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rediscoverhearing · 6 months ago
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Navigating DVA Hearing Aids: A Guide for Veterans
Hearing loss is a common issue among veterans, often stemming from exposure to loud noises during military service. Thankfully, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) in Australia provides support and assistance to eligible veterans needing hearing aids. Understanding the DVA hearing aids program, the benefits it offers, and how to access these services can significantly improve your quality of life. This guide will help you navigate the DVA hearing aid program and ensure you get the support you need.
Understanding DVA Hearing Aids
The DVA hearing aid program is designed to help veterans with hearing loss by providing access to high-quality hearing aids and related services. This program ensures that veterans receive the best possible care and support for their hearing needs, enabling them to stay connected with their families, friends, and communities.
Eligibility for DVA Hearing Aids
To qualify for the DVA hearing aid program, you must be an Australian veteran with one of the following statuses:
Gold Card holders: Entitled to full coverage for all clinically necessary treatment, including hearing services.
White Card holders: Eligible for hearing services if your hearing loss is accepted as a service-related condition.
If you are unsure about your eligibility, you can contact the DVA or a registered service provider for assistance.
Benefits of the DVA Hearing Aid Program
The DVA hearing aid program offers numerous benefits to eligible veterans, including:
1. High-Quality Hearing Aids
DVA provides access to a range of high-quality hearing aids from reputable manufacturers. These devices are designed to meet various hearing needs and preferences, ensuring optimal hearing improvement.
2. Comprehensive Hearing Assessments
Eligible veterans receive thorough hearing assessments conducted by qualified audiologists. These assessments help determine the extent of hearing loss and the most suitable hearing aid solution.
3. Fitting and Adjustment Services
The program includes professional fitting and adjustment services to ensure your hearing aids are comfortable and effective. Audiologists will fine-tune the devices to match your specific hearing requirements.
4. Ongoing Support and Maintenance
DVA supports ongoing maintenance and repairs for your hearing aids. This ensures that your devices remain in good working condition and continue to provide the best possible hearing assistance.
5. Assistive Listening Devices
In addition to hearing aids, the program offers access to various assistive listening devices, such as amplified telephones and TV listening systems, to further enhance your hearing experience.
How to Access DVA Hearing Aids
Follow these steps to access hearing aids through the DVA program:
1. Obtain a Referral
Visit your general practitioner (GP) to discuss your hearing concerns and obtain a referral to a qualified hearing service provider. Your GP can help determine if you meet the eligibility criteria and guide you through the referral process.
2. Choose a Hearing Service Provider
Select a DVA-registered hearing service provider. You can find a list of approved providers on the DVA website or through your GP. These providers have the necessary expertise and experience to deliver high-quality hearing care to veterans.
3. Schedule a Hearing Assessment
Contact your chosen hearing service provider to schedule a comprehensive hearing assessment. During this assessment, the audiologist will evaluate your hearing loss and recommend the most suitable hearing aids.
4. Hearing Aid Fitting and Adjustment
Once your hearing aids are selected, the provider will fit and adjust them to ensure they are comfortable and effective. The audiologist will also provide instructions on how to use and care for your hearing aids.
5. Ongoing Care and Support
Take advantage of the ongoing support and maintenance services offered by the DVA program. Regular check-ups and maintenance will ensure your hearing aids continue to function optimally.
Tips for Maximizing the Benefits of Your Hearing Aids
To get the most out of your DVA hearing aids, consider the following tips:
Follow Usage Instructions: Adhere to the instructions provided by your audiologist for using and caring for your hearing aids.
Regular Maintenance: Schedule regular check-ups and maintenance appointments to keep your hearing aids in top condition.
Practice Patience: Adjusting to hearing aids can take time. Be patient and give yourself time to adapt to the new sounds and sensations.
Utilize Assistive Devices: Explore additional assistive listening devices that can complement your hearing aids and enhance your overall hearing experience.
Stay Informed: Keep yourself updated on new hearing aid technologies and services that may further improve your hearing health.
Conclusion
The DVA hearing aid program offers valuable support and resources to veterans experiencing hearing loss. By understanding the benefits and following the steps to access these services, you can significantly improve your hearing and overall quality of life. Take the first step towards better hearing by reaching out to your GP and exploring the DVA hearing aid program today. Your hearing health is crucial, and with the right support, you can continue to enjoy the sounds of life.
Rediscover Hearing the Joy of Hearing with Your local & WA owned Independent Audiologists. Your local Hearing Aid and Tinnitus Specialists. Combined experience of 38 years.
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adelaidehearingclinic · 2 years ago
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Hearing Clinic Near Me | Adelaide Hearing
Hearing Clinic Near Me is a professional audiology center dedicated to providing comprehensive hearing care services to individuals in the local community. Our clinic offers a wide range of diagnostic assessments, hearing evaluations, and personalized treatment options to address various hearing concerns. With a team of highly skilled audiologists and state-of-the-art equipment, we are committed to delivering accurate assessments and customized solutions to enhance our patient's quality of life. Whether it's hearing aid fittings, hearing protection, or rehabilitation services, our knowledgeable staff ensures a compassionate and patient-centered approach. At Hearing Clinic Near Me, we prioritize exceptional care and strive to create a positive impact on individuals experiencing hearing difficulties. Adelaide Hearing Clinic is located in Australia; Call them at 0883572290.
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hearingaidsprofessional · 2 years ago
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Protect Your Ears With Custom Ear Plugs And Quality Hearing Aids
As the adage goes, "prevention is better than cure." And this couldn't be more true when it comes to your sense of hearing. 
Whether you're a musician, a construction worker, or just someone who wants to enjoy the sounds of life, protecting your ears is critical to maintaining good hearing health. 
So, if you're in the market for custom ear plugs or quality hearing aids, read on for some tips and recommendations.
Protect Your Ears with Custom Ear Plugs
Custom earplugs are one of the best ways to protect your ears. Unlike foam earplugs you can buy at the drugstore, custom earplugs are designed specifically for your ears. 
They're made from moulds that are taken of your ears so they fit snugly and comfortably, providing maximum protection.
Custom earplugs come in various styles and materials, from silicone to acrylic. They can also provide earplugs for your specific needs. 
For example, if you're a musician, you might want ear plugs that reduce the volume of the sound without distorting it. You should consider earplugs designed to block out loud noises if you work in construction.
Hear Better with Quality Hearing Aids
If you're already experiencing hearing loss or if you want to prevent it from happening in the first place, quality hearing aids are a must-have. There are a variety of hearing aids on the market, but two brands that stand out are Resound and Widex.
Resound Hearing Aids
Resound hearing aids are known for their advanced technology and high-quality sound. They offer various hearing aids to suit different needs and lifestyles, from behind-the-ear models to completely-in-canal models. 
Resound hearing aids also have an app that allows you to adjust the settings and personalise your listening experience.
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Widex Hearing Aids
Widex is another brand known for its cutting-edge technology and excellent sound quality. Widex hearing aids use artificial intelligence to adapt to your listening environment and provide a clear natural sound. 
They also offer a range of hearing aids, from behind-the-ear to in-the-ear models.
Finding an Audiologist Near You
Of course, before you invest in custom ear plugs or quality hearing aids, you'll want to visit an audiologist. An audiologist is a hearing health professional who can assess your hearing and recommend the best action.
Ask your primary care physician for a referral to find an audiologist near you. You can also search online for an audiologist near me or check with your insurance provider to see if they have a list of covered providers.
Hearing Aids Professionals: Your Partner in Hearing Health
In conclusion, whether you're looking for custom ear plugs to protect your ears or quality hearing aids to improve your hearing, plenty of options are available. And with the help of an audiologist, you can find the solution that's right for you.
At Hearing Aids’ Professionals, we're passionate about helping people achieve better hearing health. 
Our team of experienced audiologists can provide you with a comprehensive hearing evaluation and recommend personalised solutions based on your needs and lifestyle.
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hearingclinicn · 2 years ago
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Adelaide Hearing is a Recognized Hearing Clinic that Provides Hearing Aids and Tinnitus Treatment. Because of How We are in This Profession, We are Among the Best Audiologists in Australia. We Provide a Material Removal Facility, Cutting Force Technology, Skilled Staff, and Highly Experienced to Assist you in Effectively Managing any Ear-Related Concerns You Might Also Have.
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adelaide-hearing · 3 years ago
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At Adelaide Hearing, Jason gives honest & transparent advice earns the trust and loyalty of his clients buy empowers them to make confident, informed decisions. Ear Wax Removal in Adelaide holds a degree in Speech Pathology and a Masters in Audiology from Flinders University and has around 20 years of extensive diagnostic and hearing rehabilitation understanding. Reach Ear Wax Removal in Adelaide today for a better hearing solution.  
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sly-merlin · 4 years ago
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Chewy peaches |• jung jaehyun
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Characters : thief! Reader x stranger! Jaehyun
Words :2.1k (1.8k smut)( rest is drama)
Genre : erotica. Just filth. One night stand. No attachment between characters but a sweet surprise at the end.
Warning: dom! jaehyun, lip biting, slight choking(jaehyun’s throat), jae has a shoulder biting kink?, aftercare(it’s a warning yes), oral(female receiving), restraining her hands behind her back, unprotected sex(stunt not to be performed irl). Him being sweet and dubblabblabblah. he calls her chewy bcs of her bubble ass
Summary: you. Him. A bar and a room.
a/n: @lofied muafii meri jaan. Your soulmate is also a slowmate. Accept this birthday gift muah muah.~happy birthday to you~
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As soon as you both entered the room, jaehyun had you caged in his arms against the door, lips fervently finding yours in a fiery yet soft kiss as if you both were some long lost lovers. Except you were not. You had found him or rather he had discovered you while you were busy messily executing your even messy dance moves against bodies of strangers. A look at him and you had decided you wanted him to shake your core up with the same intensity his gaze followed you with. A drink with him had transformed into five and now you couldn't wait to be under him, ready to forget about your life for a little while with the handsome stranger.
Cupping your chin with his three fingers, his tongue traced your luscious lower lip and your hands gripped his shirt a little too tightly.
"I don't like strawberries." He bit your lip, his crude fingertips running over the edge of your jaw.
"Yet here you are. Dying to devour me" looking at his demanding eyes, your tongue forced itself into his mouth and very gratefully, he let it in. His unsteady hands found your ass as your hungry tongues danced with each other without any tune. Throaty gasps resounded in the small room of the bar and reached your somewhat deaf ears.
He sounded like heaven and you wanted to hear more of him.
Slowly tracking your hand up his chest to the throat, your middle finger softly pressed itself there, earning a hiccupped gasp from him.
"Fuck.do it again."
Caging his throat in your hand, this time your thumb did the deed and he hiccupped again but whined when you removed your fingers completely to run them over his cheeks.
"Don't wanna kill you before you ruin me, pretty boy."
He chuckled against your detached lips and took the breathing time to focus on the curves of your ass but your tight dress didn’t give him the access he wanted. looping your arms around his neck, he ran his fingers on your inner thighs and in one swift motion, pulled your dress upto your waist, freeing your lower half of the restraining cloth. Your legs shivered at the sudden lack of coverage and your thighs hugged each other.
“I like your chewy butt.” He chuckled deeply, squeezing and releasing your ass cheeks multiple times, clearly enjoying himself too much.
“and can you sell me your lips?” biting his lip once, you managed to catch a strained whine from him. studying his eyes blazing with desire, you kissed him again minus the teasing.
“You are tasty,” he commented, pulling you closer. Your breasts were now enfolded under your dress, ready to pop out at any chance given. You moaned into his mouth when his fingers, ghosting over the string of your thong, jammed into the material to touch your wetness from behind. Your folds shuddered at the soft pats he fingers gave, your stomach and abdomen tightening to glorify his ministrations. Your lips buzzed at the foreign sensation breaching your insides and you tugged at his nape.
Humming, he croaked out, “jump”
With a push of your heels, your legs ended up encircling his belted waist but as he jerked his thumb towards your hole and as a result, your lips slipped from his due to the sensitiveness, head falling on his shoulder, breathlessly.
“you look so deprived” you felt his chest vibrating.
He moved you towards the bed, fingers still buried in your underwear. Tossing you on the single bed, his fingers left you throbbing and he didn’t waste any second in stripping away the useless material. Soon, your heels were discarded too.
“you are dripping woman.” he voiced his thought. “fingers or lips?” he breathed and you cursed loudly at him for giving you such a hard choice.
“I thought I already told you!” you snapped and he let out a harsh breath before settling himself between your legs, parting them ever so slightly. He lowered his head to blow at your clit and you felt yourself floating as your back arched itself, giving him more of you.
He spread his tongue over your heat to lick it in one go before sucking at your folds with his skilful lips. your breathy, needy gasps harmonising with his lips were sinuous enough to create knots in your stomach. You kept cursing and he heed none, instead inserted his two fingers into your cunt. His mouth and fingers synced together, turning your legs jelly and your lower body puddle under the pressure.
"Don't stop"
His fingers just brushed against your g-spot, not reaching it properly but it did it for you.
“I’m close jae” you whimpered his name that he had introduced himself with. by now, your short dress was feeling like an adhesive, clingy and annoyingly sticky.
He said nothing, just increased his pace and the very next second, you hips buckled and you coated his chin and hands with your cum, earning groans from him.
He panted, gazing at your fucked up body, mentally patting himself for what he had done to you.
"Relax" he mouthed.
With the back of your hand, you cleaned the sweat off your forehead before closing your legs to save yourself from the sudden cold.
“you did good.” He said and right when you thought he was leaving already, he started undressing himself in front of you. as your chest rose and fell with rapid breaths, you gawked at him, teething your lip once again.
His godly built was exposed to you as he unbuttoned his black shirt, unbuckled his belt and liberated his hips. You thought you heard a jingle and your mind automatically went to your bag which was probably lying on the floor near the door but when you saw his freed member being pumped in his hand, the haze returned to ground your eyes on him.
“you good?” he asked, hopping on the bed, hovering over your body again.
“want more.” Voice mirroring the mess you were, you tried to push your back, hand reaching for his cock but he laid you down again.
“I’m short on time, chewy. Maybe some other day.” Bobbing his head to the side, he chuckled before dropping his face to nibble on your ear. You giggled at the tickle.
“then stop playing.”
Hearing your serious tone, he straightened his back, eyes suddenly darkening.
Hurriedly ridding you of your dress and the bra, his hands moulded your breasts, eliciting nervous gasps from you.
“do you have any plans of fucking me or is your dick just for show?” you groaned. He threw his hands up in the air and clicked his tongue when you whined at the lack of attention.
