A TRIBUTE TO JIMI HENDRIX

Rainbow Bridge, My Summer of Love

I still recall the very first time I ever saw Jimi Hendrix. It was at the Newport Pop Festival at Devonshire Downs in Northridge, California, not more than a few miles from my home. It was June 20, 1969, just before I ran away from home. I will never forget that concert. It was a huge three-day event with two stages, the first of its kind to be held in Los Angeles. I was behind the fence because I couldn’t afford the ticket price, since my parents wouldn’t give me the $7 entrance fee required to get in. I found myself outside the fence, just behind the stage, with all these Hells Angels and L.A. street racers who were providing security for t The cops were out in force with their billy clubs and riot gear. As soon as Jimi started playing, they all lined up and started coming at us in their attack formation, pushing us like animals. We all ran in separate directions, and rocks and bottles went flying through the air in the middle of the intersection of Devonshire Boulevard and Zelzah.

Hendrix sounded just terrible, and it was later reported that someone had spiked his drink with LSD. He returned to the stage on Sunday, however, and rocked the house with a set he did with the great drummer, Buddy Miles. I never dreamed that not more than a year later, I’d be meeting Hendrix up close and personal in Maui.

The adventure began when Barry De Prendergast showed up one day at the juice stand. He was a bit strange-looking with bushy dark hair and wearing a Hopi Indian shirt. He was totally vegan and was wearing cotton shoes with soles made from hemp. He spoke with a slight British accent, but I later found out he was originally from Ireland.

After ordering a fruit smoothie, he introduced himself. He told me he was a producer and in town to film a movie for Warner Brothers starring Jimi Hendrix called Rainbow Bridge. He said, “If you want a job, I can give you a job working in the kitchen with a few other people who will be preparing all-organic vegetarian food for the cast and crew but after a week or so of doing the catering stuff Barry put me on the set as a producing assistant wich was basically that was a big title for an errand running gopher. He went on to say“I’ve rented the only mansion on the island, and that’s where you’ll be living.”

It sounded good to me. Just like that, I quickly hung up my apron and said goodbye to Charlie’s Juice Stand. The “mansion” turned out to be Seabury Hall, which was a high-dollar private Episcapol girls school founded in 1964 by the Balwin family, a missionary family who had originally been assigned to Maui Hawaii in 1835 Barry had rented it for the summer to do a feature-length motion picture. The owners had no idea what they had signed up for.

Seabury Hall was in Makawao, on the side of Haleakala Crater. It was like living in a five-star hotel. The property was located on a few hundred acres and included an Olympic-sized outdoor swimming pool. It had horses, beautiful green pastures, where you could ride them, and million-dollar views.

While Barry and his motley crew occupied the premises, the chapel was used for viewing the daily rushes of the film. All of the classic antique furniture in the mansion was piled into one room in order to keep it out of the way of what Barry and Chuck Wein had in mind.

Chuck Wein was the director. His big claim to fame was having been part of Andy Warhol’s “Factory Crew” in New York, along with Edie Sedgwick and a bunch of other misfits. Chuck had been Andy’s lover for twelve years prior to doing Rainbow Bridge. Chuck and Barry decided to convert the spacious living room of the mansion into the “ultimate hippie salon.” The room had piles of huge pillows. A big low-lying round table was placed in the center of the pillows. The table was adorned with incense and candles. It was truly the ultimate pad. After a few days of being at Seabury Hall, I decided to make that pile of pillows my bed every night.

I’ll never forget Just before I was hired on by producer Barry De Prendergast to work at SeaBury Hall, I was in Lahaina, where there was a huge sighting of a spaceship, which literally thousands of people walking around the streets witnessed, while at the very same time, the cast and crew of Rainbow Bridge just happened to be having a meeting on UFOs at the Pioneer Inn..

Maui had two encounters with the same UFO twice within a few weeks’ time—once that time and once while sitting on the beach with a bunch of Brotherhood of Eternal Love guys in Maalaea bay. It was the classic UFO saucer shape, with the domed top, like you see in the movies, but it had rainbow colors. I could see a small white light coming out of its underbelly and after about 20 minutes It slowly turned on its side and disappeared as tourists and locals sat there with their jaws dropping to the ground. The next day, the newspapers ran a story saying that it was only a test of a rocket they had shot up in the atmosphere and that the gasses created the colorful shape. Or maybe it was a weather balloon, or swamp gas, or Soviet spies, anything but aliens.

Also, during the filming, we had a close encounter of the worst kind with guys just popping up with their cameras, claiming to be reporters for Time Magazine, and the like, asking questions about UFO sightings. Me and Hashish Harry busted one, as he was getting a bad vibe from this so-called Time reporter.

Harry jumped out at me, and knowing I had the ability to see auras, he asked me very excitedly, “What colors are you seeing around him, Scotty?”

“A lime green,” I said.

Harry came right out and snapped at him, accusing him of being a CIA spy. This guy was so blown away that he literally got up, grabbed his shit, and ran out of the room.

