The calamitous tour with Jimi Hendrix, Cat Stevens and The Walker Brothers
After moving to Britain and forming The Jimi Hendrix Experience in the mid-1960s, Hendrix and his band were invited to join Engelbert Humperdinck, The Walker Brothers and Cat Stevens on a package tour. At the time, they had only released a couple of singles and were adding the finishing touches to their debut album, Are You Experienced.
From the off, the tour was a recipe for disaster. The Walker Brothers, who were the headline act, had a soft-pop sound with harmonising vocals. Undoubtedly, the silky sounds of Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck would please most Walkers Brothers fans. Still, the overdriven psychedelic howl of the Jimi Hendrix Experience was going to stick out like a bloodied thumb.
In the run-up to the tour, Disc Magazine’s Penny Valentine interviewed Hendrix: “‘I can just hardly wait,’ says the cool Mr. Hendrix about a tour on which he and his wild Experience will fit in about as well as a trio of San Francisco hippies at a vicarage tea-party. ‘But I’m a bit worried about the type of people who’re gonna see the tour. If they come to see the Walker Brothers, then they’re not going to want us. I just hope they listen-but if they do scream for the Walkers during our act, I’ll just ignore them and play for myself. You get the same sort of mixed bills in the States, like the Beach Boys and James Brown on the same tour.’”
A week later, Disc Magazine reported on the tour’s first gig. “For Jimi Hendrix, this tour is a new experience, and he was not at all brought down by his rather mild first-night reception. ‘This is almost like a rest for me after the hectic life of constant club work’”, he announced. “Jimi was neither scared nor depressed and believes audiences would have been more enthusiastic towards his act if he had released the exciting album [Are You Experienced] he and the group are just completing.”
“Added Jimi: ‘I really hate to lose out. You can’t blame me for being selfish by trying to get our songs across to the public as quick as possible.’”
Chris Welch of Melody Maker reviewed the opening show, detailing the bout of pyromania toward its close. “Jimi Hendrix was hit by amplifier trouble, and while he was visually exciting, his guitar could not be heard above the exciting drumming of Mitch Mitchell,” Welch wrote. “They wore beautifully coloured stage gear almost as bright as the flames which leapt from Jimi’s guitar at the end of his set. Hendrix was lying on stage playing the guitar with his teeth when it suddenly burst into flames.”
He continued: “Jimi left backwards and ran off stage, followed by his group. The guitar was left burning dangerously near the closed curtains. Unfortunately, Jimi and compere Nick Jones were both burnt in the accident. An attendant rushed on stage with a fire extinguisher and put out the flames, which were leaping 10 feet in the air while the audience yelled in surprise. Hendrix said: ‘I was on my knees at the time, and the guitar had kept giving me slight electric shocks when it burst into flames. I was kinda shocked, and that’s why I just ran off.’”
Hendrix’s tall story regarding electric shocks may have had Welch fooled, but Cat Stevens remembered the events as Hendrix’s first flirtation with pyrotechnics. “The first night, I think it was at Finsbury Astoria, and then we heard: ‘Ahh, there’s a fire on stage!’ But then we found out, of course, that was the first time he ever lit his guitar on stage,” Stevens recalled during his appearance on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2020.
In a conversation with Disc Magazine after a series of destructive tour stops, Hendrix recognised that the tour manager was displeased with his antics. “The tour manager (Don Finlayson) told me to stop using all this in my act because he said it was obscene and vulgar. I have been threatened every night of the tour so far, and I’m not going to stop for him. There’s nothing vulgar about it at all. I’ve been using this act all the way since I’ve been in Britain. I just don’t know where these people get the idea from that it’s an obscene act.”
At around the same time, Hendrix told Melody Maker: “We refuse to change our act, and as a result, my amp gets cut off at the funniest times. It’s really funny playing for this tour. Before I go on, I turn around and find a guitar string is broken. Or I find my guitar is all out of tune after I just tuned it – I kinda don’t know what to say about that. They just don’t give a damn about us, but they’re not getting rid of us unless we are officially thrown off the tour.”
Despite the bullying from tour management and controversy surrounding the nature of Hendrix’s performance, the band wasn’t thrown off the tour. The run of shows came to a close following two final evenings at Granada Theatre in Tooting.
In an interview a few years later, following Hendrix’s death, Humperdinck remembered the tour of ’67. “At one point on one of those dates, my guitarist didn’t show up, and Jimi said, ‘Don’t worry, man. I’ll play for you,’” he remembered. “I said, ‘You can’t be out in the open playing, you know, you’re a star in your own right.’ He said, ‘I tell you what I’ll do, I’ll play behind the curtain.’ And it was like listening to three guitars behind the curtain when he played.”
“But Jimi was quite an unusual character even then, you know,” Humperdinck added. “He not only used to burn his guitars and used to smash them up and all that business, but basically, he was a real nice human being. Because I happened to make a comment one day, and I said, ‘Jimi, that’s a nice jacket, man.’ He says, ‘I’ll give it to you, man.’ He wanted to take it off his back and give it to me. I wish I had taken it now, at least I would’ve had something very special from a very special man.”
