Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (74 page)

Knight life: The legal drinking age comes from the 13th century when men were knighted at age 21.

The ambulance attendants tell a different story. According to author James Rotondi, the two men arrived at the apartment to find it empty…except for Hendrix lying in a mess on the bed, already dead. They say they went through the motions of trying to revive Hendrix because that was standard procedure, but to no avail. They wrapped up the body, carried it to the ambulance, and drove to the hospital; Hendrix was pronounced dead on arrival. The autopsy cautiously concludes that the exact cause and time of death are unknown, but evidence points to a time of death much earlier—possibly several hours before the ambulance arrived.

Was Monika Dannemann trying to cover up something? If so, what and why? The world may never know—she committed suicide in 1996.

The Government.
Rock music has long been associated with rebellion, revolution, and social change, ideas that appeal to youthful fans but are a cause for concern for “the Establishment.” It is well known that during the J. Edgar Hoover era, and perhaps even more recently, the FBI kept dossiers not only on political activists, but on actors, authors, and a wide variety of other potential “threats” as well. It is not surprising that influential musicians such as Jimi Hendrix would draw the interest of the U.S. government—but there may be more to it than that.

In his book
The Covert War Against Rock
, author Alex Constantine says Hendrix’s FBI file, released in 1979 to a student newspaper in Santa Barbara, reveals that Hendrix was on a list of “subversives” to be placed in detainment camps in the event of national emergency. Hendrix was an icon of not only rock ‘n’ roll rebellion, but the Black Power and antiwar movements of the 1960s. Did U.S. intelligence agencies consider Hendrix not only subversive, but dangerous?

There are some conspiracy theorists who believe that Hendrix and other musicians, including Jim Morrison of The Doors, ex-Beatle John Lennon, and more recently, rappers Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G.—all of whom died under suspicious circumstances—may have been eliminated by the government. It would be remarkably easy to make the deaths look like accidents or murders committed by crazy fans—these musicians lived life close to the edge, anyway. Paranoid fantasy? Or could there be some truth to these fears?

The Mob.
Government agents may not have been the only ones with an eye on Hendrix. Organized crime figures were involved with the music industry long before Hendrix was. To the Mob, the industry wasn’t about music—it was about money and drugs. And there was plenty of both around Hendrix.

According to Constantine, Hendrix was muscled by the Mob after declining an invitation to play at the Salvation, a New York night club controlled by the Gambino crime family. Hendrix had been a regular at the club, but after the proprietor was murdered following an attempt to break free of Mob control, Hendrix evidently felt uncomfortable playing there. Shortly thereafter, Constantine says, a stranger approached Hendrix on the street and, while chatting, pulled out a .38 pistol and casually hit a target 25 feet away. Hendrix got the message and decided to play the club after all.

Another time, Hendrix was kidnapped from the Salvation by some thugs claiming to be part of the Mafia, Constantine claims. They took him to a Manhattan apartment and told him to call his manager, Michael Jeffery, and relay a demand to transfer his contract to the Mob…or else. Hendrix was rescued from the thugs by men sent by Jeffery, but later told people he thought Jeffery had arranged the whole thing.

So Hendrix may have had good reason not to trust his manager…

The Manager.
Those seeking to tie together the loose ends of government agencies, the Mob, and enormous amounts of money need look no further than Michael Jeffery. Jeffery served in British Intelligence in the 1950s and years later boasted of underworld connections. As Hendrix’s manager, Jeffery had control of millions of dollars earned by Hendrix, much of which was diverted by Jeffery to offshore bank accounts.

Hendrix became increasingly aware that Jeffery was cheating him, and just before his death made arrangements to cancel his management contract. The manager understandably could have been upset at the prospect of losing such a lucrative client—but why kill Hendrix? The answer could lie in the rumor that Jeffery had taken out a million-dollar life insurance policy on the star. Additionally, Jeffery could have made much more from the dozens of Hendrix albums released after the musician’s death. (There were many hours of unreleased music.)

Makes sense: A group of peacocks is called an
ostentation
.

Whatever involvement the former intelligence agent may have had in Hendrix’s death would have had to have been indirect; he was vacationing in Spain when Hendrix died. To some, Jeffery was further implicated when he himself died under unusual circumstances less than three years later, in a plane crash.

FLY ON

A number of times in the weeks before his death the 27-year-old Hendrix asked friends, “Do you think I will live to be 28?” Did he have a premonition of what was coming? Friends say he was becoming increasingly paranoid…and perhaps with good reason. We may never know the truth about the death of Jimi Hendrix, but we do know that his life, as he wrote in his final song, was indeed “quicker than the wink of an eye.”

