The ObserverJimi Hendrix This article is more than 10 years old'How I helped to make Jimi Hendrix a rock'n'roll star'
This article is more than 10 years oldLinda 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 storyRock'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 fuck 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."
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