MITCH MITCHELL:
Drummer For Jimi Hendrix
Found Dead
By Tequila Mockingbird
PORTLAND, Ore. – Mitch Mitchell, drummer for the
legendary Jimi Hendrix Experience
of the 1960s and the group's last surviving member, was found dead in
his hotel room early Wednesday. He was 61.
Mitch and I
met at the Cat and Fiddle
in Laurel Canyon. We were both friends of Kim
Garner,
who was in the English band Byrds.
My old beau when I was a teenager was
Gary
Kellgren, who produced Jimi's
records at the Record Plant.
We started playing Jazz together at the Coconut Teaser on Sunday
afternoons.
Mitch
joined my band Trouble for Nora
in 1988. We recorded an album in no time up in Hendrix's
old house in Laurel Canyon. Mitch
said he had recorded there before with Jimi
in the studio located in the front of the house. The house belonged to
our friend Randy Johnson and those were crazy times. My manager was Den
Den who financed the Trouble for
Nora video which is on YOUTUBE. You can hear Mitch playing on our tracks,
but
things were spinning out of control.
Mitch
was
long gone by the time we made the video, just being
the Gypsy soul he
always was.
Sly Stone
was also recording there at the time, so the house was full of Uzis and
powder.
It was a red house on Lookout Mountain down the street from the pub and
market.
When the Cat and Fiddle
moved to Sunset Blvd. So did we jamming on the patio.
I had Mitch's Birthday
party at my Apt. in 1988. We had a Tea Party. Sheridan
Sullivan
took pictures. Mark Leventhal
and our band T4N just
hanging outside of my pad Tea cups and all and a sunny California day!.
We were celebrating the record we were gonna make. These were happy
times. He loved the record but he had to go back to England. He played
Los Angeles one more time last month.
They say he was in good spirts. I know he was a lot of fun.
The Englishman had been drumming for the Experience
Hendrix Tour, which performed Friday in Portland.
It was
the last stop on the West Coast part of the tour.
During his career Mitchell
played with the best in the business — not just Hendrix, but also Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Keith Richards, Jack Bruce, Jeff Beck, Muddy Waters and others.
Mitchell
performed with Hendrix
and Redding at the
Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, the U.S. debut of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. He
also was member of a later version of the band that performed the
closing set of the Woodstock Festival in August 1969 — where Hendrix played a psychedelic
version of "The Star-Spangled
Banner" before the band launched into "Purple Haze."
The Jimi Hendrix
Experience was inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame in
1992.
According to the Hall of Fame, Mitchell
was born July 9, 1947, in Ealing, England.
Hendrix
died in 1970. Bass player Noel
Redding died in 2003.
And now the band has been reunited in the heavens.I bet there's a jam
going on.
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