This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News
Roadie claims Hendrix was murdered
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 2 June 2009
Now, it might appear cynical of me to say this, but it does seem that every rock biography written by a little known figure in the music industry comes with its very own revelation about how a now dead rock star they once knew was murdered.
The latest to do this is ‘Rock Roadie’, by former Jimi Hendrix roadie James ‘Tappy’ Wright. In it, Wright claims that the guitarist’s manager Michael Jeffery drunkenly admitted to offing him as part of a life insurance scam. Wright alleges that Jeffery was the sole beneficiary of a $2 million life insurance policy taken out by Hendrix, and, in order to get his hands on the cash, he visited the London hotel room of Monika Dannemann, where Hendrix was staying the night he died, and force fed him pills and alcohol, which caused him to choke on his own vomit.
In the book Wright says: “I can still hear that conversation, see the man I’d known for so much of my life, his face pale, hand clutching at his glass in sudden rage. [He told me:] ‘I had to do it, Tappy. You understand, don’t you? I had to do it. You know damn well what I’m talking about. I was in London the night of Jimi’s death and together with some old friends… we went round to Monika’s hotel room, got a handful of pills and stuffed them into his mouth… then poured a few bottles of red wine deep into his windpipe. I had to do it. Jimi was worth much more to me dead than alive. That son of a bitch was going to leave me. If I lost him, I’d lose everything'”.
We tried to contact Jeffrey to get his side of the story but he died in a plane crash in 1973 and our ouija board is broken.
