Jimi Hendrix’s life was more twisted than you thought

12 minutes ago
15 min read

Jimi Hendrix once told an interviewer that besides his music, he had nothing to live for, which you might think is an insane thing for him to say at the time.

He was possibly the best musician on earth, and actually was the highest paid guitar player on earth. He had beautiful women hanging off him wherever he went, was universally respected by the best musicians in the game, and was generally just the coolest dude on the planet.

But the truth is that underneath, he really did feel like that. Nothing to live for except the music. And this emptiness inside started growing way before he became the face of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

I want to say that I know there is loads of speculation and conspiracy surrounding the circumstances of his death, and his “fiancé” at the time Monika Danneman. 'I'm not going to get lost in all of that...'

Is exactly what I would say if I was a huge wimp. I am absolutely going to get lost in that. Because the accounts of literally anyone that was involved in that day, and her version of events, and their whole relationship, just do not line up. Suspiciously so. And it deserves to be talked about.

But before we get to that we need to look at his life before all the craziness and drugs and world tours and playing guitar with his teeth. Jimi Hendrix came into this world an ordinary boy. He even joined the army once, briefly.

Jimi was actually born Johnny Allen Hendrix in 1942, before his father James changed his name to James Marshall Hendrix. Ironically, this isn’t a reference to the Marshall amplifiers Jimi would end up loving - that company didn’t even start for another twenty years.

It wasn’t an easy start. His father was in the military and didn’t even meet Jimi until he was three years old. When he requested leave to see his son be born, it was denied and he was placed in military prison to stop him going AWOL.

Meanwhile, his mother Lucille struggled to raise him, and when James Sr. finally got out of the military he found his son in the care of a friend.

The Hendrix family lived in abject poverty, and both his parents had problems with alcohol. Likely using it as a way of coping not only with their poverty, but the fact that they had four other kids to raise - all of them disabled.

Three of those brothers would all be put up for adoption. For Jimi and his remaining brother Leon, they lived in a world of drunken violence and no solid home. Jimi became a shy and withdrawn boy. He and his brother often stole food to eat, and his father is said to have been abusive and neglectful.

Years later, it would come out that not only was he living in chaos at home, but he was sexually assaulted by an unnamed man.

When his parents split when he was 9 years old, Jimi and Leon were put into the custody of their dad. When his mum died of a ruptured spleen, caused by liver cirrhosis, when he was just 15, their father refused to take them to the funeral. Supposedly, he gave them shots of whiskey and told them ‘this is how men deal with loss’.

I think that warped advice had a profound effect on Jimi during the rest of his life.

He did have one small solace in all this chaos and sadness. As you’ve probably guessed, music. He showed an interest in music from an early age, but sadly didn't get a chance to play for a while.

There's different stories about how this interest was noticed and how he got his first instruments.

Some show his dad as an attentive father, who noticed Jimi would sit and play air guitar on a broom when he was meant to be doing house chores. These versions say his dad found him an old banjo with one string left and gave it to him, and later would give him his first acoustic guitar and later an electric.

Others are very different. They say that a social worker at school noticed Jimi clinging to his guitar broom like a comfort blanket for over a year. She asked for funding to buy him a guitar, fearing for his mental health if it was taken from him. It was refused. She asked his father to buy him one, but he refused.

In this version he also got the banjo by finding it in trash he and his father were removing from a woman's home, and she let him keep it.

I don't know which version of events is true. But all the stories say the same thing: He taught himself how to play music on that one string banjo, learning by ear and playing all the notes he could find.

He’d sit and listen to anything, but his big influences are what you’d expect, the blues. Guys like Muddy Waters, BB King, Howlin Wolf. The real OG’s of the blues and later rock. He also liked Elvis, because everybody liked Elvis.

And he just sat there and figured it out. And yes, he was left handed, but no, he didn’t play upside down, that's a common myth. He restrung his guitars the normal way.

He started playing in bands young, and quickly realised he needed an electric guitar if anyone was going to hear him. So he got one, and that's when he really started developing his own sound and style. Can you imagine being the person who sold Jimi Hendrix his first guitar?

When he was arrested in a stolen car and given the choice of jail or the army, he chose the army. But Jimi Hendrix was never going to be a soldier. So he found a solution: Be the worst soldier there’s ever been. And also, tell them he was gay. He was given an honourable discharge one year into his three year sentence. Some stories say it was an injury from a parachute jump.

