ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN EXPERIENCE HENDRIX MAGAZINE, SPRING 2000
By Steve Newton
In 1966, at the nondescript location of New York’s Abtone Recording Studio, near the corner of Broadway & 55th, R&B singer-saxophonist Lonnie Youngblood laid down a handful of tracks for Fairmount Records, a subsidiary of Philadelphia’s Cameo-Parkway label.
None of those songs ever made it onto the charts, or earned respectable airplay, but the sessions were legendary because they featured a young guitarist who called himself Jimmy James. One year later this same player would take the world by storm under the moniker of Jimi Hendrix.
After Hendrix became about as famous as you can get, the recordings from the Lonnie Youngblood sessions–among the first studio recordings Jimi ever made–became the source of innumerable album releases. Together, the two musicians collaborated on 13 tracks over the course of a handful of sessions.
These included “Go Go Shoes” and its continuation, “Go Go Place” (Youngblood’s wife was a go-go dancer at the time), “Soul Food (That’s A What I Like)”, “Goodbye Bessie Mae”, “Sweet Thang”, “She’s a Fox”, “Groovemaker”, and three takes each of “Wipe the Sweat” and “Under the Table”.
Among those tracks there is nothing that comes close to being as dynamic as Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady” or “Fire”, but Youngblood–reached at his home in Little Ferry, New Jersey–says he’s still proud of his recordings with Hendrix.
“The one Jimi and I really liked the most was the one called “Wipe the Sweat'” he points out, “but you would have to hear it really from the original. See some of those tapes you may have heard was doctored. If you are a Hendrix fan, you would know that right away. They got some people to try and play it like Jimi Hendrix, to put even more of Jimi Hendrix on the tape, and that was one thing that I found very distasteful about the whole project.”
“Wipe the Sweat” actually has quite a wild boogie-blues intro, which reminds one a bit of Stevie Ray Vaughan circa 1985.
“It’s great isn’t it?”, enthuses Youngblood. “I see that you know [the music]. Well now, if you take that intro, and you take the intro on “Go Go Shoes”, those are the things that would tell you about Jimi Hendrix and what he was really about as far as R&B was concerned. I mean he had so many creative ideas, you know.
“And we had another thing called ‘Goodbye Bessie Mae’, that was Jimi and I singing harmony on there. Jimi was singing the low part: [sings] ‘Goodbye Bessie Mae, baby now don’t you cry’–sorry I forgot the words… But that was what we really liked, along with ‘Wipe the Sweat’, ‘Go Go Shoes’, and ‘Under the Table’, those tracks. It was only about six original tracks, but there were [various producers] trying to get ‘Seque One’ and ‘Segue Two’, and the crap that they did to it, man, tryin’ to put on other guitars that sounded like Jimi. Aww, man.”
Youngblood figures that countless copies have been sold, in various guises, using those original sessions as the selling point; titles such as Two Great Experiences Together (Maple Records, 1971), The Genius of Jimi Hendrix (Trip Records, 1972), Rare Hendrix (Trip Records 1972), and Roots of Hendrix (Trip Records, 1972) are among them.
He’s tried suing various parties to get his fair share–or any share–of the proceeds from the Youngblood/Hendrix collaboration, but has grown resigned to the fact that it’s impossible to keep up to all the bootleggers and rip-off artists.
“If you go after one person, they’re not there no more, and if you go after another person, they’re not there no more. They’ve got so many different coverups. And ain’t nothin’ I can do about it. I stopped bein’ angry and stuff, I’m busy just tryin’ to enjoy life. And plus with the new CD out, that’s the most important thing I got goin’.
“I got a new traditional gospel CD out, entitled In the Garden, and it’s sellin’ pretty good outta the trunk of the car, so… that’s basically where I’m comin’ from now. I’m just tryin’ to stay alive man, and at this time in my life I’m very very grateful and I’m happy that I’m still alive and that things are goin’ good for me.”
