The story of Jimi Hendrix

A Seattle childhood

Jimi Hendrix was born in Seattle on the twenty seventh of November 1942, and at first he was not called Jimi at all. His mother Lucille named him Johnny Allen Hendrix. His father Al had been drafted into the army three days after the wedding, and when the baby arrived, Al was stationed in Alabama. His commanding officer refused him leave and locked him in the stockade for two months so he could not slip away to see his son. Al did not meet the boy until late 1945, at the Berkeley home of a family friend who had been looking after him and had even tried to adopt him. In 1946 his parents renamed him James Marshall Hendrix, after Al and Al's late brother Leon Marshall.[1] [2] [3]

Home life was hard. Al struggled to find steady work, and both parents drank and fought, sometimes violently. The young boy would hide in a closet to get away from it. The family moved between cheap hotels and apartments around Seattle, and his younger brother Leon, born in 1948, drifted in and out of foster care. Three more children, Joseph, Kathy and Pamela, were given up to foster care and adoption. He was a shy and sensitive child, and years later he confided to a girlfriend that he had been sexually abused by a man in uniform. His parents divorced in December 1951, when he was nine, and Al was given custody of him and Leon. Stays with his grandmother in Vancouver were a rare escape.[1]

In the mid 1950s he carried a broom around Horace Mann Elementary School and strummed it like a guitar. A school social worker even wrote asking for funds to buy him a real one, warning that going without might do him psychological harm. The request failed, and Al refused too. Then in 1957, while helping his father clear rubbish from an old woman's house, he found a ukulele with a single string. She let him keep it, and he picked out Elvis songs by ear. On the second of February 1958 his mother died. Lucille had developed cirrhosis of the liver, and she died when her spleen ruptured. She was thirty three. Al would not take the boys to the funeral. He gave them shots of whiskey instead and told them that was how men dealt with loss.[1]

That summer, at fifteen, he finally got an acoustic guitar for five dollars. He practised for hours every day, learning from records by Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson, and the first tune he mastered was the theme from the television show Peter Gunn. His first band, the Velvetones, could barely hear him over the others, so in 1959 Al relented and bought him a white Supro Ozark electric guitar. At his very first gig, in a hall at Seattle's Temple De Hirsch, the band fired him between sets for showing off. He moved on to a group called the Rocking Kings. He also attended Garfield High School, but he never graduated.[1]

Paratrooper and sideman

Before he turned nineteen, Seattle police had twice caught him riding in stolen cars. Given the choice of prison or the army, he enlisted on the thirty first of May 1961 and was sent to the hundred and first Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Within weeks he was writing home begging for his guitar, a red Silvertone Danelectro on which he had hand painted the name of his girlfriend, Betty Jean. Al sent it. The guitar became an obsession that pulled him away from his duties, and other soldiers taunted him and roughed him up over it. At least once they hid it until he begged to have it back. In his letters home, army life was nothing but training and harassment.[1]

In November 1961 a fellow soldier named Billy Cox walked past a service club at the base and heard guitar playing inside. He later described the sound as a cross between John Lee Hooker and Beethoven. Cox borrowed a bass, the two jammed, and soon they were playing base clubs at weekends. Hendrix earned the Screaming Eagles paratrooper patch in January 1962, but his superiors were losing patience. They reported that he slept on duty and missed bed checks, and his platoon sergeant wrote that he had no interest whatsoever in the army and should be let go as soon as possible. On the twenty ninth of June 1962 he was given a general discharge under honorable conditions.[1] [2] [3]

Just after leaving the army, he walked into a jazz club in Clarksville, Tennessee, for one drink, stayed, and came out with sixteen dollars left of the four hundred he had saved. Alcohol would later become a real problem in his life. When Cox was discharged that September, the pair formed a band called the King Kasuals and moved to Nashville's Jefferson Street, the heart of the city's black music scene. There Hendrix picked up the trick of playing guitar with his teeth, after seeing another guitarist in the band do it. He later joked that down there you played with your teeth or you got shot. For two years he worked the network of black venues across the South known as the Chitlin' Circuit.[1] [2]

He backed a string of soul and blues stars, among them Wilson Pickett, Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, Ike and Tina Turner and Jackie Wilson, but he hated following bandleaders' rules. In January 1964 he moved to Harlem and checked into the Hotel Theresa. There he met Lithofayne Pridgon, known as Faye, who became his girlfriend and gave him shelter and encouragement. In February he won first prize in the amateur contest at the Apollo Theater. Soon Ronnie Isley gave him an audition, and he joined the Isley Brothers' backing band. In March 1964 he played on their two part single Testify. It failed to chart, but he was finally on record.[1]

Little Richard, Curtis Knight and Jimmy James

By late 1964 he was tired of playing the same Isley Brothers set every night, so he joined Little Richard's touring band, the Upsetters. In February 1965, in Los Angeles, he played on his only single with Richard, a Don Covay song called I Don't Know What You Got, But It's Got Me. That July he made his first television appearance, backing a duo on a Nashville show called Night Train, which is the earliest known footage of him performing. Richard and Hendrix clashed constantly over lateness, clothes and stage antics, and Hendrix complained that he was owed weeks of pay. In July 1965 Richard's brother Robert fired him, though Hendrix told his father that he had quit.[1] [2]

