'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child - Softcover

Henderson, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743274016 ISBN 13: 9780743274012

Publisher: Atria, 2009

Synopsis

The expanded edition of the definitive, critically praised, and most beloved biography of music legend Jimi Hendrix—including previously unpublished photos.

Originally published to great acclaim in 1978, ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky was written by poet, scholar, and Hendrix friend David Henderson as a personal favor to Jimi. Since then, it has garnered rave reviews and sold over 500,000 copies, reaching the legions of Hendrix fans worldwide.

This most thorough update on the book in ten years is filled with brand-new photographs and fresh revelations. It includes more of Jimi’s personal writing, more details about his romantic relationships and sexual encounters, and more in-depth research by the author into Jimi’s music and creative life. At once a grand adventure and a vivid record of 1960s culture and politics, ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky shows Hendrix as a member of the Flower Power and the Black Power movements.

With new access to old documents—once covered up by legal barriers—Henderson is now free to tell about Jimi’s opposition to the Vietnam war and his controversial support of the New York Panther 21. With his music selling off the shelves, Hendrix is a rock immortal and this is the only book to tell his whole story—now ready to reach more readers in this paperback edition.

About this title

About the Author:

The poet and writer David Henderson was a founding member of the Umbra Poets, an influential collective of poets and writers who were central to the Black Arts Movement. His books include De Mayor of Harlem and Neo-California. He has been widely published in anthologies and magazines, including The Def Jam Poetry Reader, The Paris Review, and Essence. He has read from his poetry for the permanent archives of the Library of Congress. Born in Harlem and raised in Harlem and the Bronx, Henderson now lives in downtown New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky

CHAPTER 1

September 18, 1970, the Notting Hill Gate section of London. Samarkand Hotel, 22 Lansdowne Crescent, garden suite. The front door is wide open.

The bedroom is dark, blacked out. A solitary figure is on the queen-size bed.

The bed is extremely wet. Jimi is fully dressed. He is on his back spread-eagled like Christ upon the cross. His black jacket is covered by a towel across his shoulders, both soaking wet. Vomit and red wine cover him and are all over the bed. The stench is strong, dominated by the smell of the cheap wine. The stain that suffuses his clothing and the bedding is red, from the red wine, something Jimi Hendrix seldom drank.

Lately it has been no secret that he has big enemies. His loving friends are around him always, yet as spaced out as they usually are, what could they do if he was seriously threatened?

He is alone in the room.

A body, so still against the thin gray mute of London dawn. A room deep somewhere. Misty in soundless sleep. A gray aura murmurs from the long thin body upon the blanket and coverlet. Gas heat whispers underground where the earth rumbles with the sound of machine against concrete. Rising against the pale blue India-print curtains, tiny slits of dawn filter through the top rows of the gauzelike venetian blinds. The potted tree in the tiny sunken courtyard stands against a wide barred window next to the white front door with a gold engraving of a young Buddha. The white door faces a spiraling staircase with a wrought-iron gate at the top. Two lions sit before each of the three gray-white town houses that form the Samarkand Residential Hotel.

On the long residential street of Lansdowne Crescent, the Samarkand is opposite a block-long private park, fenced and locked. The key belongs only to the residents of the crescent. Down the well-kept street, solid brick gray-white town houses sweep in a curve past the Pakistan Embassy residence, twisting on through the groves of high trees that surround the fine homes of upper Notting Hill Gate. At the top of the hill are lines of shops and stores along Latimer Road, where during the dawn hours strange-shaped vans and trucks of English manufacture energetically deliver their wares. The weekend is just about here. The early morning will throb with the energy of people expecting their pay and a holiday.

Past Lansdowne Crescent, the hill begins a steep descent into the flatlands of Notting Hill Gate where the West Indians, East Indians, mulattoes, hippies, and poor whites live. There, the view from below Lansdowne Crescent shows trees so prolific they become a solid mass of green rising like a natural mountain.

At dawn, solitary figures appear at various points along Talbot Road, where the buses and the Underground station converge. Posters and leaflets line the boarded-up storefronts, wooden fences and posts announcing the latest West Indian dances and house parties. The great flea market of Portobello Road will be held tomorrow. Throngs of bargain-seekers and fun-lovers will come from all over London to rub shoulders and mingle in the ghetto at a safe time. Crews of locals will be lined up at points along the mile-long route, drinking beer spontaneously in outdoor pubs. Street musicians, solo and ensemble, will play before clusters of casual spectators. Bargains ranging from good antiques to various concoctions of West Indian and East Indian foods will be sold.

Back up on the crescent his body is still. Opposed to the grind of the daily workers’ toil and time, his body often sleeps through their day to see some of them in his day, which is night.

