Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix, November 27, 1942 - September 18, 1970.

Bud?

Career: rock musician. Cause of death: asphyxiation by aspirated vomit following drug and alcohol use. Possibly murder.

The death of Jimi Hendrix is shrouded in haze, of a shade more wine-coloured than purple. As the canonical report goes, Jimi's girlfriend Monika Dannemann took the Greatest Electric Gitsman in Rock History back to her Notting Hill flat where, unbeknownst to her, he took 9 pills of her prescribed sleeping pills, a nasty brand of Secobarbital nastily named Vesperax. These German sleepers were far stronger than the pale-as-milky-tea British barbiturates that Jimi had become accustomed to – 9 reds on top of the large amount of red wine he had also ingested at that night's party and he was overcome, a comatose vomit consisting mostly of said wine flooding his already sluggish lungs. It's a classic rock death and a classic demonstration of the adage "wine auf beer ist fine, wine auf massive dose of downers ist nein".

Jimi's arrest photo: that hash and heroin isn't mine.

Again, as with Brian Jones, items were missing from the scene of death. And again, there's been rumours of murder. Former Animals roadie James "Tappy" Wright has claimed that Hendrix's manager Mike Jeffery admitted he'd had Hendrix killed because the rock star wanted to end his management contract.

A sad and twisted hex bookends the Hendrix saga. Dannemann, whose vague and contradictory recollections of Jimi's last night muddied the already dirty water and brought her scorn from suspicious legions, had been facing a libel case brought against her by Hendrix's long-term English girlfriend Kathy Etchingham. In Dannemann's words, Etchingham "was trying to put the finger on me". In 1996, in a Mercedes and faced with the voodoo child of Jimi's decades-ago death, a retiring and broke Dannemann gassed herself to death. 

Lucky Lager?

Visit the site of Hendrix's aspiration/asphyxiation in London:

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