Jimi Hendrix's memorabilia goes on show in London

Saturday 11^th January 1969. Jimi Hendrix and his two musicians arrive in Hamburg, after back-to-back shows in Gothenburg, Stockholm and Copenhagen, for a gig at the Musikhalle. On the way there’s some band business to attend to. The mother of bassist Noel Redding is ‘upset’ with the accountant, and drummer Mitch Mitchell owes Redding £72.

Then, two shows in the rackety German port city: a 6pm performance, which is ‘so-so’. Then, a 9pm, which is ‘brilliant’. The fee: ‘£1000 + 50%’, minus the 20% cut (‘£200+) of the ‘man[ager]’.

In this period, 18 months before his untimely death at 27, Hendrix needs to be gigging at this pace – the London-based musician has a serious rug habit that’s costing him the equivalent of £39,000 a year. As much is evident in the invoice he recently received from Belgravia Galleries: ‘One superfine silk & wool Persian hunting rug… One fine Kasmir [sic] Bokhara rug… One fine Turkish prayer rug…’

Luckily, Hendrix has someone taking care of business. As a scribbled note on the invoice attests, the rug dealers’ bill has been promptly settled by one Trixie Sullivan. A member of the musician’s management team, she is, effectively, his right-hand woman.

Such is the treasure trove of detail about the legendary musician’s period living in London that’s contained in a cache of paperwork saved by Sullivan. She had scooped them up after bailiffs had raided the offices of Anim Records in the wake of the 1973 death in an air-crash of Hendrix’s co-manager Mike Jeffery. For 50 years the documents, along with her meticulously detailed diaries, lay in boxes under her bed in Majorca.

Now having been discovered and annotated by her grandson Jonathan Garcia Sullivan, a selection is going on display in Handel Hendrix House. Located in the London building – at 23 and 25 Brook Street in Mayfair – that both musicians called home, albeit 200 years apart, the museum in part consists of a careful recreation of the flat that Hendrix and his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham shared there.

‘Jimi loved rugs so much, and bought so many of them, that he and Kathy had a load rolled up by the side of the bed, and they just alternated them on the floor,’ says exhibition curator and Handel Hendrix House deputy director Claire Davies. ‘You can see in various photoshoots done in the flat [at the time], there's always a different combination of rugs down. When you're working in a museum, everything can become quite static. So we now rotate our rugs in the same way.’ And, courtesy of Sullivan’s careful documenting of the musician’s expenses and excesses, now there’s a paper trail to back up that ‘living story in these rugs’.

Then in her mid-twenties, Sullivan was the assistant to Jeffery. In reality, she was in charge of the day-to-day affairs of the incendiary guitarist and frontman, who had relocated to London in 1966, and his band.

‘Probably more than 50% of the letters, the bills, all the legal stuff, are signed by my nan,’ Garcia Sullivan says. ‘She was dealing with it all, back and forth with so many different big businesses, anything really.’ And, as evidenced by Sullivan’s note in her diary about the band’s inter-personal dealings and concerned mums, she was more, too.

‘From what I understand, my nan acted like the bossy older sister-slash babysitter to keep them in check. People as chaotic as that probably needed that type of person kicking around, someone who keeps everything rolling.’

‘Trixie’s fielding all the phone calls,’ says Davies. ‘We have to remember that in the Sixties, even having a phone line is a luxury. So if anyone wanted to contact the band, they needed to get to her first and then she'd have to pass on the message.

‘That’s given us such a great record of so much activity,’ she continues. ‘She’s having to write down the notes from all these calls. When they move into Brook Street, Kathy is even ringing Jimmy to ask his opinion on colours for curtains. And it's the same with the band members’ parents – someone’s upset or needs some money. That's all going through Trixie. And thank goodness, because now we’ve documentation of those interactions.’

It was a loose but busy and intense time for Hendrix, who would die in September 1970 after choking on his own vomit while under the influence of wine and barbiturates. The Seattle-born musician had lived mostly in London since late 1966. Between May 1967 and October he released three albums: Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland, giving the world now-classics such as ‘Foxey Lady’, ‘Purple Haze’, ‘Voodoo Chile’, ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ and his searing cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watch Tower’. There were multiple gigs, heavy use of alcohol and drugs, and many, many nights out. The Trixie trove includes bills for restaurants, like Mr Love, an appropriately groovy eatery, and for clubs, including iconic Swingin’ Sixties spots The Bag o’ Nails and The Speakeasy.

‘There were so many unsettled bills,’ says Davies. ‘And we can now track when and how they were settled. For example, there were phone bills of Jimi’s. We know that Trixie got a taxi to pay some of them directly because we've got cheque stubs and the taxi receipts.

‘And with The Speakeasy and The Bag O’ Nails, they were late payments. We're trying to work out how much that's about lack of cashflow within the business, because Mike Jeffery had a bit of a reputation for not necessarily managing the books particularly well. But also, it's the 1960s and you can't do anything instantly – everything has to be done manually. By default, every bill can be overdue by virtue of it being a manual world.’

For all the revolutions of the time, it's also, still, a conservative world. Going on display at Brook Street is a letter, dictated by Jeffery and typed up by Sullivan, to Frank Mundy, the general manager of the Royal Albert Hall, ‘intended to reassure him that Hendrix won't be inviting nudity in his performances there,’ says Davies. ‘Because there was recently an interview in the Melody Maker in which he was talking about the concept of people taking their clothes off and being at one with music...’ Mundy was ‘really nervous’ that this would lead to mass nudity in the august hall.

‘So Trixie has to reassure him that that's just a completely misquoted and misunderstood quote. But according to her family, she also got up on stage before his performance and told everybody they have to behave themselves and that the audience has to keep their clothes on!’

Sullivan is now 82 and living with late-stage dementia; her family have auctioned off some of her archives, including audio tapes of Hendrix’s music, to help pay for her care. Even in her younger years, though, Garcia Sullivan says that his grandmother never spoke in any detail about her time at the heart of an intense and bohemian music scene. ‘But she was 25, 26 at the time when she was doing all of this. It's crazy. I'm 29 – I couldn't imagine doing all of that at 25 years old.’

How aware is she that this exhibition is happening?

‘We did have a chat with her two months ago about it. But she doesn't know the details. She's a bit too late into dementia to know. But what's interesting with [people with] dementia is that you can still connect with music. My nan won't remember your name. But she’s still singing. And she'll still recognise Jimi Hendrix’s music. It's pretty incredible.’

The Trixie Sullivan Archive goes on display at Handel Hendrix House, 23 Brook Street, London W1K 4HA, from 19^th June