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In a new book, Rock Roadie, James “Tappy” Wright, a former roadie for guitar legend Jimi Hendrix, claims that Hendrix’s manager Michael Jeffrey claimed to have murdered Hendrix in his sleep to collect millions of dollars on the Hendrix’s life insurance policy. Hendrix died in 1970 at the age of 27. The Independent reports:
James “Tappy” Wright says that Hendrix’s manager, Michael Jeffrey, drunkenly confessed to killing him by stuffing pills into his mouth and washing them down with several bottles of red wine because he feared Hendrix intended to dump him for a new manager, according to a report in the Mail on Sunday. In his book, Rock Roadie, Mr Wright says Jeffrey told him in 1971 that Hendrix had been “worth more to him dead than alive” as he had taken out a life insurance policy on the musician worth $2m (about £1.2m at the time), with himself as the beneficiary. Two years later, Jeffrey was killed in a plane crash. Wright claims Jeffrey told him: “I had to do it, Tappy. You understand, don’t you? I had to do it. You know damn well what I’m talking about. “I was in London the night of Jimi’s death and together with some old friends… we went round to Monika’s hotel room, got a handful of pills and stuffed them into his mouth… then poured a few bottles of red wine deep into his windpipe. “I had to do it. Jimi was worth much more to me dead than alive. That son of a bitch was going to leave me. If I lost him, I’d lose everything.” John Bannister, the surgeon who dealt with Hendrix at hospital, has said he was convinced the star had drowned in red wine, despite having very little alcohol in his bloodstream. “I recall vividly the very large amounts of red wine that oozed from his stomach and his lungs and in my opinion there was no question that Jimi Hendrix had drowned, if not at home then on the way to the hospital,” he wrote in 1992.
Hendrix would be 66 if he were alive today, and he’d probably would have done a single with Rob Thomas or T-Pain or some other gay shit by now to stay “relevant”, so it’s probably better that he went out like this. He’ll always be 27 and he’ll always be a rock god. In four albums, he put out better music than John Mayer will put out in his whole lifetime. Comparing Jimi Hendrix to John Mayer is like comparing King Kong to a monkey in a helmet riding a tricycle.
