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Ramblings of a retiree in France
The past year or so I’ve been mining the list of artists I’ve seen more than once but now I’m going to turn to those artists I wish I’d seen live. Sadly most are no longer with us.
“Jimi” Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; 1942 – 1970) was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated 20th century musicians. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as “arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music”.
Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at the age of 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville then Nashville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the chitlin’ circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers’ backing band and later with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965. He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: Hey Joe, Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary.
He only achieved fame in the US after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the US. The double LP was Hendrix’s most commercially successful release and his first and only number one album. He headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia in September 1970.
Hendrix was inspired by American rock and roll and electric blues. He favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was instrumental in popularising the previously undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. He was also one of the first guitarists to make extensive use of tone-altering effects units in mainstream rock, such as fuzz distortion, Octavia, wah-wah, and Uni-Vibe. He was the first musician to use stereophonic phasing effects in recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone commented:
Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began.
Hendrix was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year and in 1968, Billboard named him the Artist of the Year and Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Disc and Music Echo honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970, Guitar Player named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone ranked the band’s three studio albums among the 100 greatest albums of all time, and they ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist and the sixth greatest artist of all time.
View from the Back 
I like him a lot! His music is awesome!
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I know!!!!!
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How our musical tastes change. I never liked him at the time. I should have and I do now.
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Improve with time like a good red wine
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I remember well. We were blessed with so much musical talent back then (as opposed to being cursed with so much musical banality as they are now)
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There are still talented artists out there
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I have loved Jimi since the start and always wished I could play my guitar like him. I have all of his records on vinyl and CD’s. My bedroom as a teen had posters of him all over my walls.
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I think we all wish we could play guitar like him – truly magical
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legend!
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Absolutely
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Pingback: Musical Monday: Jimi Hendrix – MobsterTiger
My daughter is taking a rock history class. I was helping her study yesterday. I’m not going to play Purple Haze for awhile
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