Fact #34669

EYEWITNESS REPORT ON JIMI HENDRIX AND JIM MORRISON AT THE SCENE CLUB, NEW YORK CITY.
By Johnny Black
(This is an expanded version of a feature first published in Classic Rock magazine)

Lester Chambers (vocalist, The Chambers Brothers) : We were living in New York at that time, staying right up the street from Steve Paul's The Scene at the Henry Hudson Hotel. It was a very short walk, especially on the nights that we didn't work, which was very rare at that time.

At that time, we were the house band at The Cheetah Club, just a few blocks away on Broadway. When we finished at The Cheetah, we would walk over to the Steve Paul Scene. I did that almost every night. You know, I wouldn't have to go to work til eight or nine o'clock the next night, so at two in the morning you'd still have two hours to go before The Scene would close.

You would come in off the street, go down like four to five steps, so I guess it was underground, and to the right there was a small bar, and beyond that the audience, and then the stage was at the far end of the club, the eighth avenue end. It was a small space, maybe a hundred people at the most, so you got to mingle with whoever was there.

There was always amplifiers on the stage. Musicians would just come in, plug up and play. People would come from miles around to play. People would drive down from Canada. English bands, if they were passing through town, would come to Steve Paul's Scene. You never knew in advance who you might be playing with on any night. Buddy Miles might be there on drums, or the drummer from The McCoys. I think Steve Paul managed The McCoys. Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter, John Lennon came down a lot, he was always coming there, and he sometimes played in the jams. David Clayton-Thomas was always there. If Janis Joplin was in town, she'd be there. Al Kooper was down there a lot ... it just depended on who was in town. Kooper was with The Blues Project and they worked a lot. Buddy Guy would come there and he would just rip it up.

Al Kooper : When the late shows finished, the waitresses would begin their clean-ups, and the participants of that night’s jams would gather in the dressing rooms. The unknowing, paying customers would settle their bills and set out for the suburbs, and then the action would begin.

Michael J. Weber (screenwriter/author) : One of the things Steve used to do, once the guys started playing, was that he would lock the door so nobody could come in or get out.

Al Kooper : Then we’d slowly come out, like bats in the night, and take over the stage.

Danny Fields : Actually, the stage was nothing to speak of. It was just a few inches high.

Al Kooper : Hendrix loved this. he would show up more often than not, always with his guitar and his trusty Nagra (tape recorder) in tow. He would fastidiously set up the Nagra next to him and record every jam he participated in.

Many’s the night you’d find B.B.King, Jimi, yours truly, Jim Morrison, Tim Hardin and a cast of dozens wailing away on stage literally until the sun came up.

Danny Fields : Jimi was there almost every night, but not as part of the advertised show, he just showed up late at night and went on.

Lester Chambers : Once in a while Steve Paul would book in a group, The McCoys played there a lot, but most the time we went there to jam. Steve Paul also had Tiny Tim as a resident musician, he would be there every night.

Tiny Tim was a great man, a great guy. I can still see him, now, on the stage, with people throwing everything from the kitchen at him, some of it hitting him, but instead of getting mad, he'd pick it up and cherish it, going, "Oh, thank you! Thank you so very much. You're so beautiful." Every night he wound up with a bag of groceries to take home.

That was a stage act but it was also, incredibly, who he was. He lived that life. If you met him in the street, he'd bow, and politely ask how you were. "You're so beautiful. Oh, bless you." He was like that all the time.

Then this gorgeous lady, Miss Vicky, fell in love in love with him and they got married.

There was hardly ever anybody really booked there. People just showed up, like they felt they owed the stage their presence. It was like that seven nights a week.

Everybody came to The Scene, and you didn't ask to come on, you just came on. There was no list of who would play. If you wanted to play, you could play.

There was nowhere in the world like The Scene. It had the charisma, the happiness, it was a family.

Danny Fields : I was working as a publicist for Elektra Records, which meant I was working for Morrison, but he and I didn't get along, he was eager to have me fired. By that time of night, Morrison would have separated himself from the other members of The Doors, because he was quite contemptuous of them, and he wanted to be, you know, Jim Morrison, on the loose, on the prowl.

In my professional capacity I kept an eye on where Jim was, because wherever he was, there would be trouble, so I knew he was there, and Jimi was always there, and I was a teenage boy who worshipped Janis, so I knew she was there.

Rick Derringer : I played with Jimi many times at The Scene. We were known as the house band there for several years. During that time, all the famous people that came through town would come to The Scene, nightly, after their gigs. Jimi would do a gig somewhere out in the United States and fly home in time to get to The Scene, because they didn't even close the doors until 4.00am.

