Hendrix Murder Shock! The Manager Did It!

Former roadie finally finds a way to cash in!

By Fred Mills

Some days you write the news, other days it just writes itself....

With Ryan Adams and Courtney Love laying relatively low of late, and Pete Doherty apparently cleaned up enough to be let back into the circle of trust by his old bandmates, it's up to dead rock stars to carry the weight during today's news cycle. And you can't get much deader than Jimi Hendrix, who croaked on his own vomit, due to an excess of booze and pills apparently, in September of 1970.

Since then the guitar icon's become a cottage industry for just about anybody with an old tape or an old war story. To wit: erstwhile Hendrix Experience roadie James "Tappy" Wright has a new book out (uh-huh) called Rock Roadie and in it he makes the claim that Hendrix manager Michael Jeffrey was responsible for Hendrix's death.

The Daily Mail is reporting the story that Jeffrey's motivation in coaxing Hendrix to take the pills and booze was to collect on life insurance - this despite the fact that back then you didn't exactly have to convince Jimi to take pills and booze.

In lines straight out of a bad B-movie, Wright quotes Jeffrey as telling him, in a private conversation, "I was in London the night of Jimi's death and together with some old friends... we went round to [girlfriend Monika Danneman's], hotel room, got a handful of pills and stuffed them into his mouth... then poured a few bottles of red wine deep into his windpipe. I had to do it. Jimi was worth much more to me dead than alive. That son of a bitch was going to leave me. If I lost him, I'd lose everything."

Conveniently, Jeffrey is now dead, so he can't be questioned on these matters. He died in a plane crash in '73, and Wright is claiming he made the confession to him two years earlier.

Let's do the math here... 2009 - 1971 = 38 years. That's a long time to hold onto a yarn as explosive as this one. Oh wait - Wright's just published a book. Caveat emptor.

Anyway, there's some other stuff you can read about all this at the above link if you aren't bored already...