Tragically Predictable: a review of ‘Goodbye, Jimi, The Truth Behind the Tragedy’

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
– William Faulkner.

It is breathtaking how much phenomenal music Jimi Hendrix squeezed into a recording career of not even four years. In addition to four authorized original albums released during his lifetime, many more would be culled from this period for decades to come. His incredible versatility as a guitarist and his brilliant ability to juggle rock, pop, blues, soul, funk, and jazz would leave a major mark on popular music still felt today. With his often-thrilling concerts, soulfully expressive voice, and ultrahip looks, Hendrix remains the ultimate rock star. His death in 1970 at 27 when his music was flowering in so many exciting directions remains rock’s greatest tragedy.

There are many fine Hendrix biographies, but James Hawthorn’s Goodbye, Jimi: The Truth Behind the Tragedy is the first to focus on his death and disprove the myths spawned by so many supposed eyewitnesses’ conflicting (and changing) accounts.

Despite dying in his sleep from “inhalation of vomit” caused by an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol, conspiracy theorists allege that Hendrix was actually either a victim of a tyrannical manager working him to death, a suicide, a negligent groupie bedmate, or murder. Marshalling an army of well-sourced facts, Hawthorn refutes each of these theories.

Dispelling the notion that Hendrix’s manager, Mike Jeffery, tortured him to death as his “touring slave,” the new book makes clear that Jeffery shrewdly negotiated concert tours enabling his client to “become the highest-earning live act of the late 60s” and “very wealthy.” At his death, Hendrix was worth “half a million dollars (four to five million in today’s value).” Though Jimi knew Jeffery was a crook who was taking more than his fair share, a Hendrix office worker told how Jimi confided that “he would never leave Michael [because] Jimi knew Michael would make him the most money.”

Having lived his first 24 years mired in poverty, Hendrix loved money and “enjoyed spending all his money as soon as it came in – perhaps through fear that it would disappear before he could get his hands on it.” He was not just extremely generous with his father, friends, and girlfriends, but even strangers. A Hendrix office secretary observed that “Jimi might spend $10,000 in a boutique on a girl he just met and never see her again.” His own consumer habits were also of such Elvis proportions that Hendrix had to keep touring to keep the money coming.

His co-manager, Chas Chandler, described a single weekend:

[H]e bought 17 television sets … 8 stereo sets, he sent his road manager Gerry Stickells to New York to bring his car from New York to Los Angeles. He only had it in L.A. for an hour when he wrapped [wrecked] it up… walked straight away into a shop and bought a new one, which he wrapped up the following day and bought yet another one… and he bought 9 guitars that weekend.

Jeffery not only paid some Hendrix debts, but fought court battles to settle awful recording contracts that his top client foolishly signed before achieving stardom and then forgot about.

Performing too many concert gigs was not the problem. Indeed, Hendrix said in 1969, “I always enjoy playing for people, whether it’s for 10 people or 10,000.” For all his later complaints of touring too much, he played far more shows years before as a sideman for Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, and other bands. After heavy touring during his first two years of fame – like virtually every other band – Hendrix did not perform remotely as many concerts in 1969 and 1970. In fact, “In the last 12 months of his life, there were only 37 Hendrix concerts,” largely because he was increasingly incapacitated by drugs.

Jeffery tried to separate Hendrix from all the drug vampires constantly stalking him. He should have intervened far more, but Jeffrey and Jimi were “acid buddies” who took LSD together, and Jeffery bought the whole hippie mantra of total personal freedom. Still, for all Jeffery’s sleaze, Hawthorn’s book proves that Hendrix’s manager did not remotely overwork his main client or ever make him do anything against his will.

A more plausible theory about Hendrix’s death contends he committed suicide. Sharon Lawrence, a journalist who befriended the guitarist, posits this in her book, and Hawthorn confirms that all who knew him agreed that Hendrix battled anxiety, panic attacks, loneliness, and depression. At the end he confided to an interviewer how “I sometimes feel very lonely,” and his girlfriend Linda Keith recalled that “He had huge mood swings that lasted days, and I suspect today he would be diagnosed as bipolar.” “Manic Depression” is a 1967 Hendrix song with suicidal lyrics, and in late 1968 he deliberately cut his wrist. As documented by Hawthorn, by the end of his life, Hendrix faced more professional and personal pressure than ever before.

But Goodbye Jimi argues he had too many exciting recording projects underway that he had done so much work on and was eager to finish. Plus, if suicidal, why would he request more concert tour dates on the next to last night of his life? Though stressed, almost no one who knew or saw Hendrix near the end thought he was suicidal. Nor did he leave a suicide note.

