Saturday, September 14, 2013
JAMES
MARSHALL "JIMI" HENDRIX (born Johnny Allen
Hendrix; November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) was an American musician,
singer and songwriter. Despite a limited mainstream exposure of four years, he
is widely considered one of the most influential electric guitarists in the
history of popular music and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th
century.
In 1961,
Hendrix enlisted in the US Army; he was granted an honorable discharge the
following year. In 1963, he moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, and began
playing gigs on the chitlin' circuit. In 1964, he earned a spot in the
Isley Brothers' backing band and later that year he found work with Little
Richard, with whom he continued to play through mid-1965. He then joined Curtis
Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after having
been discovered by bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals. In
1967, Hendrix earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix
Experience: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", and "The Wind
Cries Mary". Later that year, he achieved fame in the US after his
performance at the Monterey Pop Festival. The world's highest paid
performer, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle
of Wight Festival in 1970 before dying from barbiturate-related asphyxia at
the age of 27.
Inspired
musically by American rock and roll and electric blues, Hendrix
favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was
instrumental in developing the previously undesirable technique of guitar
amplifier feedback. He helped to popularize the use of a wah-wah pedal in
mainstream rock, and pioneered experimentation with stereophonic phasing effects
in music recordings.
Hendrix
was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously;
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 his three non-posthumous studio albums, Are You
Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland among
the 100 greatest albums of all time and they ranked Hendrix as the greatest
guitarist and the sixth greatest artist of all time.
Jimi
Hendrix's mixed genealogy included African American, Irish, and Cherokee ancestors.
His paternal great-great-grandmother Zenora was a full-blooded Cherokee from
Georgia who married an Irishman named Moore. They had a son Robert,
who married an African American girl named Fanny. In 1883, Robert and Fanny had
a daughter whom they named Zenora "Nora" Rose Moore, Hendrix's
paternal grandmother. The illegitimate son of a black slave woman, also
called Fanny, and her white overseer, Hendrix's paternal grandfather, Bertran
Philander Ross Hendrix (born 1866) was named after his biological father, a
grain merchant from Urbana, Ohio, and one of the wealthiest white men in
the area at the time. On June 10, 1919, Hendrix and Moore had a son they
named James Allen Ross Hendrix (died 2002); people called him Al.
In 1941,
Al met Lucille Jeter (1925–1958) at a dance in Seattle; they married on March
31, 1942. Drafted by the United States Army to serve in World War II,
Al went to war three days after their wedding. The first of Lucile's five
children, Johnny Allen Hendrix was born November 27, 1942 in Seattle,
Washington. In 1946, due to being unable to consult his father Al at the time
of birth, his parents changed his name to James Marshall Hendrix, in honor of
Al and his late brother Leon Marshall.
Stationed in Alabama at the time of Hendrix's birth, Al was denied
the standard military furlough afforded servicemen for childbirth; his
commanding officer placed him in the stockade to prevent his going AWOL to
see his infant son in Seattle. He spent two months locked up without trial, and
while in the stockade received a telegram announcing his son's
birth. During Al's three-year absence, Lucille struggled to raise their
son, often neglecting him in favor of nightlife. When Al
was away, Hendrix was mostly cared for by family members and friends,
especially Lucille's sister Delores Hall and her friend Dorothy
Harding. Al received an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army on
September 1, 1945. Two months later, unable to find Lucille, Al went to
the Berkeley home of a family friend named Mrs. Champ, who had taken
care of and had attempted to adopt Hendrix, and saw his son for the first time.
After
returning from service, Al reunited with Lucille, but his difficulty finding
steady work left the family impoverished. Both he and Lucille struggled with
alcohol abuse, and they often fought when intoxicated. His parents' violence
sometimes made Hendrix withdraw and hide in a closet in their
home. Hendrix relationship with his brother Leon (born 1948) was close but
precarious; with Leon in and out of foster care, they lived with an almost
constant threat of fraternal separation. In addition to Leon, Hendrix had
three other younger siblings: Joseph, born in 1949, Kathy in 1950, and Pamela,
1951, all of whom Al and Lucille gave up to foster care and adoption. The
family frequently moved, staying in cheap hotels and apartments around Seattle.
