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🇺🇲 Chapter 2 | The Birth of the Fire Guitarist: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Monterey, and the Morning at Woodstock 〜| The Night He Burned the Guitar, the Morning He Bent the Anthem: The Era Jimi Hendrix Sounded

 

 

 

 

 

In September 1966, an unknown guitarist left New York for London on a one-way ticket. Just four years later, in September 1970, he would die at the age of twenty-seven. Those four years are among the most densely packed stretches in the history of rock. In about a year after his debut, he rewrote the standard by which guitarists around the world were measured, set a stage on fire, turned the studio into a laboratory, and went on carving into records sounds that no one had ever heard.

 

In Chapter 1, we followed a boy born into a poor house in Seattle, who lost his mother, took up a five-dollar guitar, played a right-handed guitar upside down with his left hand, and passed through the army and the touring circuits until he was discovered in a New York café. Chapter 2 is the continuation. The journey of the Jimi Hendrix Experience that began in London, the flame at Monterey, the magic in the studio, the morning at Woodstock, and finally his last summer.

 

Writing this chapter, I am keeping one thing in mind. I do not want to write a piece that only counts up a genius's "greatness." Listening to the sounds one by one, I want to look as closely as I can at the figure behind them: a lonely, gentle, clumsy young man who was more curious than anyone. I want to deliver even the quiet body heat that lies beneath the flame-like sound.

 

 


🎩 Arrival in London — The Formation of the Jimi Hendrix Experience

 

September 1966, London. Chas Chandler brought Hendrix to this city. The former bassist of the Animals had already begun a new challenge as Hendrix's manager and producer. The first thing he took on was building a band that would bring out Hendrix's sound to the fullest.

 

Two British musicians were chosen: Noel Redding, who had been a guitarist but switched to bass, and Mitch Mitchell, a drummer full of talent who had been trained on the jazz and R&B scene. With Hendrix at the center, these three came together as "The Jimi Hendrix Experience." It was around October 1966. A minimal trio of bass, drums, and guitar plus voice. Within so few notes, Hendrix's guitar would sound out the parts of many players by itself.

 

Mitch Mitchell's drumming is said to have had a free way of speaking, deeply influenced by jazz. Rather than repeating fixed patterns, he responded constantly to the guitar's movements, holding a conversation with it. Noel Redding's bass quietly supported the foundation beneath. Three people listening closely to each other's sounds and moving like a single creature. They proved that a trio, the most minimal formation, is also the freest.

 

 

In London, Hendrix quickly became the talk of musicians. A famous episode remains. At a concert by Eric Clapton's band Cream, Hendrix asked if he could sit in and play one song. Clapton accepted, and Hendrix played "Killing Floor" on stage. The people in the audience and on the stage understood on the spot that the guitarist in front of them was unlike anyone before. Clapton, it is said, left the stage somewhat dazed.

 

 

At the end of 1966, his debut single, "Hey Joe," was released. In early 1967 it reached number six on the British chart. The next single, "Purple Haze," reached number three, and "The Wind Cries Mary" number six. In just a few months, he scored hit after hit in the Top Ten. A young man who was "only a backing guitarist" in America quickly became a lead in Britain.

 

I am always astonished by this speed. A young man picked up in a New York café becomes, within months of arriving in London, a voice coming from radios across the country. Everything must already have been stored inside him. The hours in the army, the hours on tour, the years of playing behind others. That accumulation of "nameless time" exploded all at once in a place called London. Musicians are not born suddenly one day. At the end of a long silence, one day, they become a voice.

 

London at the time was one of the centers of the world's music, with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who at work. The Black American guitarist who appeared there carried with him the very scent of the blues homeland that young British players adored. At the same time, he was a strange magician who could turn that blues into a form no one had heard. For young British guitarists, Hendrix was an object of admiration and, a little, a threat.

 

 


🔥 "Are You Experienced" — The Shock of the Debut Album

 

In May 1967, the debut album Are You Experienced was released in Britain. It climbed to number two on the national chart, blocked from the top by the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's. But that fact itself tells how remarkable the album was. In the same month, a historic Beatles work came out. Was there any other newcomer band that stood shoulder to shoulder with it as runner-up?

