Jimi Hendrix, a sex worker’s apartment and a conversation Carmine Appice never forgot: “I want to make it”
Everyone seems to forget that the mantra of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, though oft-quoted, actually involves a lot of sex and even more drugs. Rock and roll sometimes ends up as a by-product.
But it was a sign that Jimi Hendrix’s musical greatness was always written in the stars, because he managed to get the balance just right, at least in his formative years. That’s not to say that a huge amount of sex and drugs didn’t go on, because of course it did; however, the point was he always knew there was a greater motive.
It’s easy to look back on the guitarist’s life and suggest this from the outside, but the true confirmation of where Hendrix’s heart lay had to come from within his innermost circle. Step forward, Carmine Appice: because if there was going to be anyone who knew how his brain worked so intimately, it was the drummer who was by his side through all of it.
People tend to turn up their noses when it comes to the gritty truth of the rock and roll scene at various times over the years, but when that involved nightclubs, prostitutes, drug addicts, and musicians caught up in the storm of it all, nothing could get more real. That’s exactly where you would find Hendrix and Appice back in the day, and it was a more seminal experience than you’d think.
“We used to play the clubs in New York together when he was Jimmy James and the Blue Flames,” the drummer said. “Right up the block, 72nd Street and Broadway, there was a club called the Lighthouse. Back in the day it was all hookers and drug addicts who used to hang out there.”
But it was on these seminal nights that Appice realised he had the making of a star on his hands, in the form of his electric friend, recalling, “We’d go across the street to a Black prostitute’s apartment, and we smoked pot, and we looked out the window at Broadway.”
“Jimi would say, ‘Man, I want to make it. I want to get out of this stuff.’ I didn’t know what making it meant – but he really wanted to make it.”
Carmine Appice on Jimi Hendrix
Indeed, they were too young to understand anything that was happening in the moment, let alone what unfolded in the future as Hendrix took off, burned bright, and then was struck down in his prime. Of course, you don’t typically hear poetic opines uttered in the apartments of prostitutes, but it was New York, and it was rock and roll – what could you do?
To be fair, Hendrix was true to his word, and although he didn’t “get out of this stuff” in terms of the immediate vicinity of the sex and drugs procurements that being a rock star offers, he did break free by becoming the global guitarist virtuoso who everyone would worship every sound from.
Clearly, that seminal memory never left Appice, if nothing more than for the sheer reason of it representing the precipice of something massive in both of their lives. The hotbed of life that is New York was one thing to conquer, but Hendrix always knew he was destined for more. It was his job to use all those lessons to take the next leap.