Hawthorn likewise refutes the theory that Hendrix died from negligence or even malice on the part of his last bedmate, Monika Dannemann. To anyone dealing with her, it was obvious she was quite mentally ill, and she gave many different versions of her idol’s demise. Dannemann was a naïve young German groupie nursing a delusion that Hendrix would marry her even though they spent just two nights together. Unable to wake him on the morning of September 18, 1970, she panicked and did not know to turn his comatose body on its side so he could vomit. Instead of calling an ambulance right away, she phoned acquaintances for advice and delayed calling medical help due to all of Hendrix’s illegal drugs in the hotel room and knowing he would hate any press about going to the hospital.

However inept, Dannemann desperately sought to save Jimi, was present when the ambulance arrived, followed it to the hospital, and was extremely upset when he died. It was Hendrix who chose to leave his own London hotel to hide out with Monika in hers to skip pressing meetings about paternity and contract lawsuits. So his capable staff did not know his whereabouts. Thus, Hendrix’s reckless lifestyle put him at the mercy of an emotionally unstable stranger. Even so, Hawthorn reveals the autopsy showed that “the barbiturate reading in Jimi’s liver was so high that he couldn’t have survived.”

The last theory Goodbye Jimi repudiates is the most bizarre – that Hendrix was murdered, either by his manager, the CIA, the Mafia, or Dannemann. First, Hawthorn argues, why would Mike Jeffery want to lose his top earner (by far), especially with top-selling new albums and tours in the works? Also, contrary to popular belief, he did not have a life insurance policy on the performer. Jeffery was a greed head whose star client’s death cost him a fortune.

There is zero evidence that the CIA had any interest in an apolitical American like Hendrix, or that the mob cared about him either. Dannemann was perhaps the first to blame the Mafia, but she also blamed the ambulance drivers taking Jimi to the hospital. As for suspicions surrounding herself, though some official investigators of Hendrix’s death privately referred to her as “barking mad,” there is nothing to suggest she wished to harm Hendrix. She would make loads of paintings of her brief sex partner, as well as write a book about them that lionized him, however absurdly surreal the content. When contacted two decades after his death, Dannemann told a caller “not to call when there was a full moon, because that was when she and Jimi would travel together on the astral plane.” Sadly, and not surprisingly, she suicided in 1996.

As Hawthorn makes painfully clear, the only person who killed Jimi Hendrix was Jimi Hendrix. Despite being a beloved, innovative musical genius, he remained deeply insecure. But instead of facing his problems, he sought escape through debauchery, especially ever-increasing massive quantities of drugs. He was a heavy smoker of cigarettes and marijuana, an alcoholic, and a prodigious user of many other substances. His main drummer, Mitch Mitchell, said of the drugs that “They did become a way of life.”

A Rolling Stone reporter who interviewed Hendrix and wrote a biography of him, Jerry Hopkins, reported just how completely drugs came to devour the rocker’s life:

Cocaine or amphetamines started the day, barbiturates or heavy downers like heroin or Quaaludes ended the day, and in between came the recreational drugs: beer and wine and Scotch, LSD, pot, hash, peyote, soma, mushrooms, mescaline, and speedballs made of smack [heroin] and coke.

As Hawthorn observes, “Drugs were an escape for Jimi, but they only served to accentuate his paranoia” and hunger for ever more intoxication. Ignoring repeated warnings about the deadly road he was on, over his last two years his drug use became ever less recreational and far more problematic. Ever less salvageable work was done in recording studios because “Recording sessions had become drug-crazed parties where Jimi entertained friends and hangers-on.”

By early 1969, he was no longer able to hide his chronically drugged state, even at major concerts. At one of the prestigious Royal Albert Hall shows in London, a staffer lamented that “He was so stoned, he was legless. I had to push him on stage.” Drugs made his performance at California’s massive Newport Pop Festival a truncated “disaster.” Indeed, Hendrix’s entire fall, 1969 concert tour had to be cancelled because a drugged-out Jimi simply “didn’t have the energy,” costing himself, bandmates, and associates major money.

In 1970 things got bleaker. A completely dysfunctional Hendrix cut short his Madison Square Garden concert after two songs. More bad shows followed. On the plane to England for a European tour three weeks before his death, Hendrix’s main concern was his frantic search for a London drug dealer. Drugs dictated another disappointing performance before his largest audience ever at Britain’s August 30, 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, and most subsequent shows were worse. He could no longer consistently recall his own lyrics and had to end another concert after two tunes because he could not hold his guitar pick. Yet another tour was aborted when Hendrix’s bassist, Billy Cox, had a bad reaction to a drink spiked with drugs. Having quit several times before in disgust at all the drugs, this time he left for good. Chained to his addictions, Hendrix confessed, “It’s no fun anymore. I don’t want to play anymore.”