He seemed like a silent lover, you wondered but before you could think any further, his hands on your hands turned your around, hoisting your ass up in the air. with your face squished down, you tried to create a balance with your elbows but he grabbed your hands to tuck them beside you.
“don’t move too much or it might hurt.” folding your wrists into his one palm, his knees drew your one thigh apart, inserting his full length into you without any further remark. Your jaw clenched feeling him plugging you from behind.
You couldn’t see him but the grunt he let out while adjusting himself made you lightheaded just by visualising his contorted face.
“tell me to stop whenever you want but I doubt your poor pussy would want that now.”
You roughly pushed yourself on his dick in answer and with a bursting ego, he started ramming with rubbishly fast pace.
“you like it rough?hmm?” driving his hips, he penetrated your hole in uncalculated rhythm. He kept grunting and rambling before he stopped but only to lean into your trembling body. Placing a quick kiss on your back, he moved further to bite on shoulder, receiving an ear piercing hiss from you.
“what the fuck are you doing dickhead?” breathing out of control, you choked out.
“leaving my mark.”
“don't eat my shoulder then!.” he chuckled at your frustrated tone and futile attempt at fucking yourself on his dick.
Ignoring your incoherent words that followed, he released your one arm to let you ease your pulsating cunt. Rubbing at your clit, you moaned louder than before but the pillow muffled some noises for you. Contrary to his crazy hips, his hand on the softness of your ass was warm and sweet.
“I'm close, princess.”
You heard him mumbling but your head wasn’t ready to form any words so you just whimpered some pleas.
“don’t stop. Right there. I think I’m gonna-
For the second time that night, your orgasm blurred your surroundings. He left your hand and grunted loudly before filling and warming you with his cum. Releasing your waist, he let you fall on the bed softly and your mouth instantly opened with relief. He pulled himself out and busied himself with admiring your glinting self.
“you are more insane in bed” he whispered, blowing kisses on your shoulders. You hummed again as his hands rotated you to face him. brushing your sweaty hair aside, he kept mumbling to you.
“we need to get up chewy. I don’t like this bed too much.” you tried to chuckle but a tired sigh betrayed you. He giggled before your sore arms got his attention and he began massaging them to soothe the ache. Your eyes fluttered shut at the gesture and it felt like eternity after which he got up.
you opened your eyes after a few minutes to find Jaehyun locking his belt in place.
“wait for me dickhead.”
“I ain't going anywhere without you chewy.” You grimaced at the ridiculous name.
Raising yourself up, you hooked your bra and were looking for your dress when a cotton cloth met with your face.
“you are all sweaty.” He laughed for the nth time at you and you couldn't understand why he found your existence so amusing. His considerate hands cleaned your face delicately, dressed you up and with the same hurry, pulled you to your feet, his actions getting weirder with each passing second.
“I’m not stopping you if you wanna go. Stop treating me like a doll,” he winced at you screech.
“no, you are coming with me.” Saying that , he placed his hand in his back pocket and everything that happened after had your jaw dropping on the floor, especially when he opened his mouth,
“y/n aka yves, you are under arrest for stealing the paintings last week.” Unfolding the cuffs, he forced your wrist into it. “Hello,I'm Officer Jung Jaehyun, a new transfer." grasping the adjoining cuff, he addressed your dumbfounded figure again, “you are going with me. To jail and if you don’t wanna flash yourself to all the officers there, I can get you a decent complementary pajama before that” The wink he shot and the way your code name had rolled off his tongue had your blood boiling and you tugged at your wrist harshly, protesting to this act.
“so you people now fuck your criminals before arresting them? and I don’t see a lady police officer here so you better open this before I start screaming.” Exasperated, you sternly said.
“so I guess you don’t want a change of clothes then. lemme call my colleague, she’ll be here in like 5 minutes.” He smiled menancily.
You threw your head back as the realisation dawned over you. There was no choice but to go!
“now a woman can’t even fuck without having to worry about being arrested!” you screamed at his face, stomping your foot on the floor.
“lets go chewy. Your new home is waiting for you.”
He let out a mirthless laugh before dragging you through the back door.
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“we just arrested her like three hours ago! How can she run away so easily.” Sending the files to the ground, jaehyun raked his hands through his hair, crying out loud at his juniors.
“we do-don’t know sir. she also left a note in her cell.”
“HOW THE HELL SHE GOT A PAPER NOW?”
“like she got keys!” another officer spoke.
“What does the note say?”
As the officer read the words, Jaehyun felt heat rushing to his cheeks, in embarrassment and shame.
“get my dress dry cleaned before my next visit. Btw you have a nice dick. It’d be a shame if I don’t use it again. signed by dear yves”
And jaehyun knew he had to be more than just ready for your arrival.
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bibliocratic · 4 years ago
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clear the area jonmartin, post-MAG200 content warnings in the tags
They earn their ending. A happy-ever-after beyond the gaze of any eyes.
Jon endures his abdication. This world has no Archivists, has need of none, the thankless crown of Knowing finally unburdened from his shoulders. The blood washes off Martin’s hands with soap and scrubbing and scalding water. They live.
The end. In conclusion. Fin.
-
Jon’s new scar, the packaging of his skin split ragged from collarbone to sternum, fades like sun-caught paint. A maw of red pursing to a gummy primrose pink, settling into a rough cartography of white.
The first few months are hard. Brimstone flare-up silences and ice-pick shouting, open-handed forgiveness and closed-fist weeping. They drain themselves to husks with anger and worry and grief until there is enough space for better things to grow there in their stead. Jon’s nightmares were a nightly stormfront to bear, sweated sheets and dawn fanfares of panic and dread, but he is learning now, with the space for his ribs to expand, that it is ok for them to breathe here.
Jon digs up the garden with a rusty trowel until it is a bumpy canvas of mulch and soil, dirt tucked under his fingernails and decorated with smudges up to his elbows. He hums while he irons their shirts in front of the television, thoughtless and senseless with tune.
Martin has tried to, but the sound goes down the wrong way.
-
Martin is happy.
-
It isn’t the sight as such, that might sit as a film over his vision to tinge his waking sepia. The reddest thing they own is a terracotta plant plot brimming with raggedy thyme that lives a precarious cliff-top existence on the kitchen windowsill. He observes Jon’s face in all its variations, even pained – when he snags splinters in his fingers, when he stubs his toe on the stone front step and swears damnation – and his response is sympathy tempered by admonishment.
It’s not the sensation, not really, that might tremble on his skin. Martin’s palms tend to dryness inside their homely bubble of creaky central heating, hemmed in by boisterous coastal winds. He handles bread knives and butter knives and steak knives and carving knives without the muscle memory of other blades, and he thinks he might be getting pretty handy with his oven experimentation.
It’s the sound. It wakes him, the noise lingering like the echo of a slap.
The slick punch of metal into muscle. A tooth-bared, tense-jawed gasp.
Resurfacing to shocked consciousness, he would be seized by a frenzy, to know, to check. His scattering hand scrabbling for the lamp with such force he hit it off the nightstand to roll in a giddy clatter, throwing off the covers to rapidly pollute both of them with the outside air. Jon would be rocked from sleep, groggy, panicked, and Martin’s words would not come, a train of thought trying to race full steam where no one had laid tracks, so it would be just the two of them, exhausted and upset and amping the other up in misery.
Now, upon his rousing, Martin knows not to turn on the light. He does not check. The aftermath of punch-gasp curls in his ear, and he inhale-exhale-inhales with the ferocity of mantra, and clamps the threatened tears in the clench of his teeth.
He does not wake Jon.
-
“How did you sleep?”
“Oh, you know me. Like a log.”
-
He is happy. He is. Why wouldn’t he be?
--
Jon rumbles like a rusty mechanism with snoring whenever he drops off on his back, and he mumbles accusatory when Martin coaxes him to his side. Martin finds black hairs on his pillowcase, in the shower plug. Jon is a vista of experience since the Eye left him, who gets hungry and tired and grumpy and drunk and silly and fed-up and giggly. Jon searches him out with the surety of magnets, and loves him, loves him, loves him. He seals kisses to Martin’s new landscape of extensive scars. Their disagreements, when they surface, are as meaningful and lasting as stones skipped on water.
Martin wanted this. He wants this. The rhythms of domesticity fading to foam on an untroubled shore.
He is out of practise with happiness, that’s all. It doesn’t come to him like breathing. He needs to till the earth of it, shelter its seeds from a thousand circling crows until it bears harvest.
He just has to try harder.
-
Night-time.
An episode or two of something simple, Jon nodding off like a capsizing ship before the credits. Encouraging him up in grousing, unwilling increments, rubbing out the nettle sting of pins and needles up his own arm. Check the locks, the light switches. Brush teeth. Pyjamas. Put his phone to charge, read until Jon succumbs to sleep. Click the light off, pushing Jon onto his side so his mouth doesn’t dry. Jon squirming around like a fastidious octopus until he has at least half his limbs hooked over Martin.
The dark creating shadow play. In the absence, Martin colouring in the gaps with lurid shades of disaster.
A creak – the rattle of a door downstairs, an intruder unfastening the back door, transferring their weight upon the staircase. A unfamiliar scent – the recollection of smoke-stench in his nostrils, the acrid promise of gas, the ferrous pungency of blood. The rain will flood their house to drown them. The wind will blow their roof in. Jon hooks his leg around Martin, the skin void of hair where Daisy’s mouth had almost torn it off, and all he can envision is the ways this could be destroyed as he watches.
Bundle Jon close. Ignore the rain, the itch at the bottom of his stomach, the queasy roil of his fear. Drift into unkind sleep populated with its garden of earthly terrors.
-
Martin is… not happy. Not exactly. And that’s fine. It’s fine.
-
Jon is happy.
-
Jon, rubbing at the compression lines around his hips, the accusatory splay of the top button refusing to budge closed:
“I can’t fit into my jeans.”
Martin enfolds him from behind, planting his palms over the slight paunch of Jon’s stomach, filled out through sensible eating and small indulgences and a hunger that will never be ravenous but has restored its human qualities.
“Hmm. It’s a good look on you. Healthier.”
“Or it’s middle age.”
“Or it’s eating things that aren’t tea and meal-deal sandwiches.”
“Or other people’s terror.”
“Oh yes, you’re right, I completely forgot about your subsistence diet of eldritch and unbidden horrors in a luscious wholegrain wrap, forgive me.”
Jon laughs at that. The sound has not yet lost its novelty for either of them.
He shifts, turns, his arms a buoy around Martin’s stomach.
“You’ve lost weight.”
“Must be all the clean air,” Martin quips. “All that healthy living.”
-
Punch. Gasp. Exhale.
Martin wakes up.
When his heart has wound down from the pace of its gallop, he extricates himself from Jon’s grip. It is a laborious task to find the places where they’ve joined in the night and pull them apart, like separating fabric snagged on rosebushes.
He gets some water from the cold tap in the kitchen. Sits heavily on the sofa, the room cossetted by the gloom.
Punch. Gasp. Exhale.
His hands shake.
He doesn’t go back to bed.
-
He isn’t happy, but he could grow to be. He could. He could. He just isn’t trying hard enough.
-
Some days, he feels like he’s waiting for the ice to give under them.
Check the passers-by as they walk. Anyone familiar, any teeth filed too sharp, anything animal or blood-shot, any eyes that glance too deep.
Check the oven. The gas knobs are angled to off but a leak is not impossible in a house this old, their alarm might malfunction, they might fall asleep and some spark from a plug socket could catch and incite a conflagration.  
Check the window latches. The opening wide enough for a body to squirm through, the claws of a Hunter marring the sill. Wriggling infestations that invade through the letter box, the keyhole, the gap under the door where the wind can whistle through.
Check. Check. Check.
-
Jon is happy. Jon has a job, work friends, a hundred small luxuries that he has struggled to earn. Jon is happy, so why can’t he be? He went through so much less, the blood washed off easily with soap, what the fuck does he have to cry over –
-
Martin has always crafted his masks from scrap, tongue out in concentration, piecing things together in low light, a make-do-and-mend of his own devising. His early efforts, the paper mâché and glue easily cracked before he learned to shore up his constructions. He has a small collection garnered over years.
The quiet-voiced, muffled-stepped, muted-smiled creation of a Good Son.
The zipped-mouth, no-refusals-no-complaints-yes-of-course-how-high earnestness of the Good Employee, the desperation sanded off the edges so no one could see.
The I’ll-get-the-first-round friendliness, the open-handed, open-hearted, too-naïve Good Colleague.
This new mask forms in increments, in the same way a rising mound of dirt marks the extent of a grave being dug.
He doesn’t mean to. It’s just he’s better at not talking about things. He always has been. And it is an ugly, easy comfort, to slip back into bad habits.
And Jon is happy.
All the things Martin does not wish to permit the light to touch he compresses inside like shaken soda. The rot in him deepens structural, the places where he papers over moulds and fungal speckles with the distraction of their new life. His smile parades simple, contented, cheeky, teasing, and there is a meticulous artistry in each. He sketches interest, paints joy, manufactures irritation out of the clay of nothingness that he allows himself to feel instead of the overwhelming rush of everything else.
I love you, his mouth murmurs, laughs, sighs, groans, and that at least is always true.
The mask of a Good Partner slips on tailor-made.
-
They find their nine-to-fives. Jon’s job is uneventful, boring, and nowhere near an Archive. He works in a registry office for the council, filing and organising and he’s cheerfully lied on his CV in order to get it. He gets the bus and texts Martin grumpy faces and GIFs summarising his mood when he gets suck in the commute or some idiot parks in a bus lane, he has a couple of colleagues he likes and a greater number that he tolerates, he gets a hot chocolate from this universe’s overpriced multinational chain on his lunch hour. When he gets home, he complains with delight at the mundanity of his dissatisfactions, regales Martin with tales of meagre drama.
Martin gets a cleaning job at a school. It is monotonous, dull and safe. Martin loses track of the time easily, quagmired in his musings. The children are wary of him and his visible scarring but it doesn’t bother him as much as he thought it would. The teachers are friendly enough, as well as the other cleaning staff, but he does not make friends. They’ll have to move anyway, if anything finds them here, if the Fears emerge again.
Martin tries not to feel like he’s waiting.
-
He wants to have a good night’s sleep.
-
“I’ll have breakfast at the school, don’t worry.”
“There were some leftovers from the canteen, so I’m kind of full.”
“It was one of the teacher’s birthdays, you know, Denise? Heh, might have had a bit too much cake. I’ll pop this in the fridge for later though, it’ll keep till tomorrow.”
