JIMI HENDRIX IS DEAD HALF A CENTURY: MOROCCAN MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE VILLAGE OF DIABAT, NEAR ESSAOUIRA
Some claim to have met him, others say they have spoken to him … Fifty years after the death of legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix, the small village of Diabat, beaten by the winds of the Atlantic in southern Morocco, vibrates with his memory.
“I saw him here, he was young and carried his guitar on his back,” swears Mohammed, a sixty-year-old who grew up in Diabat.
In the summer of 1969, the musician of genius made a quick stopover in Essaouira, a fortified city very touristy located 9 miles away. From this trip, there is no image or soundtrack left, but countless myths that fuel the legend of the voodoo child.
“He visited friends who were staying in the village, this is the last time we saw him. They say he is dead but God only knows”, sighs Mohamed, in his traditional brown djellaba.
His hamlet with white houses is inseparable from the American musician, who tragically died at 27 in London after having swallowed a cocktail of sleeping pills and red wine.
With its “Jimi café” and its “Hendrix” inn, Diabat has the air of a sanctuary, half rock, half flower power. With tags and colorful portraits, we celebrate the “historic passage” of the “guitar hero” shortly before his visit to the iconic Woodstock festival, then at the height of his glory.
“Hendrix looked in good shape. He was surrounded by his bodyguards, tall blondes. He wore a necklace with three diamonds and a lined denim jacket,” recalls Abdelaziz Khaba. This 72-year-old man says he posed with him but has “lost the photo”.
If the visits to Morocco of Jim Morrison, Paul McCartney or Robert Plant, in the years 1960–1970, are perfectly documented, the mystery surrounds the stay of Hendrix and feeds the wildest rumors.
His “short visit in the summer of 1969 produced a mountain of misinformation and fictitious stories,” notes one of his biographers, Caesar Glebbeek, in an article published on the Univibes site.
According to a perennial legend, the flamboyant left-hander was even inspired by “Dar Soltane”, a ruined fortress, almost buried at the foot of the village, to compose his famous title “Castle made of Sand”. Problem: the song was released in … 1967, two years before his stay in Morocco.
This does not in any way prevent Diabat’s little café dotted with portraits of the star from triumphantly evoking this title on a wooden sign nailed to the wall.
The stories of the Moroccan adventures of Jimi Hendrix abound: he would have crisscrossed the country in a van, tried to buy an island off Essaouira, or the whole village of Diabat, before falling back on the fortress silted up …
“Jimi Hendrix had gone to Essaouira, on the Atlantic coast (…). There were a lot of mystical things going on there”, confided in June 2019 Robert Plant, the singer of the group Led Zeppelin, in a podcast .
He too had preferred to “get closer to the Sahara” by going to Marrakech rather than staying in the north, like Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones and others, in the Rif mountains, famous for their cannabis plantations.
The Hendrix myth enchants Abdelhamid Annajar, a record seller installed in the shade of the ramparts of Essaouira. “Many tourists follow in his footsteps and they want to know everything. There are also nostalgic people who come to remember the good old days”, blows the manager of “Bob Music”.
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Laurence De Bure is one of those nostalgic. “Everything was crazy at the time,” said this 68-year-old Frenchwoman who spent two months in Essaouira in the early 1970s “with a whole bunch of Americans”.
“I never saw Hendrix but I knew a Moroccan woman who sewed velvet and waistcoats for him under her flamboyant clothes”, murmurs this “former hippie” who has been living in Essaouira since January.
Caesar Glebbeek, the biographer of the Seattle guitarist, has fun in his writings to disentangle the true from the false: yes, Jimi Hendrix has come to Essaouira where he stayed in a four star hotel, but whatever the tourist guides say nostalgic fans, he “never visited Diabat”.
ZNAGUI
New York City, Sep/16/20
