Jimi Hendrix
The history of Black Americans and rock music is a long, strange, twisted, and exhilarating affair. The Jimi Hendrix story screams right from the heart of it. Since the 1860s, Blacks have been inventing forms of popular entertainment that have transformed the country’s mass-entertainment marketplace. Our folk have also unceremoniously discarded those forms from cultural relevance at the drop of a hat—especially whenever the latest thing starts to look like it’s in need of preservation as a remnant of those “never were” good old days. When it comes to music, Black America generally tends not to be impressed by the good old days. This is why in our music, as the trumpeter Lester Bowie once noted, the tradition is innovation, not nostalgia.
That observation applies equally to our mid-nineteenth-century marching band and church hymnal composers and those who came later to establish minstrelsy, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, swing jazz, bebop, blues, rock ’n’ roll, soul and funk, house music, and hip-hop. The upside of this is that Black American music remains fluid, dynamic, transformational, and vital to each new generation, rather than static and reactionary. The downside is that, from one generation to the next, African Americans know less about our tradition of innovative musical geniuses and their contributions to world culture than plenty folk do elsewhere.
Jimi Hendrix looms large among those lapses in our collective consciousness. His absence from a general celebration of African American heroes is both absurd and symptomatic of a more widespread problem: cultural and political amnesia.
Some of that can be attributed to the fact that until recently, Black Americans have been largely a people running from a horrible past toward a more promising future. In the twentieth century our nomadic musicians always led the way on these fugitive pilgrimages, opening up spaces, internal and external, where Blacks could feel a little bit freer to be themselves (and really, to just be) in public.
Jimi Hendrix, over his too-brief twenty-seven-year life span, proved to be one of our most agile and adept freedom fighters. Decades after his rumor-shrouded demise Hendrix is still one of the most misunderstood and misapprehended of the group. We’re here to rectify the situation.
James Marshall Hendrix was born on November 27, 1942, to Al and Lucille Hendrix in Seattle, Washington. His parents had met on the dance floor at a local jitterbug contest. They soon became a prizewinning dance couple in the area. In March 1942 Al joined the Navy, leaving his pregnant wife in Seattle.
She delivered their firstborn while Al was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia. At that moment Al Hendrix sat in an Alabama stockade for allegedly thinking about going AWOL to see his spanking new son.
When Al returned home he found that his young son had been shuttled between various family members and neighbors. Lucille was a hard-drinking, party-hardy woman who would die of liver disease when young James was sixteen. She was too impoverished and too enthralled by the local nightlife to care for the child herself. James had been named Johnny at birth, after, in all probability, an area hustler with whom Lucille ran. This was a sore point for Al and helped drive a wedge between the troubled couple that eventually ended their marriage.
Al began his life as a single father after the birth of Leon, his second son with Lucille. Although he was a highly skilled factory laborer (machinist and electrician) and jack-of-all-trades, the senior Hendrix was not always able to care for both of his sons. Segregation and racism kept many men of color out of union trades for which they were well qualified. Al was forced to give Leon up to foster care when the boy was eight years old.
Young James loved his mother dearly but saw her only intermittently, at first because Al forbade it; later mostly because Lucille was just not trying to be around. One can’t help but be struck by how much young James took after his parents—Al’s work ethic and extraordinary mechanical aptitude, Lucille’s impulsive spirit and romantic wanderlust, her concomitant love for adventure and stimulation. That he and his mother would both die from liquor-related complications sadly caps off the narrative of Jimi’s familial family legacy—a tale beyond ironic and tragic.
Al and young James lived in virtual poverty until James’s teens. About then is when his father’s work as a landscaper became more lucrative. Friends and relatives remember the boy who would become Jimi Hendrix as a shy, dreamy-eyed stutterer-albeit a quite proud and dignified one. He might come to school wearing shoes with holes in them, but, by all accounts, he still carried himself with a self-possession that bordered on aristocratic.
Young James grew up listening to his father’s favorite music—the modern, electric guitar—driven blues of Big Bill Broonzy, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, and Muddy Waters. Around age twelve he started emulating the plucking of those idiomatic giants on the household broom. When his father asked him why so many bristles from the broom were turning up on the floor, James offered up a shamefaced explanation. Al was so moved that he went to a local pawnshop and bought himself a saxophone and a real guitar for his son so they could learn to play together. As Al put it in Joe Boyd’s A Film about Jimi Hendrix, “I let the sax go after a while because I figured he was going to do more with the guitar than I was going to do with the sax."
