7 Jimi Hendrix 7concerns of white hippies and black revolutionaries by
clothing black anger in the colourful costumes of London’s
Carnaby Street.
A former paratrooper whose honourable medical
discharge exempted him from service in the Vietnam War,
Hendrix spent the early 1960s working as a freelance
accompanist for a variety of musicians, both famous and
obscure. His unorthodox style and penchant for playing at
high volume, however, limited him to subsistence-level
work until he was discovered in a small New York City
club and brought to England in August 1966. Performing
alongside two British musicians, he stunned London’s
clubland with his instrumental virtuosity and extroverted
showmanship. Members of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones,
and the Who were among his admirers, but it proved a lot
easier for Hendrix to learn their tricks than it was for them
to learn his.
Hendrix had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the
musical roots on which the cutting-edge rock of his time
was based, but, thanks to his years on the road with the
likes of Little Richard and the Isley Brothers, he also had
hands-on experience of the cultural and social worlds in
which those roots had developed and a great admiration
for the work of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Yardbirds.
Speedily adapting the current musical and sartorial fashions
of late 1966 London to his own needs, he was soon able
not only to match the likes of the Who at their own high-
volume, guitar-smashing game but also to top them with
what rapidly became the hottest-ticket show in town.
By November his band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience,
had their first Top Ten single, “Hey Joe.” Two more hits,
“Purple Haze” and “The Wind Cries Mary,” followed
before their first album, Are You Experienced?, was released
in the summer of 1967, when it was second in impact only
to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Its