'How I helped to make Jimi Hendrix a rock'n'roll star'

Linda Keith lent a young blues player a guitar belonging to her boyfriend, Keith Richards – and the rest is history. In a rare interview, she tells her story

Edward Helmore
The Observer, Saturday 14 September 2013


Linda Keith modelling a snakeskin suit in 1967. Photograph: Ron Case/Getty Images

Rock'n'roll has had many pivotal moments, but few are as clear cut as when Linda Keith, a 20-year-old British Vogue model and blues fanatic, lent a virtually unknown Jimi Hendrix a white Fender Stratocaster, the instrument that would become forever entwined with the guitarist's legendary and unsurpassed technique.

One person rightfully aggrieved by this gesture was the guitar's owner and Linda's boyfriend of three years, Keith Richards. Richards, then on the Rolling Stones' 1966 tour of the US, wasn't going to get his guitar or his striking, dark-haired girlfriend back – she had made it her mission to launch Hendrix's career. But he and Brian Jones did write the song Ruby Tuesday about her – "Goodbye Ruby Tuesday/ Who could hang a name on you?/ When you change with every new day/ Still I'm gonna miss you" – and described Linda tenderly as "the one that first broke my heart".

And what of the guitar? At the time, Hendrix's own was in the pawn shop. Linda had invited Seymour Stein, the man who later discovered Madonna, to a showcase at Cafe Au Go-Go in New York's Village to listen to Hendrix's set.

"It was the night he smashed up a white guitar," she told The Observer. "I was beside myself. I'd lent him a guitar belonging to my boyfriend and there he was smashing one up on stage! I was absolutely livid with Jimi because to me that's the most un-cool thing to do."

Linda's role in Hendrix's life, while he was still performing as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, is portrayed in a new film, All Is By My Side, starring OutKast's André Benjamin as Hendrix and the British actress Imogen Poots as Linda. Director John Ridley told the New York Times he had been inspired by an obscure, late-career Hendrix recording called Send My Love to Linda and "the emotional velocity" of this pivotal but little-known chapter in Hendrix's emergence as a rock star.

The film received broadly positive reviews at a screening at the Toronto Film Festival last weekend and was praised for focusing on Hendrix at a key moment before he was transformed into a superstar, and not in the grand, cradle-to-grave sweep that has become formulaic to the music biography genre. The Guardian film critic, Henry Barnes, gave the film four stars, commending Poots's performance and describing Benjamin's as "an impeccable impression".

Over the years, Linda, who was raised in Hampstead, north London, and now lives in New Orleans with her husband, the record producer John Porter, has been largely reticent about telling her part in Hendrix's story. She fact-checked a story on the episode that Ridley prepared for the US public radio service NPR that formed the basis of his film; and, as part of the year-long commemorations that have marked the 70th anniversary of the guitarist's birth in 1942, she is set to appear in a two-hour documentary, Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A Comin', commissioned by the Hendrix estate.

Linda recalls first seeing Hendrix play at the Cheetah club in New York. "It was so clear to me. I couldn't believe nobody had picked up on him before because he'd obviously been around," Linda recalls. "He was astonishing – the moods he could bring to music, his charisma, his skill and stage presence. Yet nobody was leaping about with excitement. I couldn't believe it."

Linda's appraisal of the young American bluesman was informed by listening to blues masters on BBC radio and she had seen American musicians such as Sonny Terry and Sonny Boy Williamson when they played in London or at folk festivals. Her best friend, Sheila Klein, was dating Andrew Oldham, who became the Rolling Stones' manager, and although she avoided meeting Richards, it was perhaps inevitable that she would be drawn into the band's orbit. "I'd seen them in clubs. They were interesting but it wasn't anything that really grabbed me," Linda recalls.

But as Richards claims in his autobiography, Life, it was the more sophisticated, worldly Linda who seduced him at a record release party: "She made a straight line for me. And I was absolutely, totally in love."

Linda, who was by then posing for David Bailey after she had been discovered delivering mail at Vogue House (her first photographic assignment was modelling hats for a spread in The Observer), bonded with Richards over their shared love of music. "He was a blues aficionado and that was why we got on so well," she recalls. "It completely counteracted his shyness and that's all I wanted to talk about anyway." To the guitarist's annoyance, his new girlfriend banned him from playing the group's music on her record player. "He knew I was never a huge fan. I was hugely into black music so they sounded a bit pale by comparison," she says.