Sam Andrew (guitarist, Big Brother And The Holding Company) : We spent many nights at The Scene. I went there a lot. I saw Jimi Hendrix playing with Tiny Tim opening for him. I met Salvadore Dali in The Scene. I know a little bit of Catalan, his native language, and he lit up, so we were able to speak a little. Also, I'm a painter, so we had that in common.

You'd get all kinds of strange combinations of people playing at The Scene. It promoted that. It was a tiny club. Even if you were at the back, you'd still only be 25 feet from the stage.

They were just jamming that night on tunes that everyone knew in common, especially blues. I almost never sit on things like that, because it's really hard to get the right sound if you're going through an unfamiliar amp and everything.

Lester Chambers : The band that night, as I remember it, included Randy Hobbs, Bobby Deverson and Randy Zehringer, all from The McCoys. I can't remember anybody else on guitar but when Jimi went up to play guitar, nobody else did. We felt blessed just to hear him play. He was just absolutely incredible.

Danny Fields : I must say, I've never enjoyed that kind of jamming, improvising, so I didn't pay much attention to what they were playing.

Lester Chambers : Mostly we just jammed on old blues songs but when Jimi was on, it was like he was writing a whole album while he was on the stage. You'd hear the things he was playing turning up on his albums a few months later. I know two or three songs on Hendrix albums that came out of those jams.

I played harmonica, yeah. And if there was ever any background singing needed, I'd do that. The way he played, you picked your place in between his God-sent riffs

Those jams never ended. People would join in, people would leave the stage, but it never ended. People would go outside for fresh air and somebody else would come on.

You could only get about six people comfortably on that stage. If the stage got too crowded, sometimes musicians would take up a little area in front of the stage, or at the side.

Michael J. Weber : Jimi was going to play there, and Morrison showed up. It's not like Jimi would have been scheduled, or advertised. They way it worked was that the musicians had arrangements, verbal agreements or whatever, with the club owners.

So when Morrison showed up, he was very intoxicated, God knows on what, but he was slurring, very stoned.

Michael J. Weber : Jim was an ornery character when he wanted to be. He was very in your face, but everybody was at that time. Everybody was on speed or acid or whatever, and they were young, and thinking so fast that stuff would come flying out of their mouths that was just hysterical. If you have a group of pretty stoned, young, clever people, maybe 20 or 21, we were all just kids...

Jimi though, was very different from Morrison. He had a lovely vibe about him, and we were both interested in the same girls, so we would talk, and he was very shy and reserved. He was the same soft-spoken guy when he talked to women. Jim Morrison was anything but soft-spoken. He very abrupt, he said whatever he wanted to say.

Sam Andrew : He came in and swaggered over to where she was sitting and, without any provocation at all, he just yanked her hair down to the floor. She was already very jaundiced about him, so then she hit him with a bottle of Southern Comfort, broke it.

Danny Fields : Janis's hatred of Morrison, I don't know where it started, probably in San Francisco or LA. But if you mentioned Jim's name, she would say, 'That asshole". She just hated him.

She was not going to put up with that she thought was his childish, disgusting, rude behaviour, wherever she encountered it. It riled her. She was past giving him a chance.

She was one of the smartest people who ever lived. They were both brilliant in their own ways, but Janis had a better sense of what was good behaviour. Jim was a monster. He knew how to generate a tsunami of disgust.

Sam Andrew : He was a brat. He came from a navy family, so maybe his father was authoritarian or something. I kind of understood that sort of life because my father was in the Air Force, but he was a very understanding father. He played the guitar. Maybe Jim had a lot of trouble with his father. It was like some kind of foolish, real immature rebellion.

What he did just seemed so rude.

Lester Chambers : Jim Morrison, he was into his own world. A strange man. He was, at the same time, very turned on to music. And he drank a bit.

I knew he was there that night because we had been good friends for years. We grew up on the West Coast together. At that time, when we were in Los Angeles, when we would be at The Whisky A Go Go, The Doors were at Gazzari's, which was right up the street. We used to work out when to go onstage so that people could walk from club to club and catch a band - but it was nothing like The Scene.

Robby Krieger (guitarist, The Doors) : Jim jammed with Hendrix once. It was at the Scene in New York. Jim came in and got totally smashed, started groveling around on the stage, crawling about, and he started singing. Jimi was yelling, 'Sing into the mic, man!' He was so fucked up, he couldn't. Pretty crazy.

Lester Chambers : He drank a lot, you know, but his voice was heard. He made a couple of 'Oh-wow-wooooh" kind of noises. He was so drunk he had to hold on to the mike-stand, and every once in a while, he'd go, "Oooooooh!", and at one point, Jimi said, "Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard the sound of Jim Morrison'. But nobody would complain about that. It was like, just beautiful.

