"It's really hard to know what people want around here sometimes. All I'm interested in is doing what I feel but, like, right now I don't. I can't feel anything right now because, like, there's a few things that have happened, you know. I just have to lay back and think about it all." - Jimi Hendrix (final interview, 11 September 1970, with NME's Keith Allston in England seven days before his death).
By John Potash /
By John Potash /
Rock Creek Free Press, 28 May 2010
Newly released songs by legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix have led music magazines such as Rolling Stone to feature him in cover stories, despite his death four decades ago. Closer scrutiny of Hendrix’s life suggests that US and British Intelligence targeted Hendrix for developing anti-war and pro-Black Panther politics. Such targeting helps explain why Hendrix failed to release much of his music before his death. It also exemplifies the extreme tactics imperialist governments use to stop anyone who could have more sway over people’s hearts and minds than does the government.
This past March stores started selling
a CD of Hendrix’s previously unreleased recordings, titled “Valleys
of Neptune”. These dozen songs were some of the hundreds Hendrix failed
to release during his brief career. Posthumous releases of the
prolific guitarist’s recordings continued for decades after his
death. New evidence supports one of the reasons why Jimi Hendrix’s
manager, Mike Jeffery, worked to block Hendrix from releasing more of
his songs. Leading biographers have said in print that Jeffery stated he
“used to” work for MI6—Britain’s CIA. In 2009, James Wright, a road
manager for a band that Mike Jeffery also managed, The Animals, made
an important claim against Jeffery. In his published book Wright
claimed that Jeffery admitted to him that he had Hendrix killed
because the rock star wanted to end his management contract with
Wright.
US/British Intelligence 1960’s Attack on Political Musicians
Researchers such as
British magazine editor Frances Stonor Saunders outlined how
American and British Intelligence forces colluded in their work
against leftist artists, writers and musicians. She gave several
examples of this in her book, The Cultural Cold War.
Black artists were a particular Intelligence focus partly because the
racism blacks experienced often led them to have anti imperialist
political perspectives.
For example, intelligence
agencies closely monitored black writers Richard Wright and Franz
Fanon (Gayle, Richard Wright, 1980). Researchers highly
suspected US Intelligence actions in both these writers’ deaths,
particularly Wright’s early death. Frances Saunders said that after
Wright moved to Paris, the CIA and FBI monitored him closely until
“he died in mysterious circumstances in 1960.”
US
intelligence also had a particular longtime concern about political
musicians and had sophisticated strategies for attacking them. An
exposed intelligence document reviewed by a 1976 congressional
committee examining the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program detailed
many tactics used against political musicians (Constantine, Covert
War Against Rock, 2001). It instructed agents to: “Show them as
scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living
conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and
sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges.
Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send
articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and
free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get
records of their bank accounts. Obtain specimens of
their handwriting. Provoke target groups into rivalries that may
result in death.”
Hendrix’s Rise in Britain, Politicization and Intelligence Targeting
In the US, Hendrix received
little fame during the mid-1960s while he toured with music legends
such as Sam Cooke (“You Send Me”). Cooke died under
questionable circumstances himself. Jimi Hendrix then moved to
England where he quickly rose to stardom. Mike Jeffery coerced his
way into managing Hendrix by 1967. Evidence of Jeffery’s continued
MI6 work included his partnerships with CIA-linked figures, his
sudden huge wealth, and his skills at acquiring CIA-type tax havens
in the Bahamas.
By 1968 Jimi Hendrix had become
popular worldwide. The assassination of Martin Luther King that year
led Hendrix to engage in more radical-left activism.
Hendrix’s fiancee, Monika Danneman, and top biographers, such as
Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek, noted Hendrix’s change. He began
promoting the Black Panthers in interviews, played benefits for
Panther Bobby Seale and the war-protesting Chicago Seven, and
dedicated his last album to the Panthers.
