by Noonan McKane » Sun Feb 08, 2009 3:26 am
Well....OK. I was being a bit mischievous, choosing that one. Hotly debated. Some people say it's a disgrace, makes women look like slaves. Others, like me applaud it right up out it's psychedelic mind. Very stoned people have surmised the picture means Jimi is uber-pimp, the photo of him the girl holds out so you can see has the smuggest face of any black cat out of Seattle, anytime.
Fact is, Jimi was so shy and unadvertised, he couldn't stay at the shoot. The ladies were all paid (all volunteered via ads in NME, Radio Times etc for models for 'happening' opportunity, or something daft) £10 cash. £20 if they would take their knickers off. I believe no knickers are visible on the picture.
Fact is, Jimi was such a total big gent, a complicated and a bit emotionally lumbered sort, but a truly nice big lad, that it was inevitable he would be the eternal 'wild man of rock' in the cheap papers. Christ, look: A huge black dude from the Pacific US, plays sessions on all the rnb & soul platters, winds up in swinging London full of LSD, pals with the Beatles! Wild. Poor Jimi got shot by both sides: Endemically racist white European audience mumblingly approved of insanely good blues hybrid of Experience, but struggled with blackness of man. Black militants, raised on blues and soul gospel, who'd have cheered him on a Sam Cooke tour in 1963, despised him by 1966, and called him 'a coconut'. He was black on the outside and white on the inside. It really hurt Jimi. Worse than when, a few years earlier, Jimi got a chance to meet one of his idols, Jerry Lee Lewis on the tarmac at some airport and Lewis turned to his bodyguard and said "Get this ni&&er out of my way." That hurt Jimi.
When the 'wild man of rock' died, and the News Of The W****d told us it was in a wild bleeze of drugs and prostitutes, Jimi was laid quietly dead of mendellsons syndrome. His stomach had only a handful of rice and canape from some shite cocktail party he'd gone to, on his own because Kathy his girlfriend was a bit ill. Jimi came home and got into bed and when Kathy woke next about 3.30am Jimi had died. Sober but still a wee bit lost, god love him. And god rest him.
PS I love 'Electric Ladyland'. Including the cover. I think the girls are all beautiful and it sure doesn't demean them, they're frikken awesome. Y'know people actually object to it because some of the girls are "ugly"! Nazis.
Google: Honoring Jimi:Seattle acknowledges the genius of it's wandering son, or Seattle zoo fury, or insulted JH Foundation challenges...etc, any or all. See what you think yourself.
'my poor mother cried lor' the gypsy was right...'
i shouted out 'who killed the kennedys?' when after all it was you and me