Biography of Jimi Hendrix

Psychedelic Jimi Hendrix in a book on the blues? Damn right. Jimi Hendrix's place in the annals of blues history is assured and agreed upon by everyone except the handful of ultra-purists who believe the music went straight to hell the minute Muddy Waters decided to pick up that electric guitar. That Hendrix took that instrument--and the music -- to places no one could have dreamt of is indisputable. He may have been a "rock star," but the parallels between his story and the legendary bluesmen that came before him are just too numerous and downright eerie to ignore; the years as a teenager being too inexperienced to be allowed to sit in with the older players (Robert Johnson before he got good), the years as a young gun sideman behind bigger name stars (Little Walter with Muddy Waters), and finally, a chance to go out on his own and start melding blues with other sources -- in this case, a modern R&B songwriting of the Curtis Mayfield flavor, free form jazz a la Bird, Coltrane and Sun Ra, all of it imbued with lots of amplification and wedded to a heavier beat -- to create an amalgam of his own that allowed a new strain of blues to begin (Muddy Waters goes electric and invents the modern day Chicago blues band). And don't forget the legends that reinforce the other parallels, either; the famous on stage guitar battles with other fretboard hot shots (B.B. vs. Albert King, Freddie King vs. Magic Sam), the eye popping tricks he could perform with the instrument that made him the showman of his time (Charley Patton, T-Bone Walker, Guitar Slim), the competitive nature he exhibited onstage that drove him to outdo anyone else on the bill, even if he set his guitar on fire to do it (Howlin' Wolf), the other worldly visions he brought to his art and his passing at an early age from too much life in the fast lane, robbing the music world of a great resource (Robert Johnson and several other entries in this book). If all of this had happened in Chicago in 1954, they'd be selling plastic figurines of him through the merchandising end of the House of Blues and you'd being seeing his face adorning a United States postage stamp, pompadour haircut and all. Of course it didn't happen that way at all; Hendrix's four year run of fame on an international level happened in the late '60s with the psychedelicized world of rock & roll as its backdrop instead of South Side Chicago. But if the conventional wisdom of blues as party music gives us the standardized caricature of a bunch of folks dancing their tails off to Charley Patton while being good and drunk on moonshine whiskey, then step up the scenario a good 40 years and you have Jimi as maker of its mightiest dope music, playing to an audience of young Whites and Blacks -- together in harmony and matching headbands -- swaying in stoned ecstasy. Again, those parallels -- even the ones that are stretching it -- just keep piling up and keep getting harder to ignore. But one fact's irrefutable; Jimi Hendrix definitely belongs in this book, because in every form of musical experimentation he delved into, he always played the blues. Granted, "Purple Haze" doesn't sound much like B.B. King doing "Sweet Little Angel," but B.B. doing that number doesn't sound much like Robert Johnson doing "Hellhound On My Trail," either. Once again, the blues reinvents itself to keep pace with a changing world. Jimi was born James Marshall Hendrix in Seattle, Washington in 1942 and was playing left handed guitar by the time he was 11. Anxious to plug into Seattle's burgeoning rock & roll scene, Jimi would bring his guitar and amp down to the Spanish Castle (alluded to in both "Spanish Castle Magic" and "Castles Made of Sand"), waiting for a chance to be called up onstage for a chance to sit in with anyone willing to give the teenager a chance. The chance seldom came. After dropping out of high school, he joined the Army, serving in the 101st Airborne. One of his Division buddies was bass player Billy Cox, who would later play in Jimi's Band of Gypsys. According to Cox, Hendrix dug a wide range of music but especially blues (he loved Elmore James), always listening to records and soaking up influences like a sponge. Upon his discharge in 1961, Jimi became a fixture on the chitlin circuit, lending his guitar talents to various R&B road units, including Little Richard and the Isley Brothers. He recorded and toured with both acts in the mid-'60s, but found himself on a short leash creatively in each situation. When a similar tour with Curtis Knight and the Squires ended in New York City in 1965, he began to put down roots and get ideas. He found the city to his liking, even if he was scuffling for work most of the time. Les Paul tells the story about the night he walked into a club and heard Jimi playing, vowing to come back later to hear more of this phenomenal unknown guitarist. After tending to his other business appointments, Les headed back to the club only to find that Hendrix had been fired for playing too loud. The next time he saw Jimi's face was on the cover of his debut album, Are You Experienced?. Hendrix drifted into the Greenwich Village scene and soon got a regular gig working behind John Hammond, Jr., who was putting his first band together in the wake of Paul Butterfield's success, whose band featured the red hot guitar picking of Michael Bloomfield. With both combos playing across the street from each other, Bloomfield decided to use his break time one night to check out this new guitarist that everyone was buzzing about. Hendrix certainly knew who Bloomfield was -- then the hottest new guitar player in American music -- and proceeded to systematically destroy his ego with a double whammy display of fretboard wizardry and showmanship that left the guitarist in a state of shock. As he later related in an interview, "every sound I ever heard him get on record later I heard that night, right in that room, and he was doing it all with nothing more than a Stratocaster, a Twin and extreme volume." This much talent couldn't go unnoticed for very long and when Chas Chandler -- bass player for the Animals, now easing into production and management -- caught the act, he enticed Hendrix to drop everything and come to England. The guitarist acquiesced -- legend has it because Chandler promised to introduce him to Eric Clapton -- and by late 1966 had formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience, playing the hip London club circuit and putting English guitar heroes through the same kind of head cutting shock therapy that Bloomfield had been through stateside. The hits in the U.K. charts that came the following year quickly made Hendrix the newest star in the British rock sweepstakes, while the release of his debut album spread the word that here was a guitarist doing a lot more than just recycling B.B. King licks through a big amplifier. His American breakthrough came with a legendary set at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and after wasting his time on an ill-conceived tour opening for the Monkees (some claim it was purposely set up to enhance his reputation as an underground act), he quickly became the king of the festival and ballroom circuit, spreading his musical message around the globe, as hot as the news to come. At the absolute top of his game, his influence extended back into the Black community to R&B singer-producers like Sly Stone and George Clinton looking for a piece of the action to White youngsters just picking up the guitar like Stevie Ray Vaughan. Stories concerning his state of mind and future musical plans at the time of his accidental death in 1970 are as numerous and fanciful as the ones that proliferate about Robert Johnson. One of them has him turning his back on rock stardom and planning on becoming a serious bluesman. But whether it's truth or fanciful myth, those of us who've been mesmerized hearing him play "Red House," "Voodoo Chile," and "Little Wing" already know that no such career reassessments were ever necessary; Jimi Hendrix was always a serious bluesman. ~ Cub Koda