How Keith Richards’ Girlfriend Helped Jimi Hendrix’s Career Take Off
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has been with the iconic rock band since the early 1960s. In the early days of the Stones’ career, another up-and-coming rocker named Jimi Hendrix was working as a backup guitarist for major artists. Richards’ girlfriend at the time, Linda Keith, took an interest in Hendrix’s success, and helped the American musician become a star in his own right.
Keith Richards rose to fame with The Rolling Stones in the 1960s
Linda Keith was a young British Vogue model and blues fanatic in the early 1960s when she met Keith Richards and bonded over their love of music. “He was a blues aficionado and that was why we got on so well,” she recalled in a 2013 interview with The Guardian. “It completely counteracted his shyness and that’s all I wanted to talk about anyway.”
The model upset her new boyfriend when she banned him from playing The Rolling Stones’ music on her record player. “He knew I was never a huge fan,” she said. “I was hugely into Black music so they sounded a bit pale by comparison.”
Keith Richards’ girlfriend helped Jimi Hendrix launch his career
In 1966, while The Rolling Stones were on tour in the US, Linda was interested in helping a then-unknown Jimi Hendrix gain greater recognition as an artist. Richards was gone on tour, and his girlfriend lent Hendrix a white Fender Stratocaster. She invited Seymour Stein, the man who later discovered Madonna, to a showcase at New York’s Café Au Go-Go to see Hendrix perform. That night, Hendrix took Richards’ pristine white guitar on stage — and promptly smashed it to smithereens during his performance.
“I was beside myself,” Linda told the Observer, according to The Guardian. “I’d lent him a guitar belonging to my boyfriend and there he was smashing one up on stage! I was absolutely livid with Jimi because to me that’s the most un-cool thing to do.”
Linda’s determination to launch Hendrix’s career came at the cost of her relationship with Keith Richards. Though she was responsible for giving Hendrix a guitar that he destroyed, Richards still kept Linda close in his heart, writing the tender goodbye song “Ruby Tuesday” about her.
Hendrix would go on to gain a reputation for destroying guitars, either smashing them or setting them on fire, as he did during his infamous 1967 performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival.
Jimi Hendrix and Linda Keith’s friendship continued up until his death in 1970
After the guitar-smashing incident, Linda continued trying to get Hendrix greater recognition. She invited The Animals’ former guitarist and current manager Chas Chandler to New York’s Café Wha? to see Hendrix perform his usual set, including his breakout single “Hey Joe.”
“You’d come out the bright sun into this cave of a room. Then the stage lights would come up and there’s Jimi playing the opening chords of ‘Hey Joe,'” she remembered. “Well, it was quite mindblowing and I’m not surprised he blew Chas’s mind with the first chord. It even blew my mind – and I knew it was coming!”
Chandler began to manage Hendrix, who soon moved to London to form his own band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience. The band would go on to release three albums in 1967 and 1968: Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland.
“He had management, a girlfriend, and other people telling him how to be and my influence was possibly seen as some kind of threat,” she recounted. “Maybe they thought I would try to influence him away from a commercial sound to a more purist blues.”
Hendrix lost touch with Linda, but he reconnected with her before his death. “He wrote saying he’d written a new track, ‘See Me Linda, Hear Me, I’m Playing the Blues,'” she remembered. “I always loved his blues playing but then most of his songs do sound like the blues.”
