The strange case of the Newcastle suburb that helped to make Jimi Hendrix a star
In the annals of rock ‘n’ roll history, you expect the name Jimi Hendrix to crop up throughout. Simply put, he’s the Mozart of guitar, so why wouldn’t his name be emblazoned upon the pages more prominently than winking in a Carry On script?
However, you don’t expect the name of a music manager (albeit one who had previously played the bass in The Animals) to be quite as ubiquitous. And you certainly don’t expect a small working-class suburb in Newcastle to be at the heart of a strange case of kismet that made Hendrix a megastar to begin with.
This is the strange tale of how Chas Chandler – a one-time shipyard turner from Heaton, invariably described by his old co-workers as work-shy – changed the course of cultural history and gave the world its greatest ever instrumentalist. But how did he go from an unlikely lad to a leading luminary in the backrooms of the music industry?
Well, things happened very quickly in the 1960s. In 1962, The Animals were just about starting up. By 1964, they were spearheading the British invasion alongside The Beatles. A few months later, they delivered such a definitive version of the American blues standard, ‘House of the Rising Sun’, that they effectively wrote a new adrenalised page in the long-mythologised story of the song, and it encouraged Bob Dylan to go electric.
As The Animals’ frontman Eric Burdon opined, “I’ve been told by lots of people who know, and were around at the time, that that’s what stimulated Bob into going electric and becoming a rock star as opposed to a folk star. You might say we’re all exposed – when I say ‘all of us,’ I mean the same age group on both sides of the Atlantic – we were exposed to the root of true black music at the same time, and realised that that was the road that we wanted to take.”
However, just two years later, The Animals were no more. Tinned tomatoes have hung around in cupboards for longer. Yet, with ‘House of the Rising Sun’, they had shifted the sentiment of 1960s culture to a seismic degree. While the pivotal ripples that they set in motion at the time might have been missed by many, Chandler himself recognised the impact and implications of their song.
The wily Geordie saw a connection between the newly budding flowers of rock ‘n’ roll pop culture and followed the stem down to the folk roots from whence ‘House of the Rising Sun’ had sprung. In a very literal sense, this led him to pursue the underground scenes of the day once The Animals were over and he was looking to shape music in a different way.
Chandler would descend into the dive bars of Greenwich Village, New York, and beyond to see what talents he could spot. Yet again the seeming ever-present collision of rock and folk in his life, would fatefully smash together once more. One evening in a folk club he witnessed a hard-luck troubadour by the name of Tim Rose.
There was nothing overly notable about his set until Rose started singing the old murderous tale of ‘Hey Joe’ and Chandler made a mental note to himself, ‘That’ll be a hit for somebody someday’. But in the months that followed, it seemed increasingly unlikely that the one-time shipyard worker would be the man to bring that supposed hit to fruition either as an artist or a manager-in-waiting. He was feeling a little low on luck.
When the weary Chandler would later be persuaded to get back on the gig scene once more, after bumping into his future girlfriend Linda Keith, he begrudgingly traipsed along to the Café Wha to see this hip new guitarist Keith was apparently cockahoop about. In an instant, he found the man who he had been looking for, the fellow who would make ‘Hey Joe’ a hit.
Keith had seen Hendrix before and was puzzled by the lack of buzz surrounding him on the scene. “It was so clear to me,” she told The Guardian about her first experience of seeing Jimi Hendrix. “I couldn’t believe nobody had picked up on him before because he’d obviously been around. He was astonishing – the moods he could bring to music, his charisma, his skill and stage presence. Yet nobody was leaping about with excitement. I couldn’t believe it.”
She gave that sales pitch to a cautious Chandler shortly before he made his way down to the famed Café Wha. Producer Bob Gulick tells the best tale of what happened next. “I look over at Chandler,” he told Guitar Player, “And his mouth is hanging open. And when Jimi started playing with his teeth on ‘Hey Joe,’ Chandler’s drink fell from his hand and spilled all over his lap. I saw it happen.”
“I’m sure Chandler knew what we did at that moment,” he continued, “that Jimi had mopped the floor with every guitar player the guy had ever seen before. There wasn’t a person who saw him play who didn’t think he was a god.”
As a manager looking to sign musical talents, happening upon a ‘god’ is as good as it gets. Naturally, he approached Hendrix, signed him up in an instant and sheltered him from the prying eyes of Manhattan by bringing him home to England. More specifically, he brought him to the small, rough-and-tumble working-class suburb of Heaton.
Strangely, this proved to be the ideal place for the six-string maestro to flourish under the stewardship of a wily local who had already been at the top himself. Chandler, whose own trip to the top came thanks to a song based on a 16th-century ballad, urged Hendrix to double down on his knack for pairing pioneering newness with bygone blues.
Hendrix was inspired and endeavoured to craft a fuller approach to his artistry. “All those people who don’t like Bob Dylan’s songs should read his lyrics,” he once said, “They are filled with the joys and sadness of life.” Now, he suddenly had a manager encouraging him to meld the humanity of Dylan’s introspection with the visceral edge of guitar riffs that were threatening to pluck Sputnik out of orbit.
And he had the perfect Lowry-like local streets to draw upon. So, to hone this new style, shortly before recording The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s stunning debut album, Hendrix reportedly practised like a man possessed for a while on the workaday streets around Chillingham Road.
Weary fellows heading to and from shipyards and stoned students on their way to university in the city centre would mosey on by the odd sight of a star in the making playing the guitar with his teeth outside of a butcher shop that specialised in tripe. Enthused by his recent signing, Hendrix would pay little mind to the ambivalence that he was met with, and just jammed on fine-tuning his emerging sound.
In an age before camera-phones, people just had to take their colleagues’ word for it when they claimed, ‘I’ve just seen the greatest guitarist in the world busking outside of McCutcheon’s corner shop’. But beyond that peculiarity, these brief days in Heaton before Chandler summoned him to a studio really did prove pivotal.
Hendrix honed his chops with renewed passion, inspired by the sudden upswell of public appreciation that had thus far somehow evaded the maestro. Beyond his fabled days in Heaton have now become riddled with local myth.
But if you enter the Cumberland Arms, and mutter the word Hendrix to the right bald geriatric, you’ll be told a tall tale about Hendrix busking a blitzing rendition of Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ that could’ve knocked the socks off of Gandhi.
While Dylan’s original version hadn’t even been released during the timeframe that Hendrix was reportedly in Heaton, when it comes to a tale as twisted as this, who knows? Who really knows? All that is for sure, is that he left the cobbled roads of a frosty Heaton behind with a few well-worked tracks ready for the studio, and a manager with full faith in his fleshed-out abilities. And the rest, as they say, is ancient history.