 

The album opens with "Foxy Lady." Short, cutting guitar chops and swelling feedback. Then "Manic Depression," "Love or Confusion," "May This Be Love." Just listing the titles shows that this album runs a spectrum of feeling from one end to the other: fury, tenderness, confusion, intoxication. "Purple Haze" shines with an especially strange light. That ominous tritone at the start. The moment you hear it, a door to some world "on the other side" opens a crack.

 

"Hey Joe" was originally a folk song that Hendrix rebuilt as rock. He paints the story of a man on the run with a low, crawling bass and a quietly burning guitar. Hendrix's "Hey Joe" would later be passed down as the most definitive version of the song. "Stone Free" is a song that carries a wish for freedom from bondage inside a light rhythm. "Third Stone from the Sun" is a strange work in which the space travel of a boy who loved science fiction crystallized into an instrumental picture in sound.

 

In America the album came out in the summer of 1967 in a somewhat altered form. Songs that had come out first as British singles, such as "Purple Haze," "Hey Joe," and "The Wind Cries Mary," were added, and it is said to have been edited so that American listeners could hear the whole of him. The American version reached the Top Five on the national chart. His home country "discovered" him, in fact, only after his success in Britain.

 

I love "The Wind Cries Mary" as another face of this period. A strange title: "the wind is calling Mary." A quiet, gentle, somehow lonely guitar walking slowly into the night. Many people were surprised that Hendrix, known for violent sound, could write such a delicate song. But knowing his boyhood, I feel less surprise than recognition. A boy who lost his mother and went on playing at low volume in a small room: his quiet prayer is there.

 

Are You Experienced would later be told of as one of the great debut albums in rock history. But at the time of making it, the people around Hendrix, I suspect, were driven less by an awareness that they were making "history" than by a desperate feeling that "we must get this guitarist's sound down." History, even if it looks like a straight line afterward, is always a succession of groping steps on the ground.

 

 

The title "Are You Experienced" is a question: have you experienced it? You want to ask, experienced what? Sound, dreams, love, or something that has no name yet. A title in the form of a question seems like an entrance that turns the listener inward. When we finish the album, have we become people who have "experienced"? Such a strange question still hovers around this work.

 

 


🎆 The Monterey Pop Festival — The Night He Set the Guitar on Fire

 

June 18, 1967. Monterey, California. The Monterey International Pop Festival, one of the first large-scale rock festivals, was under way. For Hendrix, it was his first stage before an audience in his home country. Having succeeded in London, he was still almost unknown in America.

 

The lineup was formidable: Janis Joplin, the Who, Otis Redding, the Mamas and the Papas. Behind Hendrix's appearance, it is often said, Paul McCartney had recommended him to the organizers. A man at the very top of British rock introduced an American guitarist to America. Here too is the irony that Hendrix was "found by Britain before America."

 

 

There is also an anecdote about Pete Townshend of the Who and Hendrix contesting the running order with a coin toss. The Who were known for ending their sets by smashing guitars. To follow them was a severe disadvantage. Hendrix, it is said, chose to go after them anyway. And after the Who's ferocious set, he repainted the air in the arena into an entirely different dimension.

 

On stage, Hendrix was like a magician. He played the guitar behind his back, played it with his teeth, moved around the stage with the suppleness of an animal. Beginning with "Killing Floor," passing through "Like a Rolling Stone," then to the last song, "Wild Thing." Near the end of that song, he knelt beside the guitar, poured lighter fluid on it, and set it alight. Flames wrapped around the Stratocaster. He is described as holding his hands out over the burning guitar as if in prayer. Then he smashed the burned-out guitar against the stage.

 

The audience was simply stunned. No one could immediately grasp the meaning of what had happened. Was it a performance, or a ritual? To deliberately burn the guitar, the tool most precious to him. It was a gesture of destruction, and at the same time looked like an offering to something. Every time I think of this scene, I remember the boy who had taken up a five-dollar guitar and played it with such care. Burning it because it is precious. That paradox seems to me to lie at the very core of who Hendrix was.

 

From that night on, America "discovered" Hendrix. A few months after his success in London, he finally carved his name into his home country and the world. That flame did not only burn a guitar. It was, I think, a symbolic light that, in one night, burned away the "boundaries" of the genre called rock.

 

The performance was captured in D. A. Pennebaker's documentary Monterey Pop and reached young people all over the world through the film. Janis Joplin and Otis Redding also performed at the same festival, and they too were discovered by the world that summer. In the air of the so-called "Summer of Love" in 1967, Monterey became a symbolic place that announced the beginning of a new era.

