My Husband, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley: My Experience

My husband used to hang out with Jimi Hendrix.  It was the '60s, so details are...foggy...in a "purple haze".  That, and they're both dead.  I used to think Brande was confusing the rock legend from Seattle with someone else, until I learned years ago, that Hendrix' Grandmother, lived in Vancouver.

Zenora (Nora) Rose Moore was born in 1883 in Georgia, and raised in Tennessee.  She was over one hundred years old, when she died in Vancouver.  She was a flamboyantly dressed chorus girl and dancer in a travelling vaudeville Dixieland troupe, when she met her future husband, Ross Hendrix, a former Chicago policeman, turned stagehand.  When the vaudeville company came to an end in Seattle, Ross and Nora came to Vancouver, to establish a new life. 

They settled a few blocks from Hogan's Alley, which was close to Vancouver's two railway stations, Great Northern and Canadian National, and a place where Black men could find work as porters.  Nora later worked in Vie Moore's Chicken and Steak House, in Hogan's Alley.  Vie's Granddaughter, Bertha Clark says the place was famous for great food and great musicians like Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_khoX5h2FkQ

Nora and Ross had five children.  The eldest died just before his twentieth birthday, and the youngest died at the age of two months.  Nora founded the first Black church in Vancouver.  The Fountain Chapel was African Methodist Episcopal, and Nora led the choir.  Ross would become a porter with the prestigious Quilchena Golf and Country Club.  After Ross died suddenly of a ruptured aorta, their son, Al, moved to Seattle, where he met sixteen year old Lucille Jeter.  Soon after, their son, Johnny Allen Hendrix was born on November 27th, 1942.  Jimi would be 75 today.

As a little boy, Jimi travelled back and forth between Seattle and Vancouver (about a three hour trip by car), often staying with his Grandmother.  For a short time, he attended elementary school at Dawson Annex, in the city's Westend.  It would have been a bus or streetcar ride from Nora's home at 827 East Georgia.  In 1968, when the Jimi Hendrix Experience played the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, Jimi asked rock jock Terry David Mulligan if the school still existed.  It was the first time Vancouver media realized that Hendrix had Vancouver connections!

Jimi's parents divorced when he was nine.  He lived with Nora in Vancouver, because his Dad didn't want him becoming a latchkey kid. By the time he was ten, Nora had moved from the old house in Strathcona, which is now a Vancouver Heritage House.  My husband would have been two years old, and playing in the snow in Quebec City...so, they didn't hang out back then.

Record producers spend millions creating a potent mystique around rock songs.  They would consider my experience an epic fail, because I will forever link Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower, with doing my homework.  It was September, and my first week in Grade 7.  Our teacher, a part-time opera singer, assigned homework - something we had never had to do before!  As I sat on my bed, in the upstairs bedroom I shared with my sisters, I heard All Along the Watchtower, playing on my transistor radio.  Staring up at the windowsill, into the twilight sky, that night more than half a Century ago, I daydreamed that the windowsill ledge was the wall and turrets of a castle watchtower.  I was that princess keeping view.  That's how I heard those lyrics.  What Bob Dylan actually wrote, and Hendrix sang, was, "all along the watchtower princes kept the view".  I still see a princess, and she is me.

Meanwhile, my knight in faded blue jeans, had already been travelling back and forth from Quebec City and Montreal to Vancouver, or San Francisco North as it was then called.  The first time, when he was a young teenager, he hitchhiked and jumped railcars to get to the Westcoast.  Jericho, Kits Beach, and the Kitsilano neighbourhood were his idea of Utopia.

Brande told me of hanging out with a young black guy named Jimi, who played guitar.  Long after his Grandmother had moved from the home Jimi knew as a child, he would continue to making trips to Vancouver to see her.  Jimi had a girlfriend with long, blonde hair, he nicknamed Creamy.  They'd sit around in a house, or on the porchsteps, listening to Jimi play guitar.  One time he heard his friend perform at a concert, and remembers hearing him "bend the sound" in that concert space.  That sure sounds like the Jimi Hendrix Experience to me! 

Jimi's Grandmother was at the Pacific Coliseum that night in 1968, if only briefly.  In an interview years later, she said, "went out there to the Coliseum, and had a seat right down in the front, almost in the front, and it was so noisy.  I said 'well, I've got to get out of here', and so in the meantime my Daughter-in-Law says 'Mama, you have to get out of this, it's too much noise for you'.  I says 'yes, I was gonna move if you hadn't come and got me, I was gonna go anyway'.  So I says this noise was too much for me.  All those drums.  And the way he was picking that guitar, my gracious life, I don't see how he could stand all that noise...and I was so surprised, you know, to see him, he had grown up, you know, to be a young man, and all that musical talent...well I knew he had music in him, because when he was small, his Daddy bought him a guitar, an old guitar for him to play on, you know, 'round with the boys and one night they had a little party somewhere and he played for this dance and they had a lovely, lovely time and everything, so I knew he was musical, but I didn't know he had that much music in him, you see."

Jimi died of aspiration from an overdose of barbituates.  It happened September 18, 1970, in Kensington, England, far away from Seattle and Vancouver. 

This Summer, I vowed to make a pilgrimage to the Jimi Hendrix Museum in Vancouver.  The museum's website showed a tiny, quaint, cherry red brick building with flowers, and a large painted mural of Jimi, and a blonde woman.  Is that her?  I'll never know, because in mapping out "my experience" weeks before, I discovered that the museum was moved from Stathcona, to an old building near the Cenotaph, in the Downtown Eastside, and was sharing a space with the Bob Marley Museum.  Would someone kindly inform their website.

Determined to see the museum, my absolutely fabulous and fearless friend and I ventured into the notorious Downtown Eastside, home of heroin addicts and destitute people.  We discovered that it is being gentrified.  Cafes with linen tablecloths are nestled side by side with abandoned shops in derelect buildings.  And so it was with the museum...

There's a sign on the door, just above the blue guitar...read it, and weep!

My own tribute to my husband was not in the form of a 32 foot statue, or a shrine.  Instead, I scattered some of his ashes in the water off his beloved Jericho Beach.  In the middle of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, which Brande loved, I walked down to the beach, and blew a handful of his ashes into the wind.  There was a purple starfish at my feet!  Just at that moment, I could hear musician Alex Cuba, singing the lines from Bob Marley's, Three Little Birds, "every little thing gonna be alright".

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.