumed they were just the filthy offspring of gypsies.

Lucille was light-skinned and pretty, a coffee-coloured doll turning heads on the street as she trilled on by. Lucille was so light and easy she could pass if she wanted. But she never did. Instead, living back in Central as a teenager, she loved to dance and had just turned sixteen, still in junior high, when she went with school friends to Washington Hall to see Fats Waller, the black Horowitz, perform. Where she met Al Hendrix, a short, handsome iron-foundry worker with ideas above his station. Al could really dance. And he was older, had been around and earned a little spending money. Al was fun.

Like his eventual teenage bride, Al’s background was from all over. Daddy was born a year after the Civil War ended. His mama, Fanny Hendricks, a recently freed slave recently divorced from Jefferson Hendricks; his papa an unreconstructed white slave owner who wanted nothing to do with the boy, even though his mama ensured he bore all his names – Bertran Philander Ross.

Ross, as he preferred to be known, was forty-six when he changed his surname to Hendrix. He’d been a ‘special’ police officer in Chicago for a spell, been married and split, and was now in showbiz, a stagehand for a Dixieland vaudeville troupe that travelled the Pacific Northwest. He was about to marry again.

Zenora ‘Nora’ Moore was a dancer and chorus girl, a real looker. Her mama, also named Fanny, was half-Cherokee, half-African. Her daddy Robert was a freed slave from Georgia. They lived as best they could on Tennessee time.

Nora had bigger dreams, though. She’d toured with her sister Belle as a hoofer, meeting Ross when she joined the same troupe of actors, musicians, comedians and dancers. When the money-pipe ran dry and the troupe disbanded, they were left stranded in Seattle. Stage-work prospects: zero.

To save rent on a shared room – no white-owned boarding house was going to let to an unwed black couple – they married. When someone suggested Canada as a good place that people of colour might find jobs, they scrambled. On the recommendation of a patron, Ross got a gig in Vancouver, working as a steward at the American Club.

Nora swapped showbiz for housewife and five kids. Two died – the eldest, Leon, when he was twenty, and the youngest, Orville, when he was just two months old. That left Patricia Rose, Frank and, in 1919, James Allen Ross – Al to everyone else.

Three years after that the family were officially naturalised and became Canadian citizens. Life bumped along. Ross was active in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and became first porter at the newly opened Quilchena Golf and Country Club, at King Edward and 33rd Avenue, on the former First Peoples edge of Vancouver.

When the old man’s aorta ruptured spontaneously, causing rapid exsanguination and death, he was sixty-nine. The Hendrix family ruptured likewise. Nora froze. The kids flew. The Great Depression hit and the world turned wrong. Any thoughts of Al making college died with his dad. Leaving school to look for work. But jobs were bum or no-count. Waiting tables at after-hours chicken joints.

Encouraged by his mother, he took to tap-dancing. He had the biz in his blood, she said. His older brother Leon had been like a gazelle, showed him all the cool steps, tap, Charleston, the Lindy Hop, Ballin’ the Jack, the Eagle Rock and the Georgia Grind. Al got low-rent gigs off it. Added some steps of his own. Got an agent. Moved up to the clubs.

The jitterbug came in and Al got good at that too. Nora laughed and told him that when she’d dance it twenty years before it was called the Texas Tommy, from the all-black musical Darktown Follies. But the dances were segregated, to give the whites a chance, and Al went sour on it.

When his pal Al Ford told him about the amateur prizefights, twenty-five bucks a round for three rounds, Al Hendrix nearly shit. Short but strong and stocky, he talked his way into a Golden Gloves competition in Seattle, at the Crystal Pool, where he fought his first bout as a 147-pound welterweight. He won and won again. Then lost in the final. So what? The paycheck would cover the loss. Only he’d been conned. Told that only pros got paid, he walked back to the Moore hotel without the price of a cup of coffee. The topper: being told the pool there was whites only.

Fuck this cracker bullshit.

