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copied from Quashie. Jimi tried out some of this outrageousness with
the Squires, but drew little reaction.
After one particularly exasperating Squires gig, Jimi wrote a poem
about his dissatisfaction. It detailed how his so-called friends were in-
terested only in his outrageous fashion sense and didn t  dig the way
I m thinking. He had so few friends at the time that his true subject
must have been his bandmates in the Squires. He never finished the
R OOM F UL L OF MI R R OR S 129
poem or set it to music. Like many of his writings from the era, it was
simply an idea jotted on a scrap of paper and stuck into a guitar case.
The title of this particular poem could have summed up Jimi s inner
demons, both past and future. He called it,  My Friends of Fashion
Turned Out to be My Enemies of Thought.
C H A P T E R T W E L V E
MY PROBLEM CHILD
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
May 1966 July 1966
 Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating,
variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and
spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and
hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was particularly
remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a
door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed into
optical perceptions. . . . There was to my knowledge no other
known substance that evoked such profound psychic effects in such
extremely low doses, that caused such dramatic changes in
human consciousness and our experience of the inner
and outer world.
 DR. ALBERT HOFFMAN, LSD: My Problem Child
A BROWN-EYED GIRL, a Minnesota-born folksinger, and a psyche-
delic drug came into Jimi Hendrix s life on a night late in May of 1966
and each would have an indelible effect on his career. This trio of forces
would help open an inner world for Jimi that had been previously un-
R OOM F UL L OF MI R R OR S 131
tapped and forever change what had seemed, up until then, his sideman
fate. Once these changes took hold, his previous life playing fetch-
and-get-it for Little Richard, or dancing in a costume in an R&B
revue would be just distant, and unpleasant, memories. It would be
the next phase of his frequent reinvention of himself, and this persona
would prove to be a powerful and lasting one.
He met the girl first. She was twenty-year-old Linda Keith, a strik-
ingly beautiful model, who was everything Jimi was not: She was
British, Jewish, well-off, highly educated, and an integral part of swing-
ing London s in crowd. Perhaps most impressive to Jimi, her then
boyfriend was Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Linda had begun
dating Richards in 1963 and had witnessed the genesis of the Stones,
which made her, by proxy, something akin to British music royalty. The
Stones were due to arrive in the U.S. in a month for their highly antici-
pated 1966 tour; Linda had come over early to get a bigger taste of
New York s club scene. As a music freak, she loved the blues and trav-
eled with a case of her favorite 45s. Beautiful, smart, and music savvy,
her presence was enough to make young men swoon.
They swooned when she walked into the Cheetah Club in late
May, where Jimi was playing another woeful gig with Curtis Knight
and the Squires. Throughout that spring, Jimi had sworn he was going
to quit Knight s band for good, and he finally kept that promise this
particular stand would represent his last Squires booking. And no won-
der he wanted to leave: The club was almost vacant.
The Cheetah was in a building that had once housed one of New
York s grand turn-of-the-century ballrooms. It had reopened in April
1966 as a sophisticated nightspot with spotted fur wallpaper, but it had
yet to catch on. A bar lined one side of the room, and the performers
played on a fifty-foot-wide stage. Linda recalled that there were fewer
than forty people in a room that could hold two thousand. She initially
paid scant attention to the band, until she noticed the guitar player.
 The way his hands moved up and down on the neck of the guitar was
something to watch, she recalled.  He had these amazing hands. I
found myself simply mesmerized by watching him play.
132 C H A R L E S R . C R O S S
Linda was the girlfriend of a famous guitar player, not a talent
scout, but she recognized in Jimi an extraordinary ability. Seeing him
play to a tiny and unappreciative crowd also ignited her sense of justice.
 He was just a brilliant player, and a brilliant blues guitar player, she
remembered.  He was clearly a star, though he was such an odd-
looking star, and it was such an odd place, it didn t seem right. When
the set ended and Jimi was nursing a drink at the bar, Linda and her
friends invited him to their table and lavished him with compliments.
Attention from beautiful models was something Jimi knew little of;
one can only imagine the look on his face when Linda told him she was
Keith Richards s girlfriend and that Richards was due in town soon.
Linda and her friends remained for the last set. When it ended,
they invited Jimi back to an apartment on Sixty-third Street. There they
talked of music, politics, and, inevitably, of drugs. One of Linda s
friends was among the drug cognoscenti. Jimi was asked if he d be in-
terested in taking some acid. His answer showed both his naïveté and
his complete inexperience with psychedelics.  No, I don t want any of
that, he said,  but I d love to try some of that LSD stuff. He said this
straight-faced, not knowing that acid was the street name for LSD.
Prior to 1966, Jimi s drug experimentation had been limited, par-
tially by economic circumstances, to marijuana, hashish, cheap speed,
and, on some rare occasions, cocaine.  In Manhattan, the drugs of
choice were cocaine and marijuana, Taharqa Aleem observed.  No-
body in Harlem was doing acid then. Some African Americans per-
ceived LSD as a  white drug. Later that summer, Jimi tried to talk
his uptown friend Lonnie Youngblood into tripping with him.  Jimi
was saying all that crap you have in your mind, the spiderwebs, this
clears and focuses it, Youngblood recalled. Lonnie gave Jimi a lecture
about the dangers of LSD and how the drug could make you think like
a white person.  That was white kids drugs, Youngblood said.  I [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]