On the twenty seventh of July 1965 he signed his first recording contract, with Juggy Murray at Sue Records. Then he joined a New York rhythm and blues band, Curtis Knight and the Squires, after meeting Knight in a hotel lobby. Through Knight he met a producer named Ed Chalpin, and on the fifteenth of October 1965, despite the Sue deal, he signed a three year contract with Chalpin's company PPX, reportedly for one dollar. He soon forgot about it. That piece of paper would follow him for the rest of his life, and it would tie up his early recordings in court for decades after his death.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1966 he moved to Greenwich Village, where the music scene was looser and more mixed. He landed a residency at the Cafe Wha on MacDougal Street and in June formed his own group, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. One member was a teenage guitarist who would later find fame with the band Spirit under the name Randy California. In the Village, Hendrix worked up early versions of what became Red House and Third Stone from the Sun, and the seed of Little Wing. He also began playing Hey Joe in a slow arrangement he had picked up from a Tim Rose record on a jukebox. It was a song that would change his life.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The break came through a woman. In May 1966 Linda Keith, a model and the girlfriend of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, saw him playing with Curtis Knight at the Cheetah Club and was mesmerised. She championed him to the Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham and to the producer Seymour Stein, but both passed. Then she steered Chas Chandler, the bassist of the Animals, who wanted to become a manager, to see him. Chandler was sure that the song Hey Joe could be a hit for the right artist, and by chance it was one of the first songs Hendrix played for him. In late September 1966 Chandler flew him to London and signed him to a deal with himself and the Animals' manager, Michael Jeffery.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

London takes notice

On his first night in London he jammed at a club called the Scotch of St James and met Kathy Etchingham, a twenty year old DJ and hairdresser. She would be his girlfriend for about two and a half years. Chandler set about building a band around him. Noel Redding, a guitarist from Kent who had come to audition for the Animals, agreed to switch to bass, on condition that Hendrix advanced his train fare, and his permed hair is said to have helped win him the job. The drummer Mitch Mitchell, just out of Georgie Fame's band, was picked over Aynsley Dunbar on the toss of a coin. Chandler also persuaded Jimmy to spell his name Jimi.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the first of October 1966 Chandler took him to see Cream at the London Polytechnic, and Hendrix asked to sit in. He tore through Howlin' Wolf's Killing Floor at a furious pace, and Eric Clapton walked off the stage mid song. Clapton later said his life was never the same again. The Experience played their first show on the thirteenth of October in Evreux, France, supporting Johnny Hallyday. In Munich that November, fans pulled Hendrix off the stage, and in the scramble he smashed his guitar for the first time. The crowd thought it was part of the act, and Chandler decided it would stay in the act. Back in London, a showcase at the Bag O'Nails drew John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend and Jeff Beck.[1] [2]

Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers of the Who, signed the Experience to their new label, Track Records. Hey Joe, backed with Hendrix's first original for the band, Stone Free, came out on the sixteenth of December 1966 and climbed to number six in Britain. Purple Haze followed in March 1967 and reached number three, and The Wind Cries Mary hit number six in May. On the thirty first of March 1967, at the London Astoria, Chandler and Hendrix were hunting for a stunt that could top the Who's instrument smashing. The journalist Keith Altham joked that it was a pity he could not set fire to his guitar. A roadie was sent out for lighter fluid, and that night Hendrix set his guitar ablaze.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The debut album, Are You Experienced, was recorded at De Lane Lea and then Olympic Studios, where the engineer Eddie Kramer became a vital partner. It came out in Britain on the twelfth of May 1967, spent thirty three weeks on the chart and stalled at number two, kept off the top by the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hendrix answered in style. On the fourth of June, just three days after Sgt. Pepper was released, he opened a show at London's Saville Theatre with his own version of its title track, with Paul McCartney and George Harrison in the audience. McCartney later called it one of the great honours of his career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Part of the new sound came from gadgets. An electronics engineer named Roger Mayer showed him an octave doubling pedal called the Octavia, which Jimmy Page had turned down as too far out. Hendrix used it on the solo of Purple Haze, and Mayer became his sound adviser. Mitch Mitchell had once worked in Jim Marshall's drum shop, and he introduced Hendrix to Marshall, whose hundred watt amplifiers Hendrix ran flat out. Turning every knob to maximum became known as the Hendrix setting. Not all the attention was kind. After the burning guitar stunt, parts of the London press labelled him the Black Elvis and the Wild Man of Borneo.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Monterey and Axis

In America, Hey Joe went nowhere. What changed that was Paul McCartney, who told the organisers of the Monterey Pop Festival that the event would be incomplete without Hendrix, and reportedly joined its board only on condition that the Experience were booked. On the eighteenth of June 1967 Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones introduced him as the most exciting performer he had ever heard. Hendrix opened with Killing Floor, played Hey Joe, Like a Rolling Stone and Wild Thing, then knelt, set his guitar alight and threw the pieces into the crowd. A seventeen year old named Ed Caraeff, down to his last frames of film, took one of the most famous photographs in rock. D.A. Pennebaker's cameras caught it too.[1] [2]