He spent a couple years as a jobbing musician, doing recording sessions and playing for various bands. But he never seemed to hold down a gig for long. He famously got kicked out of Little Richard's band. He always seemed to be signing a contract, and then leaving it.

The heart of the problem was probably that Jimi was never meant to be playing under anyone.

The Jimi Hendrix experience came together very quickly. He was put in touch with manager Chas Chandler by Keith Richards' girlfriend, Ironically called Linda Keith. This took him to London where he started working with Chandler.

He quickly realized Jimi’s potential, and started building a band around him. Drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding - originally a guitar player - were brought in and it was done. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was born.

There’s a great quote from Eric Clapton from Hendrix: A Biography. Jimi had asked to play a few songs with Cream, which Eric obliged.

"He played just about every style you could think of, and not in a flashy way. I mean he did a few of his tricks, like playing with his teeth and behind his back, but it wasn't in an upstaging sense at all, and that was it ... He walked off, and my life was never the same again".

The Experience started gigging and word was getting around that they were the real deal. It wasn’t long before all the big dogs decided to come and see him. They did one show and everybody who was anybody was there. Clapton, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Jeff Beck, everybody. And they all said basically the same thing, which equated to ‘holy shit’.

Everyone knows about Jimi's crazy stage antics, and his drug use. And from the outside it looks like classic fun and freedom, the indulgence of the era. But I think it’s likely that he was covering something.

When Jimi drank heavily, which was a lot, and mixed it with drugs, which was a lot, he could become violent. He would go into rages and fight anyone around him. His friends, bystanders, even his girlfriend.

He once hit one girlfriend in the head with a vodka bottle, leaving her needing stitches.

This is not the love and peace festival playing LSD loving dude we remember. That’s a man that clearly has a lot of rage and pain under the surface, losing control of it. And no wonder, given his childhood.

He also suffered from horrible mismanagement at the hands of Michael Jeffrey. There were long standing allegations of money mismanagement, in other words robbing Jimi blind and hiding it behind legal mambo jumbo, completely controlling his money, and poor business deals that cost Jimi dearly.

There’s even the famous incident where Jimi was kidnapped by three supposed mafia guys and kept in a sort of house arrest for three days. They wanted something very specific: His management contract with Jeffreys. Some people think Jeffreys orchestrated the whole thing to make himself look like a figure of power to Jimi.

‘See how important I am? People will kidnap you to get to me’. The problem with this whole event is it's never been proved to have actually happened. Although one underground ‘boss’ did claim it was true and the story appeared in American Desperado.

Something that also fueled his drug use was his lifestyle, and vice versa. His life was a rollercoaster of substances. We all know he loved LSD, but he’d often be up all night on pretty much anything he could get his hands on. THen he’d take something to sleep. Then something to wake up, then something to vibe to during the gig, then something to party after, and the whole thing repeated.

His endless tour schedule and partying meant he was absolutely exhausted. Anyone who's ever done a multi day travel knows how quickly it becomes disorientating. Imagine that for years. Throw in a constant cycle of high and hungover and it would fry your brain.

Not to mention the depression that comes with depending on various different substances, and coming down off them.

This is him talking about playing Woodstock in 1969.

That little look at the camera at the end says it all. And he clearly says ‘I was exhausted’ and that he'd had about three nervous breakdowns since ‘I've been in this group, been in this business’.

He was in a bad way. One friend recalls finding him in a shocking state in a Musician article in 1996:

“I came in and went into the bedroom. It was seventy degrees outside but Jimi was in bed, shivering and sweating, with the heater on. The temperature must have been 95 degrees. In retrospect, it looked like … he was suffering from reactive depression from all the problems he had.”

And it started to show in his performances. No one ever thought Hendrix would put on a bad show, but at the end, he was getting sloppy. One tour in August 1970 got steadily worse.

At the end of one dodgy show, he told the crowd:

‘Thank you for being so patient. … Peace and happiness and all that other bullshit’

Slammed his guitar into the stage and walked off. That was about 4am. They then flew straight to Sweden, where he had to play another gig straight away.

There’s footage of that tour out there, but I'm not going to play it

The next gig after that, in September, Jimi showed up trembling and sweating, and asked to cancel the performance. The gig itself was a mess, with Jimi reportedly just stopping playing for a couple minutes before saying:

“I actually forgot what I was here for. Oh, yeah. It was ‘Message to Love,’ right? “

That song collapsed into a jumble of nothingness. 15 minutes in, Jimi had to be helped from the stage.

