The death of Jimi Hendrix: the unanswered questions

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. When a clairvoyant’s tarot reading on a 1969 trip to Morocco turned up the death card, Hendrix took the prediction literally: “I’m going to die before I’m 30,” he told a friend. “If Billy Cox had been around it wouldn’t have happened at all,” says biographer Philip Norman, author of a new Hendrix book, Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix. Dannemann wasn’t invited – another of Hendrix’s girlfriends, Devon Wilson, would be there – and when she came to collect him at 3am, Dannemann was berated from the window to “leave him alone”. Yet, according to Etchingham’s book Through Gypsy Eyes, Slater remembered seeing Hendrix on the bed looking “knackered”, and Burdon’s claim that he’d arrived at the Samarkand while there was still morning dew on the cars led Philip Norman to believe that Burdon and his associates cleaned the apartment before the ambulance was called, while Hendrix could still have been helped.