Actress and author Marsha Hunt takes to the stage in a show that promises a revised look at the Sixties. She tells FIONA MCCANNwhy and about the role Jimi Hendrix plays in what she calls a 'theatrical lecture'
'MICK WROTE Brown Sugarfor me," Marsha Hunt drops in, mid-conversation, without a trace of smugness about her status as muse to one of the best-known songs from the past half century. It's merely a statement of fact by this compelling 63-year-old, as she sits across from me on the stage of Temple Bar's New Theatre explaining the title of her new show.
Brown Sugar on Jimi Hendrixopens here this evening, and while the first part is thus explained by Hunt's relationship with Jagger, with whom she has a daughter Karis, the Jimi Hendrix connection requires a little more elaboration.
It goes back to her book, initially titled Sex With Jimi Hendrixuntil Hunt got sick of the inevitable literal interpretation. It has been a labour of love for Hunt, a singer-turned-writer of two memoirs and three novels, who also edited a book of stories written by Mountjoy prisoners, The Junk Yard: Voices from an Irish Prison.
She decided to write the Hendrix book more than nine years ago, after a London agent told her she was born to write it.
"I got to London in February of 1966," says Hunt, who was born in Philadelphia, although her father's family came from Beale Street, Memphis, the birthplace of the blues. "Jimi came to London six months after that. He had the first Jimi Hendrix Experience hit that Christmas and two months later I got in my first English blues band. So there had been circles around us. And then when I was in [the musical] Hair, the first record company that signed him came to the theatre and signed me!" The parallels don't stop there. "What was weird, really weird, was that as I started writing this book, I found out that our paths had crossed so many extraordinary times it was freaky." She whispers the last word, eyes wide in an unlined face that breaks often into a ready and luminous smile. Working on this book, she tells me, has brought her a new perspective on a decade that reshaped the political and social landscape.
“Through the research that I’ve been doing on Jimi’s life, I see a revision of 1960s history that relates to him, but relates to him through his experience, that I feel it’s my responsibility, one, as a witness, two, as a black writer, to actually tell.” The decision to put something together for the stage – something she calls a “theatrical lecture” – was made when she heard that James “Tappy” Wright, author of a book in which he claims that Hendrix’s manger confessed to the singer’s murder, was to appear at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
“I saw the book, which was so badly written and such a lot of crap, and I heard that the guy was doing a week at the Edinburgh festival,” she recalls. “So I’m incensed! I get in the car and I drive from Paris to Edinburgh.” As you do. At least you do if you’re Marsha Hunt, a woman for whom protesting is second nature. She put together a show to book-end Wright’s run, and also made a point of attending one of his “conversations” to object in person.
“[Hendrix’s] life has been trivialised in a strange sort of way, which I think is why I was so enraged when I sat back and heard this guy talking bullshit. Jimi was far more, and yet far less, than he is credited with.” After her tirade at the Wright event, an audience member approached her to commend her for it. He turned out to be Graham Forbes, former member of 1960s psychedelic folk band The Incredible String Band, who subsequently became part of Hunt’s show. “I knew then that it was worth jumping up and screaming if only because I met him.” These are the kind of things that happen to Hunt, a woman who is so busy making waves, it seems inevitable that she’ll be continuously buoyed towards land. After one date in Edinburgh, Hunt’s show is now coming to Dublin, again due to the kind of serendipity that seems to define her life.
“I was coming [to Ireland] because I’d lost my driver’s licence,” explains Hunt. She arrived in Dublin one evening earlier this month with no plans to take the stage. By the following afternoon, she had an event booked to run in the New Theatre for six nights, and a designer already lined up for the handbill. She puts much of it down to her circle of Irish friends, which includes Kathy Gilfillan, wife of Paul McGuinness, and her former partner and good friend, documentary-maker Alan Gilsenan, the man who originally brought Hunt to Ireland. Though she doesn’t have a home here anymore, and now bases herself in France, she frequently returns to Dublin, adding that the Mater Private, where she was successfully treated for breast cancer, is her “second home”.
This is why she's so pleased to be bringing Brown Sugar on Jimi Hendrixto an Irish audience, though few of its members are likely to get their hands on her book on the same subject, given that she plans to produce just 50 copies, and sell them for $3,000 each. "There's a picture of me that was taken by Patrick Lichfield the day after Hairopened and it's now become a kind of iconic picture, and that picture sells for £1,600," she says. It's a picture that went on to grace the cover of British Vogue in its first issue of 1969. "I was so shocked to see that this one photograph of me, for which I received no money, sells for such a fantastic price." Add to this her frustration with the "corporate thing that has happened to publishing", and a determination to do her own thing, and you have her reasons for selling her book as a work of art, and giving it a price tag that reflects the endeavour. So what does $3,000 dollars get you? "Our generation sold out, and in a way what my book is explaining is how that happened," she says. It's also her take on a decade that has been consistently commodified and reinterpreted, often by those who weren't even there. Hunt was there, however. "In 1964, when I was a student at Berkeley and we resisted the police and held the free speech movement sit-in, we were risking our futures. We were not hippies. We were students, committed to something that we thought was important." Hence the show. "My intention is to bear witness to something that I think is really, really important about the 1960s epoch that has been forgotten," she says. "We talk a lot about it being about love, and perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that it was about violence. About war, about protest, about resistance."
Forty years on from 1969, she’s asking where all the protesters have gone. “How is it that we feel that there are so many problems that we cannot make change? Why are people not marching in the United States to say we must have health care?” Doesn’t she see Obama’s inauguration as a sign that things are changing for the better? “Something else happened that makes me scared. Forty million people thought that Ms Palin was alright as vice-president. Forty million people, many of whom are parents raising children, teachers, librarians. I found that very f***ing scary. Yes, it’s very interesting and wonderful, that we now have a black president, but there’s another picture there to constantly be looked at.” Which is not to say she’s pessimistic. Far from it.
"I'm a true believer that out of the negative comes the positive and although I think it's very, very unfortunate that some people have been really badly hit by what's happened [economically], I think the hit is changing things." This bodes well for her grandchildren's future, the two children of her daughter Karis to whom she addresses a letter that she incorporates into her show. Beyond the letter, Brown Sugar on Jimi Hendrixalso promises video projections, a ladder, a blue guitar and several nudes on stage, though Hunt refuses to give any more away. "I'm avoiding telling you too much, because you gotta come see the show!"
She does tell me that she burns a €5 note during the performance to remind people it was not all about money. “I don’t need to be trying to get rich off this,” she says of her latest endeavour. “I’m trying to get a message out, and if a few people who leave that theatre have a rethink about the past, about the future, about themselves, hey! . . . job done.”
Her face lights up again and it’s hard not to be converted by the sheer force of her energy.
Brown Sugar on Jimi Hendrixruns at The New Theatre, 43 Essex Street from November 2 to November 7. See thenewtheatre.com