Still, Linda would go to America for Rolling Stones tours and base herself in New York or Los Angeles. It was on the band's fifth tour in three years that she saw Hendrix for the first time. "My initial thought, of course, was Keith must see this," she says. But word soon reached Richards that his girlfriend was hanging out with Hendrix. "I was determined that he should be noticed, get a record deal and blow everybody's mind. I knew it was all there so I went for it."

Linda invited Oldham to the showcase. The evening didn't go well. "It was a dreadful night. Jimi was dishevelled in his playing and in the way he looked. Andrew was weird as well. He didn't want to know. Maybe he'd heard the rumours that I'd been hanging out with this guy. Maybe he'd been sent down by Keith. Who knows? But it made me very anxious." Then she brought Stein, and the guitar was smashed. Stein saw a huge argument brewing and fled.

"Some of his movements were great but he was also a trickster – playing the guitar over his head or with his teeth. He didn't really need any of that," Linda says. The songs that would become Are You Experienced? were already in their elemental state and he was yet to don the psychedelic militaria that became his trademark.

"Oh, his fashion sense was absolutely dreadful. He wore dreadful clothes – big Copacabana shirts with too-short bell-bottoms and shoes with holes in them. He had processed hair that had spent the nights in curlers so when he took the curlers out it remained in exactly the same form. It wasn't a good look."

Linda's breakthrough came, finally, when she invited the Animals' guitarist-turned-manager Chas Chandler down to see Hendrix play his regular mid-afternoon set at Cafe Wha?. "You'd come out the bright sun into this cave of a room. Then the stage lights would come up and there's Jimi playing the opening chords of Hey Joe. Well, it was quite mindblowing and I'm not surprised he blew Chas's mind with the first chord. It even blew my mind – and I knew it was coming!"

Hendrix began to achieve success under Chandler. He moved to London to form the Experience and Linda was manoeuvred out. "He had management, a girlfriend and other people telling him how to be and my influence was possibly seen as some kind of threat. Maybe they thought I would try to influence him away from a commercial sound to a more purist blues."

Richards, meanwhile, alarmed that his erstwhile girlfriend had fallen in with bad company and patterns of drug use he had yet to develop, called Linda's father to tell him his daughter was in distress. "He told my father to come and get me. When he walked into the Cafe Au Go-Go, I thought, 'God, that looks like my father'. He took me by the arm and marched me out."

Richards was waiting in London. "There he was, looking rather smug. I told him to @#$%& off. Keith did do a bit of the dirty on me. But he genuinely felt I was in danger and he could save me. And God bless him, maybe he did."

Linda and Hendrix lost touch completely. "I was still the one he came to when the chips were really down," she says. And before his death he made contact again. "He wrote saying he'd written a new track, See Me Linda, Hear Me, I'm Playing the Blues. I always loved his blues playing but then most of his songs do sound like the blues."

[www.theguardian.com]

Way cool - thanks for posting that

Although she knew him only briefly,Linda Keith was a true friend of Hendrix -- one of the few.

Very impressive story. Didn't know

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Keep On Rolling

Strange she never mentions that she changed her name due to her obsession with Keith!

Cool

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crumbling_mice
Strange she never mentions that she changed her name due to her obsession with Keith!

Did she? I didn't know that.

I remember there were a lot of jokes at the time that if men took the woman's name when they got married, and if THEY got married, he'd be Keith Keith. Yes, that's just how hilarious we were back in the '60s.


Thanks for posting this, btw, interesting article.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-09-15 02:08 by Aquamarine.

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bye bye johnny
But he and Brian Jones did write the song Ruby Tuesday about her – "Goodbye Ruby Tuesday/ Who could hang a name on you?/ When you change with every new day/ Still I'm gonna miss you"

Eh?

Keith wrote in Life that the song was about Linda Keith. And it's been written elsewhere that Brian helped with the music.

Mick: "It's just a nice melody, really. And a lovely lyric. Neither of which I wrote, but I always enjoy singing it." - [www.rollingstone.com]

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crumbling_mice
Strange she never mentions that she changed her name due to her obsession with Keith!

