Jimi Hendrix

This week we are going to talk about one of the most influential rock guitarists of all time, and my personal favorite guitar player ever, Jimi Hendrix.

He was born Johnny Allen Hendrix on November 27, 1942, and was renamed James Marshall four years later. When he was twelve years old, he got his first electric guitar and started jamming along with his favorite musicians, the great Chicago blues players like Muddy Waters, B. B. King, and Elmore James.

When he was nineteen years old, he enlisted in the Army as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne. While he was in the Army, he met Billy Cox, a bass player. They became great friends and started up a band, Jimi’s first, called the King Kasuals. Cox would later play with Hendrix and Buddy Miles in a group they called the Band of Gypsies.

When Hendrix left the Army, he began touring with many different groups as a backup guitarist. During this time he played with Ike and Tina Turner, the Supremes, Little Richard, and B. B. King, to name a few. It was during this stage that Jimi built his confidence as a performer, as well as honing his chops by playing every night.

In 1965, Jimi moved to New York to play in the Isley Brothers backing band. He was going by the name of Jimmy James at the time. The following year, he left the Isley Brothers and formed his own band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. They played around on the New York club scene, and it was at a gig in Greenwich Village that Chas Chandler, former bass player for the Animals, noticed Jimi.

Chas was looking to begin a management career, and he thought that Jimi could be his first client. After a little persuasion, he convinced Jimi that he should move to London to gain more exposure. They held auditions before selecting Mitch Mitchell for drums and Noel Redding, a guitar player who desperately needed a gig, for bass. They called themselves the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The year was 1966.

Before the year was out, Chas had found the Experience a record deal, and their single “Hey Joe” had reached the Top 10 charts. The rest, as they say, is history.

During his short but extremely prolific career, Hendrix recorded three studio albums that were sold in the US. The first, Are You Experienced? (1967), was a distortion-laden tribute to blues and psychedelia that formed a foundation for all future guitarists to build upon. His second album, Axis: Bold As Love, was released later in the same year, and it was a lot more mellow, focusing on the songwriting aspects as opposed to the teeth-wrenching guitar wailing of the former. In the following year, Hendrix released a double album called Electric Ladyland that solidified Jimi’s place in the realm of guitar as a groundbreaking and unequivocal guitarist and songwriter.

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