Me and Jimi Hendrix

by John Stark Bellamy II

Very few, if any, of the so-called facts in my Jimi Hendrix story are capable of factual verification. Various documentary sources will attest that the Jimi Hendrix Experience played a concert at the Washington Hilton Hotel auditorium on March 10, 1968. I believe there were two Hendrix shows there that day, one in the afternoon (which I attended) and one at 8 p.m. And in both shows the Soft Machine (featuring drummer Robert Wyatt, who five years later became a paraplegic when he drunkenly fell from a third-floor window), a loud jazz-rock group, opened for Hendrix. But the following is what I remember of that odd day.

It wasn’t even my idea to attend the Hendrix concert. A bookish fan of Beatlish sentimentality, I’d never been much of a fan—I found him too boisterous, too gauche in his blatantly crude sexuality and altogether too much the “super spade” caricature of the Black Man as Sexual Superman. But my St. John’s College friend Peter Blachly, himself a talented guitarist (much of his music career spent with well-known Washington, D. C. band Claude Jones) was keen to attend the show and eventually paid for my ticket, so what was I to do but to accede gracefully to his enthusiasm and generosity?

Arriving in Washington, after a long and well-stoked car ride, we had to wait a long time in a queue which stretched up the stairs from the Hilton entrance to the auditorium doors on the 2nd floor. That in itself was a memorable scene, because it was the first time I was ever in a public place where people—dozens of them—were openly consuming illegal drugs in the presence of seemingly indifferent policemen. A year later, during a visit to San Francisco, I would become jaded with such a spectacle, but it seemed definite evidence then that the times they were a-changing. As the concert started late—a ritual by that time de rigueur with rock star appearances—the audience was practically levitating by the time the auditorium doors were opened.

Then came the concert, a mostly forgotten din of deafening noise and spastic lighting effects. The part worth remembering, however, occurred during halfway through the Hendrix set. He was in the middle of some intense solo—probably “Foxy Lady,” when, suddenly, a figure dressed in a chicken suit ran up the middle aisle, rushed onto the stage and began pummeling Hendrix with his fists. The chicken figure was bright yellow and looked a little like Sesame Street’s Big Bird but even more like a human-sized chicken.

Even as Hendrix was knocked backwards into one of the banks of massive speakers which amplified his guitar to inhuman levels of sound, he continued to play, even when knocked to the floor by his wild assailant. I and the others present watched in stunned and stoned horror as security personnel rushed to the scene and pulled the Chickenman away from Hendrix, who staggered to his feet and continued playing as if nothing untoward had occurred. A few minutes later this incident was repeated in virtually identical detail.

The first thing to emphasize about this peculiar episode is that I and probably everyone else in that audience were under the effect of drugs. I was sober enough, however, to realize that what I thought I had seen might be a hallucination. Or, if it had actually occurred, might have been a staged incident, a disquieting but premeditated stunt in the outrageous Hendrix performance routine. We all talked about it at length after the concert but could come to no conclusion.

Some months later, however, I was at a party at a house on North Park Blvd. in Cleveland Heights. Knowing no one at the party and bored out of my mind, I casually browsed through a few issues of what I recall was Cavalier, a skin magazine of the day with some Playboy-style pretensions to serious print content. To my surprise, one of the Cavalier issues contained a review of the concert I had attended by a prominent rock critic. He, too, it seems, had witnessed the “chicken man” attacks and had been unable to discover whether they were a mass hallucination, a staged act or an actual terrorist attack on the beloved Hendrix. And to this day I can’t tell you whether it happened or not.

But I can tell you this . . . Twenty-four years later, on June 25, 1992, I attended a cocktail party at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Its purpose was to launch the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and among the guests were Plain Dealer rock critic Jane Scott and Noel Redding (died 2005, cirrhosis of the liver), the erstwhile bass player in the Jimi Hendrix Experience. After hearing my chicken man story, Jane immediately marched me up to Noel to retail the tale. Noel listened politely and when I had finished, said, “Sure, that kind of thing happened all the time.” It was obvious to me, however, that he couldn’t even remember whether it had happened or not.

Read earlier episodes of Cleveland Confidential here.

Former Clevelander John Stark Bellamy II is most notorious for his books chronicling Cleveland murders and disasters, such titles as They Died Crawling, The Maniac in the Bushes and Women Behaving Badly. Countryman Press has also published an anthology of his Vermont murder tales, Vintage Vermont Villainies. This CoolCleveland.com exclusive is an excerpt from his memoir-in-progess, Wasted on the Young.

This fall Gray & Co. will publish a compilation of his disaster stories, including narratives of the Cleveland Clinic gas tragedy, the East Ohio Gas Co. explosion, the 1916 waterworks tunnel blast and a dozen more defining Cleveland castrophes.

Although he keeps a fond and constant eye on all things Cleveland cool and otherwise, John now lives with his wife Laura and their dog Clio in the most soothing part of Vermont, where he continues to recuperate from the excitements and follies of his excessively prolonged youth.