Suddenly he was hot property at home. At Bill Graham's Fillmore in San Francisco the Experience outplayed Jefferson Airplane and by the fifth night had replaced them at the top of the bill. Then came a strange booking. The Monkees, who were fans, asked for the Experience as the support act on their first American tour. Their young audience wanted the Monkees and nothing else, and after six shows the Experience left. Chandler later said he had set the whole thing up for publicity. Hendrix took something gentler from that summer. He said the happy mood at Monterey, with everybody flying and even the police relaxed, was the seed of his ballad Little Wing.[1] [2]

The second album, Axis: Bold as Love, pushed the studio further. Its opening track played with feedback and sounds circling the listener in stereo, and the closing title track contained the first recorded use of stereo phasing. Then disaster struck. Hendrix left the master tape of side one on the back seat of a London taxi. With the deadline looming, he, Chandler and Kramer remixed most of the side in one overnight session. They could not recreate their mix of If 6 Was 9, so they used Noel Redding's personal copy, which was so crumpled it had to be smoothed out with an iron. Hendrix disliked the cover, which painted the band as Hindu deities. He said they had got it wrong, because he was not that kind of Indian.[1] [2]

Axis came out in Britain on the first of December 1967 and reached number five, then climbed to number three in America. But cracks were showing. Hendrix wanted more control in the studio, and Chandler was losing patience with his demands for take after take. Hendrix's drinking was becoming a problem too. A friend said liquor set off a bottled up anger he almost never showed otherwise. In January 1968, on the first night of a Scandinavian tour, he got into a drunken brawl at a hotel in Gothenburg, Sweden, smashed a plate glass window and injured his hand. He was arrested, released, and later fined heavily.[1] [2]

Electric Ladyland

In January 1968, at Olympic Studios, the band started work on a song Hendrix had heard on a tape of new Bob Dylan material, All Along the Watchtower. Traffic's Dave Mason played twelve string guitar, and Brian Jones added percussion on a vibraslap. Noel Redding grew fed up during the session and walked out, and Hendrix ended up playing the bass himself. He then spent months in New York layering guitar parts, moving the tape from four tracks to twelve to sixteen. The single reached number twenty in America, his only top forty hit there, and number five in Britain. Dylan loved it. He later said Hendrix found things in the song nobody else would have found, and he has played it Hendrix's way ever since.[1] [2]

Sessions moved to the newly opened Record Plant in New York, and they turned into a party. Hendrix invited crowds of friends into the control room, and Redding said you could not move for people. He recorded over fifty takes of one song, and he was so unsure of his singing that he often sang hidden behind studio screens. Chandler could not stand the chaos or the perfectionism, and midway through the album he walked away, leaving the management to Michael Jeffery. Redding had formed his own band, Fat Mattress, so Hendrix played much of the bass. A late night jam with Steve Winwood on organ and Jack Casady on bass became the fifteen minute blues Voodoo Chile, and the next day the trio cut Voodoo Child, Slight Return for a film crew.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Electric Ladyland was released in October 1968 with the credit produced and directed by Jimi Hendrix. It was a double album, and by mid November it was number one in America, the only chart topping album of his life. In Britain, Track Records ignored his ideas for the cover and used a photograph of nineteen naked women. Hendrix was surprised and unhappy, though he later told Rolling Stone he dug it anyway. By then Billboard had named him its artist of the year and Rolling Stone its performer of the year, and that same year his home town of Seattle gave him the keys to the city.[1] [2]

In January 1969, back in London, he was living with Kathy Etchingham in a top floor flat at 23 Brook Street in Mayfair. The composer George Frideric Handel had lived next door two centuries earlier, and when Hendrix found out, he went out and bought recordings of Handel's Messiah. He called the flat the only home he ever had. That month the Experience appeared live on the BBC show Happening for Lulu. Midway through Hey Joe they stopped and launched into Cream's Sunshine of Your Love as a tribute, and kept going until the programme ran out of time. In February they played two sold out nights at the Royal Albert Hall, the last European shows of the original line up.[1] [2] [3]

Busted, broken up, and Woodstock

On the third of May 1969 Hendrix landed at Toronto International Airport for a concert. Customs officers searched his bag and found a small glass bottle holding what turned out to be heroin and hashish. He was charged with possession, which could carry up to twenty years in prison, and was released on ten thousand dollars bail in time to play Maple Leaf Gardens that night, where he joked with the crowd. His publicist, Michael Goldstein, later admitted he bribed someone at the Associated Press with a case of liquor to keep the story off the news wire. It largely worked. The FBI, though, opened a file on him.[1] [2] [3]

The case hung over him for seven months. At the trial in December 1969 his lawyers did not dispute that the drugs were in his bag. They argued that he had no idea they were there. Hendrix testified that fans showered him with gifts, and that a woman had handed him a vial he took to be an ordinary stomach remedy. When the prosecutor held up the metal tube the hashish had been found in, Hendrix called it a pea shooter, and the courtroom roared. He admitted smoking cannabis and trying LSD and cocaine, but denied ever using heroin. After eight hours, the jury found him not guilty. He told reporters Canada had given him the best Christmas present he ever had.[1] [2]