On occasion, family would take Hendrix to Vancouver to stay at his
grandmother's. A shy and sensitive boy, he was deeply affected by these
experiences. In later years, he confided to a girlfriend that he had been
the victim of sexual abuse by a man in uniform. On December 17, 1951, when
Hendrix was nine years old, his parents divorced; the court granted Al custody
of him and Leon.
Hendrix's
recordings were originally released in North America on Reprise Records, a
division of Warner Communications, and were released internationally
on Polydor Records. Capitol Records released the Band of
Gypsys album in the US and Canada. British releases of his albums
up to and including The Cry of Love were first issued on the
independent label Track Records, which was originally created by the managers
of the Who. Polydor later absorbed the label.
In 1994,
the Hendrix family prevailed in its long standing legal attempt to gain control
of his music, and subsequently licensed the recordings to MCA Records through
the family-run company Experience Hendrix LLC, formed in 1995. In August
2009, Experience Hendrix announced that it had entered a new licensing
agreement with Sony Music Entertainment's Legacy Recordingsdivision
which would take effect in 2010.
Some of Hendrix's unfinished material was released as the 1971 title The Cry of Love. The album was well received and charted in several countries. However, the album's producers, Mitchell and Kramer, would later complain that due to contractual reasons, they were unable to make use of all the tracks they wanted due to some tracks being used for 1971's Rainbow Bridge and 1972's War Heroes. Material from The Cry of Love was re-released in 1997 as First Rays of the New Rising Sun, along with the rest of the tracks that Mitchell and Kramer wanted to include.
In 2010, Legacy Recordings and Experience Hendrix LLC launched the 2010 Jimi Hendrix Catalog Project, starting with the release of Valleys of Neptune in March. Legacy has also released deluxe CD/DVD editions of the Hendrix albums Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold As Love, Electric Ladyland and First Rays of the New Rising Sun, as well as the 1968 compilation album Smash Hits. Hendrix's rough demos for a concept album, Black Gold, are now in the possession of Experience Hendrix LLC, but as of 2013 no official release date has been announced.
Although the details of his last day and death are unclear and widely disputed, Hendrix had spent much of September 17 in London with Monika Dannemann, the only witness to his final hours. Dannemann stated that she had prepared a meal for them at her apartment in the Samarkand Hotel, 22 Lansdowne Crescent,Notting Hill, sometime around 11 p.m., when they shared a bottle of wine. She drove Hendrix to the residence of an acquaintance at approximately 1:45 a.m., where he remained for about an hour before she picked him up and drove them back to her flat at 3 a.m. Dannemann said they talked until around 7 a.m., when they went to sleep. She awoke around 11 a.m., and found Hendrix breathing, but unconscious and unresponsive. She called for an ambulance at 11:18 a.m.; they arrived on the scene at 11:27 a.m. Paramedics then transported Hendrix to St Mary Abbot's Hospital where Dr. John Bannister pronounced him dead at 12:45 p.m. on September 18, 1970.
To determine the cause of death, coroner Gavin Thurston ordered a post-mortem examination on Hendrix's body, which was performed on September 21 by Professor Robert Donald Teare, a forensic pathologist. Thurston concluded the inquest on September 28, and concluded that Hendrix aspirated his own vomit and died of asphyxia while intoxicated with barbiturates. Citing "insufficient evidence of the circumstances", he declared an open verdict. Dannemann later stated that Hendrix had taken nine of her prescribed Vesparax sleeping tablets, 18 times the recommended dosage.
On September 29, Hendrix's body was flown to Seattle, Washington. After a service at Dunlop Baptist Church on October 1, he was interred at Greenwood Cemetery in Renton, Washington, the location of his mother's gravesite. Hendrix's family and friends traveled in twenty-four limousines. More than two hundred people attended the funeral, including several notable musicians such as original Experience members Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, as well as Miles Davis,John Hammond and Johnny Winter.
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