the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

UNDERSTAND THE MARKET 133
Considering Hendrix’s distaste for the Monkees’ music and resent-
ment of what he saw as their undeserved fame, he and his bandmates hit
it off fairly well with the Prefab Four. It helped that the Monkees were
refreshingly unpretentious about their humble abilities. “Peter Tork could
play banjo, Mike Nesmith could play guitar, Micky Dolenz was one hell
of a nice guy, and Davy Jones was extremely short,” Mitchell recalled in
his book. Tork carried a copy of the I Ching with him, and he and Hendrix
had some talks about Eastern mysticism. “We had a lot of fun on the
plane and between shows with Jimi,” Tork recalled in Glenn A. Baker’s
1986 book, Monkeemania. “He taught me how to play guitar vibrato one
day.”
But the Monkees’ fans were an insurmountable problem. The tour
opened at the Coliseum in Jacksonville, Florida, where organizers made
the mistake of having another band open the show so that the Jimi Hendrix
Experience came on just before the Monkees were to appear. In his
early career Hendrix undoubtedly had played for some tough audiences
in seedy roadhouses, but this was something new—row after row of
elementary-school-age girls and their parents. Less than halfway through
the fi rst number, the impatient preteenyboppers were already screaming
for him to yield the stage to their idols.
“We could have been Tom and Jerry on stage,” drummer Mitchell
would recall. “They didn’t care.”
It was the first of seven concerts in as many nights, and things only
got worse. Hendrix’s twenty- to twenty-fi ve-minute sets drew crowd reactions
that Hendrix biographer Harry Shapiro describes as “from muted
to hostile.” When Hendrix launched into “Foxy Lady,” one of his signature
tunes, the Monkees fans mocked him by chanting “Foxy Davy!”
over his singing.
The parents were an even bigger problem, Dolenz recalled in his
memoir. “They were probably not too crazy about having to sit through a
‘godawful’ Monkees concert anyway, much less see this black guy in a
psychedelic DayGlo blouse, playing music from hell.”