Born in southern Georgia, Youngblood discovered his love of saxophone through the music of Louis Jordan of whom his mother was a big fan. At 18 he moved to the Newark, New Jersey area to join the Pearl Reeves-Paul Farana Trio, paying his R&B dues up north while Hendrix was doing the same down south. Youngblood’s first recording was an instrumental version of the R&B song “Heartbreak”, which became a regional hit, and that success led to spots as a band leader with Faye “Atomic” Adams (“Shake a Hand”), Buster Brown (“Fannie Mae”), and then, in ’59, Baby Washington (“The Time”).
After touring the country with Washington, Youngblood started up his own band and became popular doing college dates through the Northeast, so much so that he was christened “The Ivy League King”. While Hendrix was honing his chops with Little Richard, Youngblood worked at making his own name, even opening for Chuck Berry at one point.
His musical career was put on hiatus after he was drafted into the army, but after a short period of service he returned to his home in Harlem in ’63, and there he found Hendrix, who had been discharged from the paratroopers for medical reasons, the summer before.
Nowadays, Youngblood claims to be known by many in his stomping ground as “The Prince of Harlem”, and keeps busy working everything from birthday parties to funerals. He has a steady Saturday gig at Sylvia’s soul food restaurant at 126th and Lennox Avenue in Harlem. But he doesn’t pull out those old tunes that made him an underground legend among diehard Hendrix devotees.
“I don’t do them live now,” he says, “because I’m 60 years old, and I don’t have that type of mood now. I do R&B, but basically I’m working with an organ player, a keyboard player, and a drummer, and we work all the supper clubs in New York. We work all around, we do a lotta corporate parties, and we do a lotta private things, and we do a lot of social jobs where we work dances. And we do a lotta churches. So I’m busy 12 months out of the year.”
Although he doesn’t perform the music that Hendrix played back in ’63, Youngblood feels it has a distinct place in the evolution of the rock icon. But how did the young Hendrix actually react himself to Youngblood’s compositions back then?
“Mmmm,” he ponders, “well Jimi was a professional. And so whatever he played, he put his heart into it. It’s just that Jimi wanted to take it a step further. Lemme tell you what Jimi told me one night. He came to me one night and said, ‘Man, I tried something, you gotta try it man, because it is so great.’ Jimi had been out hangin’ out with some friends, and had taken a tab of LSD. And I told him, I said, ‘You know, I could never do that because I’m scared to death of anything that might make me hallucinate.’ I always wanted to be in control.
“He said it wasn’t like that, but I never would try that, and Jimi just did his thing, man. I believe that when he did that, it helped him to take his music to where he wanted to take it, open up his head. ‘Cause if you examine the titles of some of Jimi’s original things that he wrote and created, he would have to be in another place to come up with ‘Third Stone from the Sun’ and ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, and all that good stuff, man. And [at first] I didn’t even like it, but after I listened to it a while, man, I fell in love with this stuff. I thought it was just fantastic.”
Although Hendrix hadn’t gotten close to approaching his creative peak during their sessions, Youngblood recalls that Hendrix lived and breathed music first and foremost.
“He was like one of them music fanatics,” says Youngblood, “he liked to practice. And see, when Jimi took a job with me, he didn’t have an amplifier. My wife and I took our money out the bank and went and bought an amplifier so Jimi could make the jobs. Then I had to go by his hotel room sometime and pick him up, get him up outta bed and stuff like that.
“He was a carefee guy,” continues Youngblood, “but we knew that he had the potential to be something. We just didn’t know what it could be, because he didn’t want to sing! We’d have to like force him to sing. So he didn’t like bein’ out front, ’cause he was basically sorta shy. See, when Jimi was workin’ with the group, Jimi was ‘Jimmy James’.
“I don’t know where that James thing came from, except for the fact that he loved Elmore James, and some of the other people out here. But when he recorded and we looked in the Billboard or Cashbox and we saw this number-one record by Jimi Hendrix–J-i-m-i–that was shocking, but we knew that was Jimi because nobody sounded like that but him.”
