This listing refers to how the guitar with three-tone sunburst shading looked on 31 March 1967, less than one hour before Jimi burned this guitar during “Purple Haze” (finale of the second Astoria show that night).

Manufactured: 1963 (between July and December) NOTE 1
Serial #: unknown (but would be “L” plus 5 digits)
Chrome neck plate: without “F” logo
Pickguard type: triple ply laminated plastic
Pickguard colour: white/black/white NOTE 2
Headstock size: small
Headstock logo: old style Fender “spaghetti” logo
Position markers and side markers on the fingerboard: clay dots (dull and greyish)
Screw type for mounting the pickup selector switch: Phillips
Tremolo arm (lever assembly): missing (snapped off in tremolo block) NOTE 3
Strings: present NOTE 4

Volume knob: missing
Tone knob (center): present
Tone knob (lower end of pickguard): missing
Three-way pickup selector switch tip: missing
Cigarette burn on neck: none
Wear and tear on the sides of the guitar body: a lot of paint loss
Rear cover plate: missing

NOTES
1. Up to October 1964 is possible but since the neck is from November 1963, that is extremely unlikely.
2. Stratocasters from 1959 to 1963 contain a thick pick-guard, nicknamed “green guard” because over a period of time this turns kind of green (as opposed to pure white). The center black layer bleeds through the white plastic, thus giving the white top layer a somewhat greenish tint.
3. A little silver plug is in the hole where the tremolo arm goes. It is the threaded end of what’s left of the tremolo arm. If there had been no tremolo arm, we would see a little black hole instead.
4. When Jimi burned his 1963 sunburst it only had three strings.

5. The burned Astoria Strat remains ended up with roadie Howard Parker (a.k.a. "H), who later (sometime in 1968) gave it to Frank Zappa. After "H" was fired by the JHE management he worked for Zappa as roadie until sometime in 1969 (he then returned to the UK). "H" can be seen on stage with Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight show, 30 August 1970. "H" died at sea in 1974 and his body was never found...



THE COUNTERFEIT FENDER:
1965 SUNBURST STRATOCASTER

This listing refers to how the guitar looked in June 2008. Sold during an auction (on 4 September 2008 in London) organised by the 'Fame Bureau Limited' for UK £345,560 (US $497,557).

Current owner: Antonio Adda (a wealthy Italian who collects vintage guitars), U.S.A.

The deal was brokered by American Daniel Boucher after Antonio Adda asked him to find an ex-Hendrix guitar. Previously Adda had put a deposit of UK £60,000 on a 1959 Les Paul reportedly once owned by guitarist Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. However, Adda decided not to go ahead with purchasing the Les Paul (reason undisclosed) and consequently lost his deposit (which apparently he didn’t mind!).

NOTE: Items listed in red bold indicate inaccuracies (when compared with the 1963 sunburst Jimi actually burned at Finsbury Astoria).

Manufactured: 1965
Serial #: 109657
Chrome neck plate: with “F” logo
Pickguard type: non-nitrate laminated plastic
Pickguard colour: pearly white
Headstock size: small
Headstock logo: Fender gold “transition” logo
Position markers and side markers on the fingerboard: dot pearls
Charcoal marks on the neck: hardly any
Three pickups: completely intact (except for some minor discolouration)
Screw type for mounting the pickup selector switch: flat head
Tremolo arm (lever assembly): present
Strings: missing
Volume knob: present
Tone knob (center): present
Tone knob (lower end of pickguard): present
Three-way pickup selector switch tip: present
Cigarette burn on neck: present [see photo below]
Wear and tear on the sides of the guitar body: hardly any paint loss
Rear cover plate: missing

SOMEBODY’S STRAT IS BURNING...

The (1963) guitar Jimi played at the Astoria differs immensely from the one sold at the London auction. The auctioned guitar is a 1965 model, with ‘transition’ logo, and little finish left on the guitar’s body. Another suspect matter is that the auctioned guitar has all of its plastics pieces still in place (not to mention in near-mint condition) and it contains a complete tremolo arm. All incorrect.

Journalist Keith Altham recently told UniVibes that the actual guitar burning incident at the Astoria lasted merely a matter of a few minutes and that the burning axe was also waved around Jimi’s head (before he put the burning Strat on the floor and “ran off”). This mild type of abuse to any given Stratocaster would not have produced the amount of charring on the 1965 Stratocaster sold at the auction.

Stratocasters from 1954 to 1970 were finished in a nitro-cellulose mix of paint (which is quite a lot softer than later polyester finishes) and this type of paint will burn a lot quicker than later finishes. But this still would not amount for the charring seen on the guitar sold at the auction. Jimi would have had to have left the Astoria Strat burning for around 15 to 20 minutes to create the burns on the guitar actually sold.

