It’s been 40 years since Jimi Hendrix died in London and he would have turned 68 on November 27, 2010. His music continues to tour the world.
Jimi Hendrix would have turned 68 on November 27, 2010, and had he lived he would still be playing and still be the best. He played always on fire, he had the technique and the passion, the talent and that undefined thing, the ‘whatever it is’…the thing that makes you listen.
“You can leave if you want,” he told fans at Woodstock in 1967 after getting up to play at the end of the 3 day concert; it was pouring with rain. “We’re just jamming, that’s all.” Those who were left did not leave and he and the Band of Gypsys jammed. For the many who heard it only on the album and the film his Star Spangled Banner, Purple Haze and Woodstock Jam were the concert highlights.
Jimi Hendrix Experience – Poverty and Fragmented Family
He was born Johnny Allen Hendrix in Seattle in 1942. His father, Al, from Vancouver, was in the U.S. Army when Jimi entered the world. Upon Al’s return there was impoverishment and his Mom Lucille had a drinking problem. Jimi had half-siblings but they often spent time in foster care though Jimi, his Dad had changed Jimi’s name to James Marshall Hendrix, would stay in Vancouver with grandma instead.
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His mother died from drinking when Jimi was 15 years old and around that time he got his first guitar, an acoustic for 5 bucks. Jimi spent time mimicking guitar playing with brooms and Al thought he might as well try the real thing. Hendrix played left-handed with a right-handed guitar, didn’t re-string it, and it, along with his Fender Stratocaster, became a signature.
He listened to his Father’s Muddy Waters and B.B. King records and those bluesman were great teachers for a young player with interest in blues and R&B. His father said right from the start his son played hours every day.
Jimi Hendrix in New York and London
His first band was the Rocking Kings and played gigs for little or nothing. He didn’t talk so much and said it was because his father taught him to respect elders. “I couldn’t speak unless I was spoken to first by grownups, so I’ve always been very quiet.†His first electric was a Supro Ozark 1560 S and he wasn’t quiet when he played that.
He joined the army in 1961 where he met bassist Billy Cox, who he later played with. That was the most memorable thing about the army and he did not adapt well and was given a honorable discharge a year later. Soon he was touring for musicians like Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, Ike and Tina Turner and Sam Cooke. By 1965 he was in New York and when he met Chas Chandler, bass player from The Animals, Chandler talked him into going to London.
With Chandler’s connections he formed The Jimi Hendrix Experience with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell; he also met Eric Clapton and Keith Richards and soon recorded his first album. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website says that his May 1967 debut album called Are You Experienced? “…became one of the defining releases of the psychedelic movement, reaching #2 in the U.K. and remaining on the British charts for eight months.” It came out later in the year in the U.S. and stayed on the Billboard charts there for two years. Hendrix had arrived.
Jimi Hendrix: Three Studio Albums, One Live Album
His success was immediate and he toured Europe and North America. No one played, or looked, like Jimi; with his scarves, his headbands and colorful clothes he looked like a Brazilian pirate and with his passion and feedback-fueled solos his music was like a wall of sound that included blues, rock, R&B, jazz and free form. Whatever he felt in the moment.
He only put out four albums in his lifetime, three studio albums, Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), Electric Ladyland (1968) with the Jimi Hendrix Experience and a live album called Band of Gypsys. His defining moments came at Woodstock in August of 1969 and two years earlier at the Monterey Pop Festival, where his eight song set electrified the American music scene.
Hendrix Died at aged 27 in 1970
His last birthday alive was his 27th, the same age that Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin died at, Joplin only two weeks later, Morrison in 1971. Jimi died on September 18, 1970 in the London apartment of his girlfriend, Monika Dannemann, a German figure skater and painter. The circumstances are clouded but the official cause was sleeping pills and asphyxiating on his own vomit. Dannemann was under suspicion by Jimi’s friends, some said she did not call the ambulance for hours, but she denied it. She committed suicide in 1996.
Music of Sixties Legend Jimi Hendrix Still on Tour
There are today a series of tours called the Experience Hendrix Tours, managed by family members and begun by his late father, who died in 2002. The 2010 tour wrapped up earlier this month and featured Kenny Wayne Shepard, players from Los Lobos and Double Trouble, his former bassist Billy Cox and others. They’ll be another tour playing his music next year.
And on this day, his birthday there are tributes being paid to him, as there still are each year. There’s one at the B.B. King Blues Club and Grill in New York City and at the Triple Door Club in Seattle, at a club in Portland, there’s a long list of tribute nights for Jimi Hendrix on his 68th birthday.
Jimi was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Fender Hall of Fame in 2010 (it began only in 2007). He was posthumously awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and has been voted the best Electric Guitarist Ever by Rolling Stone Magazine, Guitar World and many other publications.
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