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Ronnie Wood remembers being evicted with Jimi Hendrix
The 1960s was a wild time for anyone with an open mind, not to mention guitar-playing legends Jimi Hendrix and Ronnie Wood.
The former was discovered playing in Cheetah Club in New York by Linda Keith, the girlfriend of Keith Richards in 1966, before former Animals bassist Chas Chandler, who was making his move into music management, snapped him up and brought him across to England.
Here, they put together the dynamic trio that was The Jimi Hendrix Experience, giving the guitarist the perfect ballast to take over the world with his pioneering form of playing and magical grooves. As soon as the band’s 1967 debut Are You Experienced was released, the decade was confirmed as Hendrix’s, and it was full of raucous antics.
As for Ronnie Wood, he performed in a handful of iconic London bands in the ’60s. He joined the respected R&B outfit The Birds in 1964, performed with The Jeff Beck Group, had a brief stint in the ultimate mod band The Creation, and joined the Small Faces spin-off, Faces, in 1969. He enjoyed a stellar decade, and it saw him cement his reputation as one of the finest guitarists the country had to offer, as well as one of the hardest partying.
It is not well-known, but Hendrix and Wood were good friends. Per an account in Contactmusic, once, they were even flatmates. However, the duo was evicted after only a matter of weeks because they failed to house train the dog that Hendrix had gifted Wood.
Hendrix and Wood shared an apartment with the famous Ikette Pat Arnold in Notting Hill, London, but before too long she asked them to leave because of a rather gross reason. Wood recalled: “I shared a flat with Jimi in Notting Hill Gate for a couple of weeks. He was quite a gentle flatmate. He gave me a dog – a basset hound called Loopy.”
“We were living with Pat Arnold, who was the singer in The Ikettes but she threw me and Jimi out because the dog kept shitting everywhere,” the former Faces man explained.
Even though their time as flatmates was brief, Wood remembered that the pair had a string of jam sessions and said that he was blown away by Hendrix’s aptitude on the guitar: “We did used to sit on the bed and exchange ideas on the guitar. He could flip it over and play equally well left or right-handed. Like Ronnie O’Sullivan with the snooker cue.”