To hear Mitchell tell it, his introduction to Hendrix was hardly the weighty stuff of drumming lore. It could've just as easily never happened. In the mid-'60s, while still in his teens, Mitchell established himself in London, where he worked as a sideman and session drummer for various bands, including Screaming Lord Sutch and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates.
"It was an early equivalent, I suppose, of the brat pack," he says. "There were a few young players in the studios at that time in London: Johnny Baldwin [John Paul Jones], Jimmy Page. There was this one street, Denmark Street, which was like London's Tin Pan Alley. All the music publishers were there, and consequently, most of them had their little recording studios in the basement, and you'd go and do demo tapes for whoever it was.
"A lot of times, you didn't know who the heck it was for, because we were recording backing tracks. It could be Tom Jones, it could be Petula Clark. I did some things for Ready, Steady, Go, which was a TV program. Basically, you would take on anything that moved, and if you were lucky enough, you progressed from doing Denmark Street demos to the proper Musicians' Union sessions, which paid us a little bit more."
In 1966, Mitchell was working with Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, a well-known r&b act in Europe that had scored a respectable international hit the year before with "Yeh Yeh." Mitchell visited Fame's office every Monday to collect his weekly earnings, until one fateful payday when he was informed that the entire band was sacked. "My face sort of hit the floor, it was so unexpected," he recalls. "I literally walked down Charing Cross Road past all the music stores, back to Denmark Street - it was like going back to your roots, basically - and I went to a coffee bar just to think things over.
"Apart from being pretty devastated, my first thought was, 'I'm 19 years old. What am I going to do? What do I want to do?' I thought, the first thing, of trying to form some kind of band of my own. [Laughs] That lasted about five minutes. Actually, I did get a session that afternoon and that kind of brought a smile to my face. I thought, 'Well, okay. I have the choice of either going back to the studio or hopefully, if I'm lucky enough, I'll get gigs.' I did like the idea of working on the road with a band. It just seemed right."
Absolutely right, because Mitchell would soon receive a phone call from Chas Chandler, the former bassist with the Animals, who had since gone into band management and production. "I knew Chas vaguely from the Animals," Mitchell remembers, "and he said, 'Hey look, do you want to come and have a play with this guy I brought over [from America]?' I didn't realize it at the time, but of course, it was an audition.
"I went down to this little basement strip club in Soho and there was Jimi with a Fender Stratocaster upside-down with a kind of fake London Fog raincoat on, with his wild hair, and Noel Redding, who had been playing with Jimi I think for a couple of days, who I found out later was a guitarist, really, playing bass. I think there was a keyboard player, if memory serves me right, from Nero and the Gladiators. That was the idea first off, to maybe have a keyboard player.
"I just took down a tiny little Ludwig drum kit and said, 'What do you want?' basically. 'What are you looking for and what's it about?' I remember to this day, these tiny little amplifiers, and Hendrix was not happy with these little amplifiers so he was starting to kick them around. Like a lot of auditions, it really came down to the lowest common denominator. [We played] a bit of Chuck Berry, a bit of this, bit of that. I just threw in my Deutschmark, whatever you want to call it.
"He played a couple of things on the guitar that I found interesting - the style - and it kind of sparked me off. I used to get a lot of demos from, like, Curtis Mayfield, early Impressions things. And Hendrix was the first person I'd ever seen who could actually play that Curtis Mayfield style, which was unusual. So I named a Jerry Butler song, or an Impressions thing, and he knew it and could play it, and I thought, 'Oh, interesting.' I mean, I'd never been around that area of music before."
After jamming about 45 minutes, Mitchell packed up his gear and went home, feeling "intrigued." Two days later, he received another phone call from Chandler, who once again invited the drummer to jam with Hendrix, only this time, when he showed up, Mitchell found that there was no keyboard player - just the core power trio that would soon become internationally known as the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
At first, the three-piece lineup reminded Mitchell of Cream - a star-studded supergroup featuring Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker - which had become the talk of the town around London. He remembers, "I came out with some facetious comment like, 'So, you want me to try to play like Ginger Baker or something?' Hendrix just goes, 'Oh, yeah, whatever you want, man.' But I did get the impression on that second time playing [together] that something was released. It was like a feeling of freedom. I don't know if it's a spiritual awakening. It was just a situation where I'd gone, 'Hey, you've never worked in a three-piece band in your life, ever, and there is something with this player that is very, very special.'"
Mitchell wasn't alone. There were plenty of other drummers around London who wanted the gig. "What did surprise me, very much, is that it appears that a lot of people had been going for auditions and had been playing with Jimi for about two weeks prior to me hearing about this," he says. "London's not that large a place, and in those days, there weren't that many drummers about. A lot of my peers, colleagues - call them what you will - they'd gone for the job. Aynsley Dunbar and Mickey Waller had gone, and knew about this guy and they wanted the job, basically. That's what surprised me, because I didn't hear about it."
Mitchell got the gig after jamming with Hendrix and Redding for a third time. "I think I actually asked Chas, the manager, 'What's on offer? What's the deal here?' It was like, 'Well, look. We've got nothing, apart from a chance. There's two weeks' work, basically.' And I'd gone, 'Well, okay. I tell you what. I'll give it a crack. I'll have a go for two weeks.' What have you got to lose? You're 19 years old, and in fairness to the music, there was something that I could see was potentially inspiring."
With no record deal and hardly any original material, Chandler began to book gigs around England for the Experience. "We had no songs when we first started," Mitchell says. "So for the first couple of gigs, we were doing stuff like [Wilson Pickett's] 'Midnight Hour,' anything we could think of, quite honestly." The band's first tour was a series of opening slots for French rocker Johnny Halliday, followed by "anything that was offered," including pubs and pool halls. But the word seeped quickly through the underground about the band's wild stage shows and startling techniques, and record company cronies began to poke around backstage.
Chandler knew that the Experience was ripe for the studio. "Bless his heart," Mitchell says, "Chas was hocking every bass he owned in sight just to subsidize the band and recording time." The first song the Experience recorded was "Hey Joe" at De Lane Lea studios. In its day, it was a perfectly adequate facility, but by today's standard it was practically Jurassic. "Over all those years, the technology changed so much," Mitchell says. "When we first started recording from the Hendrix days, we had Chas Chandler working as the producer. Don't forget, the Animals' 'House of the Rising Sun' cost £4 - which is $8.00, whatever it is - to make and was done in 15 minutes, first take. And it sounded good.
"Obviously, we were fortunate enough to be around some pretty competent engineers. There was a certain amount of talent going around, especially in England then. It strikes me, looking back on it, English engineers made the most of the limited capabilities of the technology. They knew the structure of the rooms and they knew what mikes to use and where to record things from. They would make the most of the acoustics with limited equipment. And Hendrix did have a natural capability of working in the studio. To him, that was like his palate of colors. There are some people who feel very comfortable behind the board and know how things work. He was just very natural with the technology that existed. I don't know how much time he'd spent working in studios before."
