Book Review: Rock Roadie: Backstage and Confidential with Hendrix, Elvis, the "Animals", Tina Turner, and an All Star cast

Rock Roadie: Backstage and Confidential with Hendrix, Elvis, The Animals, Tina Turner, and an all-star cast was a really enjoyable book, though I mainly read it for the parts about Hendrix I found there were a lot of stories about other artists James Wright worked with as well, like Tina and Ike Turner, and mainly "The Animals" it seems he was there road manager for a long time. They also all come from around the area my dad does (James and the Animals I mean) so it was good to read about positive things coming from the North East of England too. He also had Brian Jones and John Lennon at his...more I really enjoyed this book, though I mainly read it for the parts about Hendrix I found there were a lot of stories about other artists James Wright worked with as well, like Tina and Ike Turner, and mainly "The Animals" it seems he was there road manager for a long time. They also all come from around the area my dad does (James and the Animals I mean) so it was good to read about positive things coming from the North East of England too.
He also had Brian Jones and John Lennon at his 21st Birthday party, which must be a great memory to have in hindsight.
There were lots of funny moments where I genuinely laughed, and unexpected twists, he married a Polish princess and got stalked by the secret services for a time, and at one point was asked to work for them apparently though he refused (or so he says).
I always try to write critical book reviews which is really difficult with such an enjoyable book, but there was one thing that struck me about it. It really brings home the way women were treated by the music industry as sex objects in the 1960's (and how they were treated as property sometimes by their husbands, not by James, but at one point I was shocked by what one of the Animals did to and said about his wife). Though James tries to say he loved all the girls he slept with in their own way, he sure did sleep with a lot of girls! And was also responsible for picking the girls to be bought up to the bands rooms after gigs. There's one quite worrying anecdote about one of the animals (can't remember which one sorry) putting a girl under hypnosis and being unable to bring her out of the trance, so eventually they ended up waving a gun in her face to snap her out of it. I just hope she's OK now, but I have visions of a woman who has a nervous breakdown every time she hears "House Of The Rising Sun"...
He makes some formerly unstated revelations about Hendrix (no spoilers you'll have to read the book, but lets just say he could have done with keeping it in his pants more) and told me something I didn't know about Hendrix's Girlfriend Monika at the time of his death. There was lot of stuff about Michael Jeffery too, it's the only thing I've read so far that made me think of him as only human, where as before I just thought him as some kind of psycho. But there are also a lot of things he doesn't say, makes me wonder what else he knows sometimes...
well worth a read if you are a fan of musicians from this era I really enjoyed it, all I'd say is it's perhaps a book men would enjoy more than women, you really need to be a fan of this era, and understand it was different time before women's liberation to read it and enjoy it as a woman.

Buy the book now on amazon

Monika Dannemann - Witness? Accomplice? Or Just A Nut Job?

Update: You can now read all my Hendrix Posts in one article, click "Check Out My Lens" to see the whole thing.

This is one of a series of posts I have written on Hendrix's mysterious death, there are links to the other posts at the end of this one.

Monika Dannemann was a figure skater and painter from Germany and the daughter of a wealthy German industrialist. She certainly isn’t popular among friends and fans of Hendrix, I’ve seen her referred to as “The skater from hell” “that Bitch” and simply “That Blonde Chick”.

She claims to have been engaged to Hendrix and to have had an 18 month relationship with him, but many people dispute this. After Hendrix she became romantically involved with The Scorpions guitarist Ulrich Roth who she collaborated on several songs with and painted the art work for some of his albums. She also painted many pictures of Hendrix, some have described her house as some kind of eerie shrine to him and she wrote a book about him that went unpublished because of a legal battle over slanderous claims she made about Cathy Etchingham (Hendrix's real girl friend for 2 years) in it.

Monika Dannemann's account of what happened the night before Hendrix died and at the time of his death is the most commonly heard version of events. The media have touted it for years and I believed it, until I started to look into what other people, like the medical professionals who performed the autopsy and the Ambulance men who picked him up say. The two versions of events are alarmingly different and raise a number of questions about who Dannemann actually was and what her intentions toward Hendrix really were.

First let me introduce you to Monika’s chain of events the Night Hendrix died:

I’ve read the location of Hendrix’s death described as a “Squalid Flat” and “Hotel Room” it was actually the basement apartment of the Samarkand Hotel, 22 Lansdowne crescent London, which was being rented in Dannemann's name as far as I can ascertain. One account says Hendrix went to see Devon Wilson that night, but Dannemeann claims she drove him there and he only stayed a few minutes and they were back at her flat by 8:30pm. She says she made him eat a meal and they drank White Wine, he then had a bath and washed his hair. They then spent a couple of hours talking an listening to music. At 1:30am Jimi rang Chas Chandlers Office and left a poignant message of “I need help bad, man”, but Dannemann never mentions this and others have tried to say it happened on a different night.

