James “Tappy” Wright, a former roadie who worked for the Animals and Jimi Hendrix, has something he needs to get off his chest. Hendrix, Wright claims, was murdered by his manager, who was the beneficiary of a $2m life-insurance policy the guitarist had unwittingly signed shortly before his death in 1970 from asphyxiation in his own vomit. In a statement to promote his opportunistic autobiography, the author says: “You look at all the Hendrix books that have come out in the last 40 years and it’s all the same regurgitated shit.” I’m not sure quite how you regurgitate that, and mercifully I have no experience of asphyxiating in vomit, but reading this spirit-sapping, self-serving mea culpa left me wanting to have a good scrub down.
Hendrix’s legal and financial legacies have been so messy, so twisted, so voracious in their ability to suck in and spit out appellants, chancers and delusionists, that another conspiracy theory about his death is not particularly shocking. The musician’s manager and supposed murderer, Mike Jeffery, who allegedly confessed all to Wright before his death in a plane crash in 1973, certainly sounds shady, with his boasts about killings carried out in the pay of the secret service. But he also comes across as a fantasist, a thought that never seems to occur to Wright. “Of all the crazy theories there were about Hendrix’s death,” he writes, “there is one I know to be true. There are secrets I don’t need to keep any more.” (Amazing how a publishing contract can concentrate the mind.)
Is the claim credible? Talk to any contemporary of Hendrix’s who encountered him in the lead-up to his death and each one will agree on one thing: that the American, overworked, rattling with pills and awash in alcohol, was spiralling out of control. Taking out the life policy could simply have been good business on Jeffery’s part: he may have seen what was happening to his charge and, albeit cynically, hedged his bets. Again, such a possibility seems to have passed the writer by.
Not the least of Rock Roadie’s achievements is the fact that a book about life in the music business during a golden era has almost nothing to say about music. With casual, criminal brevity, Wright places himself at the recording of the Animals’ seminal House of the Rising Sun; and at a tiny smoke-filled venue in Greenwich Village when the young Hendrix first performs Hey Joe. Both memories are dispatched in two or three sentences. What might be termed the glancing blows of memoir — those asides that hint, often unintentionally, at repressed emotions, unresolved issues and festering resentments — are also largely absent. Wright is a desperately clunky prose stylist, too lacking in curiosity to bring the 1960s pop world alive, too intent on itemising, with a startling lack of grace, the women he bedded to capture with any vividness what rubbing shoulders with Eric Burdon, John Lennon, Ike and Tina Turner, Elvis and Hendrix himself must have been like. (“Bare white arses hammered away, and I stared out over a sea of naked breasts.”) Every chuckle is mirthless, every line of (self) inquiry closed. Exclamation marks litter a text entirely free of amusement value.
Nor are there any Zeppelin- or Stones-like tales of excess-all-areas shenanigans, or indeed any scandalous revelations (beyond the book’s central contention of murder). Revealingly, Wright focuses chiefly on his own carnal escapades; it is as if the journey that took this miner’s son from Whitley Bay to America, in one of the most exciting periods in pop history, was merely a matter of travel logistics. The passion he presumably felt for music (he was in a band before becoming the Animals’ tour manager) seems to have been no match for his sexual appetite; he is nostalgic for the shagging, not the singers or the songs. Reading Rock Roadie is akin to being trapped in a pub by its resident saloon-bar bore, its 236 pages of flaccid sexual recollection as wearying as the anecdotage of the impervious career drinker.
One way or another, every pop musician in the 1960s got screwed. Wright would have us believe that at least one of them got killed, too. It’s a big claim, but a minor and scarcely believable point in a book that may leave many readers feeling they’ve also been screwed. Wright moans about “the shit that has been shovelled” on the subject of Hendrix over the years. And now he’s added to the pile.
Rock Roadie by James "Tappy" Wright and Rod Weinberg Jr
JR Books £16.99 pp236