Two other important facts to ponder on: no photographs whatsoever exist showing Jimi Hendrix with a Fender ‘transition’ logo (1965) sunburst Stratocaster, and no photographs whatsoever exist taken during 1967 showing Jimi Hendrix with a cigarette burn on any guitar.

Errors in GUITAR & BASS MAGAZINE

(Vol. 19 No 8, August 2008)

According to the byline, Phil Harris inspected “from top to toe” the burned ‘Tony Garland Stratocaster’ and his findings appeared in a feature titled ‘Phoenix from the Ashes.’ Harris’ article is littered with gross errors:

P. 26: “[This Strat] looks and feels in remarkable condition...”
Fact: Jimi’s Astoria Strat could not be played any longer.
Jimi Hendrix: “That guitar is completely ruined” (Disc and Music Echo, 15 April 1967).
Jimi Hendrix: “The old guitar has had it!” (Hitparader, August 1967).
Frank Zappa: “The neck was cracked off, the body was all fired, and the pickups were blistered and bubbled” (Guitar Player, January 1977).






P. 27: “The story goes that Jimi borrowed the Strat he used [and later burned] at Monterey...”
Fact: The Strat Jimi played and then burned at Monterey was actually bought by him in Monterey on 16 June 1967. Reporter Keith Altham was present when Jimi obtained a Fiesta-red Stratocaster: ”It was the wrong colour but he remedied that by spraying it white and drawing swirling designs all over it with a felt pen” (New Musical Express, 24 June 1967).

P. 27: “This Strat’s got the original volume knob...”
Fact: The Strat Jimi burned at Astoria contained no volume knob at all.

P. 27 (in photo caption): ”[The] tremolo arm is seriously bent forward...”
Fact: The Strat Jimi burned at Astoria contained no tremolo arm at all.

P. 27: ”It’s obvious that the scratchplate is non-nitrate, because it’s as pearly white as an Ultrabrite toothpaste ad.”
Fact: The Strat Jimi burned at Astoria contained a white/black/white scratchplate, which was anything but “pearly white.”

P. 29: “[This guitar] takes me back to Christmas 1968, where I’m watching Jimi play ‘Purple Haze’ before dropping his guitar and breaking its neck on Top Of The Pops...”
Fact: Jimi didn’t perform on any Top Of The Pops edition during December 1968 (he was in New York). The only TOTP edition with a small JH-related item was aired on the 12th: it contained a short interview with Noel Redding conducted by Jimmy Savile. Besides, even if Jimi had appeared on the TV show and had dropped a Stratocaster, the neck would not break – Fenders are built like tanks!

P. 29: “It’s a truly historic guitar.”

Dream On!

*****************end Astoria info*****************

BOOK REVIEW
– by Joel J. Brattin

JIMI HENDRIX: AN ILLUSTRATED EXPERIENCE
By: Janie L. Hendrix & John McDermott. Published: 9 October 2007, Astria Books, New York, U.S.A. (price: US $45.00. ISBN: 0-7432-9769-5); Simon & Schuster UK, London, England (price: UK £30.00. ISBN: 0-7432-9489-0). 64 pages. Index: no. Enclosed CD: 69:25 total time. – Rating: ** [fair].

Most of the information about Jimi Hendrix in this book-and-CD package appears to be correct, though the authors provide no sources for any of their quotations, and indeed offer no documentation to support any of the claims they advance here. But despite the fairly high level of factual accuracy for the text, this new package presents both trivial and also gravely serious problems with misrepresentation of the truth.

Let us consider the accompanying Hendrix Live CD first. The sticker on the front of the book claims it is a “70 minute CD” of Hendrix live recordings, although the clock actually stops at 69:25. But it is astonishing that representatives of Experience Hendrix (Janie Hendrix is the CEO, and John McDermott has been the catalog manager for a decade) would allow that sticker to say that the performances on the CD were “never commercially released.” Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “Fire” in Worcester on 15 March 1968 has been commercially released by Experience Hendrix twice previously: first on a Dagger Records recording of 1999, and again on the MCA box set in 2000.

In fact, all six tracks on the CD have been available commercially for seven years: the two interviews and three songs recorded in Worcester appeared on Live At Clark University (1999), and the “Keep On Grooving Jam/Jungle Jam” session with Buddy Miles appeared on Morning Symphony Ideas (2000). If you have these CDs, there’s simply no reason to take Hendrix Live out of its sleeve.

The text of the book is unremarkable: generally accurate, notably brief, but more carefully edited than many previous Experience Hendrix publications. The introduction emphasizes “electric blues”: that phrase concludes each of the first two paragraphs. The authors make no mention of rock music, however, and the description of Jimi jamming in “a dusty Southern roadhouse” is a romantic (and perhaps anachronistic) fantasy (p. 5).