“I’m just not that hungry tonight, Jon.”
-
He feels sharper when he doesn’t eat. It is uncomfortable, a scratched-out, hollowing sensation, but things focus more. He can control nothing else but this, and it feels good, to have this mastery over himself when so much is beyond him.
He drops down notches on his belt and tells Jon it’s all the walking he’s doing.
-
The world continues to happen to them. He goes to the cinema with Jon and picks at popcorn and encourages Jon’s outraged opinion. He meets Jon’s mildly interesting work friends and plays nice and excels at small talk, and he drinks half a cider that he nurses over the evening because it’s making his head fuggy. His body communicates its sharpness to him and he gains grim satisfaction from ignoring it. He goes to work and goes home and doesn’t sleep and goes to work and goes home and doesn’t sleep.
Martin does his best at living, and his mask doesn’t slip.
-
“You seem tired,” Jon pries his words out carefully, picking them out of his teeth as one would scraps. “Is… is everything ok?”
“Yeah, sure it is. Why?”
“…  you seem a bit down today. Recently. Is anything… is there anything you want to talk about?”
“I’ve just been working too hard. Been a while since I had to do double-shifts, heh, I’m not as young as I used to be.”
“If you’re sure?”
Jon shifts to a different position where he’s sat on the sofa, his legs tucking up under him. Martin endures his questioning gaze with practise.
“Yeah, I’m all good.”
Martin delivers a hand-crafted smile that’s gilded heavily with guilelessness and reassurance. He watches as Jon believes him and hates himself.
-
“You know… You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but you can – you know you can talk to me, Martin?”
Martin’s eyes focus on Jon’s chest at the point where a knife once sunk in, and doesn’t reply.
-
Punch. Gasp. Exhale.
Martin wakes up.
Jon has twisted over onto his back again, rattling like a chain-smoker’s cough with his snoring. They were quiet that evening, tangled up in their own thoughts, but there is none of that distance in sleep. During the night, Jon’s wormed himself out of the covers with a single-minded determination, his restless legs squashing the duvet to the bottom of the bed on his side, encouraging Martin’s to follow suit.
He’s shirtless, his top chucked off to pile unceremoniously on the floor. The temperature is ripe with a burgeoning summer heat, and Jon tosses and complains if he’s overwarm, and Martin didn’t think he’d get to feel the drudgery of another lived summer. He’s shirtless, and the room is palled in sweltering dark that softens the vague shapes of the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, the knickknacks of the life they’re building together. He’s shirtless, and Martin cannot see where the scar is, the only scar of Jon’s he has ever thought ugly, but he knows it is there. That he put it there. That he could just as easily be waking up alone.
His body pains him to live in it. His stomach tight and bottomed out empty.
He is so so tired.
Martin’s heartbeat does not slow down. His chest constricting, and he swallows, a sharp sound hiccupping in his throat. He stifles it with a forceful sniff but more come as a painful spasming wave, and he has to sit up if any air is to dribble into his lungs.
He should get up. He has to get up, do this in the bathroom, doubled-over the sink, stifling his weakness where it cannot be witnessed. He cannot do this here.
Punch. Gasp.
His burning face is soaked as he bunches up his sleeves against his reddening eyes. A calming exhale drains out shaky, moulds itself into another loud sob. He plants his hands over his mouth, screwing his eyes closed, and this will pass, he’s fine, this will pass…
“Martin?”
I’m sorry to wake you, he thinks to say. It’s nothing, go back to sleep, stop looking at me Jon, I’m fine, I’m fine, it’s nothing, it’s nothing…
His shoulders start to shake.
“Martin?” Jon repeats slowly. And the ice creaks and cracks and Martin gasps and then it breaks, and the force of his damned-up grief is tidal, catastrophic and he sobs into his hands.
“It’s… it’s alright – it’s… it was a nightmare, that’s all, ‘s alright…”
“It’s not!” Martin bubbles out, the words mashed to a wail in his hands. “It’s not, it’s not, it’ll ruin this…”
“Hey.” Jon brings his arm around Martin and he buries his head in the bony crook of his shoulder because he does not want to meet Jon’s eyes. “What do you mean? Martin?”
Jon rubs at his back. Martin’s body betrays him in a hundred ways as it collapses around him. His weeping wrings him out, dry-mouthed and headachy and trembling when he subsides into shivery breaths.
“Talk to me,” Jon says. “Please.”
“You’re so happy,” Martin sniffs out. “I-I want you to be happy, god, o-of course I do. Things are, they’re good, they’re good and we won, s-s-so why does it feel like I’m still holding my breath? I-I go to bed and I’m frightened of every noise, and I wake up and I’m terrified that someone somehow could take this all away, and I can’t sleep, and I-I’m tired, Jon, I’m tired of holding my breath, and it’s all – it’s all so much a-a-a-and I can’t – ”
“Oh, Martin – ”
His words fail him then. Jon holds him up and his arms do not loosen.
“We-we’re going to fix this,” Jon says after a long while. “I promise you, together, we’ll – we’ll talk to someone. You aren’t alone in this. Together, alright, we’ll do this together. We’ve survived – everything else, we can get through this too.”
“I don’t know if I can believe you,” Martin says, too drained to avoid honesty.
“…Maybe not yet,” Jon says after a pause. “That’s OK. I can wait.”
I’m sorry, Martin attempts to say but Jon presses a kiss to his forehead.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Jon says. He strokes Martin’s sweat-soaked hair.
“… Can we talk? Tomorrow? You don’t have to tell me everything, but… I’d like to be there for you, if you want me. If you’ll let me.”
Martin nods because he doesn’t trust his gummed-up throat. Jon takes that as an answer.
Dawn comes in slowly enough but they see it in together.
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Audiology and Hearing Aids Monroeville PA - Hearing Unlimited
Listening To Help - Kinds Of Auditory Gadgets For Listening To Loss and also the Pros and Cons
A listening device is a hearing gadget that you can make use of to assist intensify audios. If you have hearing loss you can make use of a listening device to ensure that seems in your setting would certainly be amplified, enabling you to hear them at an audible level. It can be valuable in both noisy as well as peaceful situations.
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There are several styles of listening device that you can pick from. Each design has its very own pros and cons. It would highly depend on your preference on which design you would certainly wish to use.
1) Behind-The-Ear (BTE) Listening Device
This style of listening devices is the biggest, yet it is likewise one of the most effective. It comes with a difficult plastic case that is used behind your ear, which is connected to a plastic earmold that is put inside your outer ear. All the digital elements are positioned in the plastic instance behind your ear.
Behind-the-ear listening device are suitable to be made use of for all levels of hearing loss. One more good point is that it can be low-profile, considering that it doesn't give that "plugged-up" sensation in your ears.
Nevertheless if you are putting on glasses, this kind can be challenging for you, considering that the tool can interfere with the arms of your glasses. You can additionally have difficulty in using the telephone due to the placement of the microphone, which is behind your ears.
2) In-The-Ear (ITE) Listening Device
This kind is the biggest of the custom made styles, and is only used for mild to moderate listening to loss. The device is completely healthy inside your outer ear; that's why it can give you extra occlusion effect than Behind-The-Ear sort of listening devices.
Some In-The-Ear listening device might include added functions installed; like a telecoil, which is a magnetic coil that can make it much easier for you to chat over the telephone. This sort of hearing tool is usually not utilized by children, due to the fact that as kids expand, the ear moulds need to be replaced commonly.
3) In-The-Canal (ITC) Listening To Help
The In-The-Canal (ITC) kind of hearing aid is personalized to fit the sizes and shape of your ear canal. It is typically used for moderate to moderate hearing losses. Using the telephone would not be a trouble with this kind. Yet you can obtain the occlusion effect or that 'plugged-up' sensation that can be really awkward. You would also need more dexterity to manage the handles of the device.
4) Completely In The Canal (CIC) Hearing Help
This is the tiniest hearing assistant made that is nearly hidden in your ear canal. The CIC listening devices do not have hands-on controls, as well as are used for mild to modest hearing losses. These are very pricey, and also are vulnerable to wetness and wax. The good thing is, they have less occlusion effect than the various other kinds and also using the telephone is extremely easy. Given that they are little, CIC listening devices have much less space for batteries, making their battery life much shorter than the other kinds.
Stop looking for "Hearing Medical professional Near Me". Hearing Unlimited is the top Monroeville PA Audiology as well as Listening Devices Facility & offers a cost-free 7-day examination trial for all hearing aids, supply Comprehensive Audiological services varying from diagnostic assessment to hearing loss recovery.
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rediscoverhearing · 10 months ago
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Choosing Between In-Person and Online Hearing Aid Providers
If you are dealing with hearing loss, it’s important to find a Perth hearing aid provider that you can trust. There are many benefits of buying local, in-person hearing aids from a professional audiologist, but purchasing online can offer convenience and cost savings. In this article, we will explore the pros and cons of each option so that you can make an informed decision about your hearing health.
Choosing an In-Person Audiology Clinic
There are nine major hearing clinic brands in Australia, including the behemoth Australian Hearing, which has over 500 permanent and visiting centres and supplies one-third of all government-subsidised hearing aids. Then there are hundreds of independent stores and even big box discounter Costco that also offers audiology services and hearing aids. We contacted these big chains to see what they offered in terms of screening and assessments, free trials, and satisfaction guarantees.
When you buy in-person, your audiologist can perform a comprehensive evaluation of your hearing abilities. This will allow them to determine which hearing aids are the best fit for your specific hearing needs and lifestyle, ensuring that you get the most out of your investment.
Online retailers, on the other hand, do not usually provide this service. This can be a problem if you are new to using hearing aids and aren’t familiar with the various features and models that are available. It can also be an issue if you have ongoing hearing issues that need to be addressed or if you are looking for a particular type of hearing aid.
In addition, if you choose to purchase hearing aids online, it’s crucial to research the retailer to ensure that they are legitimate. This can be done by checking their return and warranty policies, as well as verifying that the product is authentic. Counterfeit hearing aids are a common concern, and they can be difficult to identify without the help of a trained eye.
Another benefit of purchasing in-person is that your audiologist will be able to offer you a range of options to suit your budget and lifestyle. This includes devices that are more discreet, as well as higher-end models that offer more advanced features. Some audiologist even offer financing plans for their customers, so that they can pay for their hearing aids over time.
When it comes to finding a Hearing Aid Perth, the most important thing is that you choose a company that is ethical, quality-focused, and customer-centric. Pristine Hearing is a family-owned and operated company that prides itself on being just that. They’re members of Audiology Australia and the American Tinnitus Association, so you can be sure that they’ll always provide ETHICAL, QUALITY and EVIDENCE BASED hearing healthcare conducted with the highest degree of PROFESSIONALISM. They also offer a variety of interest free payment plans for their patients, so you can get the treatment you need now and pay later. This is a great way to make the treatment more affordable and manageable, especially for those on a fixed income.
Rediscover Hearing the Joy of Hearing with Your local & WA owned Independent Audiologists. Your local Hearing Aid and Tinnitus Specialists. Combined experience of 38 years.
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adelaidehearingclinic · 2 years ago
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Adelaide Hearing is a Reputed Hearing Clinic Providing Hearing Aid Tinnitus Treatment. We are one of the Top Audiologists in Australia Because of the Way We Practice our Profession. To Help you Effectively Manage any Ear Related Concerns, We offer a Material Removal Facility, Force Technology, Skilled Staff, and Highly Experienced Professionals.
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hearingaidsprofessional · 2 years ago
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How To Maintain Behind-The-Ear Hearing Aids?
 Hearing aids assist people with hearing loss perceive the sounds around them more clearly. This device collects, amplifies, and directs sound into the listener's ear so it can be processed and appropriately comprehended.
People get recommended to use hearing aids by their audiologist or ENT specialist after a thorough hearing assessment.
For those who have hearing loss, hearing aids are a necessity, so they must be kept in good condition to avoid malfunction or other damage. 
Thus, it is essential to clean your hearing aids frequently, or there could be a hindrance in their functioning.
How Do You Keep Your Hearing Aids in Good Condition?
To keep your hearing aids in good condition, you should follow a regular cleaning schedule or have them cleaned by a hearing aid cleaning service. Here's how you can maintain and clean your listening device:
To clean the earwax accumulation in the opening at the end of your hearing aid, you'll need a wax pick and a hearing aid cleaning brush. Keep a hearing aid cleaning kit on hand for the more effective dirt removal.
Put on your hearing aids after using hair products or water on your face or head to maintain hygiene. Wash your hands before and after cleaning your hearing aids.
Clean your hearing aids before sleeping so they can air out during the night.
Keep your hearing aids at room temperature when they are not being used, and keep them away from water if they are not waterproof.
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Looking for a qualified and trusted audiologist near me? Hearing Aids' Professionals is your one-stop solution.
Cleaning hearing aids can be complicated because they are delicate devices with varying compositions based on design, material, and brand.
How To Clean Behind-The-Ear Hearing Aids?
The cleaning process differs depending on the hearing aid users. Behind-the-ear hearing aids are appropriate for various forms of hearing loss. 
They are typically wrapped around the ear's back. These hearing aids are simple to use and clean.
Here's how you can clean BTE hearing aids:
To clean the tube, use warm water without getting the rest of the gadget wet.
The earmould must be removed from the hook.
You should clean the mould with a gentle brush and remove any remaining debris with a wax pick.
If the tube is clogged, it needs to be replaced.
Hearing Aids' Professionals: One-Stop Shop For Quality Hearing-Aid Services
Our skilled hearing aid specialist can help you with your hearing issues and suggest the most suitable solutions. We also provide free hearing aids for pensioners and DVA veterans.
We also provide a variety of high-quality hearing aids made by well-known brands, as well as various accessories such as hearing aid cleaning equipment, personalised ear plugs, assistive listening devices, and so on.
We also assist people eligible for the NDIS hearing aids plan in obtaining the necessary financing approval and hearing aids through the HSP.
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jimdsmith34 · 7 years ago
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Jimi Hendrix: ‘You never told me he was that good’
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death, Ed Vulliamy speaks to the people who knew him best and unearths a funny, if intense, superstar
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On the morning of 21 September 1966, a Pan Am airliner from New York landed at Heathrow, carrying among its passengers a black American musician from a poor home. Barely known in his own country and a complete stranger to England, he had just flown first class for the first time in his life. His name was James Marshall Hendrix.
On 18 September 1970, four years later, I picked up a copy of Londons Evening Standard on my way home from school, something I never usually did. There was a story of extreme urgency on the front page and a picture of Hendrix playing at a concert still ringing in my ears at the Isle of Wight festival, only 18 days earlier. The text reported how Hendrix had died that morning in a hotel in the street, Lansdowne Crescent in Notting Hill, in which I had been born, and a block away from where I now lived.
