2 Stories= Unbelievable.

From Blabbermouth comes this:

According to The Pulse of Radio, John Bonham's gong sold for $64,000 on July 6 to an anonymous buyer after failing to sell at auction. LedZeppelinNews.com reported that the gong was consigned by Bonham's sister, singer Deborah Bonham, and their mother, Joan Bonham. The instrument which was used by Bonham onstage, was purchased on July 6 by a buyer who wished to remain anonymous during an "after-sale" when the gong failed to sell as part of Bonhams and Butterfields Entertainment Memorabilia auction. The gong was originally thought to bring in a price as high as $120,000.

You mean to tell me the most famous GONG in history FAILED to sell at auction? Where was the auction, at a gong factory where all the gong makers are poor, blind asian day laborers? The first time I ever saw a gong was when Bonzo whalloped it into Submission during repeated viewings of The Song Remains The Same. This gong made hundreds of Hacky heavy metal drummers light theirs on fire before they hit it during the 25 minute drum solo that allowed the frontman to change into new spandex and snort a line or two backstage before coming out and doing the power ballad that made them famous!

And why do the Bonhams need to get rid of it? They surely don't need money do they? They can live comfortably off royalties from "When the Levee Breaks" alone, right? Was it taking up space in the garage where a new Beamer needed to go? How about donating it to a museum you bloodsuckers!

Here it is:



Here it was:





The second story is another one to file in the "Please let the dead guitar God rest dept.". Earlier this year I reported on an alleged confession from the shady manager of Jimi Hendrix named Mike Jeffrey in a new book by former roadie James "Tappy" Wright that says Jeffrey had the guitar icon murdered for the insurance money . Now comes claims from a UK website stating that the doctor who treated Hendrix after his "overdose" says the "murder" part may be true. Here is the story courtesy of Nightwatcher's House of Rock....

Doctor Who Tried To Save Hendrix Says Murder Claim Plausible

The UK's Times Online is reporting that the doctor who attempted to revive Jimi Hendrix on the night that the guitarist died believes that it is “plausible” that he was murdered.

John Bannister said that medical evidence was consistent with claims in a book that Hendrix was killed on the orders of his manager, Mike Jeffery.

James “Tappy” Wright, a former road manager who worked for Jeffery, as previously reported writes in his new memoir, Rock Roadie, that in the early hours of September 18, 1970, a gang hired by Jeffery broke into the London hotel room where Hendrix was staying with his girlfriend, Monika Dannemann, and forced sleeping pills and wine down his throat until he drowned.

Mr Bannister was the on-call registrar at the now defunct St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington on the morning that Hendrix was brought in. He had no idea who the famous patient was but remembers that he was “very long”. Mr Bannister, 67, speaking at his home in Sydney, said: “He was hanging over the table we had him on by about ten inches.”

t was apparent from the start that Hendrix had probably arrived too late for the medical staff to save him. “When you are in casualty, one always tries very hard to resuscitate people. There’s always a hope. We worked very hard for about half an hour but there was no response at all. It really was an exercise in futility,” said Mr Bannister. “Somebody said to me ‘You know who that was?. That was Jimi Hendrix’ and, of course, I said, ‘Who’s Jimi Hendrix?’.”

Mr Wright’s description of what had happened to Hendrix “sounded plausible because of the volume of wine”, Mr Bannister said. What struck him most about the unusually tall patient was that he was drenched in alcohol. “The amount of wine that was over him was just extraordinary. Not only was it saturated right through his hair and shirt but his lungs and stomach were absolutely full of wine. I have never seen so much wine. We had a sucker that you put down into his trachea, the entrance to his lungs and to the whole of the back of his throat.

We kept sucking him out and it kept surging and surging. He had already vomited up masses of red wine and I would have thought there was half a bottle of wine in his hair. He had really drowned in a massive amount of red wine.” According to the conventional account, Hendrix — one of the most charismatic guitarists in the history of rock — died at the age of 27 from choking on vomit after a drugs overdose. Wright, now 65, has stirred conspiracy theorists and Hendrix obsessives around the world with his alternative account of the guitarist’s demise. He claims that Jeffery confessed the murder to him a month before he died in an aircraft collision.

Dannemann, an ice-skating instructor-turned-drug addict, who many people suspected knew more about Hendrix’s death than she let on, committed suicide in 1996.

Wright contends that Jeffery, his old boss, was “a dangerous man” who had been in the Secret Service and flaunted his connections with organized crime. By 1970 he was heavily in debt and had fallen out with his star act who may have been looking to change management and whose behavior had become increasingly erratic as his drug taking reached uncontrolled levels.

In response Jeffery allegedly took out a $2 million life insurance policy on the guitarist. According to Wright, Jeffery told him that Hendrix was “worth more to him dead than alive”.

Mr Bannister returned to Australia in 1972 and practised as an orthopaedic surgeon until 1992, when he was deregistered in New South Wales for fraudulent conduct.

I love the british press....even a slow news day turn out tabloidish pablum. And check out the last sentence....this doc was deregistered for quackiness and wackiness. Quack is wack.

Hendrix died in 1970..he drank too much wine to wash down his barbituates. The strum stops there. If this story was true...wouldn't there be scratches or signs of a struggle? Or did Jimi just lay there while wine and pills were forced down his gullet? How does a sleeping man swallow? Allrighty then......now that we've cleared that up..