“My fingers won’t move as you can see,” he tells the crowd. The first real hint of the new sound comes after “Killing Floor.” Hendrix goes through a giddy moment, then settles down. He got the sound and he did something with it.” Not only did he make feedback, he manipulated it. “Hendrix was the first person to harness and almost make it part of the blues vocabulary,” says James Rotondi, features editor for Guitar Player magazine. The ideas were in the air, bouncing from brain to brain. Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck and other guitarists had been toying with feedback and massive volume. Hendrix was flat-out loud, every dial pushed to the maximum. Needless to say, the hints of it are in the great bluesmen of the ‘50s and ‘60s, but they weren’t doing it with that sort of amplification.” “He really psychedelicized the blues, and bless him for having done that,” says Jeff Kalis, a San Francisco-based music critic. To him, Hendrix is saying, “This is where I come from and this is where I go with it.” McDermott sees a purpose in that selection. His first number that night was “Killing Floor,” an old Howlin’ Wolf number.
He takes in all of these influences and forms his own sound.”įirst, the mechanics of that sound: a Fender Stratocaster with tremolo bar strings tuned a half-step low to make them more pliable for bending Marshall amplifier and speakers because they could produce the right highs and lows, could sustain notes for a long time, and they could take a beating. He would take in sounds, influences from jazz, rock and pop, blues and classical. “The sound on stage? It was just so awesome, and his technique was so impressive it was jaw-dropping,” he says. It was a sensual assault, appealing to the eyes, the heart and the ears, says Eddie Kramer, engineer on Hendrix’s albums. “It’s really one of the great performances in rock ‘n’ roll,” says John McDermott, author of “Hendrix: Setting the Record Straight.” “He had been on the road. He rolled, tumbled, played behind his back, with his teeth, pulled out every “chitlin’ circuit” trick in the book. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones introduced the band, calling Hendrix “a very good friend, a fellow countrymen of yours, a brilliant performer and the most exciting guitarist I’ve ever heard.”įor 40 minutes his speakers crackled, snarled and growled as if fed by a violent electric storm. Paul McCartney suggested him to Monterey’s organizers. His first single, “Hey Joe,” flopped in the United States. In 1966, Chas Chandler of the Animals took him to England with the promise of making him a star. Born in Seattle in 1942, he left home at 17 to join the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, then became a rhythm and blues sideman. Hendrix was virtually unknown in the U.S.
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