Rock On (48 page)

“Then what are you going to do?” I asked him. “Where are you staying?”

“I ain’t staying nowhere, man.”

“You can stay with me. I’ve got a house in Clarendon Road now.”

Jimi shook his head. He wasn’t even listening. “I’ve got to get into the flat, that’s all. No two ways about it.”

“Charlie?” protested Dulcie. “What the hell are you doing?”

I felt a cold, dusty draft, and I turned around, and the Patels’ multicolored plastic curtain was swinging, but Jimi was gone. I dragged the curtain back and shouted, “Jimi!” But nobody was in the Patels’ armchair-crowded sitting room except a brown, bare-bottomed baby with a runny nose and an elderly grandmother in a lime-green sari, who stared at me with eyes as hard as stones. Above the brown-tiled fireplace was a luridly colored photograph of the Bhutto family. I apologized and retreated.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? I’ve been waiting outside for ages,” Dulcie said.

“I saw Jimi,” I told her.

“Jimmy who?” she demanded. She was bleached-blond, pretty, and tarty—and always intolerant. Perhaps that was why I liked her so much.

“Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix. He was here, just now.”

Dulcie stopped chewing gum and stared at me with her mouth open. “Jimi Hendrix? What do you mean, Jimi Hendrix?”

“I saw him, he was here.”

“What are you talking about? You’re out of your fucking tree, you are!”

“Dulcie, he was here, I swear to God. I’ve just been talking to him. He said he had to get back into Monika’s old flat. You know, the flat where he—”

“Pree-cisely,” Dulcie mocked me. “The flat where he died.”

“He was here, believe me. He was so damned close I could have touched him.”

“You’re mad,” Dulcie declared. “Anyway, I’m not waiting any longer. I’m going down to the Bull’s Head for a drink.”

“Listen, wait,” I told her. “Let’s just go round to Monika’s flat and see who lives there now. Maybe they know what’s going on.”

“I don’t want to,” Dulcie protested. “You’re just being ridiculous. He’s
dead,
Charlie. He’s been dead for twenty years.”

But in the end we went round to the flat and rang the doorbell. We saw the grubby net curtains twitching, but it was a long time before we heard anybody coming to the door. A cold gray wind blew round the crescent. The railings were clogged with newspaper and empty crisp bags, and the trees were scrubby and bare.

“I don’t suppose they even know that Jimi Hendrix used to live here,” Dulcie sniffed.

Eventually the door was opened about an inch and a woman’s pale face appeared.

“Yes?”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I know somebody who used to live here, and he was wondering if you’d mind if he sort of came back and took a look around. You know, just for old times’ sake.”

The woman didn’t answer. I don’t think she really understood what I was going on about.

“It wouldn’t take long,” I told her. “Just a couple of minutes. Just for old times’ sake.”

She closed the door without saying a word. Dulcie and I were left on the step, under a cold north London sky the color of glue.

A black woman in a shiny Marks and Spencer’s raincoat pushed a huge, dilapidated pram across the street. The pram was crowded with children and shopping.

“Now what are you going to do?” asked Dulcie.

“Don’t know,” I told her. “Let’s go and get that drink.”

We drove down to the Bull’s Head and sat by the window overlooking the Thames. The tide was out, so the river was little more than a dull gray ribbon in a stretch of sloping black mud.

Courtney Tulloch was there, and so were Bill Franklin, Dave Blackman, Margaret, and Jane. I suddenly realized that I’d known all of them back in 1970 when Jimi was still alive. It was a strange feeling, like being in a dream.

What had John Lennon written? “Yea though I wart through the valet of thy shadowy hut, I will feed no Norman.”

I asked Courtney whether he knew who was living in Monika’s old flat, but he shook his head. “All the old faces are gone now, man, long-gone. It’s all changed from what it used to be. I mean, it was always rundown and seedy and all that, but everybody knew where they was, black and white, bus driver and whore. Nowadays these kids run riot. It’s like the moon.”

But Dave said, “I know who took that flat after Monika left. It was John Drummond.”

“You mean
the
John Drummond?” I asked him. “John Drummond the guitarist?”

“That’s right. But he was only there for a couple of months.”

Dulcie said, “You’re being really boring today, Charlie. Can I have another drink?”

I bought another round: snowball for Dulcie, Hoisten Pus for me. Courtney was telling a joke.