Above London, moving across the world, a massive storm of fantastic colors sweeps voluminous currents and waves across hundreds of miles of landmasses and water at an incredibly fast pace. Sunrise over the Pacific Rim. Seattle. The sun is bright over the city on the hill. Fall, Indian summer; in the quick tinges of wind that hit with swift force, the harbinger of winter nights and the waters of the storms.

Time moving so fast, backward and forward, people and places move into scenes and then out again so quickly as if in the blink of an eye, they shift from one sphere of vision to another.

Seattle 1912. He sees sticking outward from a pinnacle, a hill, the high granite arm of a statue of an Indian man, tall and stately, pointing out over the buildings of downtown Seattle, out toward the lakes that lie before the Pacific Ocean.

People are crowded from the edge of the knoll to the top of the hill where, before the statue, a rotund man in a black frock addresses them with a megaphone from a reviewing stand. He is dwarfed by the statue he points to. He gestures broadly, shouting something about Indians. Then he rapidly reads a quote from the dedication: “When the last redman shall have perished and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe...when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone.... At night when the streets of your villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not forever lost. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.”

The statue is of Chief Seattle, the Indian chief the city was named after. He is wrapped in a granite robe that appears strangely tattered. His left foot forward, his right arm raised toward the bays, he looks like he might either be beckoning or waving good-bye.

The tiny officious figure orating is the new reform mayor of Seattle, George Cotterill. He takes the occasion to reaffirm his liberal nature and to belittle the former administration, noting that its former chief of police was at this moment serving time in the penitentiary at Walla Walla.

The crowd roars with approval. On the outskirts of the crowd stands a group of blacks. They laugh, throwing up their hands; the two women are dressed in very fashionable clothes from the East; the three men wear tailored dark suits, their hats tilted and broken in Chicago style.

Nora, the youngest, laughs with the rest but she knows they really have little to be happy about. Black vaudevillians stranded in Seattle, they were wearing their stage clothes and wondering about their survival. Nora, whose full name was Zenora Rose Moore, twenty-nine going on thirty, was flirting with being an old maid, as the other showgirls would tease. Ross Hendrix was seventeen years older and had been married before. But she loved him, and their years on the road had strengthened an already natural bond.

A Model T Ford moves along the Pacific Northwest shelf, heading for Canada. The Pacific Ocean coming in and out of view on the left, faded white streamers trail and break off the speeding black car in the dust and wind. JUST MARRIED has been scrawled in white along the rear of the auto.

Nora and Ross Hendrix are the newlyweds. They have decided to live in Canada and quit the show-business life. Their colleagues accompany them for the ride. They all sing the big song from the hit black play Darktown Follies:

First you put your two knees close up tight

Then you sway ’em to the left, then you sway ’em to the right

Step around the floor kind of nice and light

Then you twist around and twist around with all your might

Stretch your lovin’ arms straight out in space

Then you do the Eagle Rock with style and grace

Swing your foot way ’round then bring it back

Now that’s what I call “Ballin’ the Jack.”


It was a great song that swept the nation and was adopted by the “colored” jazz musicians of New Orleans, who were doing a new thing that they called “jazz.”

Ross desired to escape Jim Crow, a discriminative segregation against blacks in America, but he had to acknowledge that the black showtunes, dances, and plays were changing the nation, at least as far as entertainment and recreation went.

The rickety black Ford sped for Victoria Station and the ferry that would take them across the waters to another country.

Al Hendrix, Jimi’s father, may have sounded a bit comical in his sincerity, yet he held you spellbound as he spoke, in his offhand way, about the early years of his life. It was not often Al Hendrix spoke this way. It had to be a long quiet Sunday afternoon with perhaps a few beers and a couple of shots of hard stuff. He would look off straight ahead and his eyes, which were usually sheltered by his dark creviced brow and high, close cheekbones, would shine with a liquidy light through the mahogany brown.

Al Hendrix: “My mother was born in Georgia [November 19, 1883] and raised in Tennessee. My mother and dad got stranded here in a show tour. That was before the First World War. And he wanted to go to Canada, so they went up to Canada to live. They took out papers and became Canadian citizens. My mother was a dancer. She was a chorus girl. A chorus girl back in those days used to wear tights and all such as that. My dad didn’t do any entertaining, he was a stagehand.

“My father had a long name: Bertran Philander Ross Hendrix. He was born April 11, 1866, in a small town in Urbana, Ohio.

“I met a fellow in the army who had been through there. We had a hard time finding it on the map. My daddy had been married before. I don’t know if they were separated, divorced, or what. I remember him telling me one time that he had been a special policeman in Chicago.

“My mother’s sister was in the entertainment business, too. Her name was Belle Lamarr. That was her stage name. They always used some fantastic kind of name.”