According to the multimedia artist Xenobia Bailey, a Seattle-born friend of the Hendrix family, the community in which she and the Hendrix clan grew up was one where music held a cherished place in many a Black household. Some homes even had basement areas that were set up as clubs, with bars and miniature bandstands where visiting musicians like Ray Charles and Ike Turner would routinely drop in for after-hours jam sessions. There was also a unique multigenre and multigenerational aspect to the music Seattle’s Black folk made back then. Bailey says she hasn’t heard the hybrid anywhere else since—a freewheeling blend of jazz, blues, church music, and rock ’n’ roll that made for a heady and seamless hallucinatory hybrid. Contrary to popular belief, the fabled esoteric eclecticism of Jimi Hendrix probably has more roots in what he heard in Seattle than in the swinging London scene he got airlifted into near the end of 1966. Bailey also has a perspective on Hendrix himselfshe shockingly doesn’t believe that he was such a great guitar playerleast not when compared with others in their community who she unwaveringly claims were far more accomplished. Bailey says those better guitarists ended up in jail or dead by the mid-1960s. Meaning her argument is beyond dispute by anyone not from that time and place. When Bailey describes those players’ gifts, however, their attributes are not far removed from those valorized by Hendrix devotees: the ability to make the instrument “talk” (or emulate conversational speech and full control of the instrument at a high volume). Bailey also recalls that Hendrix and these other embryonic guitar masters often got together after school to loudly jam for hours in a house she’d pass by on her way home. Hendrix’s brilliant flowering was many road-dog years and crosscountry R&B shows in the making, but Bailey’s anecdotes make one realize how much nurturing Hendrix was given by the musical proclivities of Seattle’s postwar Black community.
One reason Hendrix didn’t wind up in prison, or worse, is that right after graduating from high school he got arrested for “joyriding.” That one brush with jail pushed him to join the U.S. Army and train as a paratrooper. While stationed at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, Hendrix successfully completed twenty-seven jumps and earned a Screaming Eagle patch—a goal that had been on his mind even before he enlisted. He saw a homeboy with one emblazoned on his Army jacket. Jimi Hendrix entering the Army to pursue a Screaming Eagle is prophetic, comical. But Hendrix also later remarked that some of the inspiration for his trademark booming and whooshing guitar noises came from the sounds he heard the wind and jet engines make when he jumped out of planes. Proof once again, that there’s no experience, as the saying goes, that’s ever lost on a true artist.
While performing in bands with other soldiers, Hendrix met an affable bassist named Billy Cox, who would later rejoin him after the Jimi Hendrix Experience disbanded and the Band of Gypsys trio project arose with drummer Buddy Miles—another R&B road dog Hendrix had also met earlier.
Hendrix was honorably discharged from the Army in 1961 and wasted no time in finding work on the legendary chitlin circuit, the nationwide network of nightclubs and theaters throughout segregated Jim Crow America. Top R&B entertainers were often bundled together on package tours that might feature as many as ten different acts a night. The circuit got its name from the fact that the only place in many cities for a Black person to eat and sleep in those days was someone’s home or a boarding house, places where the fare was universally soul food—pork chops, mac and cheese, cabbage, collard greens, and that staple of the antebellum plantation diet, chitterlings, or more popularly chitlins: hog intestines, the offal of the pig. Not even the most fervent connoisseur of chitlins would deny how much they stink while cooking, and that foul odor may have led some sure wit among the performers to liken their working environment to the stench of fried pig guts.
It was on this circuit that Hendrix would really learn and perfect his craft while observing a host of legends—Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard, Ike and Tina Turner, Sam and Dave, Little Richard, and the Isley Brothers.
Little Richard, born Richard Penniman in Macon, Georgia, described himself at the 1987 Grammys as “the architect of rock ’n’ roll"—after declaring himself the winner of The Best Rock Artist award. His pianopounding, highly dramatic flair, and pancake—makeup transvestism left an indelible mark on later performers such as James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, KISS, and Hendrix. Richard once remembered Hendrix as someone who “didn’t mind looking freaky, just like I don’t mind.” Richard also proclaimed that when “Hendrix got to whanging and wailing on that guitar, making it go woo woo, it made my big toe stand up in my boot."
Hendrix’s own reflections on his time with Richard emphasized less about Richard’s bigfoot love and admiration for him than about the memory of being fired in New York for insubordination. It was at that point, in 1964, that he decided to settle in Gotham for a bit to try jumpstarting a career and finally play the music he heard in his head. To hustle some coin he’d still go back out on the circuit as needed. By this time he’d developed a reputation as one of the best guitar players on the soul music scene.
Hendrix’s personal tastes remained partial to the 1950s blues favored by his dad and to the even older acoustic-blues musicians of the 1920s and 1930s such as Robert Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Son House, and Bukka White. Black popular music was undergoing a seismic shift by 1964. Partially caused by the advent of Motown Records out of Detroit, partially by the British Invasion wherein highly and unabashedly derivative Black-influenced rock from the UK hit the U.S. charts hard: primarily thanks to the Beatles, the Kinks, the Who, the Hollies, and the Rolling Stones.