By then the Experience was falling apart. Redding resented Hendrix's lateness and his total creative control, and his diary records long days of waiting for a leader who barely showed up. In April Hendrix began recording with his old army friend Billy Cox. At the Denver Pop Festival on the twenty ninth of June 1969, police used tear gas on the crowd, and the band escaped in the back of a rental truck that fans climbed on and partly crushed. Before the show a reporter asked Redding why he was even there, since Hendrix had announced he was being replaced. The next day Redding quit and flew home to London. The original Experience had played its last show.[1] [2] [3]

Hendrix retreated to a rented house near Woodstock in upstate New York and put together a looser, bigger band, with Cox on bass, Mitchell on drums, the rhythm guitarist Larry Lee and two conga players. He was by now the world's highest paid rock musician, and although he took less than his usual fee, he was still the top earner at the Woodstock festival. He chose to close the show, so his midnight slot slid into Monday morning. By the time he walked on he had been awake for more than three days, and a crowd that had peaked at around four hundred thousand had thinned to about thirty thousand. The announcer called them the Experience. Hendrix corrected him and called them Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, or, for short, a band of gypsys.[1] [2] [3]

Then came the moment that defined the era. Hendrix played The Star Spangled Banner, twisting it with feedback and distortion into the sound of rockets and falling bombs. Many heard it as a protest against the Vietnam War. Hendrix, a former paratrooper, said weeks later that they were all Americans, and that he played it the way the air felt in America at that moment. The New York Post critic Al Aronowitz called it probably the single greatest moment of the sixties. Hendrix finished with Hey Joe, the last song of the whole festival, and collapsed from exhaustion as he left the stage. That September he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, and it was there that he first played a new song called Machine Gun.[1] [2] [3]

Band of Gypsys and Electric Lady

The old contract with Ed Chalpin still had to be settled. After two years of litigation, Hendrix agreed to give Chalpin's side the rights to an album of new material, and he decided to record it live. He formed a trio with Billy Cox and the drummer Buddy Miles, a funk and soul powerhouse who had played with Wilson Pickett and the Electric Flag. Biographers have suggested he wanted an all black band partly in answer to Black Power activists who were pressing him to use his fame for civil rights. The Band of Gypsys rehearsed for up to eighteen hours a day, then played four shows over New Year's Eve and New Year's Day at the Fillmore East. Bill Graham called it the most brilliant display of electric guitar he had ever heard.[1] [2] [3]

The centrepiece was Machine Gun, a long lament in which his guitar imitated helicopters, bombs and gunfire, and many guitarists still call it his greatest recorded solo. The Band of Gypsys album came out on Capitol in April 1970 and reached the top ten in both Britain and America. It was the only official live album released in his lifetime. A single from the same sessions, Stepping Stone, was withdrawn at Hendrix's own insistence because he hated how it had been mastered, so it never charted, and it turned out to be the last single he ever released. Buddy Miles later recorded one of his Band of Gypsys songs with his own group under the title Them Changes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band played just once more. On the twenty eighth of January 1970 they appeared at a Madison Square Garden benefit for the anti war Moratorium Committee. Backstage, Johnny Winter saw Hendrix sitting alone with his head in his hands. On stage he snapped a crude reply at a woman shouting for Foxy Lady, made a strange remark to the audience, sat down on the drum riser and then left the stage after only a couple of songs. Buddy Miles and Noel Redding later accused Michael Jeffery of dosing him with LSD to wreck the group, an accusation that has never been proven. Jeffery fired Miles after the show, Cox quit, and the Band of Gypsys was over.[1] [2] [3]

Jeffery tried to reunite the original Experience, and Rolling Stone even interviewed all three together in February 1970. But Hendrix never meant to work with Redding again, and when Redding arrived in New York for rehearsals he found Cox had his job. With Mitchell and Cox, Hendrix launched the Cry of Love tour in April at the Los Angeles Forum. On the fourth of July, at the Atlanta International Pop Festival, he played to the biggest American crowd of his career, with estimates of up to five hundred thousand people. In Maui he played two sets for Jeffery's film Rainbow Bridge, though only about seventeen minutes of footage proved usable. The tour ended in Honolulu on the first of August 1970, his last concert in America.[1] [2] [3]

Meanwhile his dream project was nearly finished. In 1968 he and Jeffery had bought a failed Greenwich Village nightclub called the Generation, and Eddie Kramer talked them into turning it into a recording studio, since Hendrix's studio bills were reportedly running at three hundred thousand dollars a year. The architect John Storyk designed it with soft curves instead of right angles, round windows and lighting that could change colour. The builders discovered the site sat over an underground stream, Minetta Creek, and the whole project cost around a million dollars. Electric Lady Studios held its opening party on the twenty sixth of August 1970. Hendrix, too shy for the crowd, sat outside on the steps, where he met the young Patti Smith and told her about the sounds he planned to make there. Then he flew to London. He never came back.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The last weeks

