the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

UNDERSTAND THE MARKET 131
Dolenz went to the Monterey Pop Festival to groove on the cutting-edge
music and generate some publicity by being seen. Dolenz was clad in an
antelope-hide suit, which he had made especially for the occasion, and a
feathered headdress which he borrowed from the studio’s costume department.
At the concert, they saw an act that Dolenz had once caught at
Café Au Go-Go in Greenwich Village—back when Hendrix used the stage
name Jimmy James. “Hey, that’s the guy that plays guitar with his teeth!”
Dolenz exclaimed. That night, Hendrix went even further. He closed his
set with a cover of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” altering it with bursts of
feedback and wild improvised melodic lines, and then suddenly placed his
guitar on the ground, soaked it with lighter fluid, and set it afi re.
Dolenz was blown away, as much by the stunt as by Hendrix’s
playing. When he got back to Los Angeles, he lobbied the tour’s promoter,
Dick Clark, to hire the Jimi Hendrix Experience, which also included
drummer Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, as an opening act. “The
Monkees was very theatrical in my eyes and so was the Jimi Hendrix Experience,”
Dolenz recalled in his 1993 memoir, I’m a Believer. “It would
make the perfect union.” Clark reluctantly agreed: “Anybody could have
seen that it was not a compatible coupling. [The Monkees] were in the
driver seat—that’s what they wanted—and the deal was made.” Tork even
invited Hendrix to stay at his Laurel Canyon home.
One might expect that Hendrix’s British business manager, Michael
Jeffery, would have laughed at the offer of an opening gig with the
Monkees. Instead, he readily accepted. Jeffery, by various accounts, didn’t
really grasp Hendrix’s artistic stature—after Hendrix’s sensational guitarwrecking
performance at Monterey, for example, Jeffery’s response was
to chastise the guitarist for breaking a microphone. Instead, Jeffery focused,
perhaps myopically, on the bottom line. Even after Hendrix’s hallucinogenic
anthem “Purple Haze” climbed the En glish pop charts in
early 1967, Hendrix and his band still appeared as the opening act on an
En glish tour with Cat Stevens, hunky crooner Engelbert Humperdinck,
and the Walker Brothers, a band of teen heartthrobs (who, like the Mon-