the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

UNDERSTAND THE MARKET 135
I was standing with Micky Dolenz, and I turned to Micky and said, ‘Good
for him.’ ”
“They’re Replacing Me with Mickey Mouse!”
Instead of explaining Hendrix’s departure with a feigned illness,
Chandler came up with a more ingenious solution. With the help of a journalist
covering the tour, he spread the fictitious story that Hendrix had
been fired from the tour as the result of pressure from the Daughters of
the American Revolution, which supposedly was outraged over parents’
complaints that the guitarist’s act was too obscene for their kids to see. To
pump up the hoax, a Hendrix publicist actually wrote letters of outrage,
supposedly from irate parents, and sent them to Forest Hills Stadium’s
management and Warner Brothers Rec ords. Hendrix himself played
along, giving a bitter phone interview with a British rock publication, the
New Musical Express. “We got screams and good reaction and some kids
even rushed the stage,” he insisted. “Some parents who brought their
young kids complained that our act was vulgar. We decided it was just the
wrong audience. I think they’re replacing me with Mickey Mouse.”
Newspapers eagerly ran with the story, without checking to see if
it was true, and what should have been a debacle actually turned into a
publicity plus for Hendrix. In America as well as En gland, the guitar virtuoso
who’d burned his guitar at Monterey now was a racy, counterculture
sex symbol, certified by the seal of disapproval as too edgy and dangerous
for squares to handle. As Redding put it in his memoir, “Getting thrown
off the Monkees tour was as good as not being invited to the White House,
as far as credibility went.”
Hendrix’s failure to connect with the Monkees’ fan base also freed
him from further commercial pressure to appease mainstream tastes. Instead,
despite being plagued by management and money squabbles and
drug abuse, he pursued his avant-garde muse on a wild ride from psychedelic
rock to blues to pop, to the borders of jazz fusion. It was a trip,