The Legend of Jimi Hendrix

Etchingham was too tired to take a peek at the so-called wild man, but later that evening she went for a drink at a club and discovered Jimi onstage. As he started to play blues tunes, the club went silent and the crowd watched in a sort of shared rapture. "He was just amazing," Etchingham recalled. "People had never seen anything like it." Eric Burdon of the Animals was one of the many musicians at the club that night. "It was haunting how good he was," Burdon said. "You just stopped and watched."

Walking out of the club, Jimi -- unaware that British cars drove on the left side of the street -- stepped in front of a taxi. "I managed to grab him and pull him back, and the taxi just brushed him," Etchingham said. Later, Jimi asked her to come to bed with him. She found him charming and handsome, and consented. They would stay together for the next two years, and Etchingham would be one of Jimi's longest-term girlfriends. She knew everyone on the scene, and she became his entree into Swinging London and friendships with the Who, the Rolling Stones and many other bands.

Jimi had been in England less than twenty-four hours and he'd already wowed a key segment of London's music scene, bedded his first English "bird" and narrowly avoided death. He had spent twenty-three years of his life struggling in an America where black musicians were outcasts within rock music. In one single day in London, his entire life had permanently been recast.

Chas Chandler's partner was Michael Jeffrey, the Animals' manager and a former British intelligence officer who did little to defuse sinister rumors that he had killed people as a spy. They placed a "musicians wanted" ad in Melody Maker, which drew in a twenty-year-old guitar player named Noel Redding. He had never before played bass, but Jimi liked Redding's frizzy hair, which reminded him of Dylan, and he was hired.

Even after Redding was hired, Chandler phoned Brian Auger, who led the blues-based jazz band the Brian Auger Trinity, and proposed a radical idea. "I've got this really amazing guitar player from America," Chandler told him. "I think it would be perfect if he fronted your band." Auger declined. As a fallback, Chandler asked if Jimi could at least jam with the Trinity at a show that evening. To this, Auger agreed.