Richard Lloyd: 3rd Stone From Marquee Moon

By: Ron Hart

Richard Lloyd by Godlis

“I’ve been in the public eye since 1975 and I have never once spoken about the fact that I knew Hendrix,” proclaims former Television guitarist Richard Lloyd. I’m speaking to the NYC punk legend about his recently released album of Jimi Hendrix covers, The Jamie Neverts Story (released September 1, 2009 on Parasol Records), which finds Lloyd setting fire to such Jimi staples as “Spanish Castle Magic,” “Ain’t No Telling,” “Bold As Love” and “Little Miss Lover,” which features Television drummer Billy Ficca behind the kit. “I got close enough to Jimi for him to sock me and to cry on me.”

We all know that Jimi Hendrix had his hands in a lot of pies (both literally and figuratively) back when he roamed the earth, as the rumors, innuendos and bootleg recordings of him working with everybody from Miles Davis to Mahavishnu’s John McLaughlin to members of Traffic to B.B. King to Jim Morrison can certainly attest. However, few could have called the existence of the guitar legend’s connection to the downtown NYC punk scene, albeit a good seven years before it even took off. But thanks to the friendship between Lloyd and his high school-age best friend, Velvert Turner, famous for being Hendrix’s sole guitar student, Jimi’s unexpected ties to CBGB have been confirmed through his roundabout acquaintance with Lloyd, whose own revolutionary, serpentine guitar style he created alongside frontman/guitarist Tom Verlaine in Television, has inspired nearly three generations of guitarists himself.

“Mr. Turner was an accomplished guitarist who crossed paths with Jimi Hendrix as a young teenager growing up in New York City in 1966,” stated the 2000 death notice in The New York Times for Turner, whose sole 1972 album, The Velvert Turner Group, is one of the great lost psychedelic soul albums of the era. “He was befriended by Hendrix, who recognized the young scholar’s passion for the electric guitar. The legendary guitarist served as a mentor to Mr. Turner, offering both guitar instruction and professional advice to the young musician.”

Unfortunately, at the time, few people believed that a poor kid from the inner city could have struck up such camaraderie with one of the most recognizable figures in rock ‘n’ roll, so Velvert’s claims of knowing Hendrix would often be met with laughter and doubt from skeptics. Except for Lloyd, whose chance meeting with Turner at a mutual friend’s house in Greenwich Village back in the summer of 1968 would eventually lead to his own brief acquaintance with Jimi.

“I was at somebody’s house and they said Velvert was coming over and that he claimed to know Hendrix,” Lloyd explains, “and that everyone should laugh at him because it was plainly impossible for a skinny black kid from Brooklyn to know Jimi Hendrix. And I said to myself, ‘Well, Jimi doesn’t live on Mars. He has to know somebody, why not this kid?’ So, I believed him and our friendship grew out of that.”

According to the very well written liner notes penned by Lloyd that accompany The Jamie Neverts Story, Velvert told the crowd that Hendrix was in town to play a show at The Singer Bowl, which, according to Lloyd, was “some place in Queens with a revolving stage.” Jimi used to book himself into various hotels around the city under a secret pseudonym, one that Velvert knew, and to silence his skeptics at the Greenwich Village apartment, he called the hotel he knew Jimi was at that day, the Warwick Hotel, and let the line ring and ring, passing the phone around the table to his naysayers until it got to Lloyd.

“On the second ring, I heard the phone being picked up and the unmistakable voice on the other end,” he explains in the notes. “It was Jimi saying, ‘Hey man, what’s up? Who’s this?’ I didn’t know what to say, so I said, ‘It’s Velvert, man!’ and handed the phone to Velvert who snuck away in the corner for a long, whispered conversation. In the meantime, the other guys were grilling me. ‘Was it really Jimi? What did he say?’ I told him I recognized his voice, and there was no mistaking it. It was Jimi.”

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I climbed down the stairs fearing that somebody might be waiting for me, but there was nobody in the parking lot except for Jimi who was sitting in one of his Corvettes. When he saw me he rolled down his window and called me over and asked for my hands. He began to caress them, weeping and apologizing for hitting me. –Richard Lloyd

Photo by: Anders Torgander

Jimi Hendrix

As a reward for believing him, Velvert took Lloyd as his “+1” to Hendrix’s concert out in Queens and the two became best friends shortly thereafter. And from there, whenever Turner would come back from his guitar lessons with Jimi, he would show the young virtuoso the chops he learned that day, helping Lloyd develop the unique style of playing he would soon craft as his own in Television.

“Jimi Hendrix didn’t teach guitar to people,” Lloyd states. “Only to Velvert. And Velvert passed on what he was doing with Jimi to me, because we were best friends and when he left Jimi’s place, he was only a couple of blocks from my house, so we would practice together.”

Lloyd himself would later experience his own private encounter with Hendrix after attending a secret club gig Jimi was playing while he was in town rehearsing for the New Year’s Eve shows at the Fillmore East that would make up the guitarist’s classic 1970 live album Band of Gypsys, which also doubled as the guitarist’s 27th birthday party. Lloyd was supposed to meet Turner at Salvation, a club in the West Village, and when the guitar prodigy never showed up Lloyd bought a ticket to the show and soon found himself sitting at a table with Jimi and his entourage after sneaking backstage. According to his liner notes, he wound up sitting right next to Hendrix at this table, who ended up drunkenly talking his ear off, confiding in Lloyd about how he felt trapped by his fame and his fears that he was only being used by people like some kind of a clown and how his handlers weren’t allowing him to fully explore what he wanted to on a musical level. Not knowing that Hendrix didn’t take kindly to compliments, Lloyd gushed about how much he loved his guitar playing and that he shouldn’t be so hard on himself, to which he was met with a trio of punches dealt by Jimi, only to find the guitarist waiting outside the club for him in order to apologize after Lloyd hid out in the club in fear of being beat up by members of Hendrix’s crew who thought he picked a fight with the guitar hero.

Richard Lloyd by Godlis

“I climbed down the stairs fearing that somebody might be waiting for me, but there was nobody in the parking lot except for Jimi who was sitting in one of his Corvettes,” Lloyd explains. “When he saw me he rolled down his window and called me over and asked for my hands. He began to caress them, weeping and apologizing for hitting me.”

For Lloyd, he sees the making of The Jamie Neverts Story, the title of which comes from a made-up code name Lloyd and Turner would use for Hendrix to conceal his identity to their nosy friends, as not just a tribute to his best friend but as an obligation to Velvert and Jimi for the gifts they had bestowed upon him as a guitar player.

“This is where I got a lot of what I do on guitar,” Lloyd, who teaches guitar himself these days and counts Wilco‘s Jeff Tweedy amongst his alumni, reflects. “I don’t think, either in Television or my own work, that anybody would have spotted a Hendrix influence. But I didn’t want one to show up. When I teach students, I teach them to play more like themselves. You’re gonna have to find your own voice on that guitar. What Hendrix and Velvert taught me is very, very important to me. Both of them are gone, and all I have is the memories. And the fact that I was around then, that’s why I feel like I owe them, as a payment of a debt, to cover some of Jimi’s songs, put it out and let some of that influence – that has always been there – finally show itself.”

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