Noel Redding's dark days after Jimi Hendrix's death

Noel Redding's dark days after the Jimi Hendrix Experience: 'I had to make the terrible decision' When the Experience Music Project, now known as the Museum of Pop Culture, was established in Jimi Hendrix's hometown of Seattle in 2000, one of the attendees at the grand opening was a fairly nondescript, 55-year-old Englishman who was moving through the various exhibits unnoticed. When someone finally recognised the man as Noel Redding, the bass player from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, a wave of whispered excitement spread through the building. This wasn't just someone who'd met Seattle's favourite son or jammed with him a few times; this was one of the co-architects of the legendary Experience sound, the thumping heartbeat of 'Hey Joe', 'Crosstown Traffic', 'All Along the Watchtower', 'Purple Haze', and all the rest. What a lot of Hendrix fans didn't realise, though, is that Redding's relationships with Hendrix, the Hendrix estate, and that entire period of his life were all complicated, to put it delicately. Along with the three-year rollercoaster ride and eventual derailment of the Experience itself, the 30 years that followed presented numerous challenges and disappointments, both financial and personal. Back in 1973, three years after Hendrix's death, Redding was low on cash after a drug bust and a contentious divorce from his first wife, and was desperate to recoup some of the money he'd never received from his days in the Experience. During negotiations with the Hendrix estate, Redding was hopeful that the band's old manager, Michael Jeffrey, would finally testify on his behalf and set the record straight about agreements Jimi had made with Noel and drummer Mitch Mitchell about royalties. On the night of March 4th, 1973, as he recalled in his 1990 memoir Are You Experienced?, Redding dreamt about Hendrix for the first time since his death. In the dream, he, feeling freaked out, asked Jimi, 'What are you doing here, you're supposed to be dead?' to which Jimi answered, 'It's OK. I'm only here to take care of some business'. Redding was 'spooked' when he awoke the next morning, and hours later, he would learn that Michael Jeffrey had been killed in a plane crash en route from Majorca to London. With his best witness now gone, his legal case hit a major roadblock, and his lawyers ultimately encouraged him to take a single payout settlement far below what he'd hoped. 'The offer was for a flat $100,000 for everything,' he wrote in his book, 'For giving up every right I had, past, present and future. [The lawyers] had assured me repeatedly that there would be no more albums released, that there would be no more money coming in after the excitement of Jimi's death had receded from public consciousness, that the Estate was receiving no foreign royalties.' Redding took the deal, not foreseeing the gigantic financial future of Hendrix's music in the form of hundreds of reissues on vinyl, CD, and other formats, not to mention books, documentaries, and more. He felt defeated the moment the deal was done, and only felt it exponentially over the years that followed. Credit: Bent Rej While he continued to play music with the Noel Redding Band in the mid '70s, they were not a commercially successful outfit, and another business dispute with that group's management company led to their third album getting shelved and the band dissolving in 1976. Redding relocated to rural Ireland in his 30s, and in another effort to pay the bills, decided to sell his beloved Fender Jazz Bass, the one he'd played throughout his time with the Experience, to a collector in 1980, for the price of just $16,000. He didn't see the guitar again for 20 years, until that day he walked through the doors of the new Experience Music Project in Seattle. There, behind glass, on display, was the bass he'd bought back in 1966, when he'd stumbled upon try-outs for a new band, and agreed to switch from guitar to bass in order to back up a talented player named Jimi. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen had eventually acquired the bass, and it was now back with various other artefacts from the Experience days. 'I never thought I'd see it again,' Redding told writer Charlie Bermant, as quoted in Bermant's book A Serious Hobby, 'I just stared at it for a long time. I was very moved'. It was rare to see Redding show emotion when discussing the Hendrix days. In many interviews since the band's 1969 demise, he'd been quick to diminish some aspects of his experience with the Experience, referring to those years as 'practice' for his better playing that came later, and downplaying any influence that Hendrix might have had on him as a musician. He was torn between appreciation for the unique miracle of being in a legendary band and the bitterness of what might have been: whether that meant a career separate from Jimi or one in which things hadn't turned so sour. Even while the Experience were still together, the good times only lasted for the first year or two. As the guitarist wrote in his memoir, 'Jimi started pissing me off more and more as he became chronically temperamental. He fucked up a show in Anaheim by only half-heartedly singing the occasional word. Even the reviewers noted his changed attitude. I was wholly unsympathetic to his 'star' attitude, and I deeply resented his refusal to play my song, 'She's So Fine', when audiences shouted for it. He kept saying: 'We never do anything new,' but refused to rehearse.' Redding wrote his 1990 memoir with considerable help from his wife, Carol Appleby, who'd been at his side through everything since the mid 1970s. Tragically, though, just days after they'd finished the book, the couple were involved in a serious car accident. 'We were returning from a gig in Glounthaune,' Redding told an Irish newspaper in 2000, 'I thought at first that [Carol] was concussed, but they told me in the hospital she was brain dead. She was in intensive care on life support, and after four days, I had to make the terrible decision of shutting down the machine.' A decade after the accident, Redding settled down with a new partner, an American named Deborah McNaughton, and enjoyed a seemingly pleasant life in Clonakilty in the south of Ireland, often playing music at the local pub. He was still threatening legal action against the Jimi Hendrix estate as late as 2003, however, when he died suddenly from a shock haemorrhage tied to cirrhosis of the liver. Redding was only 57. Sadly, his girlfriend, McNaughton, also died just nine months later from breast cancer. Earlier this year, the estates of Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell lost yet another legal challenge, this time with Sony Music Entertainment UK, as their battle to get their share of earnings from the Jimi Hendrix Experience IP carries on into its sixth decade.