Jimi Hendrix: The Man Who Reinvented the Guitar

He had barely four years in the spotlight. In that time Jimi Hendrix took an instrument thousands of people already played and made it sound like something that had never existed before — a screaming, singing, weeping, roaring extension of his own nervous system. More than half a century later, every guitarist alive is still working in the world he built. Ask the greatest players who the greatest player was, and they almost all give the same answer.

Seattle, the Army, and the Chitlin' Circuit

He was born Johnny Allen Hendrix on 27 November 1942 in Seattle, and later renamed James Marshall Hendrix by his father. He was shy, left-handed, and obsessed with the guitar from boyhood, teaching himself to play a right-handed instrument flipped upside down and restrung. After a brief stint as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne, he spent his early twenties grinding it out on the "chitlin' circuit," backing acts like Little Richard and the Isley Brothers — learning showmanship, paying dues, and going almost entirely unnoticed.

London: The Experience Begins

His life changed when Chas Chandler, bassist of The Animals, saw him play in New York and brought him to London in 1966. There Hendrix formed The Jimi Hendrix Experience with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, and the city fell at his feet almost overnight. Established British guitar gods — Clapton, Beck, Townshend — came to watch, and went home shaken. Within months he had hit singles and a reputation as the most exciting performer in Britain.

Three Albums That Changed Everything

Between 1967 and 1968 Hendrix released three studio albums — Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and the sprawling double Electric Ladyland. Together they held Purple Haze, Hey Joe, The Wind Cries Mary, Foxy Lady, Little Wing, Voodoo Child (Slight Return) and a version of Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower so complete that Dylan himself started playing it Hendrix's way. Three albums — almost the whole studio catalogue. It was enough to remake popular music.

Monterey and Woodstock: Two Fires

Two performances sealed the legend. At the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 he ended his set by kneeling over his guitar, dousing it in lighter fluid and setting it alight — a sacrifice that announced a new kind of rock star. And at Woodstock in 1969, in the grey light of Monday morning, he played The Star-Spangled Banner alone, bending the American anthem into screaming feedback that sounded like bombs and sirens — a wordless protest against the Vietnam War that remains one of the most powerful moments in recorded music.

A New Language for the Guitar

What made Hendrix singular was not speed or flash — it was vocabulary. He treated feedback, distortion, the wah-wah pedal and the whammy bar not as noise to be avoided but as colours to paint with. He played with his teeth and behind his back, yes, but the real magic was tonal: he heard sounds inside the electric guitar that no one had thought to listen for, and dragged them out into the open. Every distorted, expressive, experimental guitar tone since runs back to him.

Electric Lady and the Sudden End

In 1970 he opened Electric Lady Studios in New York, a space built to his own sonic specifications — a sign of where his restless curiosity was heading. He never got to use it for long. On 18 September 1970, in London, Jimi Hendrix died from asphyxiation related to barbiturates. He was twenty-seven, a charter member of the terrible "27 Club" alongside Amy Winehouse and so many others. He left only a handful of finished albums and an influence that has never stopped growing.

Hendrix at Skeleton House

He runs through Dead Reckoning from both directions. On Electric Church — named for Hendrix's own term for what his music was meant to be — it is Jim Morrison who sings for him, one shamanic rock visionary calling to another. And on Little Janis the roles reverse: Hendrix is the one singing, this time for Janis Joplin, who died just sixteen days after he did — the same age, behind the same blue door of the 27 Club. There's more on the whole project in the Dead Reckoning announcement.

Watch the Dead Reckoning visual album →

Four years was all he was given. He spent them rewriting the rules — and the instrument has never sounded the same since.