Hendrix’s greatest influence came not from across the Atlantic pond but from the Minnesota-born singer-songwriter born Robert Zimmerman then known to the world as Bob Dylan. Coming out of the protest tradition of folk music pioneered by figures such as Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie, Dylan transformed everyone’s idea of how poetic and polemical a pop song’s lyrics could be with every successive album he made for Columbia Records. Dylan had been signed to the label by the legendary A&R man and producer John Hammond—a man also instrumental in bringing Count Basie and Billie Holiday to Columbia. (Hammond might have brought Robert Johnson there too if the musician hadn’t died before Hammond could track him down. A dozen years later, in 1972, Hammond signed a skinny young Dylan-inspired singer-songwriter guy out of Ashcroft, New Jersey, by the name of Bruce Springsteen. A decade on he closed out his prescient career by bringing into the label’s fold a very Hendrix-inspired Texas guitarist named Stevie Ray Vaughan.)
Hammond’s son John Jr. is a guitarist and singer who, like Hendrix, was a faithful student of older blues songs. In 1965 Hammond Jr. invited Hendrix to play with him at Cafe Wha? in New York’s West Village, right down the street from Folk City, where Jimi’s idol, Dylan, often performed. In late 1965 Hendrix shuttled between Harlem and the Village, slowly weaning himself off the circuit. He was then surfing from rooming house to rooming house with his girlfriend Fayne Pridgon, a former flame of Sam Cooke’s. He sustained himself as best he could on meager earnings from downtown club dates and the occasional tour with Ike Turner or the Isley Brothers. Hendrix also did many lowbudget recording sessions with various little-known and now forgotten R&B and pop hopefuls. He even did a session with the buxom blonde actress Jayne Mansfield.
Hendrix put together his own band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, finally giving himself the space to do things that were frowned upon during his circuit sideman gigs—wearing loud clothes, playing an even louder guitar, and doing old—school blues guitar showman tricks like playing the guitar with his teeth and behind his back while suggestively humping it like a hyperfrenetic sex machine.
Hendrix was not enamored of his own voice, but he did sing blues of his own invention as well as a few cherished Bob Dylan songs—most notably “Like a Rolling Stone.” On the Village club strip, Hendrix was occasionally seen by various record company folk hoping to discover the next Dylan, but he went pretty much unnoticed during his Jimmy James days—even though he had already developed much of the look, performing style, and sound that would make him a rock god just two years later.
His luck finally turned in 1966, when a young English fashion model, Linda Keith, then involved with Rolling Stone Keith Richards, wandered into the club and was floored by Hendrix’s dynamism. Keith brought a well-known record executive down to hear Jimi, but the man, Keith recalls, spent most of the night waiting to be impressed. The Stones also dropped by to give Hendrix the once-over. Possibly because of how alluring Linda Keith found him, they too sat through his set less than dazzled. Keith then had the inspiration to approach the man who would become Hendrix’s first manager and producer, rock bassist Chas Chandler, who’d recently exited the moderately successful British Invasion group Eric Burdon and the Animals. Chandler saw immediately why Keith had been raving about Hendrix; after much discussion and hand-holding, he convinced a suspicious and nearly penniless Hendrix to accompany him to England, where they would begin the strategic process of propelling him to stardom. It’s said that what clinched the deal for Hendrix wasn’t the promise of fame and fortune but Chandler’s agreement to introduce him to Eric Clapton.
The checkered history of African American artists exiling themselves to Europe to escape racism and secure respect for their gifts stretches back to the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth via Josephine Baker and a host of bebop-era musicians including Kenny Clark, Dexter Gordon, and Johnny Griffin. Hendrix, however, was the first Black American artist to be taken to Europe by an Englishman who fulfilled his express purpose in making his managerial client as big as any of his own countrymen.
Speculation has always run rampant among Hendrix fans as to whether Jimi would have ever gotten a break in the United States like the one Chandler gave him in the United Kingdom. Count this reporter among those who’d vote a definite No. The reason for this is simple: Hendrix did not possess a Black church-approved singing voice to impress the major R&B producers of the day such as Berry Gordy or Jerry Wexler. Among the movers and shakers in that world, the standard for Black male vocal prowess leaned toward Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Otis Redding, and David Ruffin.
No one in America was likely to sign or market a flashy Black blues and soul guitarist whose own lyric-writing and vocal inspiration was Bob Dylan. And certainly not one who wanted to create his own genre of music out of everything he’d assimilated to date.
By contrast, the UK’s pop-music culture was more open-minded, having observed the massive global impact of its own artists tinkering with blues, rock, and soul verities.
In Lennon-McCartney, Pete Townsend, Jagger, and Clapton, Hendrix found simpatico creatives who well knew the recorded roots of American music. Like Hendrix, they too were intent on wringing something novel, clever, and brutally modernist out of their madcap distortions and maniacal appropriations of that tradition—not far in effect from the derangement of European painting that the Cubists had been driven to attempt after seeing African masks and sculpture. (The market value that got attached to the Brits’ productions after esthetically embracing Mama Africa also runs parallel with visual modernism.)
Hendrix instantly benefited from the UK music scene being smaller and more centralized than the vast fifty-state-wide sea-to-shining-sea expanse of America’s music consumption base. Even if Hendrix had landed a major deal in the States, he would have had to concoct threeminute songs for the Top 20 in the hope they might one day get him on AM radio or network television and raise his profile on the soul circuit. In London, Hendrix was able to sidestep the circumscribed tried-and-true African American way to showbiz success. Hendrix skipped over Motown’s civil rights-era integrationist dreams to join the emergent hippie counterculture and become a movement bellwether before the hippies even knew their own brand name.