During those three years and 362 days living in London, Hendrix had conjured with his vision and sense of sound, his personality and genius the most extraordinary guitar music ever played, the most remarkable sound-scape ever created; of that there is little argument. Opinion varies only over the effect his music has on people: elation, fear, sexual stimulation, sublimation, disgust all or none of these but always drop-jawed amazement.
The 40th anniversary of Hendrixs death next month will be marked by the opening of an exhibition of curios and memorabilia at the only place he ever called home a flat diagonally above that once occupied by the composer George Frideric Handel, on Brook Street in central London, in the double building now known as Handel House. The flat will be opened to the public for 12 days in September and there is talk about plans for a joint museum, adding Hendrixs presence to that already established in the museum devoted to Handel. Involved in the discussions is the woman with whom Hendrix furnished the top flat of 23 Brook St, and with whom he lived: the only woman he ever really loved, Kathy Etchingham.
In a rare interview by telephone, (she has moved abroad), Ms Etchingham explains: I want him to be remembered for what he was not this tragic figure he has been turned into by nit-pickers and people who used to stalk us and collect photographs and evidence of what we were doing on a certain day. He could be grumpy, and he could be terrible in the studio, getting exactly what he wanted but he was fun, he was charming. I want people to remember the man I knew.
When she met Hendrix (the same night he landed in London), he had already lived an interesting, if frustrating, 23 years. He was born to a father who cared, but not greatly, and a mother he barely knew she died when he was 15 but adored (shes said to be the focus of two of his three great ballads, Little Wing and Angel). He had always been enthralled by guitar playing a natural, immersed in R&B on the radio and the music of blues giants Albert King and Muddy Waters. When he was 18, he was offered the chance to avoid jail for a minor misdemeanour by joining the army, which he did, training for the 101st Airborne Division.
His military career was marked by friendship with a bass player called Billy Cox from West Virginia, with whom he would play his last concerts, and a report which read: Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations. Misses bed check: sleeps while supposed to be working: unsatisfactory duty performance.
Hendrix engineered his discharge in time to avoid being mobilised to Vietnam and worked hard as a backing guitarist for Little Richard, Curtis Knight, the Isley Brothers and others. But, arriving in New York to try and establish himself in his own right, Hendrix found he did not fit. The writer Paul Gilroy, in his recent book Darker Than Blue, makes the point that Hendrixs life and music were propelled by two important factors: his being an ex-paratrooper who gradually became an advocate of peace and his transgressions of redundant musical and racial rules.
Hendrix didnt fit because he wasnt black enough for Harlem, nor white enough for Greenwich Village. His music was closer to the blues than any other genre; the Delta and Chicago blues which had captivated a generation of musicians, not so much in the US as in London, musicians such as John Mayall and Alexis Korner, and thereafter Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page among many others.
As luck would have it, the Brits were in town and Linda Keith, girlfriend of the Stones Keith Richards, persuaded Chas Chandler, bass player of the Animals, to go and listen to Hendrix play at the Cafe Wha? club in the Village. Chandler wanted to move into management and happened to be fixated by a song, Hey Joe, by Tim Rose.
It was a song Chas knew would be a hit if only he could find the right person to play it, says Keith Altham, then of the New Musical Express, who would later become a kind of embedded reporter with the Hendrix London entourage. There he was, this incredible man, playing a wild version of that very song. It was like an epiphany for Chas it was meant to be.
To be honest, remembers Tappy Wright, the Animals roadie who came to Cafe Wha? with Chandler that night, I wasnt too impressed at first, but when he started playing with his teeth, and behind his head, it was obvious that here was someone different.
Before long, Hendrix was aboard the plane to London with Chandler and the Animals manager, Michael Jeffery, to be met by Tony Garland, who would end up being general factotum for Hendrixs management company, Anim. When he arrived, recalls Garland now, sitting on his barge beside the canal in Maida Vale, west London, where he now lives, I filled out the customs form. We couldnt say hed come to work because he didnt have a permit, so I told them he was a famous American star coming to collect his royalties.
It is strange, tracking down Hendrixs inner circle in London. His own musicians in his great band, the Experience Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell are dead. Likewise, his two managers, Chandler and Jeffery, and one of his closest musician friends, the Rolling Stone Brian Jones; the other, Eric Burdon of the Animals, declined to be interviewed. But some members of the close-knit entourage are still around, such as Kathy Etchingham and Keith Altham, wearing a flaming orange jacket befitting the time of which he agrees to speak, in defiance of a heart attack only a few days before.
Music in London had reached a tumultuously creative moment when Hendrix arrived and was perfectly poised to receive him. The performers were just your mates who played guitars, recalls Altham. It was tight everyone knew everyone else. It was just Pete from the Who, Eric of Cream, or Brian and Mick of the Stones, all going to each others gigs.
For reasons never quite explained, the blues both in their acoustic Delta form, and Chicago blues plugged into an amplifier had captivated this generation of English musicians more deeply than their American counterparts. Elderly blues musicians found themselves, to their amazement, courted for concerts, such as an unforgettable night at Hammersmith with Son House and Bukka White. Champion Jack Dupree married and settled in Yorkshire. People [here] felt a certain affinity with the blues, music which added a bit of colour to grey life, Altham continues. And as Garland points out: White America was listening to Doris Day black American music got nowhere near white AM radio. Jimi was too white for black radio. Here, there were a lot of white guys listening to blues from America and wanting to sound like their heroes.
Things happened at speed after Hendrix landed. Come down to the Scotch, Chas told me the day Jimi arrived and hear what I found in New York, recalls Altham. Jimi couldnt play because he had no work permit, but he jammed that night, and my first impression was that hed make a great jazz musician. That was the night, his first in London, that Hendrix met Kathy Etchingham. It happened straightaway, she recalls. Here was this man: different, funny, coy even about his own playing.
A short while later, recalls Altham, Chas took me to hear him at the Bag ONails club [in Soho] for one of his first proper gigs, turned to me and said, Whatya think? I said Id never heard anything like it in all my life. At a concert in the same series, remembers Garland, Michael Jeffery put an arm round Chas, another round me and said, I think weve cracked it, mate. They had: Kit Lambert, according to Altham, literally scrambled across the tables to Chas at one of the shows and said, in his plummy accent, he had to sign him. Chas needed a record contract, Decca had turned Hendrix down (along with the Beatles) and Lambert was about to launch a new label, Track Records, with interest from Polydor: The deal was done, on the back of a napkin, says Altham.
Hendrix had formed his band at speed: a rhythm guitarist from Kent called Noel Redding who had applied to join the Animals but to whom Hendrix now allocated bass guitar and Mitch Mitchell, a jazz drummer seeking to mould himself in the style of John Coltranes great percussionist, Elvin Jones. With a stroke of genius, Jeffery came up with the only name befitting what was to follow: the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Is there any line in rocknroll more assuredly seductive as: Are you experienced?/ Have you ever been experienced?/ Well, I have (from 1967s Are You Experienced)?
Paul McCartney, John Lennon and the other Beatles quickly converged to hear this phenomenon, along with the Stones and Pete Townshend. Arriving one night at the Bag ONails, Altham met Brian Jones walking back up the stairs with tears in his eyes. I said, Brian, what is it? and he replied, Its what he does, it chokes me only he put it better than that.
There was also curiosity from the emergent powerhouse of British blues: Cream and Eric Clapton. There was a particular night when Cream allowed Jimi to join them for a jam at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London. Meeting Clapton had been among the enticements Chandler had used to lure Hendrix to Britain: Hendrix blew into a version of [Howlin Wolfs] Killing Floor, recalls Garland, and plays it at breakneck tempo, just like that it stopped you in your tracks. Altham recalls Chandler going backstage after Clapton left in the middle of the song which he had yet to master himself; Clapton was furiously puffing on a cigarette and telling Chas: You never told me he was that fucking good.
With a reputation, a recording contract and the adoration of his peers, Hendrix was allocated a flat belonging to Ringo Starr, in Montagu Square, in which he lived with Etchingham, Chandler and Chandlers Swedish girlfriend, Lotta. It was not ideal, but base camp for an initial tour as opening act for Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck, with the Walker Brothers topping the bill.
Something was needed, Chandler thought, whereby Hendrix could blow the successive acts off the stage and Altham had the beginning of an idea. He said: Its a pity that you cant set fire to your guitar. There was a pregnant pause in the dressing room, after which Chas said, Go out and get some lighter fuel. Garland remembers: I went out into Seven Sisters Road [in north London] to buy lighter fluid. At first, it didnt make sense to me there were too many things going on to worry about lighter fluid but it all became clear in the end.
Altham borrowed a lighter from Gary the third Walker brother and drummer and that night, at the Astoria theatre in central London, Hendrix set his guitar ablaze for the first time. One of the security guards said, Why are you waving it around your head? recalls Altham. Cause Im trying to put it out, replied Jimi. Actually, he only did it three times after, says Altham, but it became a trademark.
The touring began in earnest during that winter of 1966-7: around working mens clubs and little theatres in the north of England. Thats when I remember him at his very best, recalls Etchingham. And at his happiest. The small clubs in regional venues. When he was desperate to make a name for himself, but was also playing for himself. In the working mens clubs, they just wanted some music to enjoy while they drank their beer. In the small theatres, people had come to hear him. But that was his best music ever played for its own sake. None of these crazy expectations, no one hanging on just the people he knew, liked and trusted, and his own music.
But what was this music, this singular, uplifting, otherworldly, menacing, exotic and erotic sound? Hendrix was a magpie, says Altham. He would take from blues, jazz only Coltrane could play in that way and Dylan was the greatest influence. But hed listen to Mozart, hed read sci-fi and Asimov and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix. Then there was just the dexterity he was left-handed, but I remember people throwing him a right-handed guitar and Hendrix picking it up and playing it upside down.
And dont forget, says Tappy Wright, who acted as roadie at first, then joined the management team, we were using the cheapest guitars. These were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic, but stretched to the fucking limit.
The most precious insight comes from Etchingham. People often saw Jimi on stage looking incredibly intense and serious. And suddenly this smile would come across his face, almost a laugh, for no apparent reason, she says. Well, I remember that very well, sitting on the bed or the floor at home in Brook Street. Sometimes, he would play a riff for hours, until he had it just right. Then this great smile would creep across his face or hed throw his head back and laugh. Those were the moments he had got it right for himself, not for anyone else.
Touring ran concurrent with work in the studio first the singles: Hey Joe, the inimitable Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary, written for Kathy when Hendrix was left alone at home after she had stormed out from an argument, so the story goes (Mary is her middle name). I never realised quite how hard he worked, says Sarah Bardwell, director of the Handel House Museum, researching her new charge. The Experience would finish a concert up north, drive south, record between 3am and 9am, then return north for two more shows each day. LSD had yet to play a major role if the Experience were on amphetamines, it was to keep the schedule.
In various studios, ending up at west Londons Olympic, work began. I used to ring them up to book time, recalls Etchingham. Thirty quid an hour and theyd want the cheque there and then. Chandler was aware of this and would occasionally hasten things along by taking what the band thought was a warm-up to be the finished product. What? the band would say, recalls Altham. Thats it, Chas would reply. Now for the next one.
But the soundscape unique to Hendrix, pushing the technology to its limits, was not serendipity, nor was it only about Hendrixs genius: there was science behind the subliminal magic. This was not psychcolergic, as Eric Burdon used to call it, says Garland. Hendrix knew exactly what he was doing. And this process began with a man called Roger Mayer.
We call this the Surrey blues Delta, says Mayer, with a wave of his arms across the crazy-paving pathways of Worcester Park, near Surbiton. Eric over here, Keith down the road, the Stones from there. Mayer was an acoustician and sonic wave engineer for the Admiralty, a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, but also an inventor of various electronic musical devices, including an improved wah-wah pedal and the Octavia guitar effect with its unique doubling effect. Id shown it to Jimmy Page, but he thought it was too far out. Jimi said, the moment we met, Yeah, Id like to try that stuff. One of my favourite memories of all, says Etchingham, is Jimi and Roger huddled together over the console and the instruments, talking about stuff way over my head, and then this glorious thing happening.
We started from the premise that music was a mission, not a competition, says Mayer, who describes himself as a sonic consultant to Hendrix. That the basis was the blues, but that the framework of the blues was too tight. Wed talk first about what he wanted the emotion of the song to be. Whats the vision? He would talk in colours and my job was to give him the electronic palette which would engineer those colours so he could paint the canvas.
Let me try to explain why it sounds like it does: when you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form, he adds. The electronics we used were feed forward, which means that the input from the player projects forward the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive it is speed-forward analogue, a non-repetitive wave form, and that is the definition of pure music and therefore the diametric opposite of digital.
Look, if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples it depends on how you throw the stone, or the wind. Digital makes the false presumption that you can predict those ripples, but Jimi and I were always looking for the warning signs. The brain knows when it hears repetition that this is no longer music and what you hear when you listen to Hendrix is pure music. It took discussion and experiment, and some frustrations, but then that moment would come, wed put the headphones down and say, Got it. Thats the one.
But I take none of the credit, insists Mayer. You can build a racing car just like the one that won the 1955 grand prix. But if you cant drive like Juan Manuel Fangio, youre not going to win the grand prix. Jimi Hendrix only sounds like he does because he was Jimi Hendrix.
Everyone knows that Hendrix had hundreds of women, often concurrently but that is not as interesting as the fact that, says Altham, Kathy Etchingham was the love of his life. Mayer recalls them oozing affection, even when there was a row he needed her very badly indeed. Hendrix called the flat into which he moved with her in 1968 the only home I ever had.
We knew we wanted Mayfair, says Etchingham, so we could walk to the gigs, but the prices were high, even though it was a little seedy 30 a week. The couple furnished the split-level, top-floor apartment together with prints and wall hangings from Portobello Road. When Hendrix found out that Handel had lived downstairs, he went round to HMV or One Stop Records to get Messiah, says Sarah Bardwell. What is so interesting is that they were both musicians from abroad, who came to London to make their name in this building.
It feels extraordinary now to walk over the venerable floorboards past a replica of Handels harpsichord, portraits of the composer and the score of Messiah in the room in which it was composed, then up a wooden staircase to Hendrixs whitewashed sitting room and bedroom above. Sarah Bardwells aim is for a joint Handel-Hendrix house museum of some kind. Blue English Heritage plaques accompany each other on the wall outside; Hendrix was added in 1997, a labour of devotion by Kathy Etchingham, who recalls English Heritage balking at the fact that the shop front below was a lingerie shop, all mannequins wearing suspenders and knickers, which needed covering up while the plaque was unveiled.
