Jimi Hendrix

Anyone asking who was Jimi Hendrix has to start in Seattle, Washington, where he was born on November 27, 1942, and named Johnny Allen Hendrix. His father, James Allen (Al) Hendrix, was serving in the United States Army at the time and renamed the boy James Marshall Hendrix in 1946 after returning from the war ^[1]. The family was poor and unsettled. His mother, Lucille Jeter, married Al when she was a teenager, and the couple separated when Jimi was young; she died in 1958, when he was fifteen ^[2].

Music entered his life early and informally. He was drawn to the blues records his father owned, listening to artists such as Muddy Waters and B.B. King, and he practiced first on a one-stringed ukulele found among a neighbor's discarded belongings. Al Hendrix bought him a cheap acoustic guitar around 1958, and an electric instrument the following year ^[1]. Because he was naturally left-handed, he restrung right-handed guitars upside down, a habit that shaped his distinctive technique for the rest of his life.

Hendrix played in Seattle bands as a teenager, including a group called the Rocking Kings, learning songs by ear since he never read music. After trouble with the law over riding in stolen cars, he enlisted in the United States Army in 1961 and trained as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He was discharged in 1962, and he immediately turned to music full time ^[2].

After leaving the Army, Hendrix worked the so-called chitlin' circuit of Black clubs and theaters across the American South and Midwest. With his Army friend, bassist Billy Cox, he formed the King Kasuals, then spent several years as a sideman for touring acts. Between 1962 and 1966 he backed performers including the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, and Curtis Knight, work that gave him a deep grounding in rhythm and blues showmanship but little recognition of his own ^[1].

By 1966 he was leading a small band under the name Jimmy James and the Blue Flames in Greenwich Village clubs in New York. There, Linda Keith, then the girlfriend of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, saw him play and brought him to the attention of Chas Chandler, the bassist of the Animals, who was moving into management. Chandler persuaded Hendrix to come to London in September 1966, suggested the spelling Jimi, and paired him with two English musicians: bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell. The trio became the Jimi Hendrix Experience ^[3].

London took to him almost immediately. Established guitarists, among them Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, came to watch him play, and the Experience's first single, Hey Joe, reached the upper part of the UK charts in early 1967. Two more singles, Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary, followed within months, each written by Hendrix himself ^[3]. In less than a year he had gone from an anonymous sideman to one of the most talked-about musicians in Britain.

Any list of Jimi Hendrix achievements begins with three studio albums recorded in an astonishingly short span. Are You Experienced, released in 1967, combined blues phrasing with feedback, distortion, and studio experimentation in a way no earlier record had. It was followed the same year by Axis: Bold as Love, and in 1968 by the double album Electric Ladyland, which reached number one on the American Billboard chart and included his celebrated reworking of Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower ^[4]. Dylan himself later performed the song in arrangements closer to Hendrix's version than to his own original.

His live performances became landmarks of the era. At the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, his American breakthrough, he finished the set by kneeling over his guitar and setting it alight, an image captured on film and reproduced endlessly since ^[5]. At Woodstock in August 1969, playing to a dwindling morning crowd with a hastily assembled band, he performed a solo interpretation of The Star-Spangled Banner, using feedback and the whammy bar to evoke sirens and explosions. Many listeners heard it as a commentary on the Vietnam War, and it remains one of the most analyzed performances in rock history ^[4].

Beyond individual records, Hendrix changed what the electric guitar could do. He treated amplifier feedback, controlled distortion, and effects such as the wah-wah pedal and the Octavia as musical vocabulary rather than noise, and his studio work with engineer Eddie Kramer pushed multitrack recording techniques forward ^[6]. In 1968 the readers of several music publications voted him top performer of the year, and in 1970 he opened Electric Lady Studios in New York, a recording facility built to his own specifications that still operates today ^[6].

Hendrix never married and had no children whose paternity he formally acknowledged during his lifetime, although paternity claims were pursued in courts after his death, and a Swedish court recognized James Henrik Daniel Sundquist as his son in 1975 in proceedings concerning his estate ^[2]. His longest documented relationships included Kathy Etchingham, with whom he lived in London during his rise to fame, and Monika Dannemann, who was with him at the end of his life.

Offstage, people who knew him often described a quiet, soft-spoken man far removed from his flamboyant stage persona. He was restless and worked constantly, recording hundreds of hours of studio material that would surface on posthumous releases for decades ^[1]. He also faced pressures common to stars of the period: relentless touring schedules, disputes with managers and record companies over contracts signed early in his career, and a 1969 arrest in Toronto on drug possession charges, of which he was acquitted at trial ^[2].

The London flat he shared with Etchingham at 23 Brook Street, next door to the house where the composer George Frideric Handel lived in the eighteenth century, has since been preserved and opened to the public as part of the Handel and Hendrix museum ^[7].

The Experience broke up in mid 1969 after Noel Redding's departure. For Woodstock, Hendrix assembled a larger group he called Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, and at the end of that year he formed the Band of Gypsys with Billy Cox on bass and Buddy Miles on drums. Their concerts at the Fillmore East in New York on New Year's Eve 1969 and New Year's Day 1970 produced a live album, Band of Gypsys, released in 1970, notable for the twelve-minute anti-war piece Machine Gun ^[4].

Through 1970 Hendrix toured with Cox and the returning Mitch Mitchell while recording material for a planned double album, often referred to by the working title First Rays of the New Rising Sun. He played his final full concert at the Isle of Fehmarn festival in Germany on September 6, 1970 ^[3].

On September 18, 1970, Hendrix was found unresponsive at the Samarkand Hotel in Notting Hill and was taken to St Mary Abbot's Hospital in Kensington, London, where he was pronounced dead. He was 27 years old. The inquest recorded that he had aspirated after taking barbiturate sleeping tablets, and the coroner returned an open verdict ^[2]. He was buried at Greenwood Memorial Park in Renton, Washington, near Seattle, where a granite memorial was later erected ^[1].

More than half a century after his death, the essential Jimi Hendrix facts remain remarkable: a mainstream recording career of roughly four years, three studio albums released in his lifetime, and an influence on electric guitar playing that no later musician has escaped. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and Rolling Stone magazine has repeatedly placed him first on its list of the greatest guitarists of all time ^[8].

His posthumous catalogue grew far beyond what he released while alive. After years of contested management of his recordings, his father Al Hendrix won control of the estate in 1995 and established Experience Hendrix, the family company that has since overseen archival releases such as First Rays of the New Rising Sun (1997) and numerous live and studio collections ^[6]. Seattle honors him with a statue on Broadway in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, and the city's Museum of Pop Culture, founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, grew in part from Allen's collection of Hendrix artifacts ^[5].

Any serious Jimi Hendrix biography ends with his musical afterlife. Funk, hard rock, heavy metal, and hip hop producers have all drawn on his recordings, and players from Prince to Stevie Ray Vaughan to John Frusciante have acknowledged their debt to him. The techniques he normalized, from feedback as melody to the studio as an instrument in itself, are now so widespread that it is easy to forget one musician did so much to establish them within a single decade ^[8].