When Canada declared war on Germany, Al hightailed it to Victoria, where he figured on a railroad job, but the racist gangbuster manager wouldn’t hire him, saying he was ‘too daggum short’. More bullshit. Al slept on a friend’s floor and picked up a couple of dollars shoe-shining. Then headed back to Seattle in 1940, with forty bucks and his dick in his hand.

Al hustled. Cleaned apartments. Got a gig dishwashing at a black ghetto joint on Pike Street. He still danced, still jitterbugged with the ladies, in his zoot suit and stripes. Showing them the hip to hip, the side flip and the over the back. But those Seattle gals were big. Al could spin the fat ones around, even slide the tall ones between his legs. But the only gals who seemed the right size for five-foot-six Al were the whiteys, and they only spelt danger for a black boy like him.

Working at the foundry when he met sweet-sixteen Lucille Jeter, Al couldn’t believe his luck. This chick was shorter than he. And could really dance. Really keep up. Really show Al a thing or two.

What a team, baby.

CHAPTER THREE

Chas and Kathy

Saturday, 24 September 1966. Jimmy was still on New York time when the plane touched down in London – 9 a.m. local, 4 a.m. for Jimmy. There had been so much to eat on the plane – filet mignon, lobster – and so much to drink – champagne, top-shelf Scotch and brandy – that Jimmy was frazzled. Unused to long-haul travel and being woken at 4 a.m. when he’d only just managed to fall asleep a couple of hours before, he was bad breath, cold sweat, red-eyed unprepared for what was about to happen.

Being in first class, he and Chas and their roadie Terry McVay (borrowed from the Animals) were first off the plane and first into customs, Jimmy smiling but acutely self-conscious. His social unease tainting his aura, making him feel freak-show gawky. His blackness a smear, his showy American blackness going against him, he sensed it.

Terry carried Jimmy’s guitar case. Jimmy didn’t have a work permit. The story Chas had invented for him: that he was a pro songwriter here to collect some royalties. The customs guys didn’t like it, knew it was fishy, but the big white guy in the suit seemed to know what he was talking about – they’d heard of the Animals – so they let the dodgy-looking darkie through on a seven-day non-work permit.

Jimmy and his brand-new passport and his jeans and Bob Dylan hair. Everything else he owned – the borrowed Strat, the one change of clothes, the jar of Valderma antibacterial face soap (those fucking spots, man) and his pink hair curlers – was in the guitar case.

Out on the other side of customs, Jimmy is wired, ecstatic, an unexploded firework. Chas, who has been scheming all the way over on the plane, goes to a phone box and starts plying it with penny pieces. He calls the Animals’ office, speaks to Trixie Sullivan, Mike Jeffery’s PA. Trixie knows all about Chas leaving the Animals and wanting to go into management with Mike. She likes Chas, sees him for what he is: an honest broker, talented music man and genial company. But she knows he is nothing without Mike. Mike, says Trixie, is ‘someone special . . . one tough guy and bloody clever’.

Chas’s next phone call is to his new Swedish girlfriend, Lotte. Chas and Lotte have rooms booked at the Hyde Park Towers Hotel in Bayswater, including one for Jimmy. Chas tells Lotte they will arrive later this afternoon, after he and Jimmy make a quick stop-off. Tells her to be ready. They will all be going out tonight to the Scotch of James.

The Scotch – hidden in the cobbled streets around St James’s Square, near the Houses of Parliament – is one of a handful of swinging London nightspots catering to the new pop aristocracy, places like the Ad Lib, in Leicester Square, and Blaises and the Cromwellian in Kensington. Boozed-up young bluebloods and glamorous gangsters, pushy snappers in night-time sunglasses, flat-chested fashion queens and pilled-up film-star wannabes. The sort of after-midnight champagne-ghettos Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger showed up in, surrounded by pop-life hierophants like Robert Fraser and David Bailey, Stash and Peter Max, and well-dressed goddess-class girls like Twiggy and Marianne Faithfull, Julie Christie and Jacqueline Bisset.