Now, it is the posh Jo Malone perfumery, though in our day it was Mr Loves cafe, she recalls fondly. On the corner of Oxford Street. And there was an Indian tea shop wed go to in South Molton Street, and always HMV or One Stop and wed walk to the gigs along Regent Street or across Hanover Square, and maybe take a taxi home.
The memories of the people who actually knew him overshadow the tragic, antiheroic Hendrix of popular imagination. Etchingham and Keith Altham recall a man with a sense of humour. If things were getting tense in the studio, says Altham, hed just play Teddy Bears Picnic. Adds Tony Garland: If I told Jimi to kiss my arse, hed answer, Youve got a rubber neck, do it yourself with a sly grin. You always knew you were with someone quicker-witted than yourself.
Altham also talks about Hendrix saying nothing to reporters, or contradictory things, on purpose. He would pat his fingers against his lips mid-sentence and go, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, in order to say, in effect, nothing. He wanted the music to speak. He also had this way of saying things that made you do a double take: Did he really say that? Such as, just before he went on to play with Clapton, who was his idol, for the first time, he told me, I want to see if he is as good as he thinks I am which is not at all the remark you first think it is.
But many of those who comprised Hendrixs inner circle in London now talk about some demise in his mental agility once he became popular in his native US, a mass commodity caught between the triangle of his own racially transgressive music, his blackness and the black power movement, and his overwhelmingly white audience. Even then, though, Hendrix closed the 1969 Woodstock festival with a version of The Star-Spangled Banner, which became the anthem for both the movement against the war in Vietnam and Hendrixs own complicated empathy with the young American fodder sent to fight it, as a former military man himself. Many of his childhood friends were over there, some never to return. The anthem made Jimi famous worldwide, veering into a vortex out of which emerged Purple Haze, a glorious, lyrical dirge for something, for everything; an endpiece not only to Woodstock but to so many dreams.
Chas Chandler would come into the studio and find two women in his chair, recalls Tappy Wright. Get out of my chair! hed say. And then, well, there were drugs, drugs, drugs. I never took any, because I had to make sure everyone got out of bed in the morning but they were around, too much around. Altham says that Chandler told him that he gave Jimi an ultimatum: Either I go or the hangers-on go. But there was no getting rid of them, so Chas quit and Jimi was left with Michael Jeffery.
Jimi was at his best when the fame never got in the way of the music, says Etchingham, and at his worst when the fame took over, when people who hardly knew him suddenly became his best friends. He had this thing, says Altham, of not being able to say no to people and this became a problem.
Even the flat on Brook Street became an open house, to journalists, anyone. Its funny, says Sarah Bardwell. Here we are trying to contact his old friends who are now superstars for our events and exhibition, and its like laying siege to Fort Knox! Yet Hendrix was available to anyone, perhaps almost too much so.
Despite the distractions, there was one project consistently dear to Hendrixs heart: the state-of-the-art Electric Lady Studios in New York, opened with a party on 26 August 1970, the night before he was due to fly back to England to play the Isle of Wight festival. Only Hendrix was almost too shy to appear and, when he did so, he retreated to the steps outside, where he met a young singer-songwriter too shy to enter the fray Patti Smith. It was all too much for me. Johnny Winter in there and all, recalled Smith in a past interview with the Observer. So I thought, Ill just sit awhile on the steps and out came Jimi and sat next to me. And he was so full of ideas; the different sounds he was going to create in this studio, wider landscapes, experiments with musicians and new soundscapes. All he had to do was get over back to England, play the festival and get back to work…
It had been a long weekend on the Isle of Wight and, for me, an exciting one. I was compelled not disgusted, as is the official history by the determination of French and German anarchists to tear down the fences so that it be a free festival. I loved the fact that Notting Hills local band, Hawkwind, played outside the fence in protest at the ticket prices. The strange atmosphere added to the climactic moment, after the Who and others: the one set, at 2am on the Monday, for which it was imperative to get down from among the crowds on Desolation Row and force a way right to the front and concentrate or, rather, submit to hypnosis. The set by Jimi Hendrix.
It is written in the lore of Hendrixology that this was a terrible performance. Hendrix had arrived exhausted, by the previous months events, the upcoming tour, the days violence and by walkie-talkie voices that somehow made their way into the PA system. But all I remember, having just turned 16, is a dream coming true: the greatest rock musician of all time (one knew this with assurance) dressed in blazing red and purple silks, actually playing the version of Sgt Peppers about which I had read so much in NME, playing Purple Haze, Voodoo Chile and a long, searing Machine Gun, just yards away. I remember the sound the sounds, plural bombarding me from the far side of some emotional, existential, hallucinogenic and sexual checkpoint along the road towards the rest of my life. I remember him playing the horn parts to Sgt Peppers on his guitar! I remember the deafening and painful silence after he finished his fusillade and in the crowd a mixture of rapture, gratitude, enlightenment and affection.
Afterwards, Hendrix went on a reportedly disastrous tour of Scandinavia and Germany (failing to meet one of his two children, by a Swedish girlfriend the other he had sired in New York and also never met), before returning to the Cumberland hotel and the room in which he gave his last ever interview, to Keith Altham. (To mark the anniversary, the Cumberland has designed and decorated these rooms in a swirl of colour, stocked it with Hendrix music and called it the Hendrix Suite, in which people can stay.)
There were two women in the room, recalls Altham. One of them was a girlfriend called Devon Wilson and she was dodgy she dealt him drugs and I can say that now because shes dead. But he knew me well by this time and he seemed better than Id seen him previously. The interview is a remarkable one, utterly devoid of all the nonsense that would ensue about suicide and a death wish. On the tape, Hendrix laughs and jokes; he tells Altham about plans to re-form the Experience and tour England again.
On the night of 16 September, Hendrix went to Ronnie Scotts without his guitar, hoping to jam with Eric Burdons new band, War. Burdon considered him unfit to play. The following night, he returned and joined his friend on stage. I was tired, I missed it, says Altham, though, of course, I regret that now. It was the last time Hendrix ever played the guitar.
Hendrix went on to a party with a German woman, Monika Dannemann, and back to her rooms at the Samarkand hotel in Lansdowne Crescent. There are so many accounts of exactly what happened next, but all converge on the fact that he had drunk a fair amount, taken some kind of amphetamines (Black bombers, I think, given to him by Devon Wilson, surmises Altham) and some of Dannemans Vesparax sleeping pills, not knowing their strength. He vomited during the deep ensuing sleep, insufficiently conscious enough to throw up; Danneman panicked, and telephoned Burdon, who urged her to call an ambulance. But the greatest guitarist of all time was dead upon arrival at St Mary Abbots hospital, aged 27. (Sadly, Danneman took her own life in 1996.)
So it was, back in September 1970, that I made my way up Lansdowne Rise and round the corner to the Samarkand hotel after reading the news today, oh boy. I was amazed to have the pavement outside the address at which Jimi Hendrix had died that morning all to myself for a good couple of hours not a soul. I went home, got some chalk, and wrote: Scuse us while we kiss the sky, Jimi on the flagstones (OK, but I was only 16) and retreated to watch. Nothing happened and after another hour, a man came out and washed the words away and I returned home to write a lament in my diary, which I still have, the Standards front page folded at the date.
Speculations about suicide and murder are too ridiculous to contemplate most of them are probably concocted in order to dramatise and distract from the awful reality of such a genius dying in this way but what does matter are Kathy Etchinghams reflections. Jimi died because the simple things got complicated. He was born to a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who died and he died because he was in that flat in Notting Hill with a complete stranger who gave him a load of sleeping pills without telling him how strong they were. Its as simple and as complicated as that.
Im older and wiser now, she says. I enjoy culture and the fine things in life. I can look back and see all that more clearly than I did at the time I was so young, only 24. Of the compelling memoir she has written, Through Gypsy Eyes, she says: Id like to go over it again, fill in a few things, but what I want now, most of all from this anniversary, is for people to understand that it was in Britain that he was welcomed, it was there he was happy and such fun to be around yes, grumpy at times, and a handful but such a man. Id like the young people to know that.
Lets face it, says Tappy Wright, if Jimi had stayed with Kathy, hed probably be alive and playing still. Plus, he always said he wanted to be buried in London, not Seattle, where he was born and his family lived. It wasnt just me he told that, it was plenty of people that this was home. Still, says Etchingham, at least weve got the plaque, the Handel House Museum, and Im looking forward to seeing everyone in September. They were great times and well take a trip down memory lane. Only 40 years is a long time and Jimi wont be there.
The Hendrix in Britain exhibition runs at Handel House museum, 25 Brook Street, London W1, from 25 Aug-7Nov. Hendrixs rooms will be open from 15-26 Sep
source http://allofbeer.com/2017/07/15/jimi-hendrix-you-never-told-me-he-was-that-good/ from All of Beer http://allofbeer.blogspot.com/2017/07/jimi-hendrix-you-never-told-me-he-was.html
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adelaide-hearing · 3 years ago
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samanthasroberts · 7 years ago
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Jimi Hendrix: ‘You never told me he was that good’
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death, Ed Vulliamy speaks to the people who knew him best and unearths a funny, if intense, superstar
On the morning of 21 September 1966, a Pan Am airliner from New York landed at Heathrow, carrying among its passengers a black American musician from a poor home. Barely known in his own country and a complete stranger to England, he had just flown first class for the first time in his life. His name was James Marshall Hendrix.
On 18 September 1970, four years later, I picked up a copy of Londons Evening Standard on my way home from school, something I never usually did. There was a story of extreme urgency on the front page and a picture of Hendrix playing at a concert still ringing in my ears at the Isle of Wight festival, only 18 days earlier. The text reported how Hendrix had died that morning in a hotel in the street, Lansdowne Crescent in Notting Hill, in which I had been born, and a block away from where I now lived.
During those three years and 362 days living in London, Hendrix had conjured with his vision and sense of sound, his personality and genius the most extraordinary guitar music ever played, the most remarkable sound-scape ever created; of that there is little argument. Opinion varies only over the effect his music has on people: elation, fear, sexual stimulation, sublimation, disgust all or none of these but always drop-jawed amazement.
The 40th anniversary of Hendrixs death next month will be marked by the opening of an exhibition of curios and memorabilia at the only place he ever called home a flat diagonally above that once occupied by the composer George Frideric Handel, on Brook Street in central London, in the double building now known as Handel House. The flat will be opened to the public for 12 days in September and there is talk about plans for a joint museum, adding Hendrixs presence to that already established in the museum devoted to Handel. Involved in the discussions is the woman with whom Hendrix furnished the top flat of 23 Brook St, and with whom he lived: the only woman he ever really loved, Kathy Etchingham.
In a rare interview by telephone, (she has moved abroad), Ms Etchingham explains: I want him to be remembered for what he was not this tragic figure he has been turned into by nit-pickers and people who used to stalk us and collect photographs and evidence of what we were doing on a certain day. He could be grumpy, and he could be terrible in the studio, getting exactly what he wanted but he was fun, he was charming. I want people to remember the man I knew.
When she met Hendrix (the same night he landed in London), he had already lived an interesting, if frustrating, 23 years. He was born to a father who cared, but not greatly, and a mother he barely knew she died when he was 15 but adored (shes said to be the focus of two of his three great ballads, Little Wing and Angel). He had always been enthralled by guitar playing a natural, immersed in R&B on the radio and the music of blues giants Albert King and Muddy Waters. When he was 18, he was offered the chance to avoid jail for a minor misdemeanour by joining the army, which he did, training for the 101st Airborne Division.
His military career was marked by friendship with a bass player called Billy Cox from West Virginia, with whom he would play his last concerts, and a report which read: Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations. Misses bed check: sleeps while supposed to be working: unsatisfactory duty performance.
Hendrix engineered his discharge in time to avoid being mobilised to Vietnam and worked hard as a backing guitarist for Little Richard, Curtis Knight, the Isley Brothers and others. But, arriving in New York to try and establish himself in his own right, Hendrix found he did not fit. The writer Paul Gilroy, in his recent book Darker Than Blue, makes the point that Hendrixs life and music were propelled by two important factors: his being an ex-paratrooper who gradually became an advocate of peace and his transgressions of redundant musical and racial rules.
Hendrix didnt fit because he wasnt black enough for Harlem, nor white enough for Greenwich Village. His music was closer to the blues than any other genre; the Delta and Chicago blues which had captivated a generation of musicians, not so much in the US as in London, musicians such as John Mayall and Alexis Korner, and thereafter Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page among many others.
As luck would have it, the Brits were in town and Linda Keith, girlfriend of the Stones Keith Richards, persuaded Chas Chandler, bass player of the Animals, to go and listen to Hendrix play at the Cafe Wha? club in the Village. Chandler wanted to move into management and happened to be fixated by a song, Hey Joe, by Tim Rose.
It was a song Chas knew would be a hit if only he could find the right person to play it, says Keith Altham, then of the New Musical Express, who would later become a kind of embedded reporter with the Hendrix London entourage. There he was, this incredible man, playing a wild version of that very song. It was like an epiphany for Chas it was meant to be.
To be honest, remembers Tappy Wright, the Animals roadie who came to Cafe Wha? with Chandler that night, I wasnt too impressed at first, but when he started playing with his teeth, and behind his head, it was obvious that here was someone different.
Before long, Hendrix was aboard the plane to London with Chandler and the Animals manager, Michael Jeffery, to be met by Tony Garland, who would end up being general factotum for Hendrixs management company, Anim. When he arrived, recalls Garland now, sitting on his barge beside the canal in Maida Vale, west London, where he now lives, I filled out the customs form. We couldnt say hed come to work because he didnt have a permit, so I told them he was a famous American star coming to collect his royalties.
It is strange, tracking down Hendrixs inner circle in London. His own musicians in his great band, the Experience Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell are dead. Likewise, his two managers, Chandler and Jeffery, and one of his closest musician friends, the Rolling Stone Brian Jones; the other, Eric Burdon of the Animals, declined to be interviewed. But some members of the close-knit entourage are still around, such as Kathy Etchingham and Keith Altham, wearing a flaming orange jacket befitting the time of which he agrees to speak, in defiance of a heart attack only a few days before.
Music in London had reached a tumultuously creative moment when Hendrix arrived and was perfectly poised to receive him. The performers were just your mates who played guitars, recalls Altham. It was tight everyone knew everyone else. It was just Pete from the Who, Eric of Cream, or Brian and Mick of the Stones, all going to each others gigs.
