50 years without Jimi Hendrix: this was his last days and his still mysterious death

In the last concert that Jimi Hendrix gave in his life he was booed.

It happened on September 6, 1970, 12 days before his death, at a festival called Peace and Love, on the island of Fehmarn, Germany.

Filled with members of the most violent gang of Hell's Angels motorcyclists, attacked by storms and full of bonfires to combat the cold, no one there had the courage to defend the festival's emblem: peace and love.

At the scheduled time for Hendrix's departure, a gale prevented it.

The performance could not be celebrated.

Hell's Angels didn't take it amicably.

Some shots rang out.

The recital was postponed until the next day, at noon.

When Hendrix came out onto the stage, the boos began: people chilled with cold, angry at the delay, bikers wanting to follow the rampage.

"Go home," he heard himself.

The musician approached the microphone: "Peace anyway, peace."

The disapproving voices continued.

"If you're going to boo at least it's tuning," the guitarist threw irony and began with a furious version of

, the theme of blues musician Howlin 'Wolf.

“Everyone wanted a piece of him: record labels, 'managers', 'groupies'… He was always on the front line.

And that is very harmful for someone, especially if you are a creative person like him ", says Harry Shapiro, author of 'Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy'

The protests subsided to make way for heavy rain.

Hendrix received small electrical shocks when he approached the microphone.

Everything was unpleasant and violent.

The recital ended with a good performance by

.

When Hendrix left, the bikers climbed onto the stage and bulldozed him.

"He was not happy in the final stretch of his life," says writer Harry Shapiro by telephone from London, surely the person who has gone the furthest in investigating the death of the myth and author of

.

“Everybody wanted a piece of Jimi Hendrix: record labels,

press… He was always on the front line.

And that is extremely harmful to someone, especially if you are a creative person like him.

People didn't want to hear new songs.

They always wanted the same ones, for him to play with his teeth, for him to break the guitar… Jimi was fed up and very frustrated with all that, ”explains Shapiro.

In a year and a half (from May 1967 to October 1968) Jimi Hendrix released his only three studio albums

and

the latter also double), works that changed rock. forever.

Shapiro explains it: “It is at the top of rock history.

Electric guitar and blues were never the same after Hendrix.

It changed everything white people knew about the electric guitar.

Until he arrived, electricity was used to make the guitar sound louder.

With him electricity began to be part of the music ”.

Charles R. Cross, another of the scholars of the musician's life, author of

He adds from Seattle: "His facet as a guitarist was given all the importance, but he was much more: singer, songwriter, band leader ... His music had depth and life beyond the hits of the radio."

During the last 50 years, up to four versions have been put on the table about the cause of premature death with 27 years of what for most specialists is the best rock guitarist in history: suicide for an unhappy life;

murdered by his

the slimy Michael Jeffery, to collect insurance and beset by his debts with the mob;

instigated by the CIA, at a time of racial unrest (Hendrix was a black adored by whites);

and, the officer, suffocated in his vomit by powerful sleeping pills mixed with alcohol.

Hendrix died in a basement room of an unglamorous London hotel, the Samarkand.

The woman who was with him was called Monika Dannemann, a retired German skater from an injury and from a wealthy family.

They met in 1969 and had only seen each other half a dozen times.

Dannemann went to see him in London and they stayed at her hotel.

According to the skater's testimony, on September 17 they spent the day together, listening to music and reading.

At night Hendrix told him to take you to an address.

She asked him who he had met, but the musician did not reveal it to her.

Then she went to pick it up.

Hendrix told him that he was tired and that he needed to sleep, that he had some pills.

She gave him some very strong ones (Vesparax) and warned him to only take half.

They fell asleep.

Dannemann got up at 10:20 on the 18th, saw that he was asleep and went to get cigarettes.

In half an hour he returned.

The musician was apparently still asleep, as he had left him, but with a difference: there was a thread of vomit coming out of his mouth.

“I took her pulse and it seemed normal.

But I was nervous because I saw the tablet of the pills and there were nine left.

I called Eric Burdon [Hendrix's good friend] and he told me to calm down, wait and if it didn't improve to call the doctor.

But I ended up arguing with him and called the ambulance, "he declared.

A team of doctors tried to revive the musician, but could not do anything.

Official cause: suffocation caused by own vomit after poisoning from pills and alcohol.

Among the dozens of interviews Shapiro conducted to reconstruct the events in his book

one was with Monika Dannemann.

“She basically told me the official version that she took the days after her death.

