Was Jimi Hendrix Kidnapped? – Nostalgia Central

10 September 1969 was a bad night for Jimi Hendrix. Early in the evening, the guitarist stormed off the tiny stage of New York’s Mafia-controlled Salvation Club at 1 Sheridan Square in the West Village.

The gig (pictured below) had been plagued by sound problems (the venue wasn’t suited to amped-up rock), and some patrons had walked out while his new band, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, delivered a decidedly underwhelming set.

Hendrix left the Salvation in the company of the club’s owner, Bobby Woods – who also happened to be his coke dealer, and who would be found dead with five bullets in his head in February 1970, the victim of a gangland hit.

The pair spent the dregs of the evening together, but later – as Hendrix walked alone on a dark Manhattan street, wrapped in his own thoughts  – the violent squealing of brakes snapped him out of his reverie.

“Before I realised what had happened,” he later told his friend, Curtis Knight, “I found myself forcibly abducted by four men. I was blindfolded and gagged and shoved in the back of a car.”

Hendrix was apparently driven to a house in Brooklyn, and for the next few days, none of Hendrix’s friends knew his whereabouts (some weren’t even aware he had disappeared).

The only people who truly know what happened were the kidnappers and Hendrix himself, but the guitarist’s associates have wildly different takes on what happened.

In the words of his fashion-designer girlfriend, Colette Mimram, Hendrix was “surrounded by vultures”.

One of them was Hendrix’s unscrupulous, Machiavellian manager, Mike Jeffery (pictured at right with Hendrix).

Nearly 10 years older than the guitarist, Jeffery didn’t look like a heavyweight rock’n’roll manager – more like a bookmaker – and his past was shrouded in mystery.

Some have suggested that before entering the music business in the early 60s as a club owner and manager of Newcastle band The Animals, he was an MI5 agent.

He certainly didn’t understand music. He was purely a businessman – and his primary objective in late 1969 was to reunite Hendrix with his world-beating band the Experience, who had split a few months earlier. That meant separating Jimi from his new compatriots in Gypsy Sun and Rainbows – Juma Sultan and Jerry Velez.

Bob Levine, who worked as Jeffery’s business manager, points the finger of blame for the kidnapping at the Mafia.

Recalling the kidnapping, Levine tied Hendrix’s disappearance into Bobby Woods’s death. “The next night [after the gig] Woods was found murdered, gangland-style,” he said. “The ‘boys’ knew Hendrix had spent the night with Woods and wanted to know what he had heard from him.”

This, reckoned Levine, was why the ‘boys’ kidnapped Hendrix after the Salvation gig.

The major flaw in Levine’s version of events is that Woods was shot and killed almost five months later, rather than the night after the show.

What various associates do appear to agree on is that Mike Jeffery sprang into action. According to Levine, the kidnappers had “sent word down that he was being treated comfortably and [would be] released in a couple of days”.

After learning the address, the manager sent some of his own heavies to rescue his charge.

Juma Sultan, who played with Hendrix at the disastrous Salvation show, said the guitarist told him what happened when he returned after his disappearance. “They blindfolded him, threatened him, and then 24 hours later Mike Jeffery and his crew came in like gangbusters and rescued him. Jimi was laughing about it. He saw it all as a set-up organised by Jeffery.”

There have been suggestions that Jeffery staged the kidnapping himself as a publicity stunt. But Keith Altham (widely acknowledged as one of the best PR men of the era) insists, “That’s not how you do a publicity stunt. The first thing you do is tell the papers. And they never did that.”

Other people close to Hendrix suggest that the kidnapping may never have happened.

As Jimi’s clothes designer, Colette Mimram (pictured at right with Jimi) saw the guitarist most days during this period, although she was in Morocco when the incident was said to have occurred:

“Maybe he went out of town and disappeared for two or three days with a woman, and then said that he was kidnapped.”

There’s also a possibility that Hendrix’s ever-increasing drug intake may have caused him to imagine the whole episode.

“You have to remember that Jimi lived in a dream,” explains Altham.

“If Mike Jeffery locked him in a room to make sure he was around when a show started, Jimi might well have thought he’d been kidnapped.”

The kidnapping was never reported to the NYPD, so there was no official investigation or contemporary record.

The mystery is complicated by the fact that many of the people involved are dead.

Bobby Woods died early the following year, shot by an unknown assailant. Hendrix’s band leader friend Curtis Knight, to whom the guitarist admitted being kidnapped, died in 1999, although not before writing a tell-all book, Jimi: An Intimate Biography of Jimi Hendrix, which speculated on Jimi’s death.

Jimi’s former co-manager Chas Chandler died of a heart condition in 1996. Hendrix himself died of an apparent overdose of sleeping pills in London in September 1970.

And Mike Jeffery, the shadowy, ruthless figure behind Hendrix’s later career, was killed in a mid-air collision over Nantes, in France, in 1973.

This leaves a handful of very different theories as to what happened that night after the Salvation gig and who was behind it.

That it was a publicity stunt is highly unlikely. That Hendrix skipped town himself to escape the pressures of New York has only slim support.

The idea that it was a Mafia manoeuvre to extract information about Bobby Woods is full of holes and inconsistencies.

This leaves the fake kidnapping, staged by the devious Mike Jeffery (pictured at left), as the most likely candidate. Hendrix’s reported statements to Juma Sultan, Curtis Knight, and others support this.

Keith Altham, arguably the best-connected publicist of the period, offers what may be the clincher. “I only got it second-hand,” he says, “but from very good sources – Chas Chandler and Noel Redding. Their take was that Mike Jeffery set the whole thing up – maybe a kind of wake-up call, or a warning, or to convince Jimi that he needed Mike as a manager. They had no doubts that it happened. It’s certainly the kind of thing Mike was perfectly capable of; it perfectly fits his way of working.”

Just one year later, Jimi Hendrix was dead following circumstances that have never been adequately explained. But that’s another story. Or is it?

Elements of this article first appeared in a ‘Classic Rock’ article by Johnny Black.