For reasons never quite explained, the blues both in their acoustic Delta form, and Chicago blues plugged into an amplifier had captivated this generation of English musicians more deeply than their American counterparts. Elderly blues musicians found themselves, to their amazement, courted for concerts, such as an unforgettable night at Hammersmith with Son House and Bukka White. Champion Jack Dupree married and settled in Yorkshire. People [here] felt a certain affinity with the blues, music which added a bit of colour to grey life, Altham continues. And as Garland points out: White America was listening to Doris Day black American music got nowhere near white AM radio. Jimi was too white for black radio. Here, there were a lot of white guys listening to blues from America and wanting to sound like their heroes.
Things happened at speed after Hendrix landed. Come down to the Scotch, Chas told me the day Jimi arrived and hear what I found in New York, recalls Altham. Jimi couldnt play because he had no work permit, but he jammed that night, and my first impression was that hed make a great jazz musician. That was the night, his first in London, that Hendrix met Kathy Etchingham. It happened straightaway, she recalls. Here was this man: different, funny, coy even about his own playing.
A short while later, recalls Altham, Chas took me to hear him at the Bag ONails club [in Soho] for one of his first proper gigs, turned to me and said, Whatya think? I said Id never heard anything like it in all my life. At a concert in the same series, remembers Garland, Michael Jeffery put an arm round Chas, another round me and said, I think weve cracked it, mate. They had: Kit Lambert, according to Altham, literally scrambled across the tables to Chas at one of the shows and said, in his plummy accent, he had to sign him. Chas needed a record contract, Decca had turned Hendrix down (along with the Beatles) and Lambert was about to launch a new label, Track Records, with interest from Polydor: The deal was done, on the back of a napkin, says Altham.
Hendrix had formed his band at speed: a rhythm guitarist from Kent called Noel Redding who had applied to join the Animals but to whom Hendrix now allocated bass guitar and Mitch Mitchell, a jazz drummer seeking to mould himself in the style of John Coltranes great percussionist, Elvin Jones. With a stroke of genius, Jeffery came up with the only name befitting what was to follow: the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Is there any line in rocknroll more assuredly seductive as: Are you experienced?/ Have you ever been experienced?/ Well, I have (from 1967s Are You Experienced)?
Paul McCartney, John Lennon and the other Beatles quickly converged to hear this phenomenon, along with the Stones and Pete Townshend. Arriving one night at the Bag ONails, Altham met Brian Jones walking back up the stairs with tears in his eyes. I said, Brian, what is it? and he replied, Its what he does, it chokes me only he put it better than that.
There was also curiosity from the emergent powerhouse of British blues: Cream and Eric Clapton. There was a particular night when Cream allowed Jimi to join them for a jam at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London. Meeting Clapton had been among the enticements Chandler had used to lure Hendrix to Britain: Hendrix blew into a version of [Howlin Wolfs] Killing Floor, recalls Garland, and plays it at breakneck tempo, just like that it stopped you in your tracks. Altham recalls Chandler going backstage after Clapton left in the middle of the song which he had yet to master himself; Clapton was furiously puffing on a cigarette and telling Chas: You never told me he was that fucking good.
With a reputation, a recording contract and the adoration of his peers, Hendrix was allocated a flat belonging to Ringo Starr, in Montagu Square, in which he lived with Etchingham, Chandler and Chandlers Swedish girlfriend, Lotta. It was not ideal, but base camp for an initial tour as opening act for Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck, with the Walker Brothers topping the bill.
Something was needed, Chandler thought, whereby Hendrix could blow the successive acts off the stage and Altham had the beginning of an idea. He said: Its a pity that you cant set fire to your guitar. There was a pregnant pause in the dressing room, after which Chas said, Go out and get some lighter fuel. Garland remembers: I went out into Seven Sisters Road [in north London] to buy lighter fluid. At first, it didnt make sense to me there were too many things going on to worry about lighter fluid but it all became clear in the end.
Altham borrowed a lighter from Gary the third Walker brother and drummer and that night, at the Astoria theatre in central London, Hendrix set his guitar ablaze for the first time. One of the security guards said, Why are you waving it around your head? recalls Altham. Cause Im trying to put it out, replied Jimi. Actually, he only did it three times after, says Altham, but it became a trademark.
The touring began in earnest during that winter of 1966-7: around working mens clubs and little theatres in the north of England. Thats when I remember him at his very best, recalls Etchingham. And at his happiest. The small clubs in regional venues. When he was desperate to make a name for himself, but was also playing for himself. In the working mens clubs, they just wanted some music to enjoy while they drank their beer. In the small theatres, people had come to hear him. But that was his best music ever played for its own sake. None of these crazy expectations, no one hanging on just the people he knew, liked and trusted, and his own music.
But what was this music, this singular, uplifting, otherworldly, menacing, exotic and erotic sound? Hendrix was a magpie, says Altham. He would take from blues, jazz only Coltrane could play in that way and Dylan was the greatest influence. But hed listen to Mozart, hed read sci-fi and Asimov and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix. Then there was just the dexterity he was left-handed, but I remember people throwing him a right-handed guitar and Hendrix picking it up and playing it upside down.
And dont forget, says Tappy Wright, who acted as roadie at first, then joined the management team, we were using the cheapest guitars. These were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic, but stretched to the fucking limit.
The most precious insight comes from Etchingham. People often saw Jimi on stage looking incredibly intense and serious. And suddenly this smile would come across his face, almost a laugh, for no apparent reason, she says. Well, I remember that very well, sitting on the bed or the floor at home in Brook Street. Sometimes, he would play a riff for hours, until he had it just right. Then this great smile would creep across his face or hed throw his head back and laugh. Those were the moments he had got it right for himself, not for anyone else.
Touring ran concurrent with work in the studio first the singles: Hey Joe, the inimitable Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary, written for Kathy when Hendrix was left alone at home after she had stormed out from an argument, so the story goes (Mary is her middle name). I never realised quite how hard he worked, says Sarah Bardwell, director of the Handel House Museum, researching her new charge. The Experience would finish a concert up north, drive south, record between 3am and 9am, then return north for two more shows each day. LSD had yet to play a major role if the Experience were on amphetamines, it was to keep the schedule.
In various studios, ending up at west Londons Olympic, work began. I used to ring them up to book time, recalls Etchingham. Thirty quid an hour and theyd want the cheque there and then. Chandler was aware of this and would occasionally hasten things along by taking what the band thought was a warm-up to be the finished product. What? the band would say, recalls Altham. Thats it, Chas would reply. Now for the next one.
But the soundscape unique to Hendrix, pushing the technology to its limits, was not serendipity, nor was it only about Hendrixs genius: there was science behind the subliminal magic. This was not psychcolergic, as Eric Burdon used to call it, says Garland. Hendrix knew exactly what he was doing. And this process began with a man called Roger Mayer.
We call this the Surrey blues Delta, says Mayer, with a wave of his arms across the crazy-paving pathways of Worcester Park, near Surbiton. Eric over here, Keith down the road, the Stones from there. Mayer was an acoustician and sonic wave engineer for the Admiralty, a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, but also an inventor of various electronic musical devices, including an improved wah-wah pedal and the Octavia guitar effect with its unique doubling effect. Id shown it to Jimmy Page, but he thought it was too far out. Jimi said, the moment we met, Yeah, Id like to try that stuff. One of my favourite memories of all, says Etchingham, is Jimi and Roger huddled together over the console and the instruments, talking about stuff way over my head, and then this glorious thing happening.
We started from the premise that music was a mission, not a competition, says Mayer, who describes himself as a sonic consultant to Hendrix. That the basis was the blues, but that the framework of the blues was too tight. Wed talk first about what he wanted the emotion of the song to be. Whats the vision? He would talk in colours and my job was to give him the electronic palette which would engineer those colours so he could paint the canvas.
Let me try to explain why it sounds like it does: when you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form, he adds. The electronics we used were feed forward, which means that the input from the player projects forward the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive it is speed-forward analogue, a non-repetitive wave form, and that is the definition of pure music and therefore the diametric opposite of digital.
Look, if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples it depends on how you throw the stone, or the wind. Digital makes the false presumption that you can predict those ripples, but Jimi and I were always looking for the warning signs. The brain knows when it hears repetition that this is no longer music and what you hear when you listen to Hendrix is pure music. It took discussion and experiment, and some frustrations, but then that moment would come, wed put the headphones down and say, Got it. Thats the one.
But I take none of the credit, insists Mayer. You can build a racing car just like the one that won the 1955 grand prix. But if you cant drive like Juan Manuel Fangio, youre not going to win the grand prix. Jimi Hendrix only sounds like he does because he was Jimi Hendrix.
Everyone knows that Hendrix had hundreds of women, often concurrently but that is not as interesting as the fact that, says Altham, Kathy Etchingham was the love of his life. Mayer recalls them oozing affection, even when there was a row he needed her very badly indeed. Hendrix called the flat into which he moved with her in 1968 the only home I ever had.
We knew we wanted Mayfair, says Etchingham, so we could walk to the gigs, but the prices were high, even though it was a little seedy 30 a week. The couple furnished the split-level, top-floor apartment together with prints and wall hangings from Portobello Road. When Hendrix found out that Handel had lived downstairs, he went round to HMV or One Stop Records to get Messiah, says Sarah Bardwell. What is so interesting is that they were both musicians from abroad, who came to London to make their name in this building.
It feels extraordinary now to walk over the venerable floorboards past a replica of Handels harpsichord, portraits of the composer and the score of Messiah in the room in which it was composed, then up a wooden staircase to Hendrixs whitewashed sitting room and bedroom above. Sarah Bardwells aim is for a joint Handel-Hendrix house museum of some kind. Blue English Heritage plaques accompany each other on the wall outside; Hendrix was added in 1997, a labour of devotion by Kathy Etchingham, who recalls English Heritage balking at the fact that the shop front below was a lingerie shop, all mannequins wearing suspenders and knickers, which needed covering up while the plaque was unveiled.
Now, it is the posh Jo Malone perfumery, though in our day it was Mr Loves cafe, she recalls fondly. On the corner of Oxford Street. And there was an Indian tea shop wed go to in South Molton Street, and always HMV or One Stop and wed walk to the gigs along Regent Street or across Hanover Square, and maybe take a taxi home.
The memories of the people who actually knew him overshadow the tragic, antiheroic Hendrix of popular imagination. Etchingham and Keith Altham recall a man with a sense of humour. If things were getting tense in the studio, says Altham, hed just play Teddy Bears Picnic. Adds Tony Garland: If I told Jimi to kiss my arse, hed answer, Youve got a rubber neck, do it yourself with a sly grin. You always knew you were with someone quicker-witted than yourself.
Altham also talks about Hendrix saying nothing to reporters, or contradictory things, on purpose. He would pat his fingers against his lips mid-sentence and go, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, in order to say, in effect, nothing. He wanted the music to speak. He also had this way of saying things that made you do a double take: Did he really say that? Such as, just before he went on to play with Clapton, who was his idol, for the first time, he told me, I want to see if he is as good as he thinks I am which is not at all the remark you first think it is.
But many of those who comprised Hendrixs inner circle in London now talk about some demise in his mental agility once he became popular in his native US, a mass commodity caught between the triangle of his own racially transgressive music, his blackness and the black power movement, and his overwhelmingly white audience. Even then, though, Hendrix closed the 1969 Woodstock festival with a version of The Star-Spangled Banner, which became the anthem for both the movement against the war in Vietnam and Hendrixs own complicated empathy with the young American fodder sent to fight it, as a former military man himself. Many of his childhood friends were over there, some never to return. The anthem made Jimi famous worldwide, veering into a vortex out of which emerged Purple Haze, a glorious, lyrical dirge for something, for everything; an endpiece not only to Woodstock but to so many dreams.
Chas Chandler would come into the studio and find two women in his chair, recalls Tappy Wright. Get out of my chair! hed say. And then, well, there were drugs, drugs, drugs. I never took any, because I had to make sure everyone got out of bed in the morning but they were around, too much around. Altham says that Chandler told him that he gave Jimi an ultimatum: Either I go or the hangers-on go. But there was no getting rid of them, so Chas quit and Jimi was left with Michael Jeffery.
Jimi was at his best when the fame never got in the way of the music, says Etchingham, and at his worst when the fame took over, when people who hardly knew him suddenly became his best friends. He had this thing, says Altham, of not being able to say no to people and this became a problem.
Even the flat on Brook Street became an open house, to journalists, anyone. Its funny, says Sarah Bardwell. Here we are trying to contact his old friends who are now superstars for our events and exhibition, and its like laying siege to Fort Knox! Yet Hendrix was available to anyone, perhaps almost too much so.
Despite the distractions, there was one project consistently dear to Hendrixs heart: the state-of-the-art Electric Lady Studios in New York, opened with a party on 26 August 1970, the night before he was due to fly back to England to play the Isle of Wight festival. Only Hendrix was almost too shy to appear and, when he did so, he retreated to the steps outside, where he met a young singer-songwriter too shy to enter the fray Patti Smith. It was all too much for me. Johnny Winter in there and all, recalled Smith in a past interview with the Observer. So I thought, Ill just sit awhile on the steps and out came Jimi and sat next to me. And he was so full of ideas; the different sounds he was going to create in this studio, wider landscapes, experiments with musicians and new soundscapes. All he had to do was get over back to England, play the festival and get back to work…
It had been a long weekend on the Isle of Wight and, for me, an exciting one. I was compelled not disgusted, as is the official history by the determination of French and German anarchists to tear down the fences so that it be a free festival. I loved the fact that Notting Hills local band, Hawkwind, played outside the fence in protest at the ticket prices. The strange atmosphere added to the climactic moment, after the Who and others: the one set, at 2am on the Monday, for which it was imperative to get down from among the crowds on Desolation Row and force a way right to the front and concentrate or, rather, submit to hypnosis. The set by Jimi Hendrix.
It is written in the lore of Hendrixology that this was a terrible performance. Hendrix had arrived exhausted, by the previous months events, the upcoming tour, the days violence and by walkie-talkie voices that somehow made their way into the PA system. But all I remember, having just turned 16, is a dream coming true: the greatest rock musician of all time (one knew this with assurance) dressed in blazing red and purple silks, actually playing the version of Sgt Peppers about which I had read so much in NME, playing Purple Haze, Voodoo Chile and a long, searing Machine Gun, just yards away. I remember the sound the sounds, plural bombarding me from the far side of some emotional, existential, hallucinogenic and sexual checkpoint along the road towards the rest of my life. I remember him playing the horn parts to Sgt Peppers on his guitar! I remember the deafening and painful silence after he finished his fusillade and in the crowd a mixture of rapture, gratitude, enlightenment and affection.
