Roger Daltrey Shares His Memory Of Jimi Hendrix’s Final Days

Roger Daltrey finally talks about the last time he saw Jimi Hendrix before his death. The details were revealed in his recent visit to BBC with host Romesh Ranganathan.

Daltrey admitted to being one of the few persons to have witnessed and interacted with the legendary guitarist a week before his sudden death on Sept. 18, 1970, at the age of 27. Daltrey, along with 3 other people who are present at the moment, still remembers the events like it was only yesterday.

“This is the weekend before he died,” Daltrey said. “I was on tour in Germany, and Jimi and his friend, Devon Wilson, came to my cottage in Berkshire. At my house was my wife-to-be Heather and another girl called Katherine.”

With Hendrix telling them that he wanted to pursue a different form of music that leaned more on jazz, Daltrey could see to it that the guitarist was more than excited to go to New York and master his craft. At one point, Hendrix and Wilson were doing a call-and-answer technique in music where one shouts a quote and the other answers it with the next quote. “And they were doing it with Bob Dylan lyrics,” the singer said.

Heather, Daltrey’s fiancé, noticed that Hendrix was taking barbiturates more than ever since his speech was starting to get slurred. Both he and his friend Devon passed out around 2 a.m.; the remaining 3 people were worried about what will happen next. But around 11 a.m. on the same day, the two were all ready to head back to London by cab. “That was that weekend,” Daltrey added. “And as I say, he was as right as rain in the morning like nothing had happened.”