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Jimi Hendrix

"JOHNNY ALLEN HENDRIX/JAMES MARSHAW HENDRIX/JIMI HENDRIX" (27.11.42/18.09.70)

Jimi Hendrix was one of rock’s few true originals. He was one of the most innovative and influential rock guitarists of the late Sixties and perhaps the most important electric guitarist after Charlie Christian. His influence figures prominently in the playing style of such rock guitarists as Robin Tower, Vernon Reid (Living Colour), and Stevie Ray Vaughan. A left-bander who took a right-handed Fender Stratocaster and played it upside down, Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source -- forging a trail followed by several generations of experimental rock guitarists. Rockers before Hendrix had experimented with feedback and distortion, but he turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues he began with. But while he unleashed noise -- and such classic hard-rock rifts as "Purple Haze," "Foxy Lady," and "Crosstown Traffic" -- with uncanny mastery, Hendrix also created such tender ballads as "The Wind Cries Mary," the oft-covered "Little Wing," and "Angel" and haunting blues recordings such as "Red House" and "Voodoo Chile." And although Hendrix did not consider himself a good singer, his vocals were nearly as wide-ranging, intimate, and evocative as his guitar playing.

As a teenager, Hendrix taught himself to play guitar by listening to records by blues guitarists Muddy Waters and B. B. King and rockers such as Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran. He played in high school bands before enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1959. Discharged after parachuting injuries in 1961, Hendrix began working under the pseudonym Jimmy James as a pickup guitarist. By 1964, when he moved to New York City, he had played behind Sam Cooke, B. B. King, Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, Ike and Tina Turner, and Wilson Pickett. In New York he played the club circuit with King Curtis, the Isley Brothers, John Hammond Jr., and Curtis Knight.

In 1965 Hendrix formed his own band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, to play Greenwich Village coffeehouses. Chas Chandier of the Animals took him to London in the autumn of 1966 and arranged for the creation of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, with Englishmen Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums..

The Experience’s first single, "Hey Joe," reached #6 on the U.K. chart early in 1967, followed shortly by "Purple Haze" and their debut album. Hendrix fast became the rage of London’s pop society. Though word of the Hendrix phenomenon spread through the U.S., he was not seen in America (and no records were released) until June 1967, when, at Paul McCartney’s insistence, the Experience appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival. The performance, which Hendrix climaxed by burning his guitar, was filmed for Monterey Pop.

		Hendrix quickly became a superstar. Stories such as one reporting that the Experience was dropped from the bill of a Monkees tour at the insistence of the Daughters of the American Revolution became part of the Hendrix myth, but he considered himself a musician more than a star. Soon after the start of his second American tour, early in 1968, he renounced the extravagances of his stage act and simply performed his music. A hostile reception led him to conclude that his best music came out in the informal settings of studios and clubs, and he began construction of Electric Lady, his own studio in New York.

In the years since his death, the Hendrix legend has lived on through various media. Randi Hansen (who appeared in the video for Devo’s 1984 cover of "Are You Experienced?") became the best known of a bunch of full-time Hendrix impersonators, even re-forming the Band of Gypsys with bassist Tony Saunders and Buddy Miles -- who, briefly in the late Eighties, was replaced by Mitch Mitchell. Over a dozen books have been written about Hendrix, including tomes by both Redding and Mitchell; the most authoritative bin is generally considered to be David Henderson’s ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky.

And virtually every note Hendrix ever allowed to be recorded has been marketed on approximately 100 albums. Of these -- recordings dredged up from his years as a pickup guitarist, live concerts, and jam sessions, both bootleg and legitimate, even interviews and conversations -- most attention has been given to a series produced by Alan Douglas, who recorded over 1,000 hours of Hendrix alone at the Electric Lady studio in the last year of his life. With the consent of the Hendrix estate, Douglas edited the tapes, erased some tracks, and dubbed in others, with mixed results. Radio One collected energetic live-in-the-studio performances by Hendrix and the Experience recorded for British radio in 1967.

In 1990 the first of several Hendrix tribute albums, If Six Was Nine, was released, followed by Stone Free. In 1991 ex-Hendrix girlfriend Kathy Etchingham, along with Eric Burdon and Mitch Mitchell and his wife Dee, began prodding Scotland Yard to reopen an investigation into Hendrix’s death. England’s attorney general finally agreed to the request in 1993; in early 1994 Scotland Yard announced it had found no evidence to bother pursuing the case any further. In 1993 an audiovisual exhibit of Hendrix’s work called "Jimi Hendrix: On the Road Again" toured college campuses and art galleries in the U.S., to enthusiastic -- and predominately young -- audiences, and Paul Rodgers (Free, Bad Company, the Firm) released a Hendrix tribute album (The Hendrix Set, 1993) and appeared on an all-star tribute album called Stone Free, with Hendrix songs also covered by everyone from Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, the Pretenders, and Buddy Guy to the Cure, Belly, PM Dawn, Ice-T, and even classical violinist Nigel Kennedy.

		In 1994 24-year-old James Henrik Daniel Sundquist emerged from Sweden claiming to be the son Hendrix had sired with Eva Sundquist, during a 1969 Stockholm sojourn. Sundquist announced plans to legally challenge Hendrix’s father Al as sole heir to the Jimi Hendrix estate, estimated to be worth at least $30 million. In 1993, Al -- who in the mid-Seventies had begun signing away rights to portions of his son’s work to various international conglomerates -- claimed he’d been swindled and filed a federal lawsuit against those conglomerates, as well as various holding companies and lawyers connected to the estate. Interesting Links: Jimi Hendrix - Oficial Site Jimi Hendrix and MCA Records Send your comments to: coments@portaldorock.com.br

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