Jimi Hendrix 1967-1970

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INTRODUCTION page 6

7 CONTENTS ORIGINS page 12

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THE TURNING POINT page 24 STARDOM page 46

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THE WOMEN IN JIMI’S LIFE page 116

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THE END page 160

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THE GUITAR page 128

INTERVIEWS page 184

10-11 This excellent portrait immortalizing Hendrix was taken by Gered Mankowitz in 1967, when the great guitarist’s first album Are You Experienced had just been released.

When 1966 arrived, he celebrated his 23rd birthday, but the future didn’t look bright. He began playing with Joey Dee and The Starliters, and then with King Curtis. He recorded plenty of music, but nothing seemed to change. He came to the conclusion that it was time to leave Harlem and the African American music circuit. Music was changing, and Jimmy could feel it. Rock was becoming the dominant form of popular music, and the Beatles had just invaded the United States along with a host of other English rock bands. Bob Dylan arrived on the scene. Young people started rebelling against their parents and letting their hair grow long. The world was changing quickly, and this new world was the one Jimmy wanted to live in. He had already begun writing his own songs. He noticed that nothing he wrote sounded like the soul or blues he had to play in nightclubs to earn a living. Bob Dylan became a source of inspiration for Jimmy, and his songs began to sound more and more like hard rock.

The Beatles arrived.

YOUNGPEOPLECHANGED almost overnight, rebelling

against everything

Life plodded on. Hendrix played wherever he could and tried to meet new people, particularly young women. His penchant for one-night stands is of course well-documented. One important acquaintance was Linda Keith, a 20-year-old English model. She was the perfect example of a swinging London girl and happened to be the fiancée of Rolling Stones

guitarist Keith Richards. Hendrix met her at the Cheetah Club during his last performance with King Curtis and The Squires. Linda watched him and listened to him, became curious, and after the concert she and her English friends invited Jimmy back to their apartment. Here Hendrix had his first experience with LSD, which at the time was still legal.

30 Hendrix poses for a portrait. At this time he had just had his first forays into the psychedelic world and LSD, which remained important for him for the rest of his life.

38-39 The

Experience soon conquered the London public with its vibrant shows. Here they can be seen posing backstage at the

in

From

Their performance in Monterey, California was the Experience’s United States debut. Back at home, Hendrix still wasn’t well-known, as his band’s singles hadn’t sold nearly as well as they had in the UK. On the evening of June 18, a few hours before the show began, a decision still hadn’t been made on which band should play first:

The Who or The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix and Townshend both didn’t want to decide, so they flipped a coin. The Who won and got to perform first, ending their act by destroying the stage. Then it was Hendrix’s turn. In order not to be upstaged by the preceding band, the Experience gave an explosive performance of “Wild Thing,” after which Jimi set his guitar on fire. The act of destroying a guitar was nothing new. Just before the release of the album Are You Experienced, Hendrix’s trio played a series of concerts in movie theaters around the world alongside artists such as Englebert Humperdinck, the Walker Brothers, and Cat Stevens. Hendrix destroyed many guitars during this particular tour. “The smashing routine really began by accident,” Hendrix stated in an interview published in Starting at Zero . “I was playing in Copenhagen and I got pulled off stage. Everything was going great. I threw my guitar back onto the stage and

jumped back after it. When I picked it up, there was great crack down the middle. I just lost my temper and smashed the damn thing to pieces. The crowd went mad—you’d have thought I’d found the ‘lost chord’ or something. After that, whenever the press was about or I got that feeling, I just did the bit again. But it isn’t just for the show, and I can’t explain the feeling. It’s just like you want to let loose and do exactly what you want if your parents weren’t watching. I’m not really a violent man, but people got the impression I was because of the act. You do this destruction thing maybe three or four times and everybody thinks you do it all the time. We only do it when we feel like it. You feel really frustrated, the music gets louder and louder, and all of sudden—crash! bang!—and everything goes up in smoke. Some nights we can be really bad. If we smash something then, it’s because the instrument, which is something you dearly love, simply isn’t working that night. It’s not responding, so you want to kill it.”

Over the years, Pete Townshend had transformed gutiar destruction into art. Hendrix, drawing inspiration from the artistic works of Gustav Metzger, wanted to do something even more spectacular.

69 A poster for the film Monterey Pop, a 1968 documentary directed by DA Pennebaker about the first great festival in the history of rock. The poster is an homage to Hendrix’s famous guitar-burning.

80 Jimi

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Hendrix is known as one of the most expressvive guitarists to have ever picked up the instrument

82-83 Featured here is a classic image of Hendrix playing the guitar with his tongue, a trick he picked up early in his career, when he played in the venues making up the Chitlin’ Circuit in the Deep South.

