THE JIM HENDRIX EXPERIENCE
Sound Engineer Roger Meyer drops some knowledge on Jimi Hendrix, exposing some of the myths about the late great legend.
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"A lot of the photographs I've got were of him smiling - but they were of no interest to anybody at the time because everyone wanted to see the mean, moody, sexy man," he says.
Mr Mankowitz has been going back through his 100 or so shots for a new book and exhibition.
"I think now as a visual icon he's as well known as for his music.
"I have 12-year-old boys coming to my exhibitions who know all about him. And you see him on t-shirts even more than Che Guevara!"
'Not a diva'Swedish radio journalist Lennart Wretlind met Hendrix only once, before a concert in Stockholm in January 1969.
But it resulted in one of the few surviving interviews with him.
"You could just turn up and there'd be no guards and no ID needed - there was a friendly atmosphere," says Mr Wretlind.
"It was very different in those days. Jimi didn't need any time to warm up: he was not a diva. He sounded totally relaxed and he came across as a nice person. He was a regular guy," he adds.
Listening to the radio interview now, Jimi Hendrix sounds the gentle, polite man recalled too by Mr Mayer and Mr Mankowitz.
All three men say they saw little connection between the performer on stage and the private man.
Aside from the sheer quality of his music, that enigmatic quality is surely why people remain fascinated by Jimi Hendrix today.
Singer Janis Joplin was to die only a few weeks after him, and Jim Morrison the next summer.
But of the three rock stars who died at the start of the 1970s, it is Jimi Hendrix whose music became the most potent shorthand for the new youth culture of the age.
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