Danny Fields : Morrison was doing one of his lizard crawls on the stage, wriggling on his belly like a snake. The he reared up on his knees in front of Jimi, so he could get his arms around poor Jimi's waist. Morrison's head was about guitar level, waist level, crotch level, and he starts moaning, "I wanna suck your cock."

That kind of disrespect for such a wonderful, sensitive, beautiful, sad, beloved person like Jimi Hendrix would have ignited Janis's fury. Janis was a Southern lady. She didn't go around hitting people, but he was a piece of shit. She had a natural empathy with other performers, she could relate to that. To see Jimi being sexually abused, assaulted.

Lester Chambers : I don't remember any fight between Jimi and Jim. I heard they had an argument, but the club was real small and very hot. It didn't have any air-conditioning, so you would go on, do two or three songs, then step outside to get some air and cool down.

Rick Derringer : Jimi recorded the whole scene between him and Jim Morrison. Jimi was playing, and he was recording himself that night in a jamming situation. He had one of his hats on that he used to wear, that little cowboy hat kind of thing.

Michael J. Weber : Jimi was already playing and Morrison got down on his knees and started giving Jimi like this mock blow job. He was being very lewd and crude.

Danny Fields : Jim was very drunk. Hendrix was jamming, and I noticed some commotion up front and there was Jim, crawling on the floor towards the stage. He wrapped his arms around Hendrix's knees and started screaming, 'I wanna suck your cock.' He was very loud, and Hendrix was still attempting to play. But Morrison wouldn't let go. It was a tasteless exhibition of scene stealing - something Morrison was really into.

Paul Caruso : Jim Morrison had to be dragged off the stage when he sat, or should I say fell, in with Hendrix at The Scene recently. He gets drunk and can’t control himself, knocking over mike stands and falling on his back a few times for show - they took him away after he tried to make love to Jimi’s guitar while singing some beautiful blues thing he made up.

Danny Fields : Well, they all had minders and roadies, and there were guys from the club whose job was to help keep order. Janis's guys went straight in there to help her, no questions asked, just get them apart, get them out of there and back to the hotel. Jimi was part of the family at The Scene, so the club guys would wade in to help him, and Morrison had been sending off danger signals from the moment he got there. He was behaving like someone from the sewers.

I swear there was like, fur flying, like a cloud of dust around them, as if they were in a dry river bed.

Danny Fields : To top it all off, Janis Joplin, who had been sitting in the back of the room, suddenly appeared at the edge of the stage with a bottle in one hand and her drink in the other. She stepped in a hit Jim over the head with the bottle - then she poured her drink over him.

Danny Fields : Morrison was drunk and grabbed Jimi around the waist (the stage was only a few inches higher than the floor) and groaned "I want to suck your cock," and wouldn't let go.

Janis saw this happening and always hated Jim Morrison, so she hit him over the head with something that shattered.

Danny Fields : That started the three of them grabbing and rolling all over the floor in a writhing heap of hysteria. Naturally it ended up in all three of them being carried out. Morrison was the most seriously hurt. His bodyguards were summoned and he was driven away. I'd heard that, earlier in the evening, Jim had knocked a tableful of drinks into Janis's lap.

Danny Fields : They had to be pulled apart. Morrison, who was drunk, crawled across the floor and up to the stage and put his arms around Hendrix’s waist and started screaming at him. Janis walked up and tried to smash a bottle over Morrison’s head to get him off Hendrix. The three of them were in a tangle of broken glass, dust and guitars. The bodyguards had to send them home, each in their own limousine.

A lot of dust and feathers and leathers and satins went flying around, and very quickly "handlers" for the artistes pulled the gruesome threesome apart and got them out of the room and on their various ways home.

Sam Andrew : We were there for at least a couple of hours. I didn't actually see Morrison kneeling down in from of Jimi, but Janis had this real righteous sense of when someone was taking advantage of someone else, or trying to steal the show, which Morrison was. She would become like a schoolteacher all of a sudden, and felt she had to step in to teach someone how to behave.

I would't go anywhere near Jim Morrison. I would just avoid him. Particularly that night. It was just such a murderous scene.

I think Janis was just trying to tell him stop being an ass. If he'd got up and sang a song, that'd have been fine, but we were there to listen to Jimi and he was stopping us from enjoying it.

Lester Chambers : It didn't stop the music. After Jim and Janis were gone, we just kept on playing.

Danny Fields : After The Scene closed at 4.00am, people would move on to Steve's funny little house in Chelsea. People would sit around and actually listen to albums and then, eventually, everybody would disperse.

Al Kooper : Jimi and I would usually walk back home together, as we lived only a block apart.

Danny Fields : There was an all-night coffee house across the street where you often find Jimi sitting with a peaceful cup of coffee at five or six am.