Then at 1:45 am Dannemann claims Hendrix suddenly told her he wanted to go and see some people at another flat she says he said “They were not his friends and he did not like them but he wanted to show them he could cope. He told me he didn’t want me to go with him so I dropped him off there and picked him up an hour later about 3am”. He smoked some grass while he was there and when he came home she made him a tuna fish sandwich.

Then there is a sudden divergence from her original account (I believe taken from her unpublished book), she says at 6am that something is wrong, that Devon has “slipped him an OD”. Then by his own free will he took a handful of sleeping pills (9 vesperax to be exact, those are a type of seconal, I’m going to write another post on just how lethal those babies were) the normal dose was half a pill, Hendrix normally took 2 as he had a notoriously high tolerance to drugs like barbiturates. He then apparently urged her not to commit suicide (which seems like a weird thing to say, but seconals were hypnotic so they possibly could have made him start saying weird shit). He then carried on talking to her until she was asleep. But in another account she doesn’t mention this at all she just says she took one sleeper 6:45 and fell asleep at 7am.

Sometime after 10:00am Chas Chandler apparently called Hendrix having received his message and Hendrix says “call me a bit later man”. At 10:20 Dannemann wakes up finds Hendrix asleep and goes out for cigarettes. When she returns she finds Hendrix still asleep but has been sick, so she rings Eric Burdon from the Animals (which again seems strange) to ask for advice. He apparently initially hung up on her but then called back and told her to call and ambulance, she thought about it for another 40 minutes, apparently in case he woke up in hospital angry because he was fine really. She didn’t call an ambulance until 11:00am for whatever reason, the ambulance men arrive and put him in the ambulance sitting up with his head unsupported, she claims she rode with him in the Ambulance and he was pronounced DOA at St Mary Abbots Hospital having choked on his vomit.

But here is what the medical evidence says happened:

At the inquest Doctors stated that Hendrix had been dead at least 7 hours before the ambulance arrived, Dr Rufus Compson at the department for forensic medicine at St George’s medical school started his own investigation and discovered rice remains in Hendrix’s stomach. He explained it take 3 to 4 hours for the stomach to empty and he reasoned that since Hendrix had eaten at a dinner party hosted by Pete Cameron between 11:00am and 12:00pm (which Dannemann never mentions, she says Hendrix didn’t go out until 1:45) he placed the time of death no later than 4am. Dr Bannister the surgical registrar reported the “inside of Hendrix’s mouth and the mucus membranes were black because he had been dead for some time”. He also told the London Times “Hendrix had been dead for hours rather than minutes when he was admitted to hospital”.

And Here’s what the Ambulance Men say they found when they got to flat:

The two men arrived to find the flat empty except for Hendrix lying in a mess on the bed already dead with a scarf or some other article of clothing knotted around his neck. They say they tried to revive him as is standard procedure then wrapped up the body put it in the ambulance and drove to the hospital where he was pronounced DOA.

So Danneman wasn’t even there when the Ambulance arrived let alone riding in the Ambulance with him, and all this nonsense about his death being something to do with how the Ambulance men laid him down are untrue as he was already well dead by the time he was even in an Ambulance.

The big question is what was Dannemann hiding? If Jeffrey and his mobsters really did come round and kill him she must have witnessed it or even been involved. I notice too she kept feeding him, could she have been lacing this food with the barbiturates they found in his blood? They normally came in capsules filled with powder so it would have been easy to do. Also where did she go before the Ambulance arrived? And why did she claim she was still there? And why have the media swallowed her version of events so readily for so many years?

I’d like to ask her but unfortunately she’s dead, she was found in her fume filled Mercedes a couple of days after losing her court battle with Cathy Etchingham I mentioned earlier. The verdict was suicide, but was it really? or was someone afraid she would finally start telling the truth after all these years?

Or the more boring truth could simply be Hendrix stayed in her flat alone that night and she was simply a bit of a delusional woman who invented this whole story to draw attention to herself. She did make quite life for herself out of giving interviews about the 18 months she claims she spent with Hendrix and he was subject of many of her paintings. Anyone could have made the 999 call for an ambulance no one really knows for sure it was Dannemann we only have her word for it. And as we can see her word was never really very reliable.

Monika's Previously Unpublished Book about her time with Jimi Hendrix Available On Amazon now.

See Monika's book The Inner World of Jimi Hendrix on Amazon UK by clicking on the link. Or buy The Inner World of Jimi Hendrix on Amazon USA here. There was legal battle mounted by one of Jimi's other girlfriends called Cathy Etchingham to stop this book being published as she calls her a liar in it. I imagine the book has been edited to remove those parts and released now Monika is dead.