In the small hours of the thirty first of August 1970 he headlined the Isle of Wight Festival with Mitchell and Cox. It was a troubled set. Security radio chatter kept bleeding through his amplifiers, and he was exhausted. The European tour that followed went badly. On the second of September in Aarhus, Denmark, he abandoned the show after three songs, saying he had been dead a long time. On the sixth of September he played the Isle of Fehmarn festival in West Germany, where fans booed him because a rained off set the night before had been cancelled. It was his last concert. Days later Billy Cox, suffering severe paranoia after taking LSD or being given it without knowing, left the tour and went home to his parents in Pennsylvania.[1] [2] [3]

His last week in London was tangled and tense. He faced two lawsuits, one over paternity and one over an old recording contract that was due in the High Court. He was talking with Chas Chandler and the producer Alan Douglas about leaving Michael Jeffery. He was run down, sleeping badly and fighting what seemed to be flu. On the eleventh of September he gave his final interview, to Keith Altham at the Cumberland Hotel, laughing off the idea that he was the king of the guitar. His love life was a knot of its own. Devon Wilson, a longtime girlfriend, rang in a jealous fury about the Danish model Kirsten Nefer, who was seeing him. He told a friend he could not sleep, and could not focus enough to write.[1] [2] [3]

On the fifteenth of September he tried to sit in with Eric Burdon's new band War at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho, but he was too unsteady, and Burdon told him to come back the next night. On the sixteenth he did, playing quietly on Mother Earth and Tobacco Road. It was the last time he played guitar in public. He was now staying with Monika Dannemann, a German former figure skater and painter, at her flat in the Samarkand Hotel in Notting Hill. On the seventeenth they went shopping at Kensington Market, and by chance he ran into Kathy Etchingham. He invited her to visit him that evening. She had other plans and said no, a decision she later said she had regretted ever since.[1] [2] [3]

That evening they visited an acquaintance, Phillip Harvey, where Hendrix smoked hashish and drank tea and wine. Dannemann grew jealous of the attention he was paying two women there and stormed out, and the pair argued loudly outside. Back at her flat he wrote a poem called The Story of Life and left a message on Chas Chandler's answering machine saying he needed help badly. At about a quarter to two in the morning, Dannemann drove him to a party at the flat of his business associate Pete Kameron, where he took at least one amphetamine pill. When she came back for him, other guests shouted at her from the windows to go away. He left with her at around three in the morning.[1]

Back at the flat, Dannemann said, he could not sleep. At some point that morning he took nine of her Vesparax sleeping tablets, a powerful barbiturate meant to be taken half a tablet at a time, which made it eighteen times the recommended dose. She called an ambulance at eighteen minutes past eleven on the eighteenth of September 1970. The crew found him alone, unresponsive, his airway blocked with vomit. At St Mary Abbots Hospital he was pronounced dead at a quarter to one in the afternoon. He was twenty seven. The coroner ruled that he had inhaled his vomit while intoxicated with barbiturates, but with too little evidence about the circumstances, he recorded an open verdict. On the first of October Hendrix was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Renton, near Seattle, where his mother also lay.[1] [2] [3]

Tapes, courts and the people left behind

The music kept coming. In November 1970, two months after his death, Voodoo Chile became his only number one single in Britain. In 1971 Kramer and Mitchell assembled The Cry of Love from the songs he had been finishing at Electric Lady, and it reached number three in America. Meanwhile the old recordings he had made as a sideman were repackaged again and again as Jimi Hendrix albums, hundreds of them. From 1974 the producer Alan Douglas controlled the unreleased tapes, and he angered fans by replacing some original backing parts with new studio musicians. Douglas insisted that was what Jimi would have done, and pointed out that one such album sold two million copies.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Several people in his story met hard ends. Michael Jeffery, the manager whom biographers accuse of siphoning Hendrix's money into offshore accounts, died on the fifth of March 1973 when his Iberia airliner collided with another plane over Nantes in France. He was thirty nine. Monika Dannemann spent decades feuding with Kathy Etchingham, who accused her of not doing enough to save him. In April 1996 a High Court judge found Dannemann in contempt for repeating her claim that Etchingham was a liar. Two days later Dannemann was found dead in her car in Seaford, East Sussex, from carbon monoxide poisoning. She had taken her own life. That July, Chas Chandler died of an aortic aneurysm in Newcastle, aged fifty seven.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Noel Redding never made peace with the business. In 1974, told there would be no more Experience releases, he signed away his future royalties for a one off payment of a hundred thousand dollars, just before compact discs arrived to sell the music all over again. In 1990 his partner Carol Appleby was left brain dead after a car crash, and he had to make the decision to switch off her life support. He settled in Clonakilty in Ireland and played a Friday night residency at a local pub for years. He was found dead at home in May 2003, aged fifty seven, of bleeding linked to cirrhosis of the liver, weeks after threatening to sue the Hendrix estate. Mitch Mitchell was found dead in a Portland, Oregon hotel in November 2008, apparently of natural causes, days after finishing an Experience Hendrix tribute tour.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The longest battle was over the estate itself. Everything passed to his father Al, a retired gardener and his son's sole heir. Deals arranged in 1974 by Al's lawyer, Leo Branton, handed control of the catalogue to offshore companies, and over twenty years Al was reportedly paid less than two million dollars while the music earned millions every year. In 1993, as MCA prepared to buy the rights, Al sued, helped by a loan from the Microsoft co founder Paul Allen. Under a 1995 settlement he won back his son's music and image, and he set up the family company Experience Hendrix with his adopted daughter Janie. When Al died in 2002, his will left control to Janie and a nephew. Jimi's brother Leon challenged it and lost in 2004.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

