Ballad Of A Murder Ballad ‘H


Jimi Hendrix is almost always credited with popularising the haunting death ballad,


‘Hey Joe’. But it was US folk singer Tim Rose who re-arranged this old tune in the style that Hendrix cut as his debut single and took into the charts in early 1967. KRIS NEEDS spoke with TIM ROSE shortly before his death about “that song”.


EY JOE’ IS THE SONG WHICH MADE Tim Rose’s name. Although it was not one of his own compositions, he claimed the arrangement and got downright shirty


when Jimi Hendrix scored a hit after using Rose’s version as a blueprint for his first single in late ’66. Rose claimed he had heard an old Appalachian mountain ballad called ‘Blue Steel .44’ as a child and started featuring it in his sets, rewritten as ‘Hey Joe’. But the song had a rather more convoluted history than that, a case study of a folk song’s evolution.


‘Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go’ first showed up on record in amped-up garage punk form by California’s The Leaves, appearing as a 45 on the Mira label in November ’65. They claimed to have learned it from David Crosby who himself picked it up from Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Dino Valente when the pair shared a houseboat in San Francisco. Crosby also taught the song to Byrds roadie Bryan MacLean whose subsequent group Love also started playing it live. Love guitarist John Echols then passed it to The Leaves, altering the lyric to include the key line, “where you going with that gun in your hand”. The Leaves beat everybody in charting the song, sneaking into the US Top 30 in June ’66.


The floodgates were now open and breakneck versions of ‘Hey Joe’ appeared from bands including The Standells, The Shadows Of Knight, The Music Machine and pre-Grateful Dead band The Warlocks. The Byrds eventually included it on their ’66 LP Fifth Dimension. It would have been Love’s first single but they settled on using it as a track on their debut LP.


Tim maintained that the producer David Rubinson didn’t want to record ‘Hey Joe’ at first (Rubinson begs to differ). “I didn’t record ‘Hey Joe’ until my fifth session at CBS. They had tried all kinds of their shit with me. Finally they said, ‘Hey, remember that ‘Hey Joe’ thing you do live? What about doing that?’ ”


Tim knocked off ‘Hey Joe’ with the original version clocking in at over six minutes. Clive Davis wanted to release it immediately. Stories about how Hendrix heard the song range from hearing The Leaves’ version to catching it on the jukebox of The Cock ‘n’ Bull bar to being taught it by Arthur Lee! Whichever way he heard it, Jimi was playing it in his own set at The Café Wha? In New York while still Jimmy James. Coincidentally,


almost walked out. So Chas said, ‘Here’s your ticket and your passport: go home.’ Jimi said ‘Will you let me listen to it once more?’ The irony is when Jimi recorded ‘Hey Joe’ he was already a well-known guy around Europe. He was something new and beyond a guy playing a guitar. He just needed a single and he wasn’t doing anything that was going to get played on the radio. When Chas heard this he knew it would be the perfect single.”


Tim admitted that he could be his own worst enemy when it came to moving forward. He could have milked the Hendrix connection but instead got resentful at seeing “his song” hoisting someone else into the stratosphere.


“Hey Joe, where you going with my song in your hand?” Clockwise fromabove: Tim Rose, Billy Roberts, Dino Valente, Love, The Byrds, The Standells and The Leaves (centre).


“I was doing the old Saville Theatre on Tottenham Court Road one afternoon in ’67 for the little kids. I was on with Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Incredible String Band, Keith West & Tomorrow. I had a band consisting of Aynsley Dunbar and Ronnie Wood, then members of The Jeff Beck Group. Afterwards there was a woman there who wanted to interview me for NME. First question: ‘What do you think of Hendrix doing your song?’ even though it says on the record ‘arranged and adapted by…’. I said, ‘Oh yeah, Hendrix plays a nice guitar. It’s a Gibson, isn’t it’ Wrong fucking answer! That was a snotty, shitty answer. 35 years later I wouldn’t have given that answer but I did then. Any attempt to connect me with Hendrix I wanted to do anything I could to distance myself from it, which was not to my advantage but my detriment. I should’ve really made hay there, just as I could’ve done when Jeff Beck covered ‘Morning Dew’ on his Truth album or The Grateful Dead when they did it after working with me in San Francisco. I was tremendously jealous. Instead of being jealous I should have been grateful. It should have opened a few doors for me but I wouldn’t let it.


Most of these versions credited the song to Chester Powers – an alias of Valente’s – until the true composer emerged as being Californian coffee house singer Billy Roberts. Roberts registered the song with The Library Of Congress in January ’62 but allegedly assigned the rights to Valente when he needed money following a nine-month stretch in jail on drugs offences. Legal action gave the song back to Roberts, who kept gigging until the early ’90s when he suffered severe head injuries in a car crash. ‘Hey Joe’ paid for his hospital care.


All this bypassed Tim, who maintained that he’d first heard the song done slow by NY singer Vince Martin, sometime musical partner of Fred Neil, with whom he’d shared bills in Miami, and started featuring in his set through ’66.


“I jammed with Jimi a couple of times


but I would play bass. I would never play guitar with Jimi. I sang ‘Hey Joe’ with him once at The Speakeasy, or it might have been Blaises. At the Scene in New York, James Cotton and Muddy Waters were in the audience. I’d done my set and they all came up. They were tuning up and Muddy turned to me and said, ‘Sonny, how come these boys play so damn loud?’ Because they were great believers in subtlety, I couldn’t disagree with them. Again I played bass that night.”


Chas Chandler had been knocked out by Rose’s version and was stunned to hear Hendrix singing this song he wanted to turn into a UK single for somebody when he saw him live at Wha?


Tim had another personalised twist on the story. “When Chas played the record to Jimi he said, ‘I hate it’ and


Rose’s arrangement would become the blueprint for a host of versions over the coming years by artists as diverse as Deep Purple, Marmalade, Johnny Hallyday, Patti Smith, Alvin Lee, “Weird” Al Yankovic, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (who championed Rose during the last years of his life), Offspring, Robert Plant and countless others.


It shows no sign of dying yet. 39


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