With his vast popularity
among blacks and whites, Jimi Hendrix began posing a threat to
bigoted pro-war groups. Former Air Force Secretary Townsend Hoopes
said one of the government’s greatest fears was “the fateful merging
of anti-war and racial dissension.” The FBI and police began
targeting Hendrix in the US, and other countries aided their efforts
when he went abroad. Such collaboration was common through the
International police group “Interpol.” The FBI started a closely
guarded file on Hendrix and placed him on a security list of
subversives to be rounded up for detainment in case of a
national emergency. Police detectives began round-the-clock surveillance
of Hendrix and his band.
Media Smears and Spy Manager Manipulations
Intelligence forces appeared
to use several of the tactics outlined in the above intelligence
memorandum regarding political musicians. In Toronto, Canadian
federal police arrested Hendrix at an airport, claiming that he
transported drugs. Shapiro and
Glebbeek cited Hendrix saying he’d never take such a risk and that
his manager, Mike Jeffery, set up that airport arrest.
Furthermore,
regarding Hendrix and drug use, Shapiro and Glebbeek said that,
contrary to popular belief, Hendrix produced his first classic album,
“Are You Experienced?”, with virtually no drug use. After his rise
to fame, Hendrix only snorted heroin a couple times and did some
pills, while also tripping on LSD at times. By later 1969, Danneman
said Hendrix gave it all up except for minimal amounts of alcohol and
marijuana use. Throughout Hendrix’s life and after his death, media
reports claimed Hendrix’s depravity and debauchery with drugs.
Shapiro, Glebbeek and Monika Danneman
also claimed that manager Mike Jeffery consistently sabotaged the
guitar legend’s political activist work. For example, Danneman said
that when Hendrix played one antiwar benefit show that Jeffery
opposed, Hendrix believed his manager dosed his drink with LSD.
Hendrix had given up LSD by that time and ended his set
early, discouraged that he wasn’t playing to his best ability.
The biographers and
Danneman further accused Jeffery of manipulating Hendrix with Mafi
a connections to intimidate him not to end their management
relationship. For example, few know that Mafia figures kidnapped
Hendrix for several days in Manhattan in 1969. Jeffery collaborated
with a band manager named Jerry Morrison to miraculously get Hendrix
free, supposedly with “tougher” Mafia. Morrison formerly worked as
the propagandist for CIA-supported Haitian dictator Papa Doc
Duvalier. Researchers have previously noted how the Mafia and US
Intelligence colluded to target other black entertainers, as well as
Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy (William Pepper, Act
of State; William Turner and Jonn Christian, The Assassination
of Robert F. Kennedy).
Multiple reports cite other
ways Mike Jeffery tried to undermine Jimi Hendrix’s career. For
example, as stated above, Jeffery blocked release of many Hendrix
albums. Jeffery gained this control by getting Hendrix to sign a
complicated set of contracts in 1968. Jeffery
also stole vast sums of money from Hendrix, leaving him broke at
times.
Hendrix’s Mysterious Death After Firing Manager, and Government Cover-up
Rumors continue as to how
Jimi Hendrix died at the age of 27. Living with him at that time,
Monika Danneman appeared to give the most reliable account. While
Shapiro and Glebbeek had some discrepancies with Danneman’s
recollection of Hendrix’s last 24 hours, most of their eyewitnesses’
reports backed Danneman’s general description.
Danneman
said that on September 18, 1970, the day after Hendrix finally fired
Jeffery, she found her fiance unconscious in their London apartment
bed before noon. Hendrix had been at a party
the night before and took sleeping pills to counter unusually bad
insomnia he had that night. Danneman called an ambulance and Hendrix
died within an hour or two.
The coroner said that
what Hendrix had in him shouldn’t have killed him. The coroner found
a non-fatal dose of sleeping tablets, a small amount of alcohol, a
trace of the barbiturate Seconal, and 20 mg of amphetamine (speed).
The coroner declared that Hendrix should have recovered from the
pills, so the official cause of death was “inhalation of vomit due to
Barbiturate intoxication.” Danneman said that after Hendrix returned
from the party that night, he showed her a handful of pills people gave
him at the party, which he then discarded. Danneman suspected that
someone put pills in his drinks without his knowledge.
