It’s Autumn 2004. Harsh, my 8-year-old has been taking drum lessons and is making terrific progress (proud father alert – he became a grade 8 drummer just a few years later☺️). I’m dying to see him play and as I push open the studio door, I stop in my tracks. “Foxey Lady”! Harsh is playing along to “Foxey Lady”!! He’s playing to Jimi Hendrix!!! Oh my God!!!! I could have hugged Geoff, his teacher for exposing Harsh to Hendrix. My son was learning to play to real, out-of-this-world, blow-your-mind music. I only hoped that my 8-year old didn’t understand the lyrics! 😁

Sadly, unlike Harsh, I never got to hear Hendrix as a boy. I guess some things were way too radical for AIR Delhi – Monty Python, Ozzy, Zappa, Roxy Music (no, me neither!)…and Hendrix. Of course, we talked about Hendrix from time to time, but he was merely a name. The greatest guitarist of all time (Really?! Come on yaar!). The man who made Clapton want to give up playing (don’t be silly!). The guy who guitar gods call God (hmm..!). 

And then I finally met Jimi Hendrix on Saturday, Nov 27th 1982 (how could I forget that date!). I’m upstairs in the room above the garage, listening to Radio Australia on our radiogram, studying for some test. It’s Jimi’s birthday and they are playing his greatest hits. “Foxey Lady” comes on. Stop, do not adjust your set – that feedback and fuzz is music – not noise. And then….. that insane riff starts. “Tung tung taa, tung tung taa”. Jimi whispers “Foxey” and I am hooked. I chuck my thermodynamics text book into a corner and crank up the volume on our radiogram.

“You know you are a cute little heartbreaker
You know you are a sweet little love maker” 

This is like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Clapton, my favourite guitarist at this point, is just so perfect – every note, every chord is immaculate. His guitar sound is like the jet-stream, making the blues soar in the sky. I assumed that’s how guitar perfection is meant to sound. But this ….is Raw. It’s wild. It’s perfectly out-of-control. It’s a typhoon blowing away everything in its path. But…It’s the perfect typhoon, every note in the right place but feeling as if spontaneously placed there. I can almost feel the phantasm of Clapton’s panic in the room with me.  I am mesmerised as song after song comes through. “Hey Joe” (did I hear that right – did Jimi seriously do a song about a murderer?) , “All Along The Watchtower” (the Bob Dylan song that Dylan himself says belongs to Hendrix), “Purple Haze” (OMG, that riff!) and finally “Voodoo Chile – Slight Return” (I know immediately this is going to become my favourite Hendrix song)! And as I’m jumping around the room, head-banging in perfect harmonic motion, I can practically smell the weed wafting over the airwaves! I am finally Experienced!! 

Every time I listen to “Purple Haze”, I’m instantly transported to 1967. Jimi evokes the “Summer Of Love” perfectly. Bandanas, fringes on jacket sleeves, recreational drugs everywhere, and, an entire generation gently passing out in rebellion. (The fact that I’m only four years old in 1967 is neither here nor there 😆). Jimi wrote the riff for Purple Haze while waiting backstage at a club in London, inspired by a dream about walking underwater. It was mixed such that Jimi’s vocals are on the right channel, slightly muffled, distant – as if coming through the purple haze! Meanwhile, his guitar is in my left ear, playing this maddeningly complex riff. The combination always makes me want to be 18 again and experiment with all the things I was too scared to try back then.

Fun fact: the song is built around something now universally known as the “Hendrix chord”, a chord Jimi invented, with finger positions so complex that it’s not taught in the early years of guitar lessons. Go back and watch the video please – pay attention from about 25 seconds. On the 12^th Bar, the chord kicks in and he then has it dancing up and down the fret board, for almost half a minute (I tried recently to shape my fingers into the Hendrix Chord on my guitar. It took two days for my fingers to heal ☹️). 