The UK provided Hendrix with a lower bar for duty-free entry and overnight overseas success—one that required no big-name managers or labels and little in the way of artistic compromise. For the first time in his professional life he could play music he’d composed in whatever way he chose, all without worrying about alienating the U.S. music industry’s gatekeepers—label heads, pop radio programmers, the savvy and merciless patrons of the Afrocentric chitlin circuit.
The UK was not free of racism, but it didn’t share the United States’ history of racially motivated lynching for miscegenation. So London was also a place where Hendrix, who’d attended an ethnically mixed high school in Seattle, suffered no violent repercussions for being seen nightly in the company of pink-skinned women. (After mega-success in America, Hendrix’s open dalliances with white women would be overlooked by even the ordinarily racist white youths who flocked to his concerts. The jazz trumpeter Lewis “Flip” Barnes, who grew up in integration-resistant Virginia Beach, Virginia, recalls seeing Hendrix there in 1968 and being amazed that “white boys who called me nigger every day at school were drooling over Hendrix and acting like they’d have freely given Jimi their girlfriends if he’d wanted them.")
Because Chas Chandler had already been attached to a successful British group, he was able to bring his American client to the attention of swinging London’s most prominent tastemakers—the musicians, models, fashion designers, gallery artists, record producers, filmmakers, and ad agency creatives—who told everybody else what was hot, hip, and happening on the metamorphic scene. Much of what Chandler devised to promote Hendrix could be viewed as mere publicity stunts, but they were all extremely ingenious, well calculated, and, in a couple of instances, even diabolically effective. One of the more outstanding schemes unfolded on a night soon after Hendrix’s arrival, when Chandler took him to a club featuring Eric Clapton’s then-new band, Cream. At the time, Clapton was considered by musical London to be the greatest guitarist in the world. Members of Clapton’s fervent fan base became infamous for scrawling “Clapton Is God” on public walls and bathroom stalls all over the city.
That Chandler brought Hendrix to see Clapton, whom Jimi much admired for his work with Cream and two previous groups, the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, was one thing. That he asked Clapton if his young and colorful Black guitar-slinging friend could sit in on Clapton’s gig was practically unheard of. Who would be cheeky enough to suggest such a thing? The setup was well played and the fix was in. Having heard and seen Hendrix in New York, Chandler knew that while Clapton and Jimi were both monster guitarists, Hendrix was the more eye-popping and extravagant showman and wouldn’t be shy about deploying every circuit trick in the book—especially if it meant daring to wrest away devotion from a local deity. Years later, Clapton would recount how Hendrix not only proceeded to pull out the stops but also played “Killing Floor” by Chicago blues avatar Howlin’ Wolf—a song which Clapton confessed he lacked the technique to even to attempt at the time. When Clapton tells the story he seems recovered enough to give himself a chuckle while still a bit transfixed in Hendrix’s fast-approaching high beams.
When the time came for Hendrix to put another band together, Chandler and Hendrix decided on a young jazz-mad drummer named Mitch Mitchell (who worshiped drummer Tony Williams and Elvin Jones) and Noel Redding, a rock guitarist whom Hendrix liked for his frizzy orange Afro and who reluctantly became the bold new band’s bassist. With only three songs in their repertoire, Chandler debuted the Jimi Hendrix Experience, on January 24, 1967, at the prestigious Marquee club and packed the joint with the UK rock scene’s elite. Within weeks the group had an album deal and was booked in London’s most advanced new studio, where a heady and accomplished young engineer, Eddie Kramer, worked. Kramer was a recent departee from the Beatles’ famous studio haunt, Abbey Road. There he’d apprenticed with the Fab Four’s eminent producer George Martin. Hendrix also soon made the acquaintance of an electronics genius, Roger Mayer, who gave Jimi first dibs on various gizmos he’d recently invented to alter the guitar’s stage sound with the tap of a boot. The sounds of these devices remain the stock “stomp box” arsenal of rock guitarists everywhere for dialing in distortion, wavy watery tones, and pitch-shifting, bass-boosting presence (the Octave Divider). The wah-wah pedal would come later from another inventor. Hendrix also got access to some of the first larger-than-life-size amplifiers that had just rolled off the assembly line, right as the volume level of rock music begin to edge skyward.
Are You Experienced?, the 1967 debut album Hendrix and his newborn band made with these supersonic devices, dazzles and bewilders many accomplished guitarists today, even those who know every riff, lick, and chord progression by heart. The virtuosity, creativity, vision, and brash brinksmanship Hendrix unleashes on the album’s ten cuts still blasts forth from the speakers with earth-shattering intent. On one song Hendrix even intones a proclamation announcing the martial plan behind his weaponized sound. “To your world I must put an end/May you never hear surf music again.” Six of the most frequently covered Hendrix songs ever written come off the original UK version of the album—“Purple Haze,” “Foxy Lady,” “The Wind Cries Mary,” “Manic Depression,” “Third Stone from the Sun,” and the slow blues “Red House” (which was dropped from the American release) and Billy Roberts’s “Hey Joe."
