HENDRIX, James Marshall ("Jimi"; "Jimmy";"Maurice James")

(b. 27 November 1942 in Seattle, Washington; d. 18 September 1970 in London, England), musician, singer, and songwriter, whose experimentation and innovations in guitar performance and design have been much admired and imitated by fellow musicians and have given him a faithful audience decades after his death.

Hendrix was one of two sons of James Allen ("Al") Ross Hendrix and Lucille (Jetter) Hendrix. Al, a gardener, met Hendrix's mother by chance while visiting a friend and found in her a perfect dance partner. Their romance was shortened by her pregnancy and by his being drafted in 1942 during World War II. They were quickly married, and Hendrix's mother named their son Johnny Allen Hendrix at birth. Hendrix's father later changed his son's name to James Marshall Hendrix. His nickname for most of his life was "Jimmy," even during the period that he called himself "Maurice James."

Although racial discrimination hurt his family and kept his father from securing good jobs, Hendrix seemed relatively unaffected in his own dealings with people of other ethnic groups. On the other hand, his mother's waywardness and the resulting poverty that once left him, his father, and his brother eating horse meat hurt enough to be carried inside him all his life. Even at the age of three, he had become quiet, introspective, and lost in his own world. Young Hendrix was shuffled among family members and neighbors because of his father's intermittent employment and his mother's alcoholism. Hendrix's mother left the family and eventually died on 2 February 1958 of cirrhosis of the liver and a ruptured spleen.

Hendrix was musically inclined, but he had to learn to play with right-handed guitars even though he was left-handed. Throughout his career, he played right-handed guitars upside down, one of the factors that encouraged his innovations in guitar design and allowed him to make his electric guitars "wah-wah," whoop, and thunder like a storm. In 1961 Hendrix left Seattle's Garfield High School at the age of sixteen to enlist in the army. On 31 May 1961 he was sent to Fort Ord in California for basic training. On 8 November 1961 he went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he joined the Screamin' Eagles 101st Airborne Division, a matter of considerable pride for him. Hendrix loved jumping out of airplanes, remarking that it was especially fun if he kept his eyes open. He and his fellow serviceman and bassist Billy Cox formed a group called King Kasuals that played rhythm and blues in local music houses.

Hendrix, who remained a private during his military service, received a medical discharge from the army because of a back injury in 1962, and he went to Nashville to work in the music industry. His ability to learn songs in an instant and to master even difficult styles quickly became well known in Nashville, and he was in demand as a sideman. Hendrix was slightly irritated by this, because he yearned to improvise while playing in a band; instead, he was expected to follow the routine set for him and never upstage the band's leader.

Audiences, especially other musicians, began seeking Hendrix out in 1963. Through word of mouth they learned which band he would be playing with on a given night. His technique was esteemed and emulated. By then Hendrix was experimenting with the designs of his guitars, seeking out innovative manufacturers, and making additional adjustments himself. His signature "wah-wah" sound developed out of these innovations, a sound that later musicians have imitated but never quite captured.

In 1964 Hendrix joined the Isley Brothers' band as a backing guitarist, calling himself "Maurice James." This led to a brief stint with Little Richard, who was attempting a comeback. Many writers place this period in 1963, but Little Richard and others in the band, as well as the Isley Brothers, all recall it as January 1965. When Little Richard fell five-and-a-half weeks behind on Hendrix's pay, Hendrix left the band, saying that a musician cannot live without money while on the road. In Greenwich Village, New York, he formed Jimmy James and the Blue Flames in late 1965, a group that performed in clubs. There, his performances included electronic feedback and electronic experimentation that overlaid a solid blues guitar rhythm.

Chas Chandler, the bass guitarist for the rock group the Animals, urged Hendrix to go with him to England, where Hendrix quickly found a following in small nightclubs. Other musicians, including the Beatle Paul McCartney, soon sought out the places where Hendrix was playing, to hear for themselves the revolutionary sounds he had added to songs. On 15 October 1965 the producer Ed Chalpin signed Hendrix to a three-year contract for PPX Enterprises.

From 1965 to 1966 Hendrix played with the Squires, and his reputation in England as a blues player grew. In 1966 Chalpin wanted to form a band around Hendrix, who was still calling himself Maurice James. Chalpin wanted a harder, edgier name, so he brought back the last name "Hendrix" and shortened the first name of "James" or "Jimmy" to "Jimi." The new band featured the esteemed bassist Noel Redding and the drummer Mitch Mitchell, and it was called the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The band debuted at the Olympia in Paris in 1966. They were marketed mostly to preteen and young teenage girls, and they released their first single, "Hey, Joe," in December 1966. The song went to number six on the charts in the United Kingdom. By that time Hendrix was abusing drugs, especially the hallucinogen LSD, marijuana, and alcohol. Hendrix often finished a day's performance by becoming stupefyingly drunk.

On 17 March 1967 the Jimi Hendrix Experience released the song "Purple Haze." Its downbeat became instantly recognizable, breaking cheers from audiences the moment they heard it. On his guitar, Hendrix used a "Fuzz Face" distortion pedal for creating warm mixtures of tones, and an Octavia, the invention of the Royal Navy electronics expert Roger Mayer, that enabled Hendrix to move notes by entire chords up and down the scale. His guitar seemed to be rhythm, bass, and singer all at once. In September 1967 his first album, Are You Experienced?, was released, and it established him in England as a leader of psychedelic music.