Of course, some of you might also know “Purple Haze” from one of the most famous mondegreens of all time. We’ve all been singing along to it as “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy” instead of ” ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.” Hendrix was in on the joke — during live performances, he deliberately sang “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy” while gesturing at Mitch Mitchell, the Experience’s drummer. 😂

Jimi really was the full package. Guitar Rebel. Songwriter. Singer. Entertainer. Genius. And, a Dylan super-fan, known to clear out dance floors by insisting the DJ play “Blowin’ In The Wind”. So, of course, he took a Dylan song he really liked – “All Along The Watchtower” – and rebuilt it from the ground up into the rock masterpiece that we know and love today. The part that gets me each time is not the guitar solo or the singing – it’s the guitar slide at 2:04. Maybe it’s knowing that Jimi used a Zippo lighter to play the slide because he didn’t have a slide with him at that moment! 😎 Dylan was so blown away by Jimi’s cover that he simply relinquished ownership of the song, saying the song now belonged to Hendrix. Jimi turned Dylan’s original poetic, bible-inspired, acoustic folk song into a hard rock anthem – all paranoia, urgency and apocalyptic mayhem. To be honest, I think he improved the song big time! 

Sadly, Jimi’s career was heart-breakingly short – 11 years – leaving us with just a few such masterpieces. Growing up playing broom-guitar (as you can see, we were very alike!), the left-handed Jimi was forced to playthe guitar right-handed because his dad thought lefties were the devil’s spawn. That became his signature style – playing right-handed guitars, restrung to be played left-handed. This meant that the very physics of his guitar playing was unique. The position of the pickup, his attack angle, the way his fingers moved up and down the fret board… no wonder no one has ever truly been able to replicate Jimi’s sound! 

Greatness didn’t come immediately, though. Jimi struggled for a few years on the chitlin’ circuit, playing back-up for the likes of Ike & Tina Turner, The Isley Brothers, Curtis Knight. And, he kept getting fired — not because he wasn’t great, but because he couldn’t stop outshining the main act. Even Little Richard fired him for show-boating – this from the man who invented showboating! 😂 And so, in ’65, broke and footloose, Jimifinally ended up at the Village in NYC, bumming around, living hand-to-joint and just playing gigs wherever he could find them. 

And then, one night in July ’66 at the Cheetah Club in NYC, the first gears on the Jimi Hendrix juggernaut fall into place. Chas Chandler, the bassist for The Animals, has decided he wants to be a manager and is looking for the right act to get started with. Linda Keith (Keith Richards’ girlfriend) tells him to go and see Jimi at the Café Wha down in the Village. So, a few days later, Chas walks in just as Jimi is getting started on his set. Chas grabs a drink and sits down.

Hendrix starts his set with his version of “Hey Joe”. Chas’s jaw slackens and his mouth falls open as if he’s been struck by lightning. What the hell is this?!! And a few minutes later, when Jimi starts playing the solo with his teeth, Chas’s drink literally spills all over his lap. 🤯 By the end of the set the only sentient thought in his head is “How come no one’s signed this guy up?”. Within days Chas convinces Jimi to become his first client and come to London with him. Jimi says yes on one condition. No, it’s not about contracts or money – all Chas has to do is promise to introduce Jimi to Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck! Done deal man!!

If you want to know what made Chas’s jaw slacken, next time please listen to the song with the lyrics in front of you. The dialogue between Joe and his friend in the build-up to Joe shooting his unfaithful wife, Joe’s defiant heartbroken angst, his friend egging him on to “shoot her again” is perfectly narrated. I’m always transported into the movie Jimi was directing here – and he totally sells the story!

So having secured Chas’s promise of introductions to Clapton & Beck, Jimi’s on his way to London to pay homage to his guitar heroes. Meanwhile, the Guitar Gods themselves, playing London’s clubs without a care in the world, are oblivious to their impending slaughter. They are about to find out that Jimi cannot play second fiddle to anybody