Not long after, he delivered both a brilliant line, and an ominous foreshadowing. First, he responded to jeers and boos from the crowd with:

‘“I don’t give a fuck if you boo, as long as you boo on key.”

I love that. But when he closed the gig with Voodoo Child, he for some reason chose to repeat the second to last line ‘if Idon’t see you no more in this world’ three times before delivering the final line.

Was he trying to say something? Was he just expressing how he felt? Or was it just a piece of showmanship? It could have been any. But he died just 12 days later.

If we’re going to talk about Jimi Hendrix’s life, we have to talk about his death. If you want a really in depth look, go and watch Room Full of Mirrors. It’s a great documentary on his life and death.

If we’re talking about Jimi’s death, we need to look at his so-called fiancé, Monika Danneman. I say so because she seems to be the only person who agrees they were engaged at all.

She has a book, and unpublished memoirs, that claim Jimi proposed to her once and that he even went around a restaurant showing off their rings and excitingly telling everyone they were engaged.

She even said this in a legal deposition to a panel of attorneys.

The thing is, the promotion manager of that restaurant was interviewed about that. They say no such thing ever happened. He told Musician in 1996:

“I don’t believe it. In fact, I’m absolutely certain that it didn’t happen. If he produced two rings and announced his engagement, there would have been chaos. Kathy and Jimi were a pair. They were sharing a flat. I dropped them off there one time.”

That Kathy is apparently Jimi’s girlfriend at the time.

Bassist Noel Redding also says it never happened. He even has a diary entry that says he and Jimi spent that night writing songs in his room together until the early hours.

That's the general theme of basically everything Monika said about their relationship. Especially the end of it.

Now we all know the official line reads that Jimi died of asphyxiation and barbiturate intoxication after swallowing some sleeping pills, and vomiting in his sleep. Plenty of people have suggested that the pills were simply stronger than he realised, which is entirely possible.

But what gets suspicious is that Monika's official statement of the events of that day are just not true. They aren’t. And I didn't need to be there to know, because everyone that was there on that day says so. Police, Paramedics, everyone.

And even the people they were with before. See, a group of people came out with a new story back in 1995, who had kept quiet for fear of backlash. The night before Jimi was found dead, he and Monika went to some peoples house for drinks, joints and food.

They were with a man and two women, who they had literally met in traffic. Jimi had accepted their offer of drinks with complete strangers because that's the kind of guy he was.

They enjoyed a long night of wine, joints, music and food/ They were there for hours.

As the night wore on, Monika got increasingly irritated and appeared to be jealous. Eventually she stormed out, and when Jimi followed, there was the mother of all arguments. Their host was worried the police would be called and attempted to bring them back inside.

They say she screamed abuse at Jimi for up to an hour before they left with her still harassing him. This was around 10.40pm.

They swore this to a solicitor in something similar to a legal deposition. They felt the story had to be told.

In Monika's book, she claims they were only at the party for around an hour, before they drove back to the hotel where he had a bath and she cooked him a meal of spaghetti at around 8pm.

Later that night, she drove him to a party at one of his ex-girlfriend's houses. She claims he was only there a short amount of time before he called and asked her to pick him up again, because the ex in question was too stoned to talk to and he’d wanted to talk to her about her causing trouble between him and Monika. He was there a total of about 45 minutes.

The thing is, guests at that party claim she turned up after half an hour and started hitting the intercom, and he got his friends to send her away. This happened multiple times with Jimi getting increasingly uneasy and her demanding to speak to him over the intercom. Eventually, he went with her around 3am.

And then, there is the scene where Jimi was found dead. Her version of events is shot down by everyone else present. She claims that they stayed up all night, with Jimi talking deeply about life after death. She says she made him a tuna sandwich, of which he only ate a bite. She also says that when they finally went to bed, around 7am, he wanted to take one of her sleeping tablets but she said he shouldn’t.

She took one and went to sleep, but Jimi was still awake.

When she woke up around 10, she found him asleep as normal, went out to get cigarettes. On the day, she told police that when she woke up Jimi had vomited all over his face and she couldn't wake him. She later redacted this statement in her deposition.

At 11:18, an ambulance was called to the Samarkand hotel. Monika told one interviewer she watched as they did all the normal checks unconcerned before telling her ‘you will walk out of the hospital with him’.