 

 


🌌 "Axis: Bold as Love" — An Album of Space and Love

 

At the end of 1967, with the excitement of Monterey still warm, Hendrix released his second album, Axis: Bold as Love. Barely half a year after his debut. In that short span, he had already moved on to the next place. Axis was more introspective than its predecessor, more experimental, and far gentler.

 

A famous anecdote surrounds its making. Near completion, Hendrix is said to have carelessly left one side's worth of the master tapes in a taxi or some such vehicle. The tape never came back. They had to rebuild that side in a short time, almost in a hurry. That a work born of that urgency should have such astonishingly delicate sonic texture strikes me as strange.

 

Among the album's songs, "Little Wing" is a special one. A short song, under two and a half minutes. Yet within it, one small story sits in complete form. The guitar whispers like a voice, and the voice murmurs like a guitar. Countless guitarists later covered the song and took its chord movement and phrasing as a model. It is the kind of song everyone wishes they could play guitar like. "Castles Made of Sand" is a quiet ballad singing the collapse of castles of sand as a metaphor for life. "If 6 Was 9," true to its strange title, is a psychedelic declaration that lightly flips established values.

 

I am especially moved by the long guitar solo at the end of "Bold as Love." Near the close of this song titled "bold as love," the guitar sways like waves, swells, and drifts far away. Sound moves between the left and right speakers and spreads as if floating through outer space. It is said that few at the time had used stereo technology this far for musical expression. The universe a boy once daydreamed about actually appears in the listener's ears through guitar and recording technology.

 

The album's title, Axis: Bold as Love, might be read as "axis, bold as love." A love that is the axis of the band, a bold love that could be the axis of the world. In this title, I feel condensed something that he sought in his own music. The impression of destructive guitar is strong with Hendrix, but what he was really chasing may well have been the shape of love. Behind the sound of fire there was always a hunger for love. This album quietly teaches us that.

 

"Little Wing" has since been loved and covered by many musicians. Eric Clapton took the song up with Derek and the Dominos. Stevie Ray Vaughan played it many times in tribute to Hendrix. That a song under two and a half minutes should remain so deeply in the hearts of later guitarists, I think, is because the song does not show off technique but puts the softest part of feeling directly into sound.

 

 


🎛️ The Inventor of Sound — Feedback, Wah, Fuzz, and Uni-Vibe

 

When we speak of Hendrix, the phrase "he is a skilled guitarist" is nowhere near enough. He was also an "inventor of sound." He opened, one after another, possibilities of the electric guitar that no one had used before. Much of the reason his guitar sounds different from anyone else's lies in how he used his equipment.

 

First, the Stratocaster and large Marshall amplifiers. Turn up the guitar's volume and the amp's volume. Then the guitar's strings begin to vibrate on their own, receiving the amp's sound, and a sustained, groaning sound, feedback, is born. In rock until then, this sound had tended to be avoided as "noise." But Hendrix deliberately handled it as part of the instrument. The position in which he held the guitar, the distance from the amp, the direction of his body. By adjusting these delicately, he tamed feedback like a living creature.

 

In addition, he mastered a range of effects: the Fuzz Face, the wah pedal, the octave fuzz, and the Uni-Vibe. Fuzz distorts the sound roughly. Wah makes the guitar "speak" like a human voice. The Uni-Vibe makes the sound sway as if underwater. In particular, collaboration with the sound engineer Roger Mayer is said to have deepened his sound-making. Hendrix's attachment to equipment was not simply about tools for making sound loud but something like paints for building the texture of emotion.

 

What interests me most is that Hendrix handled sound with his body. He did not rely only on effects. The strength of the hand holding the guitar, the angle of the pick, the subtle pressure of the fingers pressing the strings. The motion of the fingers turning the volume knob. All of it connects directly to changes in tone. His fingers operated the minute electrical behavior between amp and guitar as if it were part of the instrument. Machine and human become one. Then the guitar becomes not a tool but an extension of the body.

 

The upside-down right-handed guitar played with the left hand, which we touched on in Chapter 1, comes back to mind here. A guitar with the string order reversed is said to have a distinctive tonal quirk. He did not treat that quirk as a disadvantage but used it thoroughly as his own sound. Equipment, body, and a constraint he was born with. When all of these melted into a single sound, Hendrix's "voice" was born.