My sources for this post were "Jimi Hendrix Death, Drugs and rock and roll" By Jim McClusky, "It's like trying to get out of a room full of mirrors" researched by Bill Henderson and chapter seven of "The Covert War Against Rock" by Alex Constantine (interesting book I'm currently reading and will review shortly.)

This is one of a series of posts about Hendrix's death I have written the others are:

Was Hendrix Murdered? More On Hendrix, The Prime Suspect -Michael Jeffrey.

Was Hendrix Murdered?

Update: You can now read all my Hendrix Posts in one article, click "Check Out My Lens" to see the whole thing

I originally started looking at the death of Jimmy Hendrix out of curiosity after hearing former roadie James “Tappy” Wright's claims that he did not die of an OD but was in fact murdered by his manager Michael Jeffrey by pouring wine down his throat and into his lungs drowning him. I thought it would be an obvious conspiracy theory, I had no idea the disturbing world of weirdness I would enter when I delved deeper.

It turns out Tappy is not the only one who heard Jeffrey confess, he also told sound engineer (or at least he was at the time now he is a record producer) Alan Douglas that he murdered Hendrix too, Douglas also stated in his opinion he thought Jeffrey hated Hendrix.

Jeffrey certainly had a lot of money to gain from Hendrix's death having a huge life insurance policy on him, but it gets weirder it seems Jeffrey may have worked for the FBI who opened a file on Hendrix after he appeared at a few benefits for “subversive” causes. Jeffrey was in the military and got moved to intelligence, after this his military career entered an “Obscure phase”. Quite how he moved from a career as a soldier to managing Rock Groups is unclear, he also managed "The Animals". He died a couple of years after Hendrix in an mid air collision on his way to a court case concerning Hendrix.

There's also a lot of weirdness surrounding who was or wasn't Hendrix's girlfriend at the time of his death too. A woman called Monika Dannemann claimed to be his fiancé at the time of his death, he did die in her flat and the sleeping pills he took were hers. Many people seem to claim however she was fantasist and merely stalked Hendrix there was actually no relationship between them. Some even claim she had a part in his murder as she realised he planned to leave her, and she definitely lied at his inquest. She claimed Hendrix was still alive at 10am when she went out for cigarettes and when she came back he started to vomit, but medical evidence suggests he was actually dead around 4am.

It is now commonly believed she wasn't in fact there that night at all as they had big row, she did not call an Ambulance until 11:15 and apparently rang a friend called Eric Burdon (from the band "The Animals" who were also managed by Michael Jeffery) beforehand saying Hendrix wasn't well and he told her to give him coffee and slap his face, but he was already well dead at this point so what was going on in her mind I don't know. I think she came home and found him dead, he was the love of her life and she idolised him so this probably caused her to go into shock or even have some kind of breakdown perhaps deluding herself he wasn't dead just ill but I can only guess. I certainly don't believe she could have killed him on her own as some people seem to think she did. Whatever happened Ambulance attendants claim there was NO ONE in the flat when they arrived, the door was wide open and Hendrix was dead inside on the bed.

MoniKa Danneman died of carbon monoxide poisoning in her own Mercedes outside her house in 1996 (the verdict was suicide) after losing a court case with another of Hendrix's girlfriends Kathy Etchingham over claims she made in her book that Etchingham was a liar and stole from Jimi, she was ordered to stop saying it basically, the most comprehensive article I can find on the subject is here.

I'm still doing research as this has disturbed me quite a lot and I have more to write as I get it all straight, I'm also trying to find out why the case by Police was re-opened then apparently dropped in the early 90's, if anyone knows of anything else I can look into surrounding this topic please let me know. My source for most of what is written here is this article.

I also found this intriguing clip on youtube that seems to claim the Mafia and Jeffrey did it for some reason though I can't find the rest of the show or any information about it. I've contacted the person who put it on Youtube but haven't had reply yet. The person who showed it to me said the rest of the show was on there at one point but has now gone. It shows the clip from the film "Rainbow Bridge" (produced by Michael Jeffrey) where Hendrix states he has a dream of "Choking on the grape" and can't "make the choke come up" (at about 1:49, it's not very clear on this clip but if you get the DVD it is what he is saying) which is also quite disturbing and could be seen as Hendrix foreseeing his own death.

Update- The clip is no longer on youtube, but if you can get hold of the DVD it's said when Hendrix is sat drinking with them right near the end of the film, and the exact quote comes when Hendrix is talking about a dream he has about meeting Cleopatra in a Pyramid. He says "The grape chokes me but I can't let the choke come up" (he mimes choking and clutches his throat) and I said that's groovy grape wine cleo"... you will have to watch Rainbow Bridge if you want to see it, and if you would like to support this blog you can buy it from the DVD section of my astore (see the book shop widget in my sidebar).

This is one of a series of posts with more to come. The other posts are More On Hendrix Dead Ends and The prime Suspect- Michael Jeffery