Thirty-three years later, Are You Experienced? still sounds like something an avant-garde troupe of extraterrestrial soul men left behind before heading back to Alpha Centauri. The passage of time has not made it a period piece because nothing else in the period even vaguely resembles it in design or feeling—not even the Beatles’ alien, experimental, and epochal Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In the history of the electric guitar, Hendrix is the Before and After picture. Partly, this derives from his peerless knowledge of every major guitarist and guitar style in blues, jazz, folk, pop, and rock ’n’ roll that had preceded him as well as his working familiarity with classical and flamenco guitar, South Asian sitar, and Arabic music. Hendrix freely references all of that information on the album and in ways that show he’s already figured out how to make them sound like personal inventions. Ones that matter most because he’s using them in his own inimitable fashion. Hendrix and Kramer took advantage of a then newfangled recording process called multitracking, which had been developed in the BBC’s sound engineering labs in the 1950s for use in radio theater. This technology gave musicians and producers more flexibility in the recording and postproduction process, allowing someone as fecund as Hendrix to lace the same song with different freaky-deke guitar parts.
By 1968, studio technology had evolved so rapidly that four-tracks had become yesterday’s news. Hendrix’s next album, Axis: Bold as Love, was made a year later with an eight-track machine. Electric Ladyland, his third (and for many, his masterpiece), produced in between tours throughout 1968, used sixteen-track boards. Some of Jimi’s songs have as many as fourteen layered guitar parts on the same cut. (Check out his 1968 studio version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” where the guitars are made to sound like a one hundred-piece symphonic string section.) Are You Experienced? still mystifies and amazes today because it remains difficult to fathom how a trio made that convulsive and roaring a sound with such limited technology. The term “psychedelic” had not been in use long when the album came out, but the record’s mind-altering powers were quickly recognized to be the equal of any drug.
The association of Hendrix with drug use rivals his musical reputation in some sectors of mainstream society. To this day he is widely thought to have died of a heroin overdose, like his compadres Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. His autopsy found no evidence he’d ever used heroin, however. Hendrix, in fact, died from asphyxiating on his own vomit after taking an accidental overdose of sleeping pills in combination with a suspiciously high volume of red wine. (A second inquest in 1990 into the puzzling circumstances of his death led some to conclude he may even have been murdered Various parties around Jimi at the time suspected his business manager, Michael Jeffery, of being the culprit and believe an accomplice may have been Jimi’s last known girlfriend, the Swedish painter and professional figure skater Monika Dannemann.
Neither is alive today: Jeffery died in a mysterious plane crash off the coast of Majorca in 1973; Dannemann committed suicide the day after revelations from the second inquest made front-page news in London.) When Hendrix died, his bank account contained only a few hundred
thousand dollars. The lone payout Jeffery gave Jimi’s father amounted to $250,000. After Jeffery’s demise, the Hendrix family, led by Al Hendrix and friend/executor Alan Douglas, hired famed civil rights attorney Leo Branton to investigate the money trail and determine exactly how much loot Jimi’s four-year superstar career had actually garnered. Branton discovered that Jeffery and his associates had tax-sheltered millions of dollars in an offshore Bahamian island firm to which neither U.S. nor British tax agencies—nor Hendrix himself—could gain access. Hendrix had often been paid in cash for his expenses; when larger expenditures came up, like studio costs or housing, Jeffery’s office took care of payments. Hendrix had become more focused on the business end of things as he got older, wiser, and more successful, but the frenzied pace of his professional life distracted him.
Hendrix discovered that LSD was a common cocktail chaser in swinging London, and all the literature one can find on its effects suggests that it produced spectacular hallucinations and extended the range of sensory perceptions to an extremely acute degree. Some people claimed to have visions of God while tripping on acid; the guitarist Carlos Santana, of the famed San Francisco-based band that bears his name, believes that the LSD trips experienced by musicians such as Hendrix, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and others played no small part in provoking the wide-screen dream quality of the period’s best music. Over the course of the three studio albums released during his lifetime, Hendrix would provide more than a few fans with the sound track for their own trips; for the rest of us the music stands as our closest sonic replica of an LSD excursion.