Hendrix returned briefly to the United States in June 1967, and he signed with staid, upscale Warner Bros., which released Are You Experienced?. On 18 June 1967 the Experience made its U.S. debut at the Monterey Pop Festival, and Hendrix capped off a mesmerizing performance by indulging in his oft-repeated ritual of burning his guitar onstage. American audiences had never seen anything like it. Worry from Warner Bros. that the quiet, shy, bushy-haired, chain-smoking, eccentric Hendrix was too big a risk turned to delight as Hendrix's album sold 2.2 million copies, outselling all other Warner Bros. stars, including Frank Sinatra. Hendrix also added the "wah-wah" pedal to his guitars, accentuating his unique sound.

In January 1968 the Jimi Hendrix Experience released its second album, Axis: Bold as Love, with such tracks as "Little Wing," "If 6 Was 9," and "EXP." Hendrix combined his visionary lyrics with multitrack rhythms and further experimentation, perhaps influenced by the Beatles but still leaving its mark on popular music for decades thereafter. Hendrix was unhappy with the album, because he believed his sound was not accurately reproduced on vinyl. At the same time that he was producing musical innovations, he was also experimenting with various concoctions of drugs, mostly involving LSD, and the deleterious effect on his creativity was becoming apparent to those close to him.

The third album of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the double set Electric Ladyland, was released in September 1968. Although all three of the band's albums went gold, this album went to number one in the charts, the only number-one album that Hendrix had in America. In it he makes blues music into a complex, richly textured sound, classic in its depth, stretching the genre by mixing in jazz riffs and hard chords. Even so, the hit single from the album, "All along the Watchtower," the group's first and only Top Twenty single, was direct and forthright. Other memorable cuts from the album included "Voodoo Child" and "Crosstown Traffic." In 1968 Hendrix was named artist of the year by Billboard and Rolling Stone. Hendrix wanted to expand beyond his reputation as a psychedelic musician, and he disbanded the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1969. On 29 June 1969 the band played their final show at the Denver Pop Festival, the same month that their Smash Hits album was released. In August 1969 Hendrix appeared at the Woodstock Festival, giving the performance of a lifetime. His jazzy, metallic version of the "Star Spangled Banner" was the harbinger of a new era of experimentation in traditional music within the idioms of modern popular music, and it electrified young audiences. More than thirty years later, that single performance speaks volumes for where music had been and where it was going to go—and Hendrix was the stationmaster.

At least since 1968, when he went violently insane in a German hotel, destroying a room, Hendrix had been subject to terrible periods of madness in which his eyes went glassy and he could be a danger to himself and others. To avert these periods, which often occurred at night, he took sleeping pills. In 1970, under pressure from black militants to form an all-black band, he brought his old friend the bassist Billy Cox and the drummer Billy Miles together to record The Band of Gypsys, a "live" album recording from New York's Fillmore East. Still unhappy with how recordings conveyed his music, he created his own studio, Electric Lady Studios, which he designed to meet the needs of his electronics. Hendrix logged more than 600 hours of studio tapes performing with a variety of jazz and rock musicians.

On 6 September 1970 Hendrix, Cox, and Mitchell performed at the Isle of Fehmarn in West Germany; it was Hendrix's final performance. While visiting London and staying in the Cumberland Hotel, Hendrix's girlfriend, Monica Dannemann, discovered him immobile in his bed. He seemed to have overdosed on sleeping pills. He was taken to a hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival due to asphyxiation caused by a drug overdose. His repeated abuse of drugs was common knowledge, and many people assumed that he either had committed suicide in a drugged despair or had overdosed accidentally on a cocktail of drugs. The generally accepted assumption is that his prescription for sleeping pills was too weak to help him sleep and that he took too many in order to help himself rest. He was buried in Greenwood Memorial Park in Renton, Washington. Hendrix's studio archives produced numerous post-humous albums, such as Crash Landing (1975), Midnight Lightning (1975), Nine to the Universe (1980), Kiss the Sky (1985), Live at Winterland ( 1987), and Radio One (1988). At the age of twenty-seven Hendrix was only beginning to mature as a musician, singer, and composer. His successive recordings showed him mastering a variety of styles, with his mastery reaching its apex in Electric Ladyland, promising a truly mature style that Hendrix died too early to achieve. For his fans in the 1960s he became a symbol of what creativity could achieve, and his performances were memorable. In 1992 Hendrix was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1993 he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. On 23 June 2000 the Experience Music Project, a gallery of Hendrix memorabilia funded by Microsoft's cofounder Paul Allen, opened in Seattle near the Space Needle. Hendrix influenced nearly every metallic band, either directly or indirectly, after his time, and he expanded the horizons of blues music with his innovative style. Often lost in the glamorous accounts of his life are his honest humanity, his graceful handling of racial issues, and his love of making music for the sake of finding a beautiful sound.

Biographies of Hendrix include Chris Welch, Hendrix: A Biography (1972), and Curtis Knight, Jimi: An Intimate Biography (1974), which are both anecdotal accounts. See also Dave Henderson, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: The Life of Jimi Hendrix (1980); Jerry Hopkins, Hit and Run: The Jimi Hendrix Story (1983); Victor Sampson, Hendrix (1984); Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeck, Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy (1991), which is thorough and detailed about Hendrix's years in Europe and America; and James A. Hendrix and Jas Obrecht, My Son Jimi (1999), an account of Hendrix's life by his father. Biographical information also is found in Gary Carey, Lenny, Janis, and Jimi (1975); Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Post-War Rock 'n' Roll Revolution (1989); Mitch Mitchell and John Platt, Jimi Hendrix: Inside the Experience (1990); and Jerry Hopkins, The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1995). An obituary is in the New York Times (19 Sept. 1970).

Kirk H. Beetz