Cover Story: Jimi Hendrix: The Greatest Guitarist of All Time

In 1970 the escalating costs of constructing his dream studio, Electric Lady, in New York forced Hendrix back on tour. With Billy Cox on bass and Mitch Mitchell back as drummer, Hendrix was on the road from the late spring through the summer. The day after the official opening of Electric Lady in August, Hendrix had to leave for a European tour. He never returned.

On September 18th, 1970, Jimi Hendrix was rushed by ambulance from his London hotel to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Over the years, friends and associates of Hendrix have continued to offer conflicting accounts of how and why he died. But with no evidence to suggest either foul play or suicide, the coroner returned an open verdict and listed the cause of death as "inhalation of vomit due to barbiturate intoxication." Hendrix was twenty-seven years old.

Jimi Hendrix was a brilliant musician but an appallingly poor businessman. At the time of his death, his estate was in hopeless disarray, a legal and accounting nightmare that has never been fully resolved or explained. Posthumous album releases bearing his name still flood record stores. Many are cheap cash-ins, some with only nominal Hendrix involvement. Even his label, Warner Bros., has been guilty of some appalling travesties: the studio-leftovers compilation War Heroes; the 1970s albums Crash Landing and Midnight Lightning, on which producer Alan Douglas replaced the original backing tracks with stiff recorded arrangements.

But there have been "new" Hendrix records of considerable historical and musical worth. The tracks featured on the 1971 albums The Cry of Love and Rainbow Bridge together constitute much of the planned First Rays of the New Rising Sun. Radio One is an essential collection of the Experience's recordings for BBC Radio. The recent four-CD collection Stages features four entire Hendrix performances from 1967 through 1970.

More importantly, the Hendrix legacy continues to mushroom. Every hard-rock and heavy-metal band from Anthrax to ZZ Top owes great debts of inspiration and often direct influence to the Jimi Hendrix experience. Echoes of Hendrix's blues power resonate in the playing of recent innovators like Robert Cray and the late Stevie Ray Vaughan. Likewise, his absorption of jazz concepts and rhythm ideas into his own music later bore fruit in the jazz-fusion movement the Seventies (most vividly in the post-"Bitches Brew" work of Miles Davis) as well as in the harmolodic movement captained by Ornette Coleman and the scorching jazz-funk of Coleman disciples Ronald Shannon Jackson and James "Blood" Ulmer.

The Seventies funk sound popularized by Parliament-Funkadelic, the Ohio Players and his old bosses the Isley Brothers was a direct product of Hendrix's controversial marriage of glitzy, suggestive showmanship and freaky down-home soul. Prince has since put his own stamp on that marriage, right down to his flashy sartorial style. His songwriting, like Hendrix's, is a vibrant tug of war between the spiritual and the sassy, and the orgasmic scream of his guitar is unapologetically Hendrixian.

The burgeoning black-rock movement spearheaded by Living Colour has taken great inspiration from Hendrix's pivotal achievements. The Black Rock Coalition was founded in 1985 to confront the same problems that plagued Hendrix during his career: racial prejudice, musical pigeonholing, the lack of contractual as well as artistic control in business dealings, the reclamation of rock & roll as black music. Hendrix rarely spoke about his music in purely racial terms, but there was nothing colorblind about the way he could tear into Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor" or Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."

Hendrix has also endured as a songwriter. His rockers and ballads alike have been covered by artists running the gamut from Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton (with Derek and the Dominos) to the Pretenders and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The Kronos Quartet put an avant-classical spin on "Purple Haze," and although Hendrix and Gil Evans never got to work together, Hendrix compositions like "Little Wing" and "Up From the Skies" were staples of Evans's stage and studio repertoire in the Seventies and Eighties.

Not long after the Monterey show Hendrix told Newsweek about his plans for the future. "In five years, I want to write some plays. And some books. I want to sit on an island — my island — and listen to my beard grow. And then I'll come back and start all over again as a bee — a king bee."

He never really left. And he'll always be a king.

[From Issue 623 — February 6, 1992]