Those who knew him were stunned at how ill and out of it he appeared in his final weeks as he increasingly combined booze with powerful sleeping pills – and forgot how many he had taken. Jimi knew this could not continue. A month before he died, he told a sex buddy that he would be dead the next month. He even admitted to an interviewer that “I am not sure I will live to be 28.” Three days before his demise, he moaned to Sharon Lawrence that “I’m almost gone.”

A huge problem was surrounding himself with a large entourage of leechy losers just wanting to get high with the top rock star. They plied him with ever more drugs, stashing them all over his hotel rooms. Alas, as his manager lamented, “Jimi could never say no.” Bandmate Noel Redding noted how, “Once, he gave two girls $3,000 to go shopping, just to get rid of them.”

This brings up another disturbing pattern: Hendrix’s abuse of women. A serial cheater with all his many girlfriends, the non-stop groupie one-night stands continued to the end, including with underage girls. Aggravated by alcohol, many biographies also confirm his violence with many lovers. Indeed, Hawthorn reports that “Jimi had given a girl $75,000 in an out-of-court settlement, after having put her in the hospital for stitches to her head (he’d hit her with a brick).” Charles Cross’s book says it was a bottle, and that he sent the same victim to the hospital twice. In his last weeks, amidst a threesome in a hotel room, Hawthorn reveals that Hendrix “suddenly went into a mad rage. He had banged the girls’ heads together, smashed up the bedroom and thrown them out. The girls were stranded in the suite’s sitting room, without their clothes.”

Rampant promiscuity produced at least two children out of wedlock, neither of whom Hendrix ever saw or paid a cent toward, prompting paternity lawsuits. Though no longer able to care for himself, in his final two weeks, an ever-more frenzied Jimi proposed to four women. Only the likely schizophrenic Monica accepted.

More than any other biography, Goodbye Jimi demonstrates that Hendrix’s death was far from a one-time freak accident, but inevitable. As Hawthorn concludes:

His hunger for diversion, an escape from his troubles through poor lifestyle choices, eventually led him to take that one step too far. Looking at the events of those last weeks, one realizes that the tragedy could have occurred at any moment.

The heart-breaking reality is that one of the coolest, most musically capable rock stars had become a junkie unwilling or unable to avoid self-destruction. His sleep apnea noticed by girlfriends made him particularly vulnerable. Since one mistress alone saved him from drug-induced vomit deaths many times before, we are lucky to have had him for as long as we did to produce so many splendid songs, much like Janis Joplin surviving six O.D.s in 1969 alone before the fatal one on October 4, 1970 when she was by herself.

Hendrix’s story is the ultimate cautionary tale of how no amount of success, fame, money, or pleasure can fill a spiritual hole. His mother was a mentally institutionalized alcoholic who died at 32, leaving several children by several men, and his father was an often absent and abusive heavy drinker. Passed around relatives and foster care, Hendrix’s impoverished, dystopian childhood left the high school dropout utterly unprepared to navigate superstardom, and the same hippie counterculture that celebrated him created the worst possible environment to enable his self-destruction, with an army of freeloaders feeding him drugs to fuel the joyless party with no exit ramp. How tragic that the one girlfriend who loved him, London’s Kathy Etchingham, understandably left him in 1969 to escape his toxic drug scene. With no stable romantic relationship or strong religious faith, Hendrix’s personal decline became ever more pronounced.

Though Goodbye Jimi has almost no original research, too many typos, some boring business minutiae, and only one reference to its subject’s “difficult childhood,” the biography is well-written and superbly synthesizes so much insightful information from so many sources. Its consistently trenchant assessments are strictly logical, and the book exposes a plethora of errors plaguing several previous accounts of Hendrix’s death. Despite grappling frankly with Hendrix’s fatal misjudgements, Hawthorn clearly has great sympathy for the man and loves his music. The book also boasts extensive record and film guides, as well as an impressive day-by-day account of the guitarist’s last four years.

Goodbye Jimi significantly improves the Hendrix biographical canon by deflating all the conspiracy theories about Hendrix’s death that have ballooned for decades. More than any other work, it lays bare the elephant-sized drug dependency that killed the singer. While some other biographies have much more original research and explore his entire life, this new one resolves all the mysteries surrounding Hendrix’s death with thoroughness, clarity, and compassion. I will now enjoy Mr. Jimi’s tunes with even more awe that such a terribly troubled artist could still somehow create such an amazing body of wonderful music.

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Douglas Young is an author and professor emeritus whose essays, poems, and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications in America, Canada, Europe, and Asia. His first novel, Deep in the Forest, was published in 2021 and the second, Due South, came out in 2022. His first book of essays, This Little Opinion Plus $1.50 Will Buy You a Coke, appeared in 2024, and the second, Not Just Political, was published in 2025. His first book of short stories, The Double Date and Other Stories, will be published in 2026.