The close-knit, collaborative relationship Hendrix had with his chief engineer, Eddie Kramer, accounts for some of this. Hendrix heard exotic and esoteric sonorities in his mind; he and Kramer found ways to re-create them in the studio: the torrential winds he’d experienced when making parachute jumps; the tidal rush and lulling murmur of oceans, above and beneath the water; all those other transdimensional aural manifestations Hendrix created which we have no reference for other than his music. With only guitar, heart, and hands, Hendrix was capable of producing noises that evoked all manner of things—global catastrophes, human trauma and animal anguish, lust, howling winds, raging infernos, cracking lightning storms, peals of thunder, supernovas, black holes, dark matter, superstring brain waves. When you see clips of Hendrix pulling off all these effects live and in real time, you realize just how in command of his instrument, amps, and stomp boxes he was, even while pushing them to extremes their builders could scarcely have imagined. Hendrix was musically aware enough to know about the experiments with tape manipulation that European composers such as Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Ferrari had been doing since the 1950s to generate strange tones and resonances. From his time in Greenwich Village he knew about the high-pitched bestial growls and psychotic screams that jazz saxophonists like John Gilmore and Marshall Allen in Sun Ra’s Arkestra, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and John Coltrane were bursting forth with in the 1960s as well. It had always been Jimi’s ambition to have his guitar lines flow with the smooth sustain and controlled vibrato he heard in the work of saxophonists and violinists. His fleet fingerwork and penchant for high volume accomplished some of this; the new technologies he found in London for extending the guitar’s tonal palette and dynamic rage accelerated the process.
On top of all this, Hendrix was also one of the most charismatic, visceral, and physically graceful showmen who ever graced the twentiethcentury stage—as choreographically spellbinding and well coordinated in his way as James Brown and Michael Jackson were in theirs—the main difference being that his guitar became like a third leg or even a hyperkinetic dance partner. Hendrix and his guitar are so scarily aligned that every note is perfectly in sync with a facial or bodily expression that matches the rhythm and emotion of what he’s dropping on his ax. Was his sound the embodiment of his spirit, or was his body the source of his sound? Like his disciples in George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic, Hendrix wanted to free your mind but expected your ass to groove and follow along too.
Jimi’s voice was not the infinite resource that his guitar was, but in the studio he created a sensuous half-sung-half-spoken persona for himself that was capable of great subtlety, supple phrasing, seductive humor, and dramatic sensuality. He was in the tradition of all the other great bluesmen who preceded him in being a natural, fanciful, and witty storyteller.
Hendrix loved the English language as much as any other adroit lyricist of the tongue. He was a fan of science-fiction literature and film-in particular stories about apocalyptic alien invasions. At least three major songs in his canon—“Third Stone from the Sun,” “Up from the Skies” and “1983 … (a Merman I Should Turn to Be)” tell of the human population’s obliteration by space invaders or disasters.
The oblique title of his second album, Axis: Bold as Love, metaphorically conjoins Armageddon and a romance gone awry. Mystical references and allusions turn up in his songs from southern Black American hoodoo folklore-a source common to blues poetry since before Robert Johnson went down to the crossroads. Both versions of “Voodoo Chile” on Electric Ladyland draw on this lineage. Other lyrics freely cross-reference the Bible, astronomy, medieval literature, and Native American myths—the last likely derived from the Cherokee roots of his maternal family. Death and mortality make frequent appearances, as do startling premonitions of his own death. Hendrix accepted death as a side pocket of life and may not have expected a long life for himself. He openly mourned his mother throughout his adult years, dedicating two of his most beautiful ballads to her, “The Wind Cries Mary” and “Angel,” which was composed after Lucille visited him in a dream.
The Experience became a ridiculously busy and much-exploited touring machine during 1968, not least because the group was among the first in rock to pull down as much as $50,000 to $75,000 for one-hour gigs. For three men to do this with only a couple of roadies in tow made for quite a box-office haul. By comparison, James Brown was, by 1967, making as much but doing three times as many gigs, and paying much of it out to a twenty-two-person band and personal attendant entourage.
Chandler broke Hendrix in the UK and Europe shortly after Are You Experienced? by putting the group on the road, opening for acts whose audiences were unprepared for Jimi’s flamboyance, volume, and highly sexual suggestive stage antics—most notably the teen-friendly, studio TV-manufactured band the Monkees. Chandler engineered those appearances just for the scandal he knew would ensue; he also knew it would get the group thrown off the tour. (It took only one gig.) Breaking the Experience in the United States represented a whole other challenge. Opportunity arrived with news of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in California—the Summer of Love, as it became known—the year that Americans became aware that there were drug-taking, unmarried, and unwashed long-haired hippies in their midst—ones given to public cohabitation in the Bay Area’s notorious Haight-Ashbury district. The Monterey festival took place right in this countercultural epicenter. The event had been concocted by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and other West Coast music insiders to present a showcase for what the promoter saw as the best and most serious rock music of the day. On its titular board of governors was Beatle Paul McCartney, who told them no festival with those aspirations could possibly be legit if the Jimi Hendrix Experience wasn’t on the lineup.
