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he played with his guitar behind his head. The tour also represented the
first time since Garfield High School and a few shows on military bases
when Jimi was playing to white audiences. In certain towns it was an
all-white crowd, Brigati said. To his amazement, Jimi found that he
was the subject of the ardent stares of young girls who pressed against
the stage. This surprised Jimi, who at the time didn t feel particularly
handsome. Jimi had a lot of acne, friend Tunde-Ra Aleem recalled.
That added to his withdrawn nature. These young white fans helped
boost Jimi s self-confidence, and he began to brag to his bandmates
about his female fan club. He was a magnet for them, Brigati ob-
served. There was something he had that just seemed to draw girls in.
One night in Buffalo, three East Indian women slept with Jimi af-
ter declaring that he had the face of a Hindu god they had met him in
the hotel and weren t even fans of the band. At one tour stop, a partic-
ularly adventurous white woman slept with Brigati, but after their liai-
son talked about her fantasies of an interracial affair. She suggested he
phone the other band members. Brigati called them. Before I could
even get out of the bed, Brigati said, one guy was on top of her.
Jimi, however, stopped and asked, very politely, if he could take off his
cowboy boots. Brigati left the room, and when he returned two hours
later, the woman was by herself. She told Brigati it had been the great-
est day of her life.
Road sex had become a routine part of Jimi s life as a touring mu-
sician, but even these opportunities were not enough to keep him inter-
ested in the Starliters. He later told the N.M.E. that after sucking on a
124 C H A R L E S R . C R O S S
peppermint twist salary I had to quit, but he must have realized he was
no closer to his dream of releasing his own records. While on tour with
the Starliters, he had celebrated his twenty-third birthday. As 1965 be-
came 1966, he confessed to a number of friends that he d dreamed the
coming year would change his life. I used to dream in Technicolor that
1966 was the year that something would happen to me, he told one re-
porter. It sounds a bit silly, but it s the honest-to-God s truth.
That magnificent destiny would have to wait, however, because as
1966 began, Jimi was back to the same grind. He was playing with Cur-
tis Knight and the Squires, trying to pick up the occasional studio gig,
and wondering how he was going to eat. His romantic life wasn t much
smoother, as his main Harlem girlfriend, Fayne Pridgeon, had married
Taharqa Aleem. Jimi was still staying with the couple in their apartment,
but Fayne was uncomfortable with the situation. Fayne couldn t under-
stand how I would allow him to stay there after we got married,
Taharqa recalled. One night Taharqa and Fayne, thinking they were
alone, had a quarrel. She wanted me to get rid of him, Taharqa said,
but I said let him stay. They later found out Jimi had overheard them.
Hearing that he might soon be on the street, Jimi moved to a
cheap hotel. On January 13, he sent Al a postcard of the Empire State
Building: Everything s so-so in this big raggedy city of New York, he
wrote. Everything s happening bad here. He was facing eviction be-
cause of overdue rent, and often he went without eating. If there was
any solace to his situation it came in the line he used to close his post-
card to his father: Tell Ben and Ernie that I play the blues like they
NEVER heard. His boast was meant for Ernestine Benson, who had
first exposed Jimi to blues artists through her extensive record collec-
tion. His line Everything s happening bad here could have been a
lyric from one of those classic songs, but was also evidence of a shift
that was internal and artistic. The miserable conditions that Jimi en-
dured through 1965 the poverty, the segregation he d experienced
during his trips south, the loneliness had made it one of the most dif-
ficult years he had known since the death of his mother. Yet the turmoil
also matured him as an artist; it gave him some of the mud, the
R OOM F UL L OF MI R R OR S 125
pathos, that Johnny Jones said was essential for every great blues player.
Jimi was not just playing the blues, he was living them as well.
mn
HIS IMMEDIATE SALVATION came when King Curtis and the All-
Stars needed a fill-in guitarist for a show at Small s Paradise in Harlem.
Small s had launched the career of organist Jimmy Smith and had
hosted every important African American musician of the age. Mal-
colm X had once worked there as a waiter. Jimi had a fearlessness then,
because I don t care how bad you were in Harlem, you had to meet the
prerequisite, observed Taharqa Aleem. You can be bad all you want,
but you better dress like everybody else, you better look like everybody
else, you better walk like everybody else, and you better talk like every-
body else. For most of the night, Jimi lay back in the band, as part of
the rhythm section. The moment of truth came during his first solo,
which he nailed. It didn t hurt that the All-Stars included soon-to-be-
legends Bernard Pretty Purdie on drums and Cornell Dupree on gui-
tar. Playing with Dupree, who was a notable guitarist himself, Jimi
learned interplay and how to play more greased, as Dupree put it,
adding more feeling and more soul. Jimi quickly learned the band s ma-
terial. In all my years, I ve never seen another guitar player pick up the
material like that, Bernard Purdie recalled.
Jimi played and recorded with King Curtis for the next several
months, but also picked up occasional gigs with the Squires. Yet he still
struggled to pay for food and rent. That winter Diana Carpenter met
Jimi at the Ham and Eggs coffee shop at Broadway and Fifty-second.
She noticed him because it was a cold day and he was wearing a thin
jacket, without lining. He was positioned in a way that I could see he
had a hole in the bottom of his shoes, she recalled. The restaurant
charged a fifty-cent minimum seating charge for a glass of water, which
was all Jimi had in front of him.
Carpenter was a sixteen-year-old runaway working as a street
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