 

Such "inventions" were displayed fully in the studio as well. In recording, Hendrix actively took in the most advanced recording technology of the day, such as panning sounds between the left and right speakers, changing tape speeds, and using reversed playback. Collaboration with the engineer Eddie Kramer is said to have been especially fruitful. How to turn the "landscape of sound" inside Hendrix's head into real sound. That challenge advanced rock recording technology itself.

 

 


🌀 "Electric Ladyland" — The Studio Magician and "All Along the Watchtower"

 

In the autumn of 1968, Hendrix released the double-album epic Electric Ladyland. Effectively a self-produced work with Hendrix as producer, it has a degree of completion that deserves to be called a summit among rock albums. On the American album chart, it finally reached number one. The young man discovered in London had climbed, in his home country as well, to the highest possible place.

 

The British cover of the album caused controversy with a photograph of many nude women. Hendrix himself is said not to have liked it. What he wanted, reportedly, was a different design using a photograph of the three band members. There was always a small gap between the content of the music and the labels the world stuck on it. That gap would continue quietly throughout his career.

 

The making of the album was far from smooth. Friends, musicians, and fans came and went frequently around Hendrix, and the studio is said to have been often filled with a restless air. Chas Chandler grew increasingly weary of Hendrix's way of piling up take after take in pursuit of perfection. In the end, he left Hendrix partway through the production. The parting with the benefactor who had found him in London and supported his first steps was no small event for Hendrix.

 

One of the album's best-known songs is the Bob Dylan cover "All Along the Watchtower." Dylan's original was a quiet, acoustic song. Hendrix rebuilt it into a completely different one. The guitar at the opening creates an ominous atmosphere in an instant, and the solo thunders like a storm. The song entered the Top Twenty as a single in both America and Britain. Dylan himself is said to have praised Hendrix's version highly and later to have performed the song live in an arrangement close to Hendrix's. A moment in which a cover surpasses the original. A rare example is here.

 

Another song, "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)," is far too famous as a Hendrix signature. That intro with the wah pedal growling. An overwhelming song of self-affirmation declaring "I'm a voodoo child." Everything we have seen of him so far is packed in here. A boy raised in poverty, a Native grandmother's stories, the hours in the army, the loneliness of the touring road, and a sound that shook the world. In a single song, an entire life is condensed with almost violent density.

 

The album also contains long fantasies set at sea, such as "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)," running more than ten minutes. There are songs like "Still Raining, Still Dreaming" that show the continuation of a psychedelic dream. Borrowing the form of a rock album, Hendrix treated music as if it were one huge painting. By this point the title "guitarist" can no longer contain him. A composer, an artist of sound, a teller of stories. He was already standing far beyond the frame called rock.

 

Many friends took part in the recording of the album. For example, the long blues session "Voodoo Chile," running nearly fifteen minutes, features Steve Winwood of Traffic on organ and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane on bass. The studio was a laboratory full of jam-session heat, and also a place of friendship. The recording engineer Eddie Kramer is said to have played the role of gathering that heat into a single work.

 

 


🌅 The Star-Spangled Banner — The Morning at Woodstock

 

Monday morning, August 18, 1969. The Woodstock festival, which had been held for three days on a farm in New York State, was waiting for Hendrix as the final performer of the last day. But rain and delays in the schedule piled up, and he took the stage only after dawn. The grounds, which had been filled with hundreds of thousands of people, had already emptied as many headed home. Those who remained are said to have numbered some tens of thousands.

 

The band Hendrix led that day was not the Experience. Billy Cox on bass, Mitch Mitchell on drums, plus a guitarist and two percussionists: a new band. Its name was "Gypsy Sun and Rainbows." Billy, whom he had met in the army, was beside him again. The time of boyhood and the time of stardom quietly overlapped here.

 

The climax of the performance was the American national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner." He played the song on the guitar alone. The melody was one everyone knew. But woven between its phrases were sounds like the roar of bombers, screams like sirens, bursts like machine-gun fire. The scene in the lyric, "the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air," was reproduced before one's eyes as the sound of the guitar itself. In the middle of the Vietnam War, a country is made to see its own violence reflected in its anthem.

 

 

Some people took this performance as "desecration of the national anthem." But Hendrix is said not to have meant it that way. For him, it was only the expression, in sound, of America as it is. A beautiful melody and the sound of violence exist side by side in one and the same country. He played that contradiction just as it was. As a young man who had served in the army, he knew the sound of war. That is why the sound had such force of persuasion.