The problem is that every time I spoke to journalists, I changed some details, minimal, but they were important ”.

Did you call the ambulance fast enough?

Did you get nervous and not able to make the call until it was too late?

Did you contact a friend in order to collect all the drugs that were in the room so that the police wouldn't find them?

Were those minutes vital to saving the musician's life?

“Dannemann's testimony is hard to believe because it contains some fantasy.

She was presented as the great love of Hendrix's life, and it is clear that it is not true.

Their relationship was short.

Yes, it is possible that she was negligent and took too long to call the ambulance, ”says Charles R. Cross.

And she adds: “If you mix drugs, alcohol and sleeping pills the result is lethal.

Jimi had already combined all three on several occasions.

I don't think he was suicidal or depressed, but he was reckless.

What happened is that fame, money and success did not give him what he thought.

The drugs, especially his experimentation with heroin, didn't help.

But even in the drug arena, Jimi never let anything get more important than music.

My conclusion is that the death was an accidental overdose that probably occurred because I was unaware of the potency of German-made sleeping pills ”.

Shapiro had a lengthy interview in 2010 with James

Wright, a familiar face on the rock scene of the sixties.

Wright served as what is called a

(tour technician and support staff) for stars like Elvis Presley, The Animals, Tina Turner… and Jimi Hendrix.

Wright told Shapiro that

Hendrix's

, Michael Jeffery, had confessed to him that he had caused the guitarist's death.

The reason: overwhelmed by pressure from the mob to pay him back borrowed money and knowing that he could collect part of the insurance policy he signed with Warner.

“Dannemann's testimony is hard to believe because it contains some fantasy.

She was presented as Hendrix's great love, and it is not true.

Their relationship was short.

Yes, it might take a long time to call the ambulance, ”says Charles R. Cross, author of 'Jimi Hendrix.

The biography'

The musician / manager relationship was rotten in 1970. The debts did not stop.

The budget for the construction of the musician's studio in New York, Electric Lady, had skyrocketed;

a contract signed early in the musician's career was bleeding them financially, and the excessive pace of life the two led continually necessitated an opulent income.

The only way to cope with that sea of ​​dollars was for Hendrix to tour almost constantly, without a break.

But the musician wanted to stop this hectic life on the road, lock himself in his recently released studio and experiment.

He had a pending collaboration with Miles Davis.

The last interviews he gave were not reassuring about his state of mind.

“Now I see miracles every day.

I used to notice them once or twice a week, but some are so radical that if I had explained them to a person, by now they would have locked me up, "he told

few days before he died.

Eric Burdon is another of the central characters of Hendrix's last days.

Although that concert on September 6 in Fehmarn, Germany, was Hendrix's last, there was a last stage presence of the musician.

Burdon was playing London's Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, presenting his psychedelic funk project

, after finishing The Animals.

The Briton invited Hendrix to play, who performed on September 15 “so high” (as Burdon later recalled) that he couldn't get on the stage.

Yes, he did it the next day, September 16, 48 hours before he passed away.

He participated in three songs, basically playing the guitar.

Burdon is the person Dannemann phones when he suspects, on the morning of September 18, that something is wrong with Hendrix's situation.

Burdon, who is still alive (he is 79 years old) has given several versions of what happened that night.

The most surprising was the one offered two days after the musician's death.

He conducted an interview stating that it had been a suicide and even that there was a written note.

Rock writer Phillip Norman tried to contact Burdon for his recent book

, but the British singer declined, saying he would shortly tell his version.

After that fateful September 18, 1970, a score of Hendrix albums have been released.

Nor has his death had rest.

Kathy Etchingham, the most official girlfriend the musician ever had, decided to investigate the case in the early 1990s and her investigations with a detective led the police to reopen the case.

The detective's conclusion was that Dannemann's attitude was negligent.

The police, however, again closed the case without taking action.

"I think she gave him the pills, he vomited and died, and she panicked," Etchingham tells Mick Wall in the book

, published in October by Alianza Editorial.

Dannemann, whose time was stopped that day in 1970, lived 25 years remembering her relationship with Hendrix and insulting Etchingham for questioning his version of that night.

Etchingham took her to court to stop her saying in interviews that she was a liar.

In 1996, a judge financially convicted Dannemann for contempt and for continuing to accuse Etchingham of a liar.

Two days after her conviction, Dannemann locked herself in her home garage, started her Mercedes and inhaled carbon monoxide to death.

She was 50 years old.

About 70 people attended her funeral.

The vast majority were Jimi Hendrix fans.