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him. Jimi s lawyer was also looking for Jimi; meetings were planned
that week in London to try to settle the overseas claims resulting from
the Ed Chalpin PPX lawsuit. Jimi never showed for those appoint-
ments. Diana Carpenter s lawyers were also seeking Jimi, trying to force
him to take a blood test in her paternity suit against him over daughter
Tamika; they, too, were unable to find him.
If Jimi was a phantom to those seeking him for legal or profes-
sional reasons, several of the important women in his life found him
easy to locate. Kathy Etchingham bumped into Jimi at Kensington
Market. He came up right behind me and grabbed me, she recalled.
Jimi was shopping for antiques and he had a blond woman with him,
whom he didn t introduce. He told Kathy to look him up at the Cum-
berland Hotel. Jimi s relationship with Kathy had been the longest, and
perhaps most intimate, romance of his life. As they parted, she gave
him a peck on the cheek.
328 C H A R L E S R . C R O S S
That week, Jimi also ran into Linda Keith at the Speakeasy. Linda
was leaving the club and he was entering, and they chatted for a few
minutes in the foyer. Their exchange was awkward: Her relationship
with Jimi in New York, back in 1966, had spelled the end of her ro-
mance with Keith Richards, but four years later, she was sporting an en-
gagement ring and a new fianc�. Jimi was with a mysterious blonde
himself. While their meeting appeared accidental, Jimi had, in fact,
sought her out. Though they had not stayed close since the tumultuous
New York period and they had not managed to stay friends Linda
had recently been on his mind. At his Isle of Wight concert, he had
changed a line in Red House to because my Linda doesn t live here
anymore. He had also recorded a studio track two months earlier titled
Send My Love to Linda, which was an ode to her. At the Speakeasy,
Jimi handed Linda a guitar case and said, This is for you. Inside was a
new Stratocaster, his repayment for the instrument she had procured
back when he was a backup player named Jimmy James with no guitar
of his own. Jimi had never fully acknowledged what Linda had done
for his career dragging three producers to see him but the guitar
was a small confession of their past. You don t owe me anything,
Linda said as she attempted to give it back. She told him, in fact, that
her fianc� had a tiny sports car and they had no way to transport a gui-
tar. Still, Jimi insisted. I owe you this, he said. He left Linda the gui-
tar case, grabbed his blond date s hand, and walked away. Linda drove
home with the guitar strapped to the roof of her fianc� s car. When she
later opened the case, she found that in addition to the guitar, there
were letters she had written to him during the summer of 1966. Jimi
had apparently kept these during the entire four years since that time;
now, like a lover forever spurned, he was returning them as if to remind
her of their earlier feelings of romance.
The blond woman whom both Linda and Kathy saw with Jimi
was Monika Dannemann, a twenty-five-year-old ice-skater from D�s-
seldorf whom Jimi had first met in 1969. On Tuesday, September 15,
after his argument with Kirsten Nefer, Jimi had paired up with Danne-
R OOM F UL L OF MI R R OR S 329
mann, who had tracked him down at his hotel. According to Danne-
mann s version in her 1995 book, The Inner World of Jimi Hendrix, over
the previous two years she had maintained a close, intimate relationship
with Jimi, whom she visited in London on several occasions, and they
had kept in touch by letter and phone. During the last week of Au-
gust 1970, he had moved into a room she was renting in a long-stay
hotel. Much of Dannemann s story has been discredited over the
years some of it declared fraudulent by a court of law but she was
indisputably Jimi s London paramour for several days beginning on
Tuesday, September 15. That night the pair showed up at Ronnie
Scott s nightclub, where Eric Burdon and War were playing. Jimi had
hoped to jam with his old friend Burdon but was turned away at the
door because he was staggering, and obviously stoned. For the first
time I d ever seen him, he didn t have his guitar, Eric Burdon recalled.
When I saw him without that guitar, I knew he was in trouble. In one
of Burdon s two autobiographies, he described Jimi as having a head
full of something heroin, Quaaludes. Whatever Jimi had taken, sev-
eral people at the club recalled that his level of intoxication was embar-
rassing, as was watching him the master of the jam be turned away
from a stage because of his condition.
Jimi spent at least part of the next day with Monika. In the late af-
ternoon, they stopped by a party, where Monika introduced herself to
anyone within earshot as Jimi s fianc�e. Though much of Monika s
story was exaggerated, one can easily imagine Jimi rashly asking her to
marry him; he had asked the same of Kirsten Nefer just a few days
prior. Any proposal, however, would hardly have constituted a true in-
tent to wed. Later that night, Jimi and Monika again went to Ronnie
Scott s, where Jimi successfully jammed with Eric Burdon. He looked
better that night, Burdon recalled. They played Tobacco Road and
Mother Earth, and Jimi chose to go back to his old role as band gui-
tarist rather than lead singer. After the jam, Jimi spent the night at
Monika s hotel.
The next morning Thursday, September 17 Jimi woke up late.
330 C H A R L E S R . C R O S S
At around two PM, he had tea in a little garden outside Monika s room.
Monika took twenty-nine photographs of him, some with him playing
his black Stratocaster, which he called the black beauty. During the
afternoon, they went to a bank, a drugstore, and an antiques market.
Jimi bought shirts and trousers. Monika maintained that he was never
out of her sight, yet several people, including Mitch Mitchell and Gerry
Stickells, reached him by phone at his hotel across town that day where
he said he was alone. Mitch said Jimi made plans to meet him later that
night to play with Sly Stone but Jimi failed to show at the appointed
time. During that afternoon, Jimi and Monika ran into Devon Wilson,
who was walking down King s Road. Devon had taken a quick flight [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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