*        *        *

A TALE OF TWO CHORDS

In July 2003, hard-rock band Metallica announced that they were suing the Canadian band Unfaith over their use of the guitar chords E and F. “We’re not saying we own those two chords individually, that would be ridiculous,” Metallica’s Lars Ulrich was reported to have said. “We’re just saying that in that specific order, people have grown to associate E and F with our music.”

Unfaith’s lead singer, Erik Ashley, responded, “I thought it was a prank at first. Now I’m not sure what to think.” Actually, he knew exactly what to think. Why? Because he created the prank.

But that didn’t stop the media from running with the story without contacting the parties involved. ABC talk show host Jimmy Kimmel reported it, as did MSNBC’s Jeannette Walls.

So why did Ashley do it? “To gauge just how willing America was to buy a story as extraordinary—as outlandish—as Metallica claiming ownership of a two-chord progression.” He added, “If this week was any indication, America is all too willing to believe it.”

But after all of Metallica’s well-publicized attempts to sue online music downloaders, was it really that hard to believe? Said one anonymous chat room attendant: “I’m not sure what’s worse—that the story is a fake, or that it was actually conceivable that Metallica would do that.”

At its peak, the Persian empire was roughly 2/3 the size of the United States.

THIS OLD (OUT)HOUSE

In all our years writing
Bathroom Readers,
this is one of the strangest hobbies we’ve ever heard of. We’re never going to look at a bottle collection the same way again
.

T
ALKING TRASH

Try to imagine a world with no garbage collection—no garbage man to come and empty your trash cans, and no city or county dump to haul your old stuff to. What would you do with everything you have to throw away?

It wasn’t so long ago that nearly everyone in America was faced with this problem. In the 19th century, few if any communities had trash collection, and not many had dumps, either. People were on their own. If trash was edible, they might feed it to animals or compost it for use in the garden. If it was flammable, they burned it. If they didn’t know what else to do with it, they threw it in the backyard. “People had really messy yards,” says archaeologist Liz Abel. “What they couldn’t burn in the cookstove, they threw out back.”

But if the item was small enough, oftentimes they went out to the outhouse and dropped it down the hole.

THE FINAL FRONTIER

The people who tossed things into their privies probably assumed that what they disposed of would never see the light of day again. They were wrong. A growing number of antique collectors and amateur history buffs have made it their hobby to dig this stuff up. In the process they’ve uncovered clues about the daily lives led by people in the 19th century.

“It’s amazing what you can tell about someone who lived more than a hundred years ago by what they threw in their outhouse,” says Jeff Kantoff, a New York lumber salesman who digs up Brooklyn outhouses in his spare time. “You can tell how many people were in the family, did they have kids, were the kids boys or girls, did they have money, what were their ailments.”

Such outhouse excavators—or “privy diggers,” as they prefer to be called—insist that as disgusting as it may sound to the uninitiated, outhouse digging is really not that bad. Decades of organic activity have converted all that old poop into compost indistinguishable from ordinary dirt. “There is no stink whatsoever,” says John Ozoga, a Michigan geologist and privy-digging enthusiast.

World’s biggest desert: Sahara, at 3.5 million sq. miles. The Gobi is #2, at 500,000.

THE HOLE TRUTH

Privy digging dates back to the late 1950s, when antique bottle collecting began to take off as a hobby. Bottles are one of the most common items found in outhouses, not necessarily because people liked to drink soda, mineral water, or beer while they answered nature’s call, but probably because tossing bottles down the privy was safer than having glass strewn all over the backyard.

And there’s much more to find than just bottles. Privy diggers have found coins, clay pipes, pottery, silverware, ice skates, toys, shoes, pistols, billiard balls, false teeth, squirrel bones (people used to eat squirrels), and even Model T parts. In coastal areas it’s also common to find oyster shells—
lots
of oyster shells—and not just because people liked to eat oysters. “Oyster shells were an early form of toilet paper,” says Kantoff. “I don’t know how they were used. I don’t want to know.”

Thanks to low oxygen levels, many items found in privies are in surprisingly good shape. Apples more than 150 years old still retain their color, and leather goods like shoes and saddlebags (yes, saddle bags) look like they were thrown away yesterday.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

The hardest thing about excavating an old outhouse is knowing where to dig. The outhouses themselves have long since been torn down, and the holes, or “vaults,” underneath them have been covered over with dirt and forgotten, with few visible clues indicating where they are.

One way of finding likely places to dig is by consulting old fire insurance maps to see if they show outhouse locations. Another trick is to put yourself in the shoes of the home owner—if you had to place an outhouse on your property, where would you put it? They were usually far enough away from the main house to control odors, but not so far as to be inconvenient. In areas with harsh winters, the outhouse is likely to have been closer to the main house, so that people didn’t have to trudge through snow to use the facilities. On city lots, the outhouse is likely to be right up against the back property line, frequently in a corner.