Government officials’ foul
play abounded thereafter. Danneman said that when police
investigated her place they failed to take anything and warned her to
not say anything about the death. Then, an official British
inquest resulted in the London coroner and the inquest members
declaring an open (inconclusive) verdict on Hendrix’s death. The
inquest had only called three witnesses to testify: Danneman,
Hendrix’s road manager and the coroner. They failed to have the
ambulance workers, the people Hendrix saw at the party, or the
hospital doctors testify. Such investigative omissions further
indicate possible government intelligence involvement in
Hendrix’s murder.
Further evidence of
government foul play includes media-echoed police reports that
Hendrix left recorded messages with his friend Chas Chandler, saying
that he was suicidal. Chandler said he didn’t own an answering
machine. The coroner also found an unidentifiable compound in
Hendrix’s body. Top doctors told Danneman that because the coroner
waited several days to do Hendrix’s autopsy, any poisons in
his system may have no longer been in a detectable state.
Other Investigations and Government Cover-up Around Hendrix’s Death
Groups reexamined Jimi Hendrix’s
death at least twice in later years. In 1975, the magazine Crawdaddy investigated
and concluded that a death squad of undercover intelligence agents
killed Hendrix. While that magazine’s sources are uncertain, more
official inquests followed.
In 1992, England’s
attorney general ordered an inquiry into Hendrix’s death, and
Scotland Yard also re-examined the case. Danneman, Shapiro and
Glebbeek easily contradicted Scotland Yard, exposing the agency’s
cover-up. For example, Scotland Yard claimed to quote Hendrix’s
attending doctor, Dr. John Bannister, saying Hendrix was “dead on
arrival… [dying] in the ambulance or at home.” The ambulance workers
denied Hendrix was dead on arrival, as supported by official reports
of his death an hour after arriving at the hospital.
Danneman also asked for
more information from Dr. Bannister. Scotland Yard told her he
had been struck off England’s official list of doctors, without any
further explanation. In 2009, Dr. Bannister turned up, reporting in
a London Times article that he moved to Australia in
1972. He eventually lost his license there for fraudulent behavior.
In that 2009 Times article, though, Bannister supported
road manager James Wright’s assertion about Jeffery saying he had
Hendrix killed and that Hendrix appeared to have been murdered.
Fight over Hendrix’s Posthumous Music, Linked Deaths and his Legacy
Mike
Jeffery confiscated all of Hendrix’s recordings and belongings from
his New York studio. It took 25 years for Al Hendrix to gain
the rights to his son’s music from Warner Records. And then, on
albums and memorabilia that made over $100 million in sales, he was
only given $2 million.
Several
groups sued Hendrix’s manager, Mike Jeffery, for money he owed them.
A judge allowed Jeffery to travel for business during the trial, and
Jeffery reportedly died in a plane crash in 1973. Because a witness
only identified Jeffery from his jewelry, some believe he escaped
with the shell company fortunes he created. Jeffery created his tax
haven shell with the same Bahamas institutions that worked later with
George H.W. Bush’s CIA in the BCCI/Iran-Contra scandal.
One
key Hendrix-linked death occurred much later. Monika Danneman said
Jeffery threatened to kill her if she published the memoir about
Hendrix that she wrote in 1971. She said she lost her book manuscript
twice between 1971 and 1973, first to a thief she believed Jeffery
sent, and then to a Jeffery associate.
In
1995, Monika Danneman finally published a book (The Inner World of
Jimi Hendrix) about Hendrix’s activist political plans,
Jeffery’s sabotage, and government cover-up. News reports said
Danneman killed herself in 1996. Her close friends believe she was
murdered. They said Danneman had continued getting death threats over
the years and had just finished a long interview for a film on
Hendrix.
While most rock historians still
consider Jimi Hendrix the top guitarist of all time, his
image remains soiled with falsehoods. Evidence supports that he
was moving away from drugs and that intelligence forces killed him
for the political activism he started in 1969. Such evidence also
suggests that other political musicians’ early deaths deserve more
scrutiny.
This article was adapted from a
chapter of The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders,
http://fbiwarontupac.com.
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