It was past 3 am on September 18, 1970. Little did Jimi know that the following were to be the last hours of his life as he trudged down the stairs with his girlfriend Monika Dannemann to her basement flat at the Samarkand Hotel on Notting Hill.
Once inside the flat, Monika made Jimi a tuna fish sandwich and the two of them stayed up talking for a while. Despite having complained of exhaustion and his inebriation on red wine, sleep still eluded Jimi and so he asked Monika for a sleeping pill. She refused, telling him to try and sleep naturally as she took one for herself. At some point after that, Jimi had nine tablets of a powerful German sedative called Vesparax, which he was not aware were twice as powerful as American sedatives.
Jimi was sleeping normally when Monika woke up. She left to buy cigarettes at around 10.20am, came back and saw him covered in vomit. She could not wake him. She called up his friend Eric Burdon who ordered her to call for an ambulance. The ambulance attendants arrived about 20 minutes later, wrapped him up, and carried Jimi up from the garden apartment. Instead of laying him down in the ambulance they sat him in a chair and sat him upright. He tried to bend over so he could vomit, but one of the attendants quickly pushed his head back and strapped him in tighter, recollects Monika later. He was rushed from the ambulance into St Mary Abbots Hospital.
Jimi Hendrix, one of history’s greatest guitarists, was declared dead, asphyxiated on his own vomit. He was 27-years-old.
The recorded facts paint a vague portrait of Hendrix’s death, and the events surrounding the incident leave a lot of questions unanswered. Many, including journalist Keith Altham who last interviewed Hendrix, have questioned Monika Dannemann’s story, stating that she keeps changing the facts with each interview. At first, she said she was alone when the ambulance arrived and that she rode with Hendrix on the way to the hospital where he suffocated en route. This is a direct contradiction to the story narrated by the ambulance attendants who said that they found the musician lying on his back, already dead, on the bed when they arrived and there was no record of who had called the ambulance.
In May 2009, former Animals roadie James Wright claimed in his book Rock Roadie that Hendrix was murdered by his manager Michael Jeffrey, who had allegedly confessed to killing him by stuffing pills into his mouth and washing them down with several bottles of red wine because he feared Hendrix intended to dump him for a new manager. Some alleged the involvement of the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, which was designed to eliminate subversive behaviour in the country, in the “murder” of Jimi Hendrix.
Of course, mixing red wine with high potent downers is reckless and definitely asking for trouble, but the amount of wine found in his lungs suggests a drinking binge so quick and gruesome that it was not humanly possible. Whether it was up to fate or any single unknown person, we may never know. But one thing remains…Jimi Hendrix did not have to die that day.
