the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 134
It all quickly got to Hendrix. Increasingly depressed and sullen, he
would turn his back to the audience and play sloppy, breakneck renditions
of his songs. He complained that his guitar was malfunctioning. Sometimes
he would refuse to sing, compelling Redding and Mitchell to cover
for him. The band drank and toked themselves into oblivion on the inevitable
red-eye flight to the next show. As Redding recalled in his memoir,
“This led to some awkward moments, as the tour was very straight.” The
bassist once amused himself by giving one of the Monkees a dose of amyl
nitrite, a heart medication that when snorted causes a brief but intensely
disorienting rush, just before takeoff.
Such fun aside, by the time the tour had returned to Forest Hills,
New York, on July 14 for the first of three shows, the situation had deteriorated
to a crisis point. Hendrix’s producer-adviser Chas Chandler, who
forced himself to attend the first show, saw the Experience struggle
through a thirty-minute set in which Hendrix not only was subjected to
the usual “We want the Monkees!” chants, but suffered the additional
indignity of splitting his pants.
Hendrix’s management quarreled about what to do. In Chandler’s
version, he wanted to pull Hendrix off the tour immediately, but Jeffery
was concerned about being sued by tour promoter Dick Clark. Chandler
then decided to take matters in his own hands. He called Clark, whom
he’d gotten to know when the Animals played on another Clark tour.
“Chas met me in the hotel and said, ‘What are we going to do? This is not
a compatible combining of talents,’ ” Clark recalled years later. “And I’m
like, ‘I think your client’s going to get very sick—and we’ll have to announce
that he can’t make it.’ And that was the arrangement that we
made.”
The final show, on July 16, was the nadir. In Joe Smith’s 1988 book
Off the Record: An Oral History of Pop Music, Nesmith recalled the moment:
“[Hendrix] was in a middle of a number. He threw his guitar down,
flipped everyone the bird, said ‘[Expletive] you,’ and walked off the stage.