Jimi Hendrix could dazzle on stage, and was an important figure in the counterculture movement. Philip Norman captures his life in Wild Child.
(Image Credit: David Redfern/Redferns)
Jimi Hendrix was one of one. During his 27 years on the planet, he became widely known as the greatest guitar player of all time. Hendrix was impossible to categorize as a musician. On stage, Hendrix pulled off stunts like no other. He would frequently play the guitar with his teeth, smash his guitar into bits, or even light the instrument on fire. His life was in some ways the epitome of sex, drugs, rock and roll – he loved all three. And yet to define him as just another Rockstar would be an irresponsible simplification of one of Rock’s great characters.
Music historian Phillip Norman’s Wild Thing: The short spellbinding life of Jimi Hendrix, is an impressive feat of historical research and writing. Norman covers Jimi’s entire life, sometimes in painstaking detail. At all turns, Norman does his best to provide maximum context, and present the different recollections of important events. Hendrix had a habit of misleading the press, which Norman notes frequently throughout the book, and for which Norman deserves even more credit for his efforts to decipher and deliver the truth.
And the truth, to put it mildly, was a long story. Born as Johnny Allen Hendrix on 27 November 1942, his name was soon changed to James Marshall by his father, Al. Hendrix had a bizarre early life, which included being adopted away from his family in Seattle to a family in southern California, only to have his father return from the Army and head down the coast to claim his three-year-old biological son. Al was a constant source of insecurity and anxiety throughout Jimi’s life. An alcoholic, Al never approved of Jimi’s (who at that time went by Buster) guitar playing. Even after finding a broken guitar in a scrap heap and learning to produce great sounds from it, Jimi had to convince his dad to buy him a proper guitar. From there, he was completely devoted to the instrument for the rest of his life. Even when his son returned to Seattle to play sold-out shows many years later, Al was unimpressed. Being the best of all time was apparently not good enough for Al, and Jimi tried and failed to make his father proud of him to the day he died.
Norman is at his best with short bursts of brilliant writing that add value to his historical record keeping. In describing Hendrix’s biggest hit, a cover of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower, Norman writes that “a terse ‘hey!’ announces a break which, for me, surpasses any other to have been recorded since guitars had electrical wires threaded through their bodies like keyhole surgery and metal pickups and volume knobs and tremelo levers dentist-drilled into their faces.”
At other points, Norman’s writing lacks pace, and seems unfit to describe someone he defines as “spellbinding.” For example, Jimi’s early years as a musician were covered in complex detail, through his numerous adventures joining and leaving bands. Many of the events could have been summarized, and the book would have benefitted from fifty less pages. Another disappointment in the book were the spelling errors, almost 10 in total, that were unusual for a published work like this one. They were unprofessional and distracting as a reader and while likely not Norman’s fault, they hurt his writing.
For all of his greatness, Jimi’s black skin would often set him apart from other Rockstars. While trying to make it as a young musician, he had to cut his teeth on the “chittlin circuit,” a nationwide series of bars and clubs that featured African American performers. It was there that he met and played with a great number of the premier black performers of the era.
Jimi’s once-in-a-generation talent was not destined to be pigeon-holed. Norman describes in detail how the Beatles and other British groups helped to import “black” music like R&B back into mainstream American society. At the same time, Jimmy was growing bored of the same old music he was playing, and was beginning to pay more attention to new Rock groups. Norman wrote that it was difficult for managers to place Jimi, because “he wasn’t exactly rock nor pop nor soul nor R&B nor blues nor country nor folk nor jazz but a bit of everything. In a world of racialized music, Jimmy could cut through genres at will.
Put another way, music promoter Bill Graham, describes in the book that Hendrix was “the first black man in the history of this country who caused the mass of white females in the audience to disregard his race and want his body.”
Jimi’s biggest hits would come as a member of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, a three person band formed in Britain. Hendrix was known to play covers throughout his career, but other tunes like Purple Haze, Hey Joe, and Voodoo Child became hits as well. More than for his studio work though, Jimi was known for his incredible skill as a performer, emphasized by his frequent habit of playing in bars and clubs despite his fame, all the way until his death.
The 1960’s were an intense and violent time in the history of American race relations, but Hendrix was not initially the radical symbol of counterculture that he may be remembered as. Despite the increasing urges of the Black Panther Party for Hendrix to more directly take up their cause, it took Jimi years to fully embrace their agenda. “He grew adept at deflecting suggestions from hefty brothers in black berets and sunglasses” wrote Norman. One reason for the initial hesitancy was Jimi’s own career in the military. Norman wrote “his sympathies were as much with the young soldiers fighting a clearly unwinnable war, especially the black ones… who were allowed to die for their country yet not granted equality in it.”