Afterwards, Hendrix went on a reportedly disastrous tour of Scandinavia and Germany (failing to meet one of his two children, by a Swedish girlfriend the other he had sired in New York and also never met), before returning to the Cumberland hotel and the room in which he gave his last ever interview, to Keith Altham. (To mark the anniversary, the Cumberland has designed and decorated these rooms in a swirl of colour, stocked it with Hendrix music and called it the Hendrix Suite, in which people can stay.)
There were two women in the room, recalls Altham. One of them was a girlfriend called Devon Wilson and she was dodgy she dealt him drugs and I can say that now because shes dead. But he knew me well by this time and he seemed better than Id seen him previously. The interview is a remarkable one, utterly devoid of all the nonsense that would ensue about suicide and a death wish. On the tape, Hendrix laughs and jokes; he tells Altham about plans to re-form the Experience and tour England again.
On the night of 16 September, Hendrix went to Ronnie Scotts without his guitar, hoping to jam with Eric Burdons new band, War. Burdon considered him unfit to play. The following night, he returned and joined his friend on stage. I was tired, I missed it, says Altham, though, of course, I regret that now. It was the last time Hendrix ever played the guitar.
Hendrix went on to a party with a German woman, Monika Dannemann, and back to her rooms at the Samarkand hotel in Lansdowne Crescent. There are so many accounts of exactly what happened next, but all converge on the fact that he had drunk a fair amount, taken some kind of amphetamines (Black bombers, I think, given to him by Devon Wilson, surmises Altham) and some of Dannemans Vesparax sleeping pills, not knowing their strength. He vomited during the deep ensuing sleep, insufficiently conscious enough to throw up; Danneman panicked, and telephoned Burdon, who urged her to call an ambulance. But the greatest guitarist of all time was dead upon arrival at St Mary Abbots hospital, aged 27. (Sadly, Danneman took her own life in 1996.)
So it was, back in September 1970, that I made my way up Lansdowne Rise and round the corner to the Samarkand hotel after reading the news today, oh boy. I was amazed to have the pavement outside the address at which Jimi Hendrix had died that morning all to myself for a good couple of hours not a soul. I went home, got some chalk, and wrote: Scuse us while we kiss the sky, Jimi on the flagstones (OK, but I was only 16) and retreated to watch. Nothing happened and after another hour, a man came out and washed the words away and I returned home to write a lament in my diary, which I still have, the Standards front page folded at the date.
Speculations about suicide and murder are too ridiculous to contemplate most of them are probably concocted in order to dramatise and distract from the awful reality of such a genius dying in this way but what does matter are Kathy Etchinghams reflections. Jimi died because the simple things got complicated. He was born to a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who died and he died because he was in that flat in Notting Hill with a complete stranger who gave him a load of sleeping pills without telling him how strong they were. Its as simple and as complicated as that.
Im older and wiser now, she says. I enjoy culture and the fine things in life. I can look back and see all that more clearly than I did at the time I was so young, only 24. Of the compelling memoir she has written, Through Gypsy Eyes, she says: Id like to go over it again, fill in a few things, but what I want now, most of all from this anniversary, is for people to understand that it was in Britain that he was welcomed, it was there he was happy and such fun to be around yes, grumpy at times, and a handful but such a man. Id like the young people to know that.
Lets face it, says Tappy Wright, if Jimi had stayed with Kathy, hed probably be alive and playing still. Plus, he always said he wanted to be buried in London, not Seattle, where he was born and his family lived. It wasnt just me he told that, it was plenty of people that this was home. Still, says Etchingham, at least weve got the plaque, the Handel House Museum, and Im looking forward to seeing everyone in September. They were great times and well take a trip down memory lane. Only 40 years is a long time and Jimi wont be there.
The Hendrix in Britain exhibition runs at Handel House museum, 25 Brook Street, London W1, from 25 Aug-7Nov. Hendrixs rooms will be open from 15-26 Sep
Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/07/15/jimi-hendrix-you-never-told-me-he-was-that-good/
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Jimi Hendrix: ‘You never told me he was that good’
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death, Ed Vulliamy speaks to the people who knew him best and unearths a funny, if intense, superstar
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On the morning of 21 September 1966, a Pan Am airliner from New York landed at Heathrow, carrying among its passengers a black American musician from a poor home. Barely known in his own country and a complete stranger to England, he had just flown first class for the first time in his life. His name was James Marshall Hendrix.
On 18 September 1970, four years later, I picked up a copy of Londons Evening Standard on my way home from school, something I never usually did. There was a story of extreme urgency on the front page and a picture of Hendrix playing at a concert still ringing in my ears at the Isle of Wight festival, only 18 days earlier. The text reported how Hendrix had died that morning in a hotel in the street, Lansdowne Crescent in Notting Hill, in which I had been born, and a block away from where I now lived.
During those three years and 362 days living in London, Hendrix had conjured with his vision and sense of sound, his personality and genius the most extraordinary guitar music ever played, the most remarkable sound-scape ever created; of that there is little argument. Opinion varies only over the effect his music has on people: elation, fear, sexual stimulation, sublimation, disgust all or none of these but always drop-jawed amazement.
The 40th anniversary of Hendrixs death next month will be marked by the opening of an exhibition of curios and memorabilia at the only place he ever called home a flat diagonally above that once occupied by the composer George Frideric Handel, on Brook Street in central London, in the double building now known as Handel House. The flat will be opened to the public for 12 days in September and there is talk about plans for a joint museum, adding Hendrixs presence to that already established in the museum devoted to Handel. Involved in the discussions is the woman with whom Hendrix furnished the top flat of 23 Brook St, and with whom he lived: the only woman he ever really loved, Kathy Etchingham.
In a rare interview by telephone, (she has moved abroad), Ms Etchingham explains: I want him to be remembered for what he was not this tragic figure he has been turned into by nit-pickers and people who used to stalk us and collect photographs and evidence of what we were doing on a certain day. He could be grumpy, and he could be terrible in the studio, getting exactly what he wanted but he was fun, he was charming. I want people to remember the man I knew.
When she met Hendrix (the same night he landed in London), he had already lived an interesting, if frustrating, 23 years. He was born to a father who cared, but not greatly, and a mother he barely knew she died when he was 15 but adored (shes said to be the focus of two of his three great ballads, Little Wing and Angel). He had always been enthralled by guitar playing a natural, immersed in R&B on the radio and the music of blues giants Albert King and Muddy Waters. When he was 18, he was offered the chance to avoid jail for a minor misdemeanour by joining the army, which he did, training for the 101st Airborne Division.
His military career was marked by friendship with a bass player called Billy Cox from West Virginia, with whom he would play his last concerts, and a report which read: Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations. Misses bed check: sleeps while supposed to be working: unsatisfactory duty performance.
Hendrix engineered his discharge in time to avoid being mobilised to Vietnam and worked hard as a backing guitarist for Little Richard, Curtis Knight, the Isley Brothers and others. But, arriving in New York to try and establish himself in his own right, Hendrix found he did not fit. The writer Paul Gilroy, in his recent book Darker Than Blue, makes the point that Hendrixs life and music were propelled by two important factors: his being an ex-paratrooper who gradually became an advocate of peace and his transgressions of redundant musical and racial rules.
Hendrix didnt fit because he wasnt black enough for Harlem, nor white enough for Greenwich Village. His music was closer to the blues than any other genre; the Delta and Chicago blues which had captivated a generation of musicians, not so much in the US as in London, musicians such as John Mayall and Alexis Korner, and thereafter Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page among many others.
As luck would have it, the Brits were in town and Linda Keith, girlfriend of the Stones Keith Richards, persuaded Chas Chandler, bass player of the Animals, to go and listen to Hendrix play at the Cafe Wha? club in the Village. Chandler wanted to move into management and happened to be fixated by a song, Hey Joe, by Tim Rose.
It was a song Chas knew would be a hit if only he could find the right person to play it, says Keith Altham, then of the New Musical Express, who would later become a kind of embedded reporter with the Hendrix London entourage. There he was, this incredible man, playing a wild version of that very song. It was like an epiphany for Chas it was meant to be.
To be honest, remembers Tappy Wright, the Animals roadie who came to Cafe Wha? with Chandler that night, I wasnt too impressed at first, but when he started playing with his teeth, and behind his head, it was obvious that here was someone different.
Before long, Hendrix was aboard the plane to London with Chandler and the Animals manager, Michael Jeffery, to be met by Tony Garland, who would end up being general factotum for Hendrixs management company, Anim. When he arrived, recalls Garland now, sitting on his barge beside the canal in Maida Vale, west London, where he now lives, I filled out the customs form. We couldnt say hed come to work because he didnt have a permit, so I told them he was a famous American star coming to collect his royalties.
It is strange, tracking down Hendrixs inner circle in London. His own musicians in his great band, the Experience Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell are dead. Likewise, his two managers, Chandler and Jeffery, and one of his closest musician friends, the Rolling Stone Brian Jones; the other, Eric Burdon of the Animals, declined to be interviewed. But some members of the close-knit entourage are still around, such as Kathy Etchingham and Keith Altham, wearing a flaming orange jacket befitting the time of which he agrees to speak, in defiance of a heart attack only a few days before.
Music in London had reached a tumultuously creative moment when Hendrix arrived and was perfectly poised to receive him. The performers were just your mates who played guitars, recalls Altham. It was tight everyone knew everyone else. It was just Pete from the Who, Eric of Cream, or Brian and Mick of the Stones, all going to each others gigs.
For reasons never quite explained, the blues both in their acoustic Delta form, and Chicago blues plugged into an amplifier had captivated this generation of English musicians more deeply than their American counterparts. Elderly blues musicians found themselves, to their amazement, courted for concerts, such as an unforgettable night at Hammersmith with Son House and Bukka White. Champion Jack Dupree married and settled in Yorkshire. People [here] felt a certain affinity with the blues, music which added a bit of colour to grey life, Altham continues. And as Garland points out: White America was listening to Doris Day black American music got nowhere near white AM radio. Jimi was too white for black radio. Here, there were a lot of white guys listening to blues from America and wanting to sound like their heroes.
Things happened at speed after Hendrix landed. Come down to the Scotch, Chas told me the day Jimi arrived and hear what I found in New York, recalls Altham. Jimi couldnt play because he had no work permit, but he jammed that night, and my first impression was that hed make a great jazz musician. That was the night, his first in London, that Hendrix met Kathy Etchingham. It happened straightaway, she recalls. Here was this man: different, funny, coy even about his own playing.
A short while later, recalls Altham, Chas took me to hear him at the Bag ONails club [in Soho] for one of his first proper gigs, turned to me and said, Whatya think? I said Id never heard anything like it in all my life. At a concert in the same series, remembers Garland, Michael Jeffery put an arm round Chas, another round me and said, I think weve cracked it, mate. They had: Kit Lambert, according to Altham, literally scrambled across the tables to Chas at one of the shows and said, in his plummy accent, he had to sign him. Chas needed a record contract, Decca had turned Hendrix down (along with the Beatles) and Lambert was about to launch a new label, Track Records, with interest from Polydor: The deal was done, on the back of a napkin, says Altham.
Hendrix had formed his band at speed: a rhythm guitarist from Kent called Noel Redding who had applied to join the Animals but to whom Hendrix now allocated bass guitar and Mitch Mitchell, a jazz drummer seeking to mould himself in the style of John Coltranes great percussionist, Elvin Jones. With a stroke of genius, Jeffery came up with the only name befitting what was to follow: the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Is there any line in rocknroll more assuredly seductive as: Are you experienced?/ Have you ever been experienced?/ Well, I have (from 1967s Are You Experienced)?
Paul McCartney, John Lennon and the other Beatles quickly converged to hear this phenomenon, along with the Stones and Pete Townshend. Arriving one night at the Bag ONails, Altham met Brian Jones walking back up the stairs with tears in his eyes. I said, Brian, what is it? and he replied, Its what he does, it chokes me only he put it better than that.
There was also curiosity from the emergent powerhouse of British blues: Cream and Eric Clapton. There was a particular night when Cream allowed Jimi to join them for a jam at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London. Meeting Clapton had been among the enticements Chandler had used to lure Hendrix to Britain: Hendrix blew into a version of [Howlin Wolfs] Killing Floor, recalls Garland, and plays it at breakneck tempo, just like that it stopped you in your tracks. Altham recalls Chandler going backstage after Clapton left in the middle of the song which he had yet to master himself; Clapton was furiously puffing on a cigarette and telling Chas: You never told me he was that fucking good.
With a reputation, a recording contract and the adoration of his peers, Hendrix was allocated a flat belonging to Ringo Starr, in Montagu Square, in which he lived with Etchingham, Chandler and Chandlers Swedish girlfriend, Lotta. It was not ideal, but base camp for an initial tour as opening act for Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck, with the Walker Brothers topping the bill.
Something was needed, Chandler thought, whereby Hendrix could blow the successive acts off the stage and Altham had the beginning of an idea. He said: Its a pity that you cant set fire to your guitar. There was a pregnant pause in the dressing room, after which Chas said, Go out and get some lighter fuel. Garland remembers: I went out into Seven Sisters Road [in north London] to buy lighter fluid. At first, it didnt make sense to me there were too many things going on to worry about lighter fluid but it all became clear in the end.
Altham borrowed a lighter from Gary the third Walker brother and drummer and that night, at the Astoria theatre in central London, Hendrix set his guitar ablaze for the first time. One of the security guards said, Why are you waving it around your head? recalls Altham. Cause Im trying to put it out, replied Jimi. Actually, he only did it three times after, says Altham, but it became a trademark.
The touring began in earnest during that winter of 1966-7: around working mens clubs and little theatres in the north of England. Thats when I remember him at his very best, recalls Etchingham. And at his happiest. The small clubs in regional venues. When he was desperate to make a name for himself, but was also playing for himself. In the working mens clubs, they just wanted some music to enjoy while they drank their beer. In the small theatres, people had come to hear him. But that was his best music ever played for its own sake. None of these crazy expectations, no one hanging on just the people he knew, liked and trusted, and his own music.
But what was this music, this singular, uplifting, otherworldly, menacing, exotic and erotic sound? Hendrix was a magpie, says Altham. He would take from blues, jazz only Coltrane could play in that way and Dylan was the greatest influence. But hed listen to Mozart, hed read sci-fi and Asimov and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix. Then there was just the dexterity he was left-handed, but I remember people throwing him a right-handed guitar and Hendrix picking it up and playing it upside down.