Chris tells Lotte to call the guys at the Scotch, let them know they will be coming down that night, hold a couple of tables. The Scotch is the most likely Saturday-night happening in London at the moment, a great shop window in which to show Jimmy off, even if he can’t legally play anything in public – yet.

Next call is to old mucker Zoot Money.

Zoot is the singer-organist in his own outfit, the Big Roll Band, who have just had a minor hit with ‘Big Time Operator’. Though he doesn’t know it yet, Jimmy’s influence is about to transform Zoot from an average R&B club act – one up from nice-boy square Georgie Fame, one down from wild-man Brian Auger – into a short-lived, summer of love psychedelia-by-numbers outfit called Dantalian’s Chariot. (Dantalian being the name of the mythological Great Duke of Hell, who commanded thirty-six legions of demons.)

Zoot has a nice pad in Fulham, a taxi ride from the airport. Chas figures to take Jimmy there first, grab a smoke, a tea, a gentle hang with like-minded cats before going official later that night at the Scotch. It’s that or take Jimmy straight to the hotel. Lonely one-window bedroom, no friends, no vibe, no smoke.

Zoot’s pad is Grand Central for every passing head and muso in west London. When Chas swings by with Jimmy around eleven Zoot is very cool. When Jimmy sees the Big Roll Band’s gear all set up in the lounge, he knows he has come to the right place. That Chas knows things. Jimmy asks, humble-faced, if he can jam on Zoot’s white Telecaster, and Zoot gives him the nod, head wreathed in the good smoke.

Jimmy big-grin lets fly.

Zoot takes it in. Tries to. He hears blues, soul, gospel; he hears black, white; he hears pure bright light. Jingle-jangled. Kissing, biting, laughing. He looks over at his wife Ronni and she is visibly turned on. Inside shrieking. She is gunking-gooing.

Jimmy all shy eyes thrusts out his crotch and makes the Tele cry.

Ronni can’t believe it, runs upstairs to her friend Kathy’s flat.

Kathy Etchingham on the phone to me years and lifetimes later, telling me Ronni shouted: ‘Kathy! Come downstairs quick! Chas has brought this bloke from America and he looks like the Wild Man of Borneo!’

Kathy, lying in bed smoking, is in no hurry. She hears the noise, but she didn’t get back last night till God knows what time. Zoot and Ronni have a lot of would-be wild men in the house. Kathy is twenty years old, very fashionable and very pretty. Large brown eyes, dark straight hair, Kathy works as a hairdresser. When she’s out at night with Ronni, though, she is a DJ, sometimes at the Cromwellian and the Scotch.

Kathy and honey-blonde Ronni are a good double act. Kathy the sexy, free, swinging London chick, Ronni the warm earth mother and hands-off wife of Zoot. They are what’s happening wherever they go. Ronnie protective; Derbyshire-lass Kathy in no need of protection. She’s already been out with Brian Jones, Keith Moon, that scene. Kathy is a big girl now, lipstick-tipped cigarettes and hash.

Kathy takes her time getting down the stairs and by then it’s too late. Chas and Jimmy are leaving. Never mind. They agree to meet at the Scotch that night.

Jimmy wants to see Linda Keith. Linda is the reason Jimmy has made it this far. Jimmy wants to see everything there is to see. But Linda is still Keith’s chick, and though she’s psyched to see Jimmy finally in London, all her own work, Linda says she’ll meet him later at the Scotch.

When Jimmy turns up that night with Chas and Lotte, it is quiet, shy Jimmy that is on display – until he gets his little showcase on the stage and every cat in the place falls about like, What, huh?

This is not Wild Man of Borneo Jimmy, this is serious muso Jimmy, here to show his credentials. A young, black American bluesman, dig? Hear that train a-coming. No show, just blow. In-house hurricane. The sharkskin-suited mods and art-school, post-Beat scruffs can’t believe what they’re hearing. The pretty mini-skirted chicks all flicking their hair, all aquiver like it’s cool to love a black man stranger dude.