Despite his initial stance, Hendrix became the target of COINTELPRO, the counter intelligence program operated by the FBI and its director J. Edgar Hoover, who used the program to target the Black Panther Party. In addition to being wildly illegal (and eventually exposed as one of Richard Nixon’s many spying ventures), the program was extremely racist. As a high-profile black person in the country, let alone a scandalous Rockstar, Hendrix was a main target of the program, although Norman describes the “findings of COINTELPRO’s sleuths proved disappointingly thin,” proof that targeting Jimi had more to do with racism than any evidence of wrong-doing.
Despite the attention of the government, Jimi slowly became more and more engaged with the cause of Black Power, ultimately leading to his most famous performance. Hendrix waited all night to play in a muddy farmer’s field in Woodstock, New York. With an 400-500,000 visitors over the course of the weekend, the festival was the largest ever for a festival, and as Norman points out, “arguably the largest ever convened for a purpose other than fighting battles.” But the line up was so delayed that Hendrix had to wait until Monday morning to play.
In describing Woodstock and the performance on-stage, Norman produces some of his best writing. He writes that Hendrix had played the Star-Spangled Banner before, but never quite like he did that day. The performance included Jimi’s “long dying falls erupting into a feedback cacophony that somehow mimicked the war’s sounds – the whip of helicopter blades, the whistle of falling bombs, the whoomph of Napalm, the screams of its shredded victims.” Perhaps not fully on purpose, Hendrix provided the counterculture movement with its lasting moment on stage. While he hadn’t initially wanted to be a symbol of a political movement, he became one that day. A column in the New York Post would write “You finally heard what that song was about, that you can love your country but hate the government.”
In a poignant summary, Norman writes, “he walked off stage as Mitch Mitchell recalls (Jimi’s bandmate), ‘cold, tired, hungry, and unhappy with his performance.’ He would never know he had just created the defining moment of Woodstock – and, many people believe, the whole decade.”
At times, appealing to all races means appealing to none. After Woodstock, Norman writes that “performing for such a huge, overwhelmingly white crowd inevitably brought cries of ‘Uncle Tom’ from the Black Panthers (just as it brought threats from redneck whites to beat him to a pulp if he ever defiled the National Anthem like that again).”
However not long after his biggest successes and most memorable performances, Hendrix was dead. How he actually died is shrouded in conspiracy theories and changing stories. The official story is that Jimi died on an overdose of sleeping pills, taken from a young woman he was staying with at the time, German and former figure skater Monika Dannemann. Dannemann alleges that Jimi couldn’t sleep and asked for a pill, but when she woke up she found that Jimi had apparently taken nine of the tablets. However, Dannemann’s official recount of the events of that night changed some 14 times, and friends who arrived on the scene the morning Jimi died poked holes in the timing of events. Some allege that hours passed between the time that Dannemann called friends in a panic and the time that she called the ambulance. As Norman notes several times, Dannemann was a new figure in Jimi’s life, and older friends of his described Monika were suspicious. She appeared to show relatively little grief, especially considering how tragic and traumatizing the episode must have been.
Jimi left this earth far too soon. Throughout his short but massively successful career, he rubbed shoulders with many of the best guitarists and musicians to walk this planet. They almost all agreed that Jimi was the best. Eric Clapton for example, was seen to be God on the guitar. One night, Jimi sat in with Clapton’s band Cream, to play a number. ‘Halfway through the song, Eric stopped playing” recalled Chas Chandler, a friend of Jimi’s. Clapton retreated to the dressing room and said ‘you never told me he was that fu**ing good.’” Jimi would have high voltage fans for the rest of his career. A headliner for Hendrix once reported seeing many of Rock’s biggest stars waiting to see Jimi play, saying that he saw “all my biggest heroes… Pete Townshend (The Who)… Keith Richards (Rolling Stones)… Stevie Winwood… Eric Clapton, looking like “Oh my God, I’m not God anymore.”
Trying to explain the legacy of Jimi Hendrix can be tough, even with 350+ pages. Talented, unique, and short are the descriptors that best describe the man and his life. A Billboard magazine edition just after his death provided perhaps the best memorial for a man like no other.
“To a black gypsy cat / who rocked the world / when it needed to be rocked. / Sleep Well.”
Jimi faced challenges at every stage of his life. From an alcoholic, violent father, to the military, to coming up as a black musician in a still overtly racist and violent country. Eventually, greedy management, drug use, and creative burnout hurt him as well. But Hendrix was not only remarkably talented, but resilient as well. As long as he had his guitar, he was happy. And boy, did he rock this world.
Norman’s history is but one of a long line of tribute books, movies, and albums. For longer than he lived, people have been memorializing the best guitar player in history. “I still have my guitar and an amp, and as long as I have that, no fool can stop me living,” he once wrote to his father. Indeed, no fool ever could. And while a series of small pills took him away from this planet, Jimi’s legacy remains untouched as the greatest shredder to ever pick up a guitar.