And dont forget, says Tappy Wright, who acted as roadie at first, then joined the management team, we were using the cheapest guitars. These were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic, but stretched to the fucking limit.
The most precious insight comes from Etchingham. People often saw Jimi on stage looking incredibly intense and serious. And suddenly this smile would come across his face, almost a laugh, for no apparent reason, she says. Well, I remember that very well, sitting on the bed or the floor at home in Brook Street. Sometimes, he would play a riff for hours, until he had it just right. Then this great smile would creep across his face or hed throw his head back and laugh. Those were the moments he had got it right for himself, not for anyone else.
Touring ran concurrent with work in the studio first the singles: Hey Joe, the inimitable Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary, written for Kathy when Hendrix was left alone at home after she had stormed out from an argument, so the story goes (Mary is her middle name). I never realised quite how hard he worked, says Sarah Bardwell, director of the Handel House Museum, researching her new charge. The Experience would finish a concert up north, drive south, record between 3am and 9am, then return north for two more shows each day. LSD had yet to play a major role if the Experience were on amphetamines, it was to keep the schedule.
In various studios, ending up at west Londons Olympic, work began. I used to ring them up to book time, recalls Etchingham. Thirty quid an hour and theyd want the cheque there and then. Chandler was aware of this and would occasionally hasten things along by taking what the band thought was a warm-up to be the finished product. What? the band would say, recalls Altham. Thats it, Chas would reply. Now for the next one.
But the soundscape unique to Hendrix, pushing the technology to its limits, was not serendipity, nor was it only about Hendrixs genius: there was science behind the subliminal magic. This was not psychcolergic, as Eric Burdon used to call it, says Garland. Hendrix knew exactly what he was doing. And this process began with a man called Roger Mayer.
We call this the Surrey blues Delta, says Mayer, with a wave of his arms across the crazy-paving pathways of Worcester Park, near Surbiton. Eric over here, Keith down the road, the Stones from there. Mayer was an acoustician and sonic wave engineer for the Admiralty, a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, but also an inventor of various electronic musical devices, including an improved wah-wah pedal and the Octavia guitar effect with its unique doubling effect. Id shown it to Jimmy Page, but he thought it was too far out. Jimi said, the moment we met, Yeah, Id like to try that stuff. One of my favourite memories of all, says Etchingham, is Jimi and Roger huddled together over the console and the instruments, talking about stuff way over my head, and then this glorious thing happening.
We started from the premise that music was a mission, not a competition, says Mayer, who describes himself as a sonic consultant to Hendrix. That the basis was the blues, but that the framework of the blues was too tight. Wed talk first about what he wanted the emotion of the song to be. Whats the vision? He would talk in colours and my job was to give him the electronic palette which would engineer those colours so he could paint the canvas.
Let me try to explain why it sounds like it does: when you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form, he adds. The electronics we used were feed forward, which means that the input from the player projects forward the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive it is speed-forward analogue, a non-repetitive wave form, and that is the definition of pure music and therefore the diametric opposite of digital.
Look, if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples it depends on how you throw the stone, or the wind. Digital makes the false presumption that you can predict those ripples, but Jimi and I were always looking for the warning signs. The brain knows when it hears repetition that this is no longer music and what you hear when you listen to Hendrix is pure music. It took discussion and experiment, and some frustrations, but then that moment would come, wed put the headphones down and say, Got it. Thats the one.
But I take none of the credit, insists Mayer. You can build a racing car just like the one that won the 1955 grand prix. But if you cant drive like Juan Manuel Fangio, youre not going to win the grand prix. Jimi Hendrix only sounds like he does because he was Jimi Hendrix.
Everyone knows that Hendrix had hundreds of women, often concurrently but that is not as interesting as the fact that, says Altham, Kathy Etchingham was the love of his life. Mayer recalls them oozing affection, even when there was a row he needed her very badly indeed. Hendrix called the flat into which he moved with her in 1968 the only home I ever had.
We knew we wanted Mayfair, says Etchingham, so we could walk to the gigs, but the prices were high, even though it was a little seedy 30 a week. The couple furnished the split-level, top-floor apartment together with prints and wall hangings from Portobello Road. When Hendrix found out that Handel had lived downstairs, he went round to HMV or One Stop Records to get Messiah, says Sarah Bardwell. What is so interesting is that they were both musicians from abroad, who came to London to make their name in this building.
It feels extraordinary now to walk over the venerable floorboards past a replica of Handels harpsichord, portraits of the composer and the score of Messiah in the room in which it was composed, then up a wooden staircase to Hendrixs whitewashed sitting room and bedroom above. Sarah Bardwells aim is for a joint Handel-Hendrix house museum of some kind. Blue English Heritage plaques accompany each other on the wall outside; Hendrix was added in 1997, a labour of devotion by Kathy Etchingham, who recalls English Heritage balking at the fact that the shop front below was a lingerie shop, all mannequins wearing suspenders and knickers, which needed covering up while the plaque was unveiled.
Now, it is the posh Jo Malone perfumery, though in our day it was Mr Loves cafe, she recalls fondly. On the corner of Oxford Street. And there was an Indian tea shop wed go to in South Molton Street, and always HMV or One Stop and wed walk to the gigs along Regent Street or across Hanover Square, and maybe take a taxi home.
The memories of the people who actually knew him overshadow the tragic, antiheroic Hendrix of popular imagination. Etchingham and Keith Altham recall a man with a sense of humour. If things were getting tense in the studio, says Altham, hed just play Teddy Bears Picnic. Adds Tony Garland: If I told Jimi to kiss my arse, hed answer, Youve got a rubber neck, do it yourself with a sly grin. You always knew you were with someone quicker-witted than yourself.
Altham also talks about Hendrix saying nothing to reporters, or contradictory things, on purpose. He would pat his fingers against his lips mid-sentence and go, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, in order to say, in effect, nothing. He wanted the music to speak. He also had this way of saying things that made you do a double take: Did he really say that? Such as, just before he went on to play with Clapton, who was his idol, for the first time, he told me, I want to see if he is as good as he thinks I am which is not at all the remark you first think it is.
But many of those who comprised Hendrixs inner circle in London now talk about some demise in his mental agility once he became popular in his native US, a mass commodity caught between the triangle of his own racially transgressive music, his blackness and the black power movement, and his overwhelmingly white audience. Even then, though, Hendrix closed the 1969 Woodstock festival with a version of The Star-Spangled Banner, which became the anthem for both the movement against the war in Vietnam and Hendrixs own complicated empathy with the young American fodder sent to fight it, as a former military man himself. Many of his childhood friends were over there, some never to return. The anthem made Jimi famous worldwide, veering into a vortex out of which emerged Purple Haze, a glorious, lyrical dirge for something, for everything; an endpiece not only to Woodstock but to so many dreams.
Chas Chandler would come into the studio and find two women in his chair, recalls Tappy Wright. Get out of my chair! hed say. And then, well, there were drugs, drugs, drugs. I never took any, because I had to make sure everyone got out of bed in the morning but they were around, too much around. Altham says that Chandler told him that he gave Jimi an ultimatum: Either I go or the hangers-on go. But there was no getting rid of them, so Chas quit and Jimi was left with Michael Jeffery.
Jimi was at his best when the fame never got in the way of the music, says Etchingham, and at his worst when the fame took over, when people who hardly knew him suddenly became his best friends. He had this thing, says Altham, of not being able to say no to people and this became a problem.
Even the flat on Brook Street became an open house, to journalists, anyone. Its funny, says Sarah Bardwell. Here we are trying to contact his old friends who are now superstars for our events and exhibition, and its like laying siege to Fort Knox! Yet Hendrix was available to anyone, perhaps almost too much so.
Despite the distractions, there was one project consistently dear to Hendrixs heart: the state-of-the-art Electric Lady Studios in New York, opened with a party on 26 August 1970, the night before he was due to fly back to England to play the Isle of Wight festival. Only Hendrix was almost too shy to appear and, when he did so, he retreated to the steps outside, where he met a young singer-songwriter too shy to enter the fray Patti Smith. It was all too much for me. Johnny Winter in there and all, recalled Smith in a past interview with the Observer. So I thought, Ill just sit awhile on the steps and out came Jimi and sat next to me. And he was so full of ideas; the different sounds he was going to create in this studio, wider landscapes, experiments with musicians and new soundscapes. All he had to do was get over back to England, play the festival and get back to work…
It had been a long weekend on the Isle of Wight and, for me, an exciting one. I was compelled not disgusted, as is the official history by the determination of French and German anarchists to tear down the fences so that it be a free festival. I loved the fact that Notting Hills local band, Hawkwind, played outside the fence in protest at the ticket prices. The strange atmosphere added to the climactic moment, after the Who and others: the one set, at 2am on the Monday, for which it was imperative to get down from among the crowds on Desolation Row and force a way right to the front and concentrate or, rather, submit to hypnosis. The set by Jimi Hendrix.
It is written in the lore of Hendrixology that this was a terrible performance. Hendrix had arrived exhausted, by the previous months events, the upcoming tour, the days violence and by walkie-talkie voices that somehow made their way into the PA system. But all I remember, having just turned 16, is a dream coming true: the greatest rock musician of all time (one knew this with assurance) dressed in blazing red and purple silks, actually playing the version of Sgt Peppers about which I had read so much in NME, playing Purple Haze, Voodoo Chile and a long, searing Machine Gun, just yards away. I remember the sound the sounds, plural bombarding me from the far side of some emotional, existential, hallucinogenic and sexual checkpoint along the road towards the rest of my life. I remember him playing the horn parts to Sgt Peppers on his guitar! I remember the deafening and painful silence after he finished his fusillade and in the crowd a mixture of rapture, gratitude, enlightenment and affection.
Afterwards, Hendrix went on a reportedly disastrous tour of Scandinavia and Germany (failing to meet one of his two children, by a Swedish girlfriend the other he had sired in New York and also never met), before returning to the Cumberland hotel and the room in which he gave his last ever interview, to Keith Altham. (To mark the anniversary, the Cumberland has designed and decorated these rooms in a swirl of colour, stocked it with Hendrix music and called it the Hendrix Suite, in which people can stay.)
There were two women in the room, recalls Altham. One of them was a girlfriend called Devon Wilson and she was dodgy she dealt him drugs and I can say that now because shes dead. But he knew me well by this time and he seemed better than Id seen him previously. The interview is a remarkable one, utterly devoid of all the nonsense that would ensue about suicide and a death wish. On the tape, Hendrix laughs and jokes; he tells Altham about plans to re-form the Experience and tour England again.
On the night of 16 September, Hendrix went to Ronnie Scotts without his guitar, hoping to jam with Eric Burdons new band, War. Burdon considered him unfit to play. The following night, he returned and joined his friend on stage. I was tired, I missed it, says Altham, though, of course, I regret that now. It was the last time Hendrix ever played the guitar.
Hendrix went on to a party with a German woman, Monika Dannemann, and back to her rooms at the Samarkand hotel in Lansdowne Crescent. There are so many accounts of exactly what happened next, but all converge on the fact that he had drunk a fair amount, taken some kind of amphetamines (Black bombers, I think, given to him by Devon Wilson, surmises Altham) and some of Dannemans Vesparax sleeping pills, not knowing their strength. He vomited during the deep ensuing sleep, insufficiently conscious enough to throw up; Danneman panicked, and telephoned Burdon, who urged her to call an ambulance. But the greatest guitarist of all time was dead upon arrival at St Mary Abbots hospital, aged 27. (Sadly, Danneman took her own life in 1996.)
So it was, back in September 1970, that I made my way up Lansdowne Rise and round the corner to the Samarkand hotel after reading the news today, oh boy. I was amazed to have the pavement outside the address at which Jimi Hendrix had died that morning all to myself for a good couple of hours not a soul. I went home, got some chalk, and wrote: Scuse us while we kiss the sky, Jimi on the flagstones (OK, but I was only 16) and retreated to watch. Nothing happened and after another hour, a man came out and washed the words away and I returned home to write a lament in my diary, which I still have, the Standards front page folded at the date.
Speculations about suicide and murder are too ridiculous to contemplate most of them are probably concocted in order to dramatise and distract from the awful reality of such a genius dying in this way but what does matter are Kathy Etchinghams reflections. Jimi died because the simple things got complicated. He was born to a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who died and he died because he was in that flat in Notting Hill with a complete stranger who gave him a load of sleeping pills without telling him how strong they were. Its as simple and as complicated as that.
Im older and wiser now, she says. I enjoy culture and the fine things in life. I can look back and see all that more clearly than I did at the time I was so young, only 24. Of the compelling memoir she has written, Through Gypsy Eyes, she says: Id like to go over it again, fill in a few things, but what I want now, most of all from this anniversary, is for people to understand that it was in Britain that he was welcomed, it was there he was happy and such fun to be around yes, grumpy at times, and a handful but such a man. Id like the young people to know that.
Lets face it, says Tappy Wright, if Jimi had stayed with Kathy, hed probably be alive and playing still. Plus, he always said he wanted to be buried in London, not Seattle, where he was born and his family lived. It wasnt just me he told that, it was plenty of people that this was home. Still, says Etchingham, at least weve got the plaque, the Handel House Museum, and Im looking forward to seeing everyone in September. They were great times and well take a trip down memory lane. Only 40 years is a long time and Jimi wont be there.
The Hendrix in Britain exhibition runs at Handel House museum, 25 Brook Street, London W1, from 25 Aug-7Nov. Hendrixs rooms will be open from 15-26 Sep
from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/07/15/jimi-hendrix-you-never-told-me-he-was-that-good/
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rediscoverhearing · 1 year ago
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Compensation For Hearing Loss From Government
The Department of Defense (DoD) bears substantial costs associated with compensation for hearing loss from government and noise-induced hearing injury in its accession/training, occupational outcomes, and intervention processes. However, published estimates do not capture all expenses related to this preventable condition. This multiphase research effort aims to develop methods to comprehensively determine the economic burden of hearing impairment and noise-induced hearing injury for active duty U.S. Service Members from the DoD perspective. This first phase focuses on developing a framework and model for cost burden analysis. The model synthesizes inputs from various sources and projects the cumulative economic impact of these events over the career span of a typical Service Member.
Work-related hearing loss illness cases account for 11.4 percent of all illness cases among private industry workers and occur at a rate of 1.4 per 10,000 full-time workers. In 2019, there were 14,500 such cases, up from 11,200 cases in 2017.
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