Before Jimmy there had been safe old coloureds over from the States playing homespun acoustic blues, like Big Bill Broonzy, already in his fifties and therefore ancient. Or there had been mean-bear electric black dangermen like Muddy Waters, not much younger than Big Bill but infinitely scarier. Crazy old geezers the boys liked but the girls held their noses to.

Now here was Jimmy James, young and pretty and shy and sweet, mumbling soft words into the mic. Magicking with his guitar like Pan playing his pipes on your window ledge after dark when the world is sound asleep dreaming.

Linda Keith watched this from her table with a mixture of delight and dread. She had been right: Jimmy really was a star in the making. Only now did it dawn on her what came next, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Jimmy had been Linda’s great discovery, Linda’s special friend. Now Jimmy would belong to everyone else. Linda who?

When Kathy arrived – perfumed hair, bum-cheek skirt, manic up-north energy – she was late again. Jimmy had already finished his little hot spot. Chas waved her and Ronni and Zoot over to the table where he and Jimmy and the rest of the gang were sitting. Pulled out a chair and sat Kathy right down next to Jimmy.

Jimmy instantly gratified. Gestures for Kathy to come closer, then whispers in her ear, ‘I think you’re beautiful.’ Kisses her ear and smiles. Then tells her some other things. Man-to-girl things, all googly-eyed.

Ronni seeing this: happy for her friend, giggly. This is too goddamned much for Linda, who flips out. Throws her drink at Ronni. Plates start flying. Tables turn over. Jimmy grabs Kathy’s hand and they flee. Chas telling them to grab a taxi and meet them back at the hotel. Kathy and Jimmy laughing, running out into the street still holding hands.

Back at the hotel, in the bar, Jimmy gives Kathy the treatment. Shy and sweet, polite and attentive – and American and fun. Chas says he’s going to be a star. Jimmy all aw shucks, Kathy trying to be cool.

In the morning, in bed with Kathy holding his arms out, looking at the scars on his wrist, cooing. Jimmy nearly shits when the door flies open and Linda Keith bursts into the room.

‘Hey, baby . . .’

Linda, not listening, grabs the Strat she’d given him and runs out again.

‘Bastard!’

Jimmy telling Kathy it’s okay, baby, it’s Keith Richards’s chick. Out-of-her-mind crazy chick, forget her. Kathy okay with it – for now. Everything a big one-night-stand adventure, maybe more, Kathy doesn’t know yet, but she’ll work on it.

Jimmy simply jazzed on openly being with a white chick. Back home that could still get you lynched in some states. Interracial marriages still a crime in most of them. White-hate protesters with their Race Mixing Is Communism banners still coming out marching whenever the TV news needed them.

Even Frank Sinatra’s buddy Sammy Davis Jr., the biggest ‘honorary white man’ in showbiz, didn’t get away with schtupping a white chick. After his marriage in 1960 to hot-tomato Swedish movie queen May Britt, white-hate groups picketed the theatre where he was working waving signs: Go Home Nigger.

An avalanche of hate mail hit them from all sides. Death threats at his shows in Reno, San Francisco, Chicago . . . At the Lotus Club in Washington the American Nazi Party picketed outside, Sammy nervously tugging at his glass eye.

Then came the public and private criticism from American blacks, accusations of being an Uncle Tom, newspaper headlines asking, Is Sammy Ashamed He’s a Negro?

Shit-scared Sammy hired twenty-four-hour armed guards. He and May stopped going out. And when they did, Sammy carried a gun or a cane with a knife concealed in the handle.

Man, Sammy was a famous black artist. What chance a poor no-count half-breed like Jimmy? Still, Jimmy had fucked plenty of white chicks before. But that had always been strictly undercover. This scene here with Kathy, with Linda, with these English white chicks, man, this was something else. Almost, you know . . . free.