It's her real name. Her father was Alan Keith, a well known radio personality.

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latebloomer

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crumbling_mice
Strange she never mentions that she changed her name due to her obsession with Keith!

It's her real name. Her father was Alan Keith, a well known radio personality.

+1 - I reckon crumbling_mice was just joking, but the Department of Historical Accuracy
would appreciate at least a smiley in that post to let innocents know it's not true! :E

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Wry Cooter

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bye bye johnny
But he and Brian Jones did write the song Ruby Tuesday about her – "Goodbye Ruby Tuesday/ Who could hang a name on you?/ When you change with every new day/ Still I'm gonna miss you"

Eh?

Yeah well, that's Edward Helmore's interpretation.

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with sssoul

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latebloomer

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crumbling_mice
Strange she never mentions that she changed her name due to her obsession with Keith!

It's her real name. Her father was Alan Keith, a well known radio personality.

+1 - I reckon crumbling_mice was just joking, but the Department of Historical Accuracy
would appreciate at least a smiley in that post to let innocents know it's not true! :E

Ahh, I see...well, I'll believe anything before I've finished my morning cup of coffee, with ssoul. Thanks for the DOHA correction.

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latebloomer
Her father was Alan Keith ...

... who was born as Alexander Kossoff

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Keep On Rolling

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Rolling Hansie

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latebloomer
Her father was Alan Keith ...

... who was born as Alexander Kossoff

Really, Hansie? Maybe I should wait for confirmation from the DOHA...

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latebloomer
Really, Hansie?

According to [en.wikipedia.org]

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Keep On Rolling

Keithoff, then?

Her father's brother was David Kossoff, the actor, and also the father of Paul Kossoff, the great Free guitarist.

Alan Kossoff used to do the light classical music on Radio 2, Your Hundred Best Tunes, and when he died, he was considered the oldest DJ in Britain.

For me it's wierd to think that keith gave a shit about any girl before Anita. I recently met the actor who's playing Keith in this Hendrix film, he said there's a scene where he shows up at Linda's house & goes crazy at her. He also said he thought a lot of his scenes would end up on the cutting room floor, i'm not sure why. Looking forward to seeing it though.

Very pretty lady.

After reading Linda Keith's words (I can't tell from the story if these are recent quotes in relation to the movie or not) I thought I'd post this by Jimi's much longer term girlfriend, Kathy Ethchingham. I wasn't there, but her story sounds very plausible to me. I'm always leary of projects that don't have permission to use the real music, but then the Hendrix family is by no means 100 % pure and honorable either, so.......



[www.kathyetchingham.com]

Etchingham can be taken with a large grain of salt.

"Advises him how to play the guitar..."

OK, so I guess she DIDN'T change her name because of her obsession with Keith. I guess that explains why I didn't know that! But I also had no idea of her connection to David Kossoff (fixture on early Sunday evening broadcasting on British TV) and thus Paul. That's a real 6-degrees-of-separation deal.

Interesting...Thanx for posting...

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Aquamarine
OK, so I guess she DIDN'T change her name because of her obsession with Keith. I guess that explains why I didn't know that! But I also had no idea of her connection to David Kossoff (fixture on early Sunday evening broadcasting on British TV) and thus Paul. That's a real 6-degrees-of-separation deal.

David Kossoff was a bit like Bob Dylan in that he, too, converted from Orthadox Judaism to Christianity. He was also behind a festival in the 1970s, known as the Festival of Light, which involved Mary Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Cliff Richard. It was music, art, and literature against the culture of eroticism within the arts.

David Kossoff also went on tours, speaking against drug-use within the music industry after the demise of his son, Paul.

An interesting question would be: did Keith, or Mick Jagger, ever meet Paul Kossoff and Free ? I know that Clapton met Paul Kossoff, as Blind Faith were supported by Free on some of their gigs, and Clapton was impressed by Paul's vibrato technique. I also know, at some point, circa 72/73, Mick Taylor was approached by Paul Rodgers and Andy Frazier to join Free, but he declined to do so.

I also know that Paul Kossoff turned up on Jim Capaldi solo albums, and John Martyn albums.

Cool article!

THE AGE ------- 4 June 2014



ROCKMAN