The 1967 Curtis Knight reunion sessions

Two releases by Experience Hendrix (You Can’t Use My Name and No Business), feature recordings from the summer ’67 reunion session between Jimi and R’n’B singer Curtis Knight (although the two releases feature mainly the 1965-66 recordings by Curtis Knight And The Squires featuring Hendrix).
The reason for this is because there is little that is exploitable from the 1967 recordings.
See the Before Fame section for details of the 1965 – 1966 pre-Experience recordings.


This subject merits attention and I spend time on it to sort out all the terrible confusion that it has created over the decades. Producer Ed Chalpin created such a puzzle that even after all this time, many Hendrix fans still mistake these 1967 reunion session jams for pre-Experience recordings!
It must be said right away that the music here is sub-standard and bears no relation to the main body of Jimi’s work.

How the Curtis Knight recordings came back to haunt Jimi
As detailed in the Before Fame section, during his pre-Experience days, in and around New York, Hendrix recorded a number of songs with Curtis Knight & The Squires (a.k.a. The Lovelights). By the summer of 1966 Jimi formed his own little group in New York: Jimmy James & The Blue Flame (a.k.a. The Rainflowers) but would occasionally still play club gigs with Knight (he was in fact discovered by Linda Keith at the Cheetah Club while he was playing with either Knight’s band or with Carl Holmes & The Commanders. Then Linda got Chas Chandler interested, who took Jimi to London and made him an international sensation.
In late 1966, Mike Jeffery flew to New York in order to clear up the old contracts that Jimi said he had signed. Jeffrey recruited the New York law firm Marshall & Vigoda to track down the various companies involved. As Jimi hadn’t yet broken in the States (and was only beginnng in Europe) it was very easy for Jeffery to buy ou the old contracts that belonged to Henry “Juggy” Murray Jnr. (Sue Records and Copa Management) for little outlay. So, all appeared neat and tidy.

A few months later, Jeffery was on a night out with Jimi in a London club and the D.J. put on a promo single on the R.S.V.P. label titled Hornet’s Nest by Curtis Knight & The Squires. This was in fact an instrumental written and recorded by Jimi in New York shortly before he’d left for England with Chas and Mike. For some reason, Jimi hadn’t mentioned that he’d signed a contract with R.S.V.P back in early 1966! It seems that Jimi didn’t know that the song, backed with Knock Yourself out, would be released. This is perhaps true because only DJ-destined promo copies have been found since. However, Jimi had surely been aware that R.S.V.P. had previously released How Would You Feel b/w Welcome Home in April ’66 (a few weeks before Jimi met Linda Keith).

Mike Jeffery immediately instructed Marshall & Vigoda to buy out the contract with R.S.V.P. Records, owned by Jerry Simon (who had sneakily inserted his name as co-writer of the two songs). Thus Jeffery obtained the rights to seven songs that Simon had: Hornet’s Nest, Knock Yourself Out, U.F.O., I’m A Fool For You Baby, Gotta Have A New Dress, Ballad Of Jimmy and Your Love (an instrumental cover of the Petula Clark song with perhaps Hendrix on bass, it surfaced on some Chalpin exploitation albums as My Heart Is Higher). Jeffery had of course no intention of releasing this inferior material. So again, all seemed neat and tidy for Jimi, Chas and Mike.

Then months later a certain Ed Chalpin notified Track, Polydor and Warner Brothers that Jimi in fact belonged to him, thanks to an exclusive three-year contract that Hendrix had signed back in 1965, when he was a session musician for Chalpin’s recording company PPX Enterprises. At the time, Hendrix hadn’t even told Chalpin that he was already signed to Juggy Murray for management and record releases. Chalpin must have been living under a rock in 1967 because he hadn’t heard of The Jimi Hendrix Experience until he was looking through some overseas record sales information. He didn’t know about Jimi’s Monterey performance (which was big news in the industry at the time) or about the U.S. releases of Are You Experience and the successful singles! In the summer of ’67, Chalpin finally issued a lawsuit against Jimi’s management and labels in the USA and Europe.

Jimi makes a big mistake
Then, unknown to his management, Jimi (naively hoping to calm things down and make amends), met up with Knight and Chalpin in New York and offered to participate in two jam/recording session as an uncredited player. This reckless decision only gave Chalpin more recordings to exploit. Subsequent releases have revealed that at the beginning of one session, Jimi calls out to Chalpin “Don’t use my name on this, OK ?”. You can hear Chalpin simply reply “Don’t worry about it”. Jimi would soon have plenty to worry about and Chaplin came back to haunt him for the following three years.

While both sides readied themselves for the legal battle, Chalpin rushed out an album of Knight/Hendrix recordings (1965 to 1967) on Capitol Records titled Get That Feeling, featuring a cover photo of Jimi performing at Monterey. Capitol A&R man Nick Venet said that they’d had to overdub extra bass and drums in order to create a fuller sound. Jimi discovered the record one day in a record shop and this was obviously a big shock to him and his management and record companies.

Yameta did manage to block the Get That Feeling album in early 1968 due to its misrepresentation as the album was by Jimi Hendrix and Curtis Knight. Because of that, a second Capitol album titled Flashing, stated more clearly “Jimi Hendrix Plays – Curtis Knight Sings”).

However, Chalpin counter-attacked and managed to get the judges to freeze Hendrix record royalties paid to Warner Brother and tour revenue from General Artists Corporation! This was a dramatic drop in revenue for the Hendrix organisation. If you wondered where all he money went, a lot of it was frozen!
A further court ruling gave PPX 2% of US L.P. and tape sales profits up to 1972 plus 1% for Canadian releases. This was also retroactive for the releases prior to 1968. It was also ruled that Capitol/PPX would be granted a new album of Jimi Hendrix Experience recordings.

When the Experience broke up in June 1969, Jimi was in the midst of a creative block and still had nothing new to offer. He thought a way out of the litigation would be to give Capitol a live album. This turned out to be Band Of Gypsys which Chalpin rightly claimed didn’t fulfil the agreement (for a proper JHE studio album). The lawsuits continued all the way into the 21st century when Chalpin received a pay-off shortly before he died and submitted (or leased) all his master tapes to Experience Hendrix. This resulted in the releases of two studio albums (without Capitol’s post-session rhythm section overdubs) on Sony and Dagger Records (You Can’t Use My Name and No Business) and one un-retouched live album on Dagger Records (Georges Club recordings without Capitol’s post-session rhythm section overdubs).