 

The performance went straight into "Purple Haze." In the afterglow of the anthem, when that ominous tritone begins to ring, the listener is pulled in one stroke from the national anthem into the fog of psychedelia. And then, in a quiet and beautiful flow of sound like "Villanova Junction," his playing slowly dissolved into the morning air.

 

The performance was later included in the documentary film Woodstock and was etched into the memories of people around the world as one of the festival's symbolic scenes. Young people covered in mud, a guitar in the morning sun, fragments of an anthem. At the end of the summer of 1969, that sound was left behind as a portrait of the era itself.

 

Whenever I watch this footage, my eyes go to Hendrix's expression on stage. Rather than ecstatic, he looks somehow like someone quietly praying. Tens of thousands of exhausted young people, in the mud, bathed in morning sun, listening to his guitar. There, the hope, the fatigue, and the pain of the 1960s were ringing as a single sound. How did you hear Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner"? Was it anger? Prayer? Or something that was neither?

 

 


🎶 Band of Gypsys — An Attempt at a New Black Music

 

Around Woodstock, the circumstances surrounding Hendrix were changing greatly. The Experience came to an end in the summer of 1969. Noel Redding left the band. The relationships among the three are said to have been slowly fraying through long tours, fame, and differences in musical direction. Hendrix had begun searching for a new form of music with new companions.

 

What was born was "Band of Gypsys." On bass was his old friend from the army, Billy Cox. On drums was Buddy Miles. All three were Black musicians. Where the Experience was often discussed in the context of British rock, Band of Gypsys was an attempt to return to a place closer to the roots of Black music: funk, soul, and blues.

 

From New Year's Eve of 1969 into New Year's Day of 1970, they gave historic concerts at the Fillmore East in New York. The performances were recorded and released in 1970 as the album Band of Gypsys. It is the only live album Hendrix officially released in his lifetime. There was a different, sticky groove there. Billy's bass crawls along the ground, deep and heavy. Buddy's drums push from behind with the bouncing rhythm of funk.

 

The album also contains songs sung by Buddy Miles, and the color of collaboration as a band comes through strongly. Instead of Hendrix alone standing in front, the three sound each other's notes as equals. In a song like "Who Knows," Hendrix's voice and guitar quietly but surely point in a new direction inside a funk groove. A different heat from the Experience's flame, deeper, blacker, and quieter, was there.

 

At the time, voices within parts of the Black community are said to have criticized Hendrix, wondering whether he was playing music for white young people. Against that background, forming a band made up entirely of Black musicians may have been an act of confirming his own roots once again. The question "music for whom?" he was trying to answer through sound itself.

 

The most shocking track on the album is probably "Machine Gun." A twelve-minute-plus single journey of a long solo. On the guitar, Hendrix depicts, almost without words, the burst of machine-gun fire, the roar of bombers, screams, and the memory of a battlefield echoing from afar. He is said to have dedicated the song to the soldiers fighting in the war. If the "Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock was a mirror reflecting a country's contradictions, "Machine Gun" was a cry thrusting the very sound of war into raw view.

 

Whenever I listen to this song, I think of the young Hendrix in the army. A young man playing the same tune with Billy Cox in the clubhouse of the base. He did not go to Vietnam, but the air of war had certainly soaked into his body. That memory, a few years later, took a single form here. An unexpected detour of life connects, in music, like a distant payback. That always strikes me deeply.

 

But the activity of Band of Gypsys was short. An incident often told is that at a concert at Madison Square Garden in January 1970, Hendrix left the stage partway through. Soon afterward, the band broke up. The road to new music had only just begun. Hendrix, I believe, surely intended to go much further.

 

 


🌹 The Lonely Star — The Weight of Fame and Parting From Companions

 

Fame was both a blessing and a burden for Hendrix. The world demanded of him an image: "the man who burns guitars," "a wild Black rock star who plays like a beast." That flame he showed at Monterey was burned too intensely into people's memories. Audiences expected him to set his guitar on fire night after night. He himself is said to have come to feel those expectations as increasingly heavy.

 

In May 1969, drugs were found in his luggage at an airport in Toronto, and he was arrested. In the trial that followed, he is said to have been acquitted. But I wonder whether that incident cast no small shadow on his heart. It was also a period in which a young man at the peak of success was trying to step back and look at himself.