The roster for the festival eventually included the Who, Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the MGs, Lou Rawls, and Otis Redding, who was to make a career-expansive appearance (one that Redding barely enjoyed, as he perished when his plane went down in a Nevada lake only a few months later). Hendrix went on second to last, at which point he and the band blazed through a set of originals and covers that included B. B. King’s “Rock Me Baby,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” and the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” which morphed into a frenzied feedback soundclash that saw Hendrix grind his guitar up against his man-size Marshall amp so vehemently a roadie had to bodily bolster it from behind. Jimi performed somersaults while soloing; for his finale he set a hand-painted Stratocaster guitar aflame with a lighter, then pounded it on the stage floor until it shattered to bits, howling in its destruction like an animal tortured, gutted, and slaughtered by a madman. The documentary director D. A. Pennebaker’s handheld film of the performance captures every spectacular nuance in graphic, close-up detail. After Monterey, the Jimi Hendrix Experience would hardly ever be off the road in America or Europe for much of the next two years. In 1967 alone the group played 255 shows.
The making-it-up-as-they-went-along aspect of the fledgling rock business led to a transatlantic helter-skelter schedule of one-nighters; the group might play Cleveland one evening, Belgium the next, then Los Angeles the night after that. The schedule induced permanent jet lag, which inevitably took a toll on Hendrix, Redding, and Mitchell’s camaraderie and creativity. The group that had stunned London with its ad hoc but ready-made synergy in 1967 sounded more than a little ragged around the edges, sometimes even dispirited, by late 1968. That Hendrix managed to complete the double album Electric Ladyland despite touring and band strife is a testament to his ambition, will, and skill at delivering magical results. The studio was a refuge for him. It was where he felt most liberated and focused as an artist. Eddie Kramer recalls Hendrix spending hours recording a single riff over and over until its tracking met his exacting standards. The Allen twins, Arthur and Allen (later known as the Aleems, Tunde and Taharqa), became Hendrix’s studio background singers and were already among his best friends in New York—they’d known Hendrix since his days scuffling for R&B gigs in Harlem bars, and recall how his work ethic preceded his celebrity. They also tell of seeing him hunched over a small record player in their shared apartment. working well into the night practicing songs by John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Muddy Waters until the chords, fingering, and timing became second nature.
As Hendrix’s ambitions as a songwriter, composer, and player grew, so too did his dissatisfaction with his bandmates, Redding especially. A fair amount of Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland features Hendrix on bass. The story goes that while he played, Redding was allegedly across the road downing pints in a pub and sulking over the interminable studio time and over being told what to play. Hendrix also began to disdain his wild-man stage image and the expectation that he’d have to bump and grind or burn his ax at every show. He longed to be taken seriously as a musician and to play outside the box of the heavy-rock trio. He told an interviewer, “We did those things mostly because it was fun. They just came out of us, but the music was still the main thing. Then what happened was the crowd started to want those things more than the music."
By midsummer 1969 the Experience was a wrap. Hendrix retreated to a house in Woodstock, New York, to jam with compadres old and new. Finding a replacement for Redding proved incredibly simple: A call went out to Jimi’s Army and chitlin circuit pal Billy Cox, who was then off the road for a spell and living in Kentucky. Over the next year, with many drastic changes and events to come, Cox would become Hendrix’s most stalwart musical companion and pal.
Hendrix explained his new agenda to the press: “I plan to use different people at my sessions from now on. Their names aren’t important. You wouldn’t know them anyway. It really bugs me that there are so many starving musicians who are twice as good as the big names. I want to try and do something about that. Really I am just an actor—the only difference between me and those cats in Hollywood is that I write my own scripts. I consider myself first and foremost a musician. A couple of years ago all I wanted was to be heard. Now I’m trying to figure out the wisest way to be heard."
Besides Cox, he brought two percussionists to the upstate house, veteran Juma Sultan and young buck Jerry Velez, as well as a second guitarist, Larry Lee, who in the early 1970s would become Al Green’s lead guitarist and music director. It was with this core unit that Hendrix spent most of the summer of 1969. Mitch Mitchell was initially invited to drum but is said to have felt alienated by all the Black brotherly love surrounding Jimi at that point. Whether Mitchell realized that Hendrix may have spent the previous three years overcoming his own alienation in the very white-dominated rock world, the historical record does not say. When Mitchell did come around, it was during the two weeks before the now legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair scheduled for three days in August.
The Woodstock band Hendrix dubbed “Gypsy Sun and Rainbows” was scheduled to perform during the closing sunrise event of the festival; by that time much of the near-million-strong audience from the previous two days and nights had scattered out of sheer exhaustion. For the faithful, though, Hendrix and the band played for almost two hours straight. They performed songs old and new, then unleashed an a cappella interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that has since become the default sound-track anthem for every PBS and History Channel documentary about Vietnam and 1960s-era political upheaval.
Surprisingly, Hendrix was not always against the war in Vietnam.
Like many working-class and middle-class African Americans of the time who weren’t members of the Black Panthers or the Black Arts Movement (that is, like most of us), he was pro-American and even jingoistic when the subject was communism. One friend, Eric Burdon, recalls Jimi as having a “right-wing attitude” when he first got to England. In 1967 Hendrix told a Dutch paper, “The Americans are fighting in Vietnam for a completely free world. As soon as they move out, they [the Vietnamese] will be at the mercy of the communists. The yellow danger [China] should not be underestimated."