His standing has only grown. The Experience entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and Rolling Stone ranks him the greatest guitarist of all time. In London his Brook Street flat carries the first English Heritage blue plaque ever given to a pop star, and since 2016 its rooms have been part of a museum shared with his neighbour Handel. In Seattle his remains were moved in 2003 to a domed memorial in Renton, which the family company says draws about a hundred thousand visitors a year, and a park near his childhood neighbourhood opened in 2017. In June 2026 West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, home of Electric Lady, was renamed Jimi Hendrix Way. As of 2026, Billy Cox is the last surviving musician who played regularly in his bands.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

The people around Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix and Chas Chandler. Chandler found Hendrix in Greenwich Village, flew him to London, shared a flat with him, paid for the Hey Joe session before there was any record deal, and helped dream up the burning guitar. When Hendrix threatened to go home rather than turn down his amplifier, Chandler put his passport on the mixing desk and told him to go. Hendrix laughed and they got back to work. By 1968 Chandler could not bear the chaotic Electric Ladyland sessions and walked away. On his last night, Hendrix left a message asking him for help.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jimi Hendrix and Michael Jeffery. The former Animals manager co managed Hendrix from 1966 and took sole control after Chandler left. Hendrix biographers are almost unanimous in criticising him, accusing him of diverting Hendrix's income into offshore accounts. Band members accused him of sabotaging the Band of Gypsys, and in his final days Hendrix was trying to get out of his contract. Jeffery died in a mid air collision over France in 1973, and a former roadie later accused him of murder, a claim others dismiss as a lie.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jimi Hendrix and Noel Redding. Chandler turned the Kent guitarist into Hendrix's bassist, and Redding's driving, trebly lines anchored the first two albums. He was a guitarist at heart and never loved the bass, and by Electric Ladyland he was walking out of sessions. He quit after the Denver riot in 1969, was passed over for a reunion in 1970, and spent years bitter about lost royalties, once writing that Hendrix's death was the most lucrative act of his career. Late in life he softened, remembering Hendrix as a gentleman and a wonderful musician.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jimi Hendrix and Mitch Mitchell. A former child actor and jazz fan who modelled himself on John Coltrane's drummer Elvin Jones, Mitchell told Chandler he would give the job two weeks. He stayed through almost every line up, from the Experience to Woodstock to the Cry of Love tour, and his drumming was as restless as the guitar it chased. After Hendrix died he helped Eddie Kramer finish the posthumous albums, and he was still playing the songs on tribute tours when he died in 2008.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jimi Hendrix and Billy Cox. They met in 1961 when Cox, ducking out of the rain at Fort Campbell, heard Hendrix playing and introduced himself. Together they built the King Kasuals and worked the Southern club circuit. When Hendrix left for London he invited Cox to come, but Cox said he had only three strings on his bass and no money for the trip. Hendrix called him again in 1969, and Cox played at Woodstock, in the Band of Gypsys and on the final tour. As of 2026 he is the last surviving musician who played regularly with Hendrix.[1] [2]

Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Miles. They met as teenage sidemen at a show in Montreal in 1964 and jammed for years afterwards. Miles drummed on part of Electric Ladyland, and Hendrix wrote a poem for the sleeve of a Buddy Miles Express album and produced tracks for another. In late 1969 Miles became the drummer of the Band of Gypsys. He always blamed Michael Jeffery, who resented their friendship, for destroying the group. Miles died in Austin, Texas, in February 2008.[1] [2] [3]

Jimi Hendrix and Kathy Etchingham. She met him on his first night in London and was his partner for about two and a half years, sharing the Brook Street flat he called his only real home. She says she inspired The Wind Cries Mary, and that Send My Love to Linda was first written with her name until she objected. After his death she campaigned for his blue plaque, arranged a private investigation into his death and pressed Scotland Yard to reopen the case. She has asked that he be remembered as funny and charming, not as a tragic figure.[1] [2] [3]

Kathy Etchingham and Monika Dannemann. Dannemann met Hendrix in Dusseldorf in 1969 and was with him in his last days, later claiming they had been engaged. Etchingham said Dannemann had known him for only a few days and accused her in the press of not doing enough to save him. Dannemann's book painted Etchingham as a liar, which broke an earlier undertaking, and in 1996 the High Court found Dannemann in contempt. Two days later she took her own life.[1] [2] [3]