The three chapters devoted to Hendrix’s life and career before the Experience (pp. 6-19) mention Jimi’s siblings Leon and Joey, allude to Jimi’s “juvenile indiscretions” with stolen cars, quote from his official military records, and emphasize, appropriately, his work with such groups as the King Kasuals, the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, Joey Dee, and Curtis Knight.

Four chapters (pp. 20-45) cover the entire career, recordings, and performances of the JHE, from the early singles to the breakup of the group, the Toronto drug bust, and Jimi’s jams with Billy Cox and Larry Lee in the Ashokan House in the summer of 1969. Apart from the claim that Jimi played a “slide bass part” with a cigarette lighter on “All Along The Watchtower,” the facts in these chapters are largely accurate.

The final three chapters (pp. 46-61) treat Woodstock, the Band of Gypsys, the late recordings and final concerts, and Hendrix’s legacy. The most significant distortions are the perfunctory treatment of Jimi’s final European tour, selling short some fine shows after the Isle of Wight festival, and the elision of most of Hendrix’s posthumous history: the book leaps directly from 1971 to 1993, with no acknowledgment of the accomplishments (or shortcomings) of the Alan Douglas years.

This short book is richly illustrated, as the title suggests. Only a single page is wholly without illustration, and seven pages are devoted entirely to photographs of Jimi. Most of the images are familiar – the full-page shot of Hendrix on stage at the L.A. Forum in 1970 near the end of the book occupied a similar position in Jimi Hendrix: The Lyrics (2003), for example, but here it hasn’t been subjected to sepia toning, and is correctly attributed to photographer Chuck Boyd. There are a few previously-unpublished shots of Jimi on stage, and backstage and in the studio; in the best new shot, engineer Eddie Kramer captures Jimi happily writing lyrics at The Record Plant in the spring of 1968.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the book is the presence of detachable facsimiles, either bound into the book or more commonly tucked into one of thirteen separate pockets or envelopes. Facsimiles of paper ephemera like handbills, tickets, and a concert program, and reproductions of artwork from Hendrix’s childhood and maturity, are of less interest than the facsimiles of Jimi’s written work. For the most part, these manuscripts have been published elsewhere previously.

It is too bad greater care was not taken with them, but Experience Hendrix has an unfortunate record of treating Jimi’s handwritten materials with disrespect. The facsimile of the notebook with lyrics for Electric Ladyland omits several songs, gives “Gypsy Eyes” in incomplete form, and inaccurately presents some pages Jimi actually penned on rectos as though they were on versos.

The letter Jimi sent his dad from Kentucky in November 1961 is clearly incomplete (p. 15). [Note: Like the postcards mentioned in the next paragraph, this “reproduction” is almost certainly a counterfeit – C.G.] And the “Machine Gun” lyrics, originally written on Beverly Rodeo Hyatt House stationery, are reproduced from Jimi Hendrix: The Lyrics, rather than from the original manuscript, resulting in the addition of printed lines to the background (p. 49).

The most grievous mistakes with respect to the facsimiles appear to be instances of outright deception on someone’s part, if not the authors: the “reproductions” of postcards Hendrix sent home from Los Angeles on 19 February 1965 (p. 18) and from München on 12 November 1966 (p. 23) are both counterfeits.

These two postcards are not in Jimi’s handwriting, and even the photographic images on the cards don’t match the originals Al Hendrix photocopied and presented to Caesar Glebbeek in Seattle on 25 January 1989.

If the originals could not be located for this book project – in his 1999 book My Son Jimi Al claimed, “I don’t have any of the original letters or postcards Jimi sent me” – why not admit this fact, rather than trying to pass off deceptive fabrications as the real thing?

There are a few facsimiles here that are new, and welcome: the lyrics to “Voodoo Child” now include the ending, omitted (presumably by accident) from Jimi Hendrix: The Lyrics, and readers will be grateful to have Jimi’s instructions for the Electric Ladyland cover art, his “Letter to the Room Full of Mirrors,” and his handwritten notes for the album sleeve all assembled together.

Best of all is Jimi’s last letter home, written in the final weeks of his life. Though the letter is evidently incomplete, bearing no greeting, address, date, or signature, it seems indisputably authentic, and its content is quite interesting.

The CD is useless, and the text of the book unremarkable, but there are some attractive photographs here, and a few interesting facsimiles. The counterfeit items, however, are deeply disturbing, and may, perhaps, influence some potential purchasers to save their money.

[First published in UniVibes #56, April 2008. All rights reserved.]

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