Rainbow Bridge would eventually go down in movie history as a cult classic. It was intended, as Barry explained, to be “a high-energy experiment in color, light, and sound.” Completely unscripted, the cast of characters included people brought from around the world who were all interested in various forms of the occult.

The grand finale would be a Jimi Hendrix concert where an audience of some 400 people was partitioned into sections, determined by their various astrological signs, hence, according to the director Chuck Wein, allowing Jimi to focus his energy toward the various astrological groups. Well, that was how the rumor went anyway. Quite frankly, I think Hendrix thought Chuck Wein, Barry de Prendergast, and all of their cast and crew were nothing but a bunch of Hollywood idiots. Chuck seriously claimed he was some sort of wizard and he started pushing his wizard rubbish, which didn’t go over very well with Jimi.

In addition to the motion picture production, Barry De Prendergast had an agenda for me. I was a hot little surfer boy and being some what naive, I didn’t realize that Barry was gay until it was too late. He didn’t come off as gay, at least not to me. He didn’t talk or act in an effeminate way or speak with a lisp, He showed none of the stereotypical behavior patterns of gay men at the time.

He eventually succeeded in screwing me, but not in a sexual way. He ripped me off in a pot deal some years later, though his efforts at seducing me came during the filming of Rainbow Bridge. And although I rejected his passes, he would manage to get me so high on LSD and various other drugs, he would begin massaging me into submission. He would often say to me, “You’re gay. You just don’t know it yet! One day you’re gonna discover that you’re gay.” But that day never came, I’m sure much to his disappointment.

I can’t imagine “trying” to be gay; I just don’t see how that would work. Besides, I just liked women too much and couldn’t bare the thought of fucking in the ass with their shit all over my cock! Barry got jealous and pissed some years later when he introduced me to his gorgeous niece who was visiting from Ireland. I fell in love with her and we had a hot little affair before he broke it off. But that was long after my Rainbow Bridge experience.

Shortly after arriving at Seabury Hall, I was given the run of the place. Over the course of a few weeks, the participants arrived, including a group of peyote Indians, a seventy-five-year-old clairvoyant from South America, they call “Clara Clairvoyant,” and Albert Einstein’s nephew, Dr. Bronners. Clara Clairvoyant sat with me every night at dinner so I could help serve her. My personal take on Dr. Bronners was that he was totally insane. He used to catch me in the office in the back of the kitchen and start practicing his ecology speeches on me, none of which I could understand. When Hendrix himself finally joined us, he spent most of the time in a room upstairs, above the living room, with a slew of gorgeous women and the co-star Pat Hartley, a member of Andy Warhol's Factory, who was a black chick from New York.

Whatever needed to be done, I did, cooking, giving rides to the cast and crew, and helping build sets. In typical communal fashion, every night forty-to-sixty people ate together at a long group of tables in the huge dining room. All the food was vegetarian, and it was all part of the “Rainbow Bridge Light and Color Experiment.”

A Brotherhood guy, named Paul, showed up and started passing out some really powerful acid he called “White Lightning.” He claimed it was the miracle batch, and everyone was tripping out on it. One night, about ten guys from the Brotherhood showed up with a huge Afghani wedding hookah. They filled it with half a kilo of primo Afghan hash. It took about twenty minutes just to get the thing lit, and when it got going, it literally filled the mansion’s living room with smoke.

Hendrix was involved in a jam session at the time and didn’t really know what to make of it. All these hippies were hacking away and coughing their heads off.l standing on a small stool in order to reach the top of this huge hookah the hash punjent smoke that filled their lungs to the hilt. It's like drowning in a vat of deliciously decadent chocolate.

Despite this distraction, Jimi just continued to jam in the living room with the other two members of his trio, Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox. The following morning, I remember picking up Jimi’s guitar and trying to play it, but because I am right-handed, it was a bit awkward. It was still nice to be able to do it. I thought, at the time, years from now, I can say that I had actually played Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. Not many people can make that claim! I didn’t realize how prophetic that statement would be. Many years later, when high-tech billionaire Paul Allen paid $740,000 for that very guitar to add to his private collection.

When Jimi stayed over at the mansion at Seabury Hall, he came downstairs and asked me to pick up some hamburgers for him at the McDonald’s in Wailuku. “Thanks, little brother,” he’d say. If anyone could get away with eating meat on the vegetarian set of Rainbow Bridge, it was him. I think he must have thought what a bunch of rubbish, vegetarian bullshit.

The one day when I actually spent some time around Jimi was when Leslie Potts invited me along to smoke some hash. Leslie was a renowned Maui surfer whom I knew before Rainbow Bridge. In fact, my brother, Ron, had given Leslie the startup capital for a surfboard shaping company that was one of the first such businesses on the island.

There were only Jimi, Leslie, and myself. Jimi talked about buying some land in Maui to build a communal center focusing on the arts. He wanted to construct pyramids and domes, all as sort of an ongoing Rainbow Bridge concept. Sadly enough, those dreams of the greatest guitarist of all time were cut short when he passed away on September 18, 1970 only forty five days after the filming wrapped.