HENDRIX WASN’T A POLITICAL ACTIVIST, BUT HE SUPPORTED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND SPOKE OUT AGAINST THE VIETNAM WAR

108 Jimi Hendrix during a concert on February 24, 1969, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The band ended its most recent European tour with two concerts on February 18 and February 24, the only occasions in which Hendrix played this famous venue.

THE INVENTIVENESS OF HENDRIX’S GUITAR CONTINUES TO INSPIRE BUDDING GUITARISTS

Hendrix never offered pure comfort or certainty. Instead, he gave listeners the ability to choose their own meanings and the permission to transform themselves. Without a doubt, Electric Ladyland represents the peak of his career as a musician. At last he had attained total independent creativity. Each song on the album was an experiment in itself, so it’s hard to say exactly where Hendrix would have taken his music had he lived longer. Would he have continued further into psychedelia, or would he have pared his tracks down and focused more on his solos? Whatever the possibilities, one thing is certain: his guitar would have been at the forefront of his musical development. He was constantly discovering new depths to reach with this incredibly rich instrument, and it’s interesting to think about where he would have taken his legendary guitar skills if he had made another album. Electric Ladyland was released in September of 1968.

Within a few weeks, it shot to number one on the US charts. Hendrix had conquered rock music. The foundation of the album was the inventiveness of his guitar playing. He presided over each track like a conductor over an orchestra. Hendrix’s use of distortion, echoes, delay, flangers, and a thousand other gadgets and devices modified the sound of his instrument in ways that didn’t feel gimmicky or shallow. He seemed to have an entire universe in his hands instead of six strings. Indeed, his intricate solo work always seemed to push the limits of what could be achieved on a guitar with a single pair of hands. But perfect technique was never an end in itself. If something in one of his songs sounded too clean or manufactured, Jimi would give it an edge with a new effect or a new swirl of notes. He is thus remembered as one of the guitar’s most inventive practicioners. And of course all of this is even more astounding given his humble beginnings. Hendrix seemed to embody the spirit of modernist painters like Pablo Picasso or Marc Chagall in that he combined traditional techniques with a bold new vision. In 1967, he put aside his usual approach to the guitar and began playing as though he were a curious extraterrestrial.

137 A photograph from Jimi Hendrix’s last concert, which was held on September 6, 1970 on the island of Fehmarn in Germany. Hendrix died only a few days later.

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JIMI HELPED TRANSFORM

THE GUITAR INTO A SYMBOL OF YOUTH CULTURE

Because of this, it was only natural that he should accept an invitation extended to him by concert promoter Michael Lang, whom Hendrix had met the year before, at the Miami Pop Festival in Miami, Florida, to participate in the Woodstock Music and Art Fair set for August 15–18, 1969. Hendrix accepted, and his manager, Michael Jeffery, had only one condition—that Hendrix be the last to perform. The organizers expected an audience of 100,000, but over 500,000 young people showed up to the event, and the festival went down in history as the largest, most joyful musical gathering ever to take place. Because of delays, a lack of proper infrastructure and facilities, and heavy rain, Hendrix went onstage early in the morning on the concert’s fourth day. By then, most of the crowd had already left. At 8:30 a.m., Hendrix went onstage and stated that he was tired of The Experience and that the larger band behind him would now be called Gypsy Sun and Rainbows. This was the beginning of one of the most memorable concerts of his career, and certainly one of the longest. The band played sixteen

THE WOODSTOCK GENERATION TRANSFORMED HENDRIX INTO A REVOLUTIONARY HERO

songs and an amazing rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner,” which later became part of history thanks to Michael Wadleigh’s famous documentary about the Woodstock Festival. Hendrix’s interpretation was a veritable explosion of sounds—howls, groans, whistles, screams, shouts, blows, bangs, knocks, squeaks, scrapes and rumbles—an incredible version of the American national anthem that also featured the sound of bombs exploding (a reference to the Vietnam War). Even though no lyrics were sung, Hendrix’s version of the national anthem became an important pacificist song. This not only helped put Hendrix’s indelible stamp on the Woodstock Festival, it also became one of the defining moments of the 60s, which were about to end. “We washed and drank / in God’s tears of joy / And for once. . . and for everyone. . . / The truth was not a mystery,” wrote Hendrix in a poem about the event.

166 Woodstock Music & Art Fair, held in Bethel, New York, in August of 1969. Behind Hendrix, bassist Billy Cox can be seen wearing a turban.