 

The people who had supported him also drifted away, little by little. Chas Chandler, who had guided him from his debut, left him in 1968. His Experience companion Noel Redding left in the summer of 1969. Mitch Mitchell kept returning to Hendrix's side from time to time, but the form of the band remained unstable, swaying.

 

There were always many people around Hendrix. Fans, friends, musicians, managers, and people with various motives. But among them, how many could quietly share his "real loneliness"? Days of moving from hotel to hotel. The roar on stage and the silence after returning to his room. I think he tasted that drop almost every night.

 

In 1970, he realized a great dream. He built his own studio in Greenwich Village in New York. Its name was Electric Lady Studios. In the very neighborhood where he had once sung, unknown, as "Jimmy James and the Blue Flames," he built a castle of his own sound. The studio opened in the summer of 1970. A place where he could search for his sound at his own pace. Where no one hurried him or bound him, where he could pile up sound one piece at a time. It may have been the "room" he had been dreaming of all along.

 

The room of his boyhood, where he played at low volume so that nothing would be heard through thin walls. He had come a long way from there, and at last he had a place where he could "sound his own music in his own room." But the time he was able to spend in that room was far, far too short.

 

 


🕊️ September 18, 1970 — A Departure at Twenty-Seven, and the Music Left Behind

 

In the summer of 1970, Hendrix was on his last tour. On August 30, he appeared at the Isle of Wight Festival in England. The young man found in London stood before hundreds of thousands on an island in the south of the country. The performance was later recorded as albums such as Isle of Wight and became a precious document conveying his final period.

 

On September 6, he appeared at a festival on the German island of Fehmarn. It is said to have been one of his last big concerts. On September 16, at a club in London, he is said to have enjoyed a surprise jam with old musician friends. It is told as the last time he performed in public.

 

September 18, 1970, London. Jimi Hendrix was found unconscious in a hotel room and taken to a hospital, but died there. He was twenty-seven. The cause of death is given as asphyxiation from inhaling vomit, under the effects of sleeping pills. The inquest returned an "open verdict," a judgment that did not settle on either accident or suicide. Various speculations about the truth of his death have been told, but the one thing certain is the fact that a genius left this world far too early and far too quietly.

 

Just four years after being found in London. The journey a boy who lost his mother began with a five-dollar guitar ended in the far-too-short span of twenty-seven years. Yet the sounds left in that time had already crossed over an era.

 

It is said that before his death he had been envisioning a collaboration with the jazz giant Miles Davis and the arranger Gil Evans. Beyond the blues and rock, toward the language of jazz. His ear was still searching for new places. What kind of music might have been born had it come true? Just imagining it, my chest warms, and at the same time I feel a deep sense of loss.

 

After his death, his unfinished recordings came out one after another. The Cry of Love in 1971 contains "Angel," written with his mother in mind. First Rays of the New Rising Sun in 1997 is an attempt to reconstruct, from surviving recordings, the next album he had been planning. "The first rays of the new rising sun." In this title you can clearly feel the atmosphere of the place he was about to head toward. He was still before the dawn.

 

The early deaths of rock musicians go on: Brian Jones in 1969, Janis Joplin in 1970, Jim Morrison in 1971. The phrase "27 Club" is a name later people gave to that coincidence. But I do not want to speak of Hendrix only as "a member of a legend." At twenty-seven, he had already rewritten the standard of rock history. And countless sounds he had yet to paint remained. Thinking of that, my chest tightens.

 

Rolling Stone later named Hendrix the greatest guitarist of all time, number one. But rankings say almost nothing of his essence. A boy who kept playing at low volume in a poor room in Seattle, in a few years shook the hearts of young people around the world, and left this world earlier than anyone. I think the weight of that story cannot be measured by rankings or prizes.

 

What was the first Hendrix song you heard? Does the shock of that sound still remain somewhere in your body?

---

The journey of the Experience that began in London, passing through the flame at Monterey, the magic of the studio, and the morning at Woodstock, ran on to the new challenge of Band of Gypsys, and then to September 18, 1970, far too fast. Behind the flame-like sound there was always the quiet prayer of a boy who had been left behind.

 

The sounds he left passed into the hands of countless guitarists afterward and keep ringing, changing form. In the next chapter, Chapter 3, we will follow the legacy Hendrix left to the guitarists who came after. On to Chapter 3. 🎸

 

 

 

 

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-Blues Rock, psychedelic rock, rock, rock guitar