After Woodstock, Hendrix found himself at the mercy of the multimillion-dollar business that owned a fair piece of him. His manager, Michael Jeffery, once showed up at the upstate house with some Mafia-connected guy who put a bull’s-eye on a tree and shot point-blank rounds into it while Jeffery pressed Hendrix to do a gig at a Mafia-owned club. What Jeffery’s nudging and cajoling could not accomplish, the mob guy’s marksmanship did, and Jimi unhappily acquiesced.
Hendrix wanted to fire Jeffery but was too intimidated to do it on his own. He sought out alternatives, notably Alan Douglas, a producer who’d made records in the 1950s and 1960s with such jazz luminaries as Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, and Betty Carter. Douglas would later produce the Last Poets’ first recordings. Douglas tried to set Hendrix up for a session with Miles Davis and Tony Williams, but the word is that Miles balked, demanding $50,000 beforehand, and the session was canceled. Douglas was also unable to pull Jimi away from Jeffery; what might have happened when Jeffery’s contract was up at the end of 1970 remains a matter of speculation. In December. Hendrix began work on the very lyrical, driving, and
opulent music that would appear on the posthumously released albums The Cry of Love and Rainbow Bridge—originally intended by Hendrix to be a double album titled Gypsy, Sun & Rainbows. He also formed his one and only all-Black group, Band of Gypsys, with Billy Cox and Buddy Miles. Even forty years after Hendrix’s death, the sight of a completely African American trio of hard-rock musicians can be startling. Except for a brief window in the 1990s when the all-Black rock bands Living Colour, Fishbone, and Bad Brains each had contracts with Columbia Records and maximum MTV exposure, such a sight has been rare since Hendrix’s death. For Hendrix, though, the idea did not come about because of any long-suppressed cultural-nationalist tendencies. In the years of poverty in New York that had preceded his sojourn to England, he had signed album contracts with various low-level producers, hoping to jump-start a solo career. One of these deals resurfaced in 1969 and obliged Hendrix to give the contract owner, one Ed Chalpin, the right to profit from his next full-length album. Jeffery decided they would give Chalpin a live album of new material instead. Out of this end-run strategy the Band of Gypsys was born.
The concert album was culled from the four sets Band of Gypsys performed on New Year’s Eve 1969 at the Fillmore East in New York. It quickly became, upon release in June 1970, the first Hendrix album to viscerally connect with young Black people. The solid, muscular grooves laid down by Cox on bass and Miles on drums were the funkiest Hendrix had built on his post-chitlin circuit career. White rock critics tend to slag it off as a jam-happy throwaway. Yet for those Hendrix fans who also like funk in their rock ’n’ roll stew, the album remains a milestone. Although Mitchell would rejoin Hendrix soon after the Band of Gypsys fell apart-due as much to Jeffery’s interdiction as to, some say, that Buddy’s scat singing annoyed Jimi—the foundation Cox and Miles provided allowed Hendrix to lock into his band’s rhythmic powerhouse in ways Mitchell’s messier, jazzier style precluded. The result, heard on the original well-edited album and on later full concert CDs, shows how highly evolved Hendrix had become as an improvising guitarist. One whose extemporaneous mastery and blending of genres was as exploratory and relentlessly magical as the best jazz saxophonists of the day. deeply
Before Hendrix, the guitar had stunning but circumscribed roles in blues and R&B as a mostly accompanying instrument whose solo space was limited to a few bars here and there. Early 1950s rock ’n’ roll guitar pioneers Bo Diddley, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Chuck Berry, Ike Turner, and Elvis’s man Scotty Moore firmly established the guitar as a defining ingredient in the emergent genre. Yet until Hendrix came along, no one had shown how versatile and explosive and imaginative a single guitar player could be on one album or in one show. Pete Townsend of the Who credits Hendrix with making him take the guitar seriously. But what Hendrix really did was make the guitar and guitar players as prominent, necessary, and fashion-forward as lead singing in late twentieth-century popular music. Along with Sly Stone and James Brown, he also became a pacesetter for the younger Black (and some non-Black) musicians who redefined R&B and electric jazz in the 1970s—Santana; Earth, Wind & Fire; Rufus featuring Chaka Khan; the Isley Brothers; War; Mandrill—and Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea’s Return to Forever, and Weather Report too. One of Hendrix’s last concerts, the Isle of Wight Festival, also included a post-Bitches Brew Miles Davis band featuring two electric keyboards, electric bass, and an electrified horn of Davis’s—all the result of Miles’s decision to propel jazz into the high-voltage big-tent concert world of late sixties arena rock.
In September 1970 Hendrix spent his last time onstage jamming with members of War, just hours before he was found dead in his London apartment. The transplanted West Coast musicians were then backing up his old friend Eric Burdon, whose former bassist Chas Chandler had been Jimi’s UK-born savior from poverty and obscurity in America. The poignant torch-passing symmetry of those connections between the doomed Hendrix and his heir-apparent brothers in War now seems taken from some Aquarian-age variation on a Greek tragedy.