the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 128
Hendrix fan magazine. Hendrix’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell, concurs.
“[The Monkees] were a nice bunch of chaps and all that, even though we
thought they couldn’t play,” he wrote in Jimi Hendrix: Inside the Experience,
a 1990 memoir. “. . . But God, did their audience hate us.”
How, and why, this unlikely pairing came to be remains one of the
largely forgotten chapters of 1960s rock lore. The peculiar truth about the
brief convergence of Hendrix and the Monkees is that despite the gaping
disparity in their artistic stature, each possessed something the other
wanted. The Monkees longed to be more than a comedy act—they harbored
hopes of evolving into an actual rock group, of being taken seriously
by an older, hipper audience. Hendrix, conversely, was eager for the sort
of commercial breakthrough that too often eluded radically original,
paradigm-shifting artists. And while their brief tour together was a spectacular
fiasco, in subtle ways it did help both the Monkees and Hendrix
achieve what they were seeking—and in the process, may have altered the
history of rock.
“Are You Out of Your [Expletive] Mind?”
Musically, the difference between the “Prefab Four,” as some derisively
dubbed the Monkees, and the wizard of the wah-wah pedal was
vast. Eric Lefcowitz, author of the group’s definitive 1985 history, The
Monkees Tale, described it as the equivalent of “soda pop versus psilocybin.”
But the disparity between their respective paths to fame was just as
jarring. Hendrix, a Seattle native, was a self-taught virtuoso who honed
his skills on the road as a humble backup player for Little Richard, the
Isley Brothers, and others. He was playing in a bohemian nightclub in
Greenwich Village for $15 a night, and in ill health from malnutrition,
when he was discovered by Chas Chandler, bassist for the British rock
group the Animals. Chandler convinced him to move to En gland, where
his flamboyant fusion of blues and psychedelic rock might find a more
sophisticated audience, with Chandler as his producer- adviser.
The Monkees, by contrast, were created by a pair of Hollywood