I hadn’t realized that John Drummond had lived in the same flat as Jimi. For my money, John had been a better guitarist than Jimi—technically, anyway. He was always more single-minded, more creative. He’d been able to make his guitar talk in the same way that Jimi did, but the voice that had come out had been less confused than Jimi’s, less angry, less frustrated. And he’d never played an uneven set like Jimi did at Woodstock, or a totally disastrous one like Jimi did in Seattle the last time he ever appeared at a concert in America. John Drummond had played first with Graham Bond and then with John Mayall and then his own “supergroup,” the Crash.

John Drummond had reached number one both sides of the Atlantic with “Running a Fever.” But then, without warning, he’d suddenly retired, amid newspaper reports of cancer or multiple sclerosis or chronic heroin addiction. That had been the last that anybody ever saw of him. That was—what?—1973, 1974, or something like that. I didn’t even know if he was dead or alive.

That night in my one-bedroom flat in Holland Park Avenue, the telephone rang. It was Jimi. His voice sounded distant and powdery.

“I can’t talk for long, man. I’m in a call box in Queensway.”

“I went to the flat, Jimi. The woman wouldn’t let me in.”

“I have to get in there, Charlie. No two ways about it.”

“Jimi—I found out something. John Drummond had that flat after Monica. Maybe he could help.”

“John Drummond? You mean that young guy who kept hanging around wanting to play with the Experience?”

“That’s right, amazing guitarist.”

“He was shit. He couldn’t play for shit.”

“Oh, come on, Jimi. He was great. ‘Running a Fever’ was a classic.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. I could hear traffic, and Jimi breathing. Then Jimi said, “When was that?”

“When was what?”

“That song you mentioned, ‘Running a Fever,’ when was that?”

“I don’t know. Early seventy-four, I think.”

“And he was good?”

“He was amazing.”

“Was he as good as me?”

“If you want the God’s honest truth, yes, he was.”

“Did he sound like me?”

“Yes, he did, except not many people would admit it, because he was white.”

I looked down into the street. Traffic streamed endlessly past the front of my flat, on its way to Shepherds Bush. I thought of Jimi singing “Crosstown Traffic” all those years ago.

Jimi said, “Where’s this Drummond guy now? Is he still playing?”

“Nobody knows where he is. He had a number-one hit with ‘Fever’ and then he quit. Warner Brothers couldn’t even find anybody to sue.”

“Charlie,” urged Jimi hoarsely, “you’ve got to do me one favor. You’ve got to find this guy. Even if he’s dead, and you can only find out where they buried him.”

“Jimi, for Christ’s sake. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“Please, Charlie. Find him for me.”

He hung up. I stood by the window for a long time, feeling frightened and depressed. If Jimi didn’t know that John Drummond had played so well—if he wasn’t aware that John had reached number one with “Running a Fever” then where had he been for the past twenty years? Where had he been, if not dead?

I telephoned Nik Cohn and he met me in this stuffy afternoon drinking club in Mayfair. Nik had written the definitive work on pop in the sixties,
Awopbopaloopa Alopbamboom,
and he had known just about everybody, including the Beatles, Eric Burdon, Pink Floyd in their UFO days, and Jimi, of course—and John Drummond.

He hadn’t seen John for yonks, but about six years ago he had received a postcard from Littlehampton on the south coast, saying nothing much except that John was trying to get his mind and his body back together again.

“He didn’t exactly explain what he meant,” Nik told me. “But he was always like that. You got the feeling that he was always thinking about something else. Like trying to deal with something that was going on inside him.”

Littlehampton in the middle of winter was windswept and bleak. The funfair was closed, the beach huts were closed, the Red Indian canoes were all tied together in the middle of the boating pond so that nobody could reach them. Fawn sand waved in flat horses’-tails across the promenade, and old lolly wrappers danced across the tufted sea grass.

I spent hours walking around the town center looking for John Drummond, but that first afternoon I didn’t see anybody between the ages of three and sixty-five. It started to rain—a cold, persistent rain—so I rang the doorbell at one of the redbrick Edwardian villas close to the seafront and booked myself a room for the night.

It wasn’t much of a place to stay, but it was warm. There was also fish and chips for supper in a small dining room I shared with two traveling salesmen, an unmarried mother with a snotty, wriggling boy in soiled dungarees, and a bristly-mustached retired colonel with leather arm-patches on his jacket and a habit of clearing his throat like a fusillade of gunshots.