Jimi Hendrix and Linda Keith. Keith, a Vogue model then going out with Keith Richards, was mesmerised by Hendrix in a New York club in 1966. She befriended him, lent him support and pushed him on anyone who would listen, until Chas Chandler came to see him. She drifted into drug dependency, and her father eventually went to America to bring her home. Some biographers think Red House was partly about her, and he dedicated it to her at the Isle of Wight in 1970.[1] [2] [3]

Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Kramer. The Olympic Studios engineer recorded almost everything Hendrix released, from Are You Experienced onwards, and followed him to New York in 1968. Hendrix often described the sounds he wanted in terms of colours. Kramer talked him into turning a failed nightclub into Electric Lady Studios, and after his death he assembled The Cry of Love and later First Rays of the New Rising Sun. Since the family regained the rights in 1995, he has co produced the estate's releases.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. Meeting Clapton was one of the lures Chandler used to bring Hendrix to London, and within a week Hendrix was jamming on stage with Cream. Clapton left mid song, reportedly complaining to Chandler afterwards that he had never told him Hendrix was that good, and later said his life was never the same. The admiration stuck. Clapton recorded Little Wing with Derek and the Dominos weeks before Hendrix died, meaning it as a tribute to a living legend, and he has kept playing it ever since.[1] [2] [3]

Jimi Hendrix and Al Hendrix. Their bond was complicated. Al missed his son's first years, refused to buy the guitar the school asked for, and handed his grieving boys whiskey instead of taking them to their mother's funeral. Kathy Etchingham said Hendrix told her his father had beaten him for pretending a broom was a guitar. Yet Al did buy his first electric guitar, and as sole heir he fought for years to win back his son's music, finally succeeding in 1995 and founding Experience Hendrix.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Jimi Hendrix