Belle and Zenora’s mother, Al’s grandmother, Fanny, was a full-blooded Native American of the Cherokee Nation. She had married a half Native American and half Irishman named Robert Moore in Tennessee in 1881.

Zenora Moore and Bertran Hendrix’s marriage produced four offspring: Leon Marshall in 1913, Patricia in 1914, Frank in 1918, and James Allen Hendrix in 1919, the baby of the family. Bertran and Zenora became Canadian citizens in 1922. James Allen was called “Allie” by his mother and became simply “Al” from then on. He worshiped his older brother Leon Marshall, who played both the violin and piano by the time Al became aware of music. Leon was long and lean with long tapering fingers on his large hands. He read and wrote music so well Bertran and Nora hired a piano teacher to help him advance. During the last part of the twenties Leon played the new jazz music so well that he had a discernible style of his own. He also was an excellent dancer who was very popular with the women. He had a regular dancing partner and they were often called upon to perform at public events, where they would do the generally popular waltz, tango, and even the Apache dance. But Leon shone when they got to the popular black dances: tap, the Charleston, the Lindy Hop. Leon often looked after Al and, at his youngest brother’s insistence, taught him those dances he had mastered. Al never forgot those lessons, those steps. When Leon died suddenly of a ruptured appendix in 1932, Al, only thirteen, was devastated. His father died two years later. The family was plunged into insecurity and poverty, but they held on. It was the height of the Depression and Al began to hustle for every cent he could earn. The family soon adjusted to their losses. Al took up boxing and went out and got a job waiting tables at Jean Fuller’s Cafe, an afterhours chicken place where his mother also worked on the weekends, supplementing the money she made doing laundry. Between orders Al would do some of the dancing he had cultivated and often received tips. The jitterbug craze grew and he and his sister Pat grew closer since he was the natural selection to escort her to dances, something Leon would have done. Frank was a wallflower, not very social. Pat and Al were photographed dancing to a Duke Ellington Orchestra appearance and it was printed on the front page of the Vancouver Sun. After that Al had local fame as a dancer.

Al Hendrix: “Duke Ellington came to Vancouver in 1936. That was the first time a big band came to Vancouver in years. Jitterbugging was in then. We used to have jitterbug contests. But they used to separate the whites from the blacks for the contests, because the whites thought they wouldn’t have a chance against the blacks. Once four of us entered the contest: Buster Keeling, Alma, myself, and Dorothy King. We were the couples in the black group. They had a hundred dollars for the prize. They brought a jitterbug group from L.A. and they danced on the stage to show the folks what the jitterbug was all about. That’s when jitterbugging first became a craze. Man, I picked it up real quick. I mean, shoot, I had all the timing, because I used to do a lot of tap dancing. We went down and put in an application for the contest. That night there were only two black couples in the thing. I thought we had it made. So I said, ‘Well heck, we’ll split the purse whoever wins and that’ll be twenty-five dollars apiece.’ But the girls went and chickened out and that made us so mad. They didn’t want to go on. That just about killed me. I was so disgusted. Twenty-five dollars back in those days was equivalent to about a hundred nowadays. I wasn’t working or nothing.

“I used to go out and dance with a group, with a white band. But they couldn’t play my type of music. They didn’t have the rhythm. They’d flow the music along. I would try to tell the pianist to play stop-time music. So you’d get that do do doot doot...duu duu. I mean all the breaks in between the music. But man, he’d flow it all together. So I used to go out with them and dance, but I wouldn’t dance to their music. I would be humming to myself in my mind when I danced. I would go along with it. But I had to steel myself. Still, I enjoyed it. I mean, I always thought I would be scared in front of a crowd. But shoot, the bigger the crowd, the better I felt. I would be enjoying myself, and entertaining myself, too. I used to dance in between breaks at intermission. This group would go around to different dances, and they’d call me and I’d go along. I wasn’t able to make a living at it. I had other jobs. But I was able to make more in one night dancing than I could in a whole week of hauling wood.

“When Canada declared war against Germany, I knew it would only be a matter of time before the United States got into it. I knew the Canadian Army would come for me, because my brother served in the Canadian Army. I got my hat and headed for Victoria. I told Ma, ‘Well, I’m on my way.’ I tried to get a job on the railroad. But the old guy would never hire me. He’d tell me I was too daggum short. I wasn’t too daggum short, he just wanted to fool with me. I was around twenty, but I was about at my full growth then. This was during the Depression and I decided to go on for myself. I told my mother I ain’t coming back this way. I’m gonna go out and make something. So that’s what I did. When I left I went over to Victoria and worked there for about two weeks, made myself a little capital shining shoes, and then came to Seattle. I had always planned on going to New York or Chicago, the big places. I’m glad I didn’t go to those places. They were wild, cold-blooded. S...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0743274016
• ISBN 13: 9780743274012
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480