Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix: Four Years That Rewired the Guitar

The whole recorded career fits inside four years. The Jimi Hendrix Experience played its first date in Évreux, France, in October 1966; Hendrix was dead in a London flat by September 1970, aged twenty-seven. In between came three studio albums, one live album, and a wholesale redefinition of what an electric guitar was for. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's flat verdict is that he was "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music."

A Broom, Then a Five-Dollar Guitar

He was born Johnny Allen Hendrix in Seattle on 27 November 1942, while his father Al was away at the war. His parents' marriage did not survive; they divorced on 17 December 1951, and much of his childhood was spent shuttled among relatives. At nine he was carrying a broom around the house and pretending it was a guitar. In 1957 he found a ukulele with one string on it. In the middle of 1958, at fifteen, he bought his first acoustic guitar for five dollars and taught himself by ear, playing along to Elvis Presley records.

He never learned to read music. Everything he ever played, he worked out with his hands.

The 101st Airborne, Then the Chitlin' Circuit

Caught twice riding in stolen cars, he enlisted in the army on 31 May 1961 and was posted to the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, earning his Screaming Eagles patch on 11 January 1962. He was gone by 29 June that year, discharged under general honourable conditions after his platoon sergeant filed the most useful line in his service record: "He has no interest whatsoever in the Army."

What followed was the hardest apprenticeship in American music. He worked the chitlin' circuit for three years as a hired hand — behind Wilson Pickett, Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, Ike & Tina Turner and Jackie Wilson. He won the Apollo Theater amateur contest in February 1964. He joined the Isley Brothers' I.B. Specials and recorded "Testify" that March, then toured with Little Richard's Upsetters from mid-1964 to July 1965. By late 1965 he was with Curtis Knight and the Squires, and had signed away rights to Sue Records and to Ed Chalpin's PPX — a contract that would come back to bite him.

Linda Keith Makes a Phone Call

In May 1966 Linda Keith, Keith Richards's girlfriend, watched him play at the Cheetah Club in New York and told Chas Chandler about him. Chandler, the Animals' bassist, was looking for something to manage. He brought Hendrix to London on 24 September 1966 and signed him to a management and production deal with himself and Michael Jeffery.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience formed in October with Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums, and played Évreux on the 13th. "Hey Joe" was cut on 23 October and reached number six in Britain. "Purple Haze" got to three, "The Wind Cries Mary" to six.

Eighteen Months, Three Albums

*Are You Experienced* appeared on 12 May 1967 and stalled at number two in Britain, kept off the top only by *Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band*. *Axis: Bold as Love* followed on 1 December 1967, hitting five in Britain and three in America, and carried the first use of stereo phasing on a record.

Then, on 25 October 1968, the double album *Electric Ladyland* — number one in the United States for two weeks, and credited "produced and directed by Jimi Hendrix." It contains his best-selling single, a cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower," which reached twenty in America and five in Britain. Noe Goldwasser of *Guitar World* called the album "Hendrix's masterpiece"; Peter Doggett wrote in 2004 that it "remains a prime contender for the status of rock's greatest album."

Monterey and Woodstock

The two festival performances did as much as the records. At Monterey on 18 June 1967, playing to America for the first time, he closed by setting his guitar on fire; Ed Caraeff's photograph of him kneeling over the flames is among the most reproduced images in rock.

At Woodstock in August 1969, headlining, he played "The Star-Spangled Banner" using feedback, distortion and sustain to imitate rockets and bombs — a wordless anti-war argument delivered entirely through amplifier artifacts. In 2011 the editors of *Guitar World* voted it the greatest performance of all time. When the MC announced the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Hendrix corrected him from the stage: call it Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, or Band of Gypsys.

Band of Gypsys

That name became a record. Cornered by the Chalpin settlement into delivering an album to another label, Hendrix formed a trio with the bassist Billy Cox and the drummer Buddy Miles and taped four nights at the Fillmore East across New Year 1969–70. Released by Capitol in April 1970, it went top ten on both sides of the Atlantic. Its long centrepiece, "Machine Gun," is what the musicologist Andy Aledort called "the premiere example of his unparalleled genius as a rock guitarist." By 1969 Hendrix was the highest-paid rock musician in the world.

Why Jimi Is Called a Genius

It is worth being exact about what kind of claim this is. Hendrix was not a theorist, could not read music, and left no body of written thought. The genius attributed to him is a genius of craft and of conception — of the hands, and of an idea about what an instrument is.

The craft half is straightforward: extraordinary physical fluency, a vast dynamic range, and improvisation of a kind rock had not previously accommodated. The Hall of Fame calls him a "Psychedelic Blues Visionary" who expanded the blues "by incorporating feedback, extended improvisation, and a distinctively fluid technique."

The conceptual half is the more important, and it is a genuine invention. Before Hendrix, feedback and fuzz were faults — the noises an overdriven amplifier made when you got it wrong. He reclassified them as timbres. *Rolling Stone*'s formulation is precise: he "pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source" and "turned those effects into a controlled, fluid vocabulary." Wah-wah, Octavia, Uni-Vibe, distortion, sustain — he treated the whole signal chain as the instrument, not the wood and strings at the end of it. He carried the same thinking into the studio, pioneering panning, backmasking and phasing, and taking the production credit on *Electric Ladyland* himself. David Fricke's 1992 induction essay names it well: Hendrix "devoted his life to the creation of a new guitar language of explosive, orchestral possibility and raw, soulful eloquence." Neil Young, who inducted him, put it as a musician would: "When you play guitar, you can play – or you can transcend. Jimi showed me that."

The counter-case is mostly about proportion. The stagecraft — the burning guitar, the theatrical destruction — was showbiz learned on the chitlin' circuit, and it has always risked eclipsing the musical argument underneath. The catalogue he actually authorized is small: three studio albums and a live one. And he died at twenty-seven, before anyone could find out whether the language he invented had a second act. What we call genius here is four years of unrepeatable execution, not a completed body of work.

Legacy

He died in London on 18 September 1970 of barbiturate-related asphyxia, one of the founding members of rock's grimmest club. The Jimi Hendrix Experience entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. Every distorted guitar recorded since is, in some measure, working inside a vocabulary he assembled between 1966 and 1970 — funk, glam and metal all took from him directly. The broom, in the end, turned out to be the only piece of formal training he needed.

Achievements

• UK Music Hall of Fame
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1992
• Instruments: guitar, kazoo and glockenspiel
• Genres: psychedelic rock, hard rock and acid rock