Even after Hendrix had made it to the big-time with his psychedelic blues-rock, he returned to visit Youngblood, who claims that the reunion resulted in a jam session at the Record Plant. One of their meetings from this era was captured in an onstage photograph from ’69, the same one that would grace the cover of the Two Great Experiences Together album, which actually spent four weeks on the Billboard charts upon its release in ’71.
“A lotta people don’t know this here,” informs Youngblood. “Jimi came to see me up at Small’s Paradise in Harlem. I looked up one night and here is a guy with a big wide hat on–if you ever see the picture on that album, that’s the week he came–with a pair of white pants, and the sash around his waist, and that big hat. I was on the stage playin’ and Jimi got up there with me and started playin’, man, and we tore the joint completely out.
“And at this time now I’m sniffin cocaine–it’s a silly thing, but back in them days we did it; youth and good sense, they don’t travel on the same road. It wasn’t particularly Jimi’s choice of drugs, but we were cool to it. Anyways, we were in the car gettin’ high together and talkin’ and stuff and he said, ‘Man, you know, I’m goin’ away, but when I come back, we’re gonna put together a band that will play our music: gospel, blues, and jazz.’
“We was gonna do these three things in the concept of this band. I was very excited about that, but then he said something that disturbed me to death, I’ll never forget the night he told me that. He said, ‘Lonnie, man, a lotta crap has been goin’ on in my organization.’ He said, ‘A lotta heads gonna be rollin’, and we gonna reorganize.’
“And I thought that was very disturbin’ because he never told me what he was talkin’ about, and neither did I even ask him, because–hey, that was a helluva statement. I told him, ‘Be careful with that, man,’ because that was heavy, and I didn’t take it no further.”
It wasn’t long after that meeting that Youngblood heard the shocking news that, on September 18, 1970, Hendrix had died in his sleep from an inhalation of vomit, due to barbituate intoxication. Since his days with Hendrix Youngblood has released 12 albums, performed in Italy and Germany, and basically just kept chasing the music rainbow. He says that he’s been blessed, but it hasn’t always been pretty, as he’s had his own serious battles with drugs.
Considering the enormous fame that Hendrix achieved, especially since his passing, it’s perhaps easy to overplay his personal importance to old friends and fellow musicians. But Youngblood claims that, even if Hendrix had never gone on to godlike status, he still would have remembered him.
“Sure I would because, you know, when you play with an exceptional musician who can really set you on fire, you don’t forget people like that. I had a few people like that in my lifetime. And plus he was a nice guy, he was a funny guy. He had a personality that was Jimi Hendrix, that was all his.
“He sure became something that was phenomenal and brought some joy and pleasure to millions and million of people, including myself. I mean ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ and ‘Third Stone from the Sun’, whew, I listen to that and it just blows me away! I don’t know where that stuff came from, I just know that it was somewhere deep down in his guts.”
So knowing what he does now about the undying legacy Hendrix would leave, is there anything Lonnie Youngblood would do differently as far as his experience with Hendrix goes? He gets a little flustered at the query, but then states what’s on his mind.
“I don’t know.. I probably… I might… I might have went with him. ‘Cause one day he came to me and he said ‘Man, I’m goin’ down to the Village, and we’re gonna trip out, come on let’s go.’ And meanwhile I got a car, I got an apartment, I got a family. I said, ‘I can’t afford to trip out, man, down in the Village,’ and I didn’t like the Village anyways. I said, ‘No I can’t do that,’ and he said, ‘Well man, I’m going down there and I’m gonna be trippin’ out.’
“So he went down there, and the next I know, [Hendrix manager Chas Chandler] and the Animals were down there walkin’ the streets one night and they heard this great guy down there–even back then, Jimi was quite a show by himself–and I can imagine what went through their heads. They saw this guy, man, and the rest of it is history.”