• His birth name was Johnny Allen Hendrix, and his parents renamed him James Marshall Hendrix when he was three. His mother chose Johnny Allen while his father was away in the army. In 1946 the parents renamed him James Marshall, honouring his father and his father's late brother, Leon Marshall.[1] [2]
• When Jimi was born, his father was locked in an army stockade so he could not go absent to see the baby. Al Hendrix was stationed in Alabama and was refused the usual leave. He spent two months locked up without trial, and learned of his son's birth by telegram.[1]
• A school social worker once asked for public money to buy young Jimi a guitar. He carried a broom around Horace Mann Elementary School for over a year as a pretend guitar. The social worker warned that leaving him without one might cause psychological damage. The request was turned down.[1]
• His first instrument was a one string ukulele he found in an old woman's rubbish. In 1957, while helping his father clear junk from a house, he found the ukulele and was allowed to keep it. He learned single notes by ear, playing along with Elvis Presley records.[1]
• The first tune Hendrix ever learned on guitar was the theme from the television show Peter Gunn. He got his first acoustic guitar for five dollars in 1958, at fifteen, and practised for hours a day. The Peter Gunn theme was the first thing he mastered.[1]
• At his very first gig, Hendrix was fired between sets for showing off. The show was in the Jaffe Room of Seattle's Temple De Hirsch. The unnamed band let him go halfway through the night, and he moved on to a group called the Rocking Kings.[1]
• He painted his girlfriend's name, Betty Jean, on the guitar he took into the army. It was a red Silvertone Danelectro, which his father mailed to him at Fort Campbell after he begged for it. Betty Jean Morgan was his high school girlfriend back in Seattle.[1]
• Billy Cox first described Hendrix's playing as a mix of John Lee Hooker and Beethoven. Cox heard him through the wall of an army club at Fort Campbell in November 1961, borrowed a bass and joined in. They stayed friends for the rest of Hendrix's life.[1] [2]
• Hendrix won first prize at the Apollo Theater's amateur contest in February 1964. He had just moved to Harlem and was living at the Hotel Theresa. The win came shortly before Ronnie Isley hired him for the Isley Brothers' backing band.[1]
• The earliest known film of Hendrix performing comes from a Nashville TV show called Night Train in 1965. He appeared in July 1965 as part of Little Richard's touring band, backing a duo called Buddy and Stacy. It was his first television appearance.[1]
• His contract with the producer Ed Chalpin was reportedly made legal with a payment of one dollar. He signed the three year deal in October 1965, even though he was already under contract to Sue Records. It led to years of lawsuits, and the Band of Gypsys album was made partly to settle it.[1] [2]
• Spirit guitarist Randy California played in Hendrix's 1966 Greenwich Village band. The group was Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, which held a residency at the Cafe Wha on MacDougal Street. Several future Experience songs took shape there.[1]
• Mitch Mitchell won the Experience drum job on the toss of a coin, and later lost a Wings audition the same way. In October 1966 he was chosen over Aynsley Dunbar by coin toss. In 1974, auditioning for Paul McCartney's Wings, he lost to Geoff Britton in another coin toss.[1]
• Noel Redding agreed to join the Experience on condition that Hendrix advanced him his train fare. Redding had come to London to audition as a guitarist for the new Animals. Chas Chandler talked him into trying bass, and his perm and granny glasses reportedly helped him get the job.[1]
• When Hendrix threatened to quit England over volume, Chandler put his passport on the desk and told him to go. During an early session Chandler asked him to turn down, and Hendrix said he might as well go back to New York. Faced with his own passport, he laughed and got back to work.[1]
• Jimmy Page turned down the Octavia pedal before Hendrix made it famous on Purple Haze. Its inventor, Roger Mayer, first showed it to Page, who thought it too far out. Hendrix tried it within weeks of meeting Mayer and used it on the Purple Haze solo.[1] [2]
• Police stopped a Hendrix gig at a hotel in Ilkley, Yorkshire, in March 1967 because it was dangerously overcrowded. The Troutbeck Hotel was licensed for about two hundred and fifty people, and reports suggested around nine hundred squeezed in. Some fans remember a riot, while others insist it was far quieter.[1] [2]
• Hendrix played Barbeque 67 in Spalding, Lincolnshire, sometimes called Britain's first rock festival. On the twenty ninth of May 1967 he shared the bill in a bulb auction shed with Cream and Pink Floyd, for a one pound ticket. The town later honoured him with a blue plaque.[1] [2]
• The Experience quit a tour supporting the Monkees after only six shows. The Monkees asked for them because they were fans, but the teenage crowds did not take to Hendrix. Chas Chandler later said he arranged the tour for publicity.[1]
• Hendrix left the master tape of side one of Axis: Bold as Love in a London taxi. The band remixed most of it overnight to meet the deadline. For If 6 Was 9 they used Noel Redding's own crumpled copy, which had to be smoothed flat with an iron.[1] [2]
• Hendrix played a recorder on If 6 Was 9, an instrument he had never been taught. The session also featured Graham Nash and Gary Leeds stamping their feet on a drum riser to create a percussion effect.[1]
• Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones plays the rattling vibraslap on All Along the Watchtower. Traffic's Dave Mason played twelve string guitar on the session, and Hendrix ended up playing the bass after Noel Redding walked out.[1]
• Bob Dylan has performed All Along the Watchtower more than two thousand times, mostly in Hendrix's style. Dylan said Hendrix's version overwhelmed him and that ever since Hendrix died he has done it his way, feeling each performance is a kind of tribute to him.[1]
• Hendrix's publicist bribed someone at the Associated Press with a case of liquor to bury news of his Toronto arrest. Michael Goldstein later admitted it, saying a million dollars was riding on the story staying off the wires. Only a few papers carried the news.[1]
• Electric Lady Studios was built over an underground stream, Minetta Creek. When the site flooded during demolition, sump pumps had to be installed and then soundproofed. The project took nearly twice as long and cost twice as much as planned.[1]
• Hendrix asked the designer of Electric Lady to avoid right angles wherever possible. Architect John Storyk remembered him wanting everything soft, curvy and white, with lighting that could change colour. Hendrix spent only about ten weeks recording there before he died.[1] [2] [3]
• Hendrix's last studio recording was a solo demo of Belly Button Window, made on the twenty second of August 1970. It was cut at Electric Lady just days before the studio's opening party and his departure for the Isle of Wight Festival.[1]
• At the Isle of Wight in 1970, security walkie talkie chatter could be heard through Hendrix's amplifiers. The interference is audible during his performance of Machine Gun. He took the stage in the early hours of the thirty first of August.[1]
• His only number one single in Britain, Voodoo Chile, topped the chart two months after his death. Track Records released it as a single after he died, and it reached number one in November 1970.[1]
• Buddy Miles sang lead vocals for the California Raisins in their claymation TV adverts. The former Band of Gypsys drummer also recorded two California Raisins albums. The day before he died in 2008, he heard Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton play his song Them Changes down a phone line.[1]
• Noel Redding signed away his Experience royalties in 1974 for a single payment of a hundred thousand dollars. He was told there would be no more Experience releases. Compact discs later sold the music all over again, and he spent decades fighting for a share.[1] [2]
• Hendrix's Hollywood Walk of Fame star, the one thousand nine hundred and forty third, was paid for by his record label in 1991. Warner and Reprise covered the four thousand eight hundred dollar fee while preparing a Hendrix box set. About six hundred people turned up, three times the usual crowd.[1]
• His Brook Street blue plaque, put up in 1997, was the first English Heritage ever gave to a pop star. Kathy Etchingham campaigned for it. She recalled the shop below was selling lingerie, and the mannequins had to be covered up for the unveiling.[1] [2]
• Students at Garfield High School like to stick rolled paper in the mouth of Hendrix's bronze bust. The family donated the bust in the mid 1980s. The sculptor said the school was hesitant to accept it at first because of how Hendrix died.[1]
• The 2013 biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side contains no songs written by Hendrix. His estate refused permission, so the film stuck to songs he covered in 1966 and 1967, with new music written to sound like his early style.[1]
• The cover of the 2010 album Valleys of Neptune is based on a painting Hendrix made at school in 1957. His father kept about a hundred and ten of his childhood drawings. Janie Hendrix said this one seemed made for the album title.[1]
• Footage of Hendrix's biggest American concert, Atlanta in 1970, lay undeveloped in a barn for thirty years. It was eventually made into the film Electric Church, which BBC Four broadcast in September 2025. Crowd estimates for the show range from three hundred thousand to half a million.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.