The Monkees Talk About Jimi Hendrix

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Urban Legends!

Claim: Jimi Hendrix was dropped as an opening act from a Monkees tour because the Daughters of the American Revolution complained that his stage act was "too erotic.

Origins: One of the more bizarre pairings in pop music history 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 notoreity, but he still lacked the chart hit (and its 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.

Micky Dolenz later recalled: "The first time I'd seen Hendrix was in New York at some club in the Village. He was playing lead guitar for the John Hammond band. I'd been invited down to hear "this guy play with his teeth." Sure enough, there was this young Black guy who, besides being an extraordinary guitar picker, would occasionally raise the instrument up to his mouth and play it with his teeth."

MIke Nesmith remembered when he first heard of Hendrix as well:
"I was in London visiting John Lennon, and I was having dinner with him, McCartney and Clapton. And John was late. When he came in he said, "I'm sorry I'm late but I've got something I want to play you guys." He had a handheld tape recorder and he played "Hey Joe." Everybody's mouth just dropped open. He said, "Isn't this wonderful?" So I made a mental note of Jimi Hendrix, because Lennon had introduced me to his playing."

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: "It just so happened that we were due to begin our summer tour in a couple of weeks, and we still needed another opening act. When I got back to L.A. I mentioned Hendrix and his impressive theatrics to [our producers]. The Monkees was very theatrical in my eyes and so was the Jimi Hendrix Experience. It would make the perfect union. Jimi must have thought so too, because a few weeks later he agreed to be the opening act for our upcoming summer tour."

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 the 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:

"Oh God, I hate them! Dishwater. I really hate somebody like that to make it so big. You can't knock anybody for making it, but people like the Monkees?"

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:

Hendrix and [his co-manager Chas] Chandler had their own reasons for accepting the dates. They had achieved three top ten hits in England, but they were yet to chart in America. The scorching set at Monterey was a start, but it needed to be capitalized upon immediately, and Dick Clark's offer of playing before hundreds of thousands of record-buying American kids was hard to refuse.

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: "The Jimi Hendrix Experience ... were the apotheosis of sixties psychedelic ribbon shirts and tie-dye, they had pinwheels for eyes and their hair was out to here ... I thought, "Man, I gotta see this thing live." So that night, I stood in front of the stage and listened to Hendrix at sound check. And I thought, "Well, this guy's from Mars; he's from some other planet, but whatever it is, thank heaven for this visitation." And I listened to him play the sound checks and the concert. I thought, "This is some of the best music I've heard in my life."

Peter Tork was more candid, and more on the mark: "Nobody thought, "This is screaming, scaring-the-balls-off-your-daddy music compared with the Monkees," you know? It didn't cross anybody's mind that it wasn't gonna fly. And there's poor Jimi, and the kids go, "We want the Monkees, we want the Monkees." ... We went early to the show and listened to what this man could do because he really was a world class musician."

As everyone should have expected, things went badly right from the start, as precious few of the anxiously screaming Monkees fans cared to sit through an act they could neither comprehend nor appreciate.

Micky Dolenz noted: "Jimi would amble out onto the stage, fire up the amps, and break into "Purple Haze," and the kids in the audience would instantly drown him out With, "We want Davy!" God, was it embarrassing."

As Mike Nesmith observed: "The night he opened in front of us ... he walked into the beast. There were twenty thousand pink waving arms. He would sing "Foxy" and they would shout, "Davy" - "Foxy" - "Davy ... " Oh, man, it was a seriously twisted moment. He lasted seven dates."

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 fucking 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:

After a handful of gigs, Hendrix grew sick of the "We want the Monkees" chant that met his every performance. Finally, he flipped the bird at the less-than enthusiastic crowd at Forest Hills Stadium in New York and stormed offstage.

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.

 

Mike Nesmith Of The Monkees On Jimi Hendrix

From Best Of Univbes Magazine

LONDON - 1967
"It was real interesting the way it came down, because I had hooked up with Clapton, George Harrison, Lennon and McCartney for dinner. .. And Lennon had at the time a little transistor cassette player. And he said, "you gotta hear this thing", and he played "Hey Joe". And so everybody sat around sort of reverentially listening to this "Hey Joe". Of course it was so stunning to hear this particular record, because it completely and utterly altered the way we all thought about music. And to see these guys standing there with their jaws dropped was even more impressive. And the evening unwound and I headed back ·to the hotel, and Mickey [Dolenz] came to me and says, "look I've come up with a guy I think I wanna open for us, I found him. playing in a club here in London". And I was tired and I said, "whatever you want is fine with me". And he said, "well this guy wants 1,500 dollars a night", which at that time was an enormous amount of money. And I said, "whatever you want". And he said, "well it's a trio, and he plays really strange music". and I said, "Mick, whatever you want is fine with me, I'm signing off, I wanna go to bed, that's it, I'm out of here". So the next morning at breakfast he told me that it was Jimi Hendrix ... "


U.S.A. - JULY 1967
"I hadn't heard anything except this record. We took over one wing of the Holiday Inn. And we were all standing around ... be[ing in] a rock band it's kind of being imprisoned in the west wing of a Holiday Inn; there's air, [with] nothing to do ... And there's this squad of police who are lining the hallways, and down at the end of this hallway, it was a startling image, the door opens, and in walks Hendrix with his hair out to here. And I'm still pretty convinced that he was probably from Mars. I mean I know he wasn't from Earth, I just don't know where he was from. And Noel and Mitch popped up at either side of him, dressed in ribbons ... the most spectacular trio I have ever seen in my life .. And they proceeded to walk down this cordon of these policemen. And Jimi, he was a small man, and so he sort of just passed under the skins of all these these giant cops and bid everyone good afternoon, and disappeared into his room. So I got even more excited. So that night I got into the equipment van and went down to hear him play, play the opening set. Got there, and parked in the sound booth kind of unseen, and that was the first time I ever saw a Marshall stack ... And he started off with "Purple Haze"; moved me back psychically about two feet and I thought this is the most celestial music, it's Wagner reincarnated, something's going on here of the first magnitude. And after that I watched him every single night ... "


NEW YORK CITY -13 TO 16 JULY 1967
"Then in Forest Hills [Stadium] he pretty well had [enough ofj "we want the Monkees, we want the Monkees", all the way through "If Six Was Nine" ... It was the largest sea of blank fourteen-year-old girl faces I've ever seen in one place ... Well people used to [ask me], how did Hendrix play the guitar? And over the years developed a kind of standard answer, that he didn't play the guitar, he was the guitar. When he was playing the guitar there was no real way to see where his fingers ended in where the guitar neck started ... it was something special.. .he was spectacular. .. "

LONDON - 10 SEPTEMBER 1970
"I saw Jimi [shortly] before he died. It was in London, getting on an elevator. I was having a party and I was having a press conference in London [Park Hotel]. I looked over, and he showed up ... After the press conference was over we were heading up to the room ... and he said, "well, you know I feel like I'm singing better these days, I'm finally getting my singing chops together. . .I'm gonna start working with a horn section and see if I can do some R & B stuff like that ... " And I could see that he really didn't have any clear idea of the kind of impact he had, he had revolutionized music. Talking about holding up today, it's holding up for decades, this music. And I said, "Jimi don't you understand you invented heavy metal, you invented psychedelic music, you made it up, from nowhere". And he said something like, "oh well, wowowowow...."