She also claims she rode in the ambulance with them, with Jimi sitting upright and his head nodding, and the siren switched off.

None of what she said is corroborated by anyone else that was there. It’s directly contradicted.

For a start, she claims to have woken up around 10 for cigarettes, but interviewers found that Gerry Stickells had received a call from Jimi's friend Terry Slater at 8 or 9am saying there was ‘a problem with Jimi at the hotel’. He mistakenly went to the wrong hotel.

An hour before she claims to have woken and at least two before the ambulance was called.

The Scotland Yard paperwork shows that Slater also went to the Russell Hotel, where he found Eric Burdon on the phone with Monika, around 9.30 am. She later changed her tune to support this story.

Noel Redding's mother insists he told her about Jimi's death around this time - how did he know? But it’s the ambulance crew and police that really damn her story. The ambulance crew swear that when they got to the scene, nobody was there and the door was wide open.

“It was horrific. … He was covered in vomit. There was tons of it all over the pillow – black and brown, it was. His airway was completely blocked, all the way down. His tongue had fallen back. … John ran up and radioed for the police. He got the aspirator too. We felt his pulse between his shoulders, pinched his ear lobe and nose, shone a light in his eyes. But there was no response at all. I knew he was dead as soon as I walked in the room.”

It was clear Jimi was dead, and by the dried vomit he had been for some time. There was so much of it they wrapped him up in the bedsheets to remove his body.

They're also both sure she was not there in the ambulance, and that Jimi was lying flat and that the siren was going - they specifically mention that that is standard procedure for unconscious patients.

The coroner's estimate also puts his death around 5AM, which if correct means he would have been in that state when Monika first woke.

Other things in that coroner's autopsy report also contradict her stories. One, there was absolutely no evidence of a tuna sandwich found in his stomach or throat. There was rice however, which the young man from the party had said was in the dinner Jimi ate. Judging by the digestion of the rice, Jimi had eaten it a few hours before he died.

This is in direct contradiction to both Monika's claim they were only at the party a short time, and that he was alive when she woke.

Now, of course I'm not saying that she killed Jimi Hendrix. That would have a team of lawyers at my door. But why do none of her stories correlate to what the professionals say? And why did she change her story with the police on scene? Something happened between that party and the time the ambulance was called.

It was probably just a bad cover up of a bad situation - the world's biggest rockstar dead, drugs in the room, and her panicking. Her and Jimi are the only people who really know. Probably. As for Stevie Ray Vaughan's claim that he had some help because he scared some people… I only wish he'd spoken more on that.

But right as I came to finish this video, I found that someone else did. Now I am not claiming this as fact or accusation, this is simply telling you what somebody wrote in their book.

Former roadie James ‘Tappy’ Wright shockingly claimed that Jimi's manager Michael Jeffrey admitted to murdering him. He even claims that Jeffrey detailed the murder to him telling him they shoved pills in his mouth and poured red wine down his throat until he swallowed them. He allegedly claimed he ‘had to do it’ because Jimi was going to leave him. Chandler has recently taken out a $2m life insurance policy on Jimi's life, with himself as beneficiary.

This sounds pretty outlandish until you consider two things:

Jimi was found with 18x the recommended dose in his system. How would an experienced drug user make such a monumental mistake? And even more damning, the surgeon who performed Jimi's autopsy specifically highlighted it appeared Jimi had drowned on red wine.

Dr John Bannister in a letter to Biographer Harry Shapiro, wrote:

“I recall vividly the very large amounts of red wine that oozed from his stomach and his lungs and in my opinion there was no question that Jimi Hendrix had drowned, if not at home then on the way to the hospital."

Drowned, not choked. And yes those are two different things.

It was also suggested that his hair, clothes and bed were covered in red wine, not just vomit.

It could be a load of rubbish said to sell a book, which is disgusting. But if it is true, it's a horrific image of Jimi's last moments. I honestly hope its not. There’s even some suggestions that the poem he was writing the night he died was some sort of suicide note, because it included the line

‘The story of life is quicker than the blink of an eye

The Story of life is hello and goodbye, until we meet again.'

Was he suicidal or was he merely down and musing on life? Either way, I can hear those lyrics in his voice, and I wish we’d got to hear them.

I think the sad circumstances of his death are a perfect metaphor for his life. Jimi Hendrix deserved better from the start, and didn't get it. He deserved better in life, and didn't get it. And he deserved a better death than he got. Rest in Peace Jimi.

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Music Mongoose