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corpse to the ramparts we hurried.

Next morning it was still raining, but I walked the silvery-gray streets all the same, looking for John Drummond. I found him totally by accident, in a pub on the corner of River Road, sitting in a corner with an untouched pint of McEwan’s and a half-eaten packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps. He was smoking incessantly and staring at nothing.

He was thin, so much thinner than the last time I’d seen him, and his hair was graying and wild. He looked a bit like a geriatric Pete Townshend. He was dressed in tight black trousers and a huge black leather jacket with about fifty zippers and D-rings. He wore a lapel badge with a picture of three pairs of scampering legs on it and the motif “Running Men Tour 1986.”

I parked my lager next to his and dragged up a chair. He didn’t even look at me.

“John?” I said, without much confidence.

His eyes flicked across at me, and narrowed.

“John, it’s Charlie. Charlie Goode. Don’t you remember me?”

“Charlie Goode?” he asked dully. Then, very slowly, as if recognition were penetrating his consciousness like a pebble falling into treacle, “Cha-a-arlie Goode! That’s right! Char-lie Goode! How are you keeping, man? I haven’t seen you since . . . when was the last time I saw you?”

“Isle of Wight.”

“So it was. Isle of Wight. Fuck me.”

I lifted my beer and drank some and wiped my lips with the back of my hand. “I’ve been looking for you since yesterday,” I told him.

He sucked at the butt of his cigarette, then crushed it out. He didn’t make any comment, didn’t even look as if he’d heard me.

“I’m not really sure why,” I said, trying to sound light-hearted about it. “The thing is, Jimi asked me.”

“Jimi asked you?”

“It sounds stupid, doesn’t it?” I said with a forced laugh. “But I met him in Notting Hill. He’s still alive.”

John took out another cigarette and lit it with a cheap plastic lighter. Now he wouldn’t take his eyes off me.

I said, more seriously, “He was trying to get back into Monika’s old pad. He didn’t say why. The thing is, he found out that you lived there for a bit, after he—well, after he stopped being around. He said I had to find you. He said it was crucial. Don’t ask me why.”

John blew out smoke. “You saw Jimi, and Jimi told you to find me?”

“That’s right. I know it sounds stupid.”

“No, Charlie, it doesn’t sound stupid.”

I waited for him to say something else—to explain what was going on—but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. He sat there and smoked and drank his beer and occasionally said, “Jimi asked you, fuck me.” Or else he sang a snatch from one of Jimi’s old songs.

In the end, though, he drained his glass and stood up and said, “Come on, Charlie. You’d better see what this is all about.”

Hunched, spindly-legged, he led me through the rain. We crossed River Road and into Arun Terrace, where a long road of small Victorian artisans’ cottages with slate roofs and majolica-tiled porches stood. The hedges smelled of cat pee, and wet cigarette packets were snared in the shrubbery. John pushed open the gate of number 17, “Caledonian,” and opened the front door with his own key. Inside, it was gloomy and crowded with knickknacks: a miniature ship’s wheel with a barometer in it, the plaster head of a grizzled Arab with a hawk on his shoulder, a huge ugly vase full of pink-dyed pampas grass.

“My room’s upstairs,” he said, and led the way up a flight of impossibly steep stairs, covered in red sculptured carpet. We reached the landing and he opened the door to a small bed-sitting room—a plain, cold British bedroom with a candlewick bedspread and a varnished wardrobe and a Baby Bellingcooker. The only indication that this was the home of one of the best rock guitarists since Eric Clapton was a shiny black Fender Strat with finger marks all over it.

John pulled over a ratty basketwork chair with a collapsed seat. “Make yourself at home,” he told me. Then he sat down himself on the end of the bed, and took out his cigarettes again.

Cautiously, I sat down. I felt as if I were sitting down at the bottom of a dry well. I watched John light up again and testily smoke. He was growing more agitated by the minute, and I couldn’t figure out why.

After a while, however, he started talking in a low, flat monotone. “Jimi was always talking about the time he used to tour with the Flames—years ago, before he got famous or anything, just after he left the Army Airborne. They played in some back-of-beyond town in Georgia somewhere, and Jimi got mixed up with this chick. I always remember what he said about her, ‘foxy to the bone.’ Anyway, he spent all night with her, even though he missed the tour bus, and even though this chick was married and kept telling him that her husband would beat her when she got home.