7 Electrifying Moments in Jimi Hendrix’s Career

Before he achieved fame as a bandleader, Hendrix was a sideman for hire, drifting from gig to gig. From 1964 to 1966, he had brief stints as a guitarist for the Isley Brothers, Joey Dee and the Starliters (in which he replaced Joe Pesci) and Little Richard's touring band.

Hendrix made his television debut on the short-lived "Night Train" program in July 1965, performing in Little Richard's ensemble band and backing a duo called Buddy & Stacey. Their performance of Junior Walker and the All Stars’ song “Shotgun” contains the earliest known footage of Hendrix playing guitar.

However, Hendrix's stint with Little Richard wasn’t meant to last. As biographer Philip Norman writes in Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix, the strict dress code and inflexible arrangements demanded by Little Richard clashed with Hendrix’s free spirit. “His unpunctuality and sartorial offences continued to worsen,” Norman wrote. By the summer of 1965, Hendrix was out of the band. Little Richard’s brother and tour manager, Robert Penniman, later said he fired Hendrix for persistent tardiness. Hendrix, however, told his father that he had quit amid a dispute over unpaid wages.

A pivotal moment in Hendrix’s transition from sideman to rock icon came in November 1966. The guitarist had been in London gigging and—with the help of manager Chas Chandler—recruiting members for his own band. In early October, he “sat in” with British rock power trio Cream and outplayed their own guitarist, Eric Clapton. “It scared me, because he was clearly going to be a huge star,” Clapton later wrote. 

By the time the nascent Jimi Hendrix Experience band—rounded out by bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell—played a showcase on November 25 at the tiny Bag O'Nails nightclub, word was out. British rock heavyweights Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Jeff Beck were among the musicians who came to witness rock’s new force.

"It was all over,” British singer Terry Reid later recalled. “Everyone was dumbstruck, completely in shock.” Afterward, Lennon walked into the group’s dressing room and proclaimed: “That’s grand, lads.”

“Those English guys—Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton—they were sort of salivating because they were seeing a blues-based rock ‘n’ roll phenom emerging right in front of them,” says music historian Harvey Kubernik, co-author of Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child.

The breakout performance earned Hendrix a breathless write-up in Record Mirror, which described him “whirling like a demon, swirling his guitar every which-away” and “playing the guitar with his teeth.” The author presciently predicted that Hendrix would “whirl round the business like a tornado.”

Few debut albums have landed with the seismic impact of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s "Are You Experienced," released in May 1967. With songs like “Foxy Lady,” "Third Stone from the Sun" and "The Wind Cries Mary," the album showcased Hendrix’s sonic intensity. Fretboard slides, wah-wah wails and riffs now embedded in the vocabulary of hard rock seemed alien to listeners weaned on the pop confections of the Monkees or Herman’s Hermits. Reviewing the album at the time, British music magazine Melody Maker wrote that the record “may sound very weird and freaky to some” and observed how the songs “change speed mid-number, stop, start, fade, fizzle, simmer and burn in a cauldron of beautiful fire.”

The album spent more than 30 weeks on the British charts and helped bridge the blues, rock and soul of the mid-’60s with emerging psychedelia and acid rock. The song “Purple Haze” set a template for what would later be called heavy metal.

Since Hendrix hit it big first in the London rock scene, his appearance at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival in Monterey, California served as a kind of homecoming. The hippie-filled festival followed the U.K. release of "Are You Experienced" and became Hendrix’s first large-scale performance in America.

“He knew he had to make an impression,” says Kubernik. “He was coming back to the West Coast … This was an audience of open-minded hippies and tastemakers waiting to see what he was gonna bring to the table.” 

During the performance, Hendrix’s mesmerizing theatrics were on full display. He picked at his guitar with his teeth during “Hey Joe” and played the instrument between his legs on “Foxy Lady.” But it was the distorted sounds his instrument emitted that audience members had never heard before. Rock critic Robert Christgau described those sounds, decades later, as “the dawning of an instrumental technique so effortlessly fecund and febrile that rock has yet to equal it.”

At the climax of Hendrix’s set, during his exhilarating cover of “Wild Thing,” the musician poured lighter fluid on his guitar, set it on fire and smashed it on the stage as feedback continued ringing out at piercing volume. The stunt generated extensive coverage in the music press and was immortalized in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1968 Monterey Pop documentary, effectively enshrining it in rock history.

Hendrix’s only double album, "Electric Ladyland"—his third and final album with the Experience—saw him go deeper into psychedelia and acid-rock. Like many double LPs, the album gave its creator a chance to experiment in the studio and stretch in directions he hadn’t explored before. That included songs like “1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be),” “Gypsy Eyes” and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” It also yielded a hit in a crackling cover of Bob Dylan's “All Along the Watchtower,” which Hendrix made indisputably his own. 

At the time of its release, in the fall of 1968, "Electric Ladyland" drew mixed reviews. Melody Maker dinged it as “mixed-up and muddled.” Today, it’s often regarded as a masterpiece. AllMusic describes it as “Hendrix's original musical vision at its absolute apex.”

Performing with a new band he called Gypsy Sun & Rainbows after the Jimi Hendrix Experience broke up earlier that summer, Hendrix was the last artist to perform at the Woodstock Rock Festival in 1969. The guitarist took the stage around 9:00 a.m. on a rainy Monday, August 18, exhausted after going several days without sleep. Rain and other delays had pushed the festival well beyond its scheduled end. By then, most of the crowd had already left. Nonetheless, Hendrix gave the defining performance at the gathering that’s often regarded as the high point of '60s counterculture. 

Clad in a blue-beaded white leather jacket and red headscarf, Hendrix performed a rousing two-hour set containing both longtime staples and new material. Toward the end of the set, he delivered a wailing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” doused in feedback and distortion. As Norman writes, his radical interpretation of the national anthem erupted “into a feedback cacophony that somehow mimicked the [Vietnam] war’s sounds.”

Leaving the stage, Hendrix was “cold, tired, hungry and unhappy with his performance,” drummer Mitch Mitchell later said.

Where would Jimi Hendrix have gone next had he not died at age 27? Nobody knows. But "Band of Gypsys"—the final album released during his lifetime—offers potent clues. The live album was recorded on January 1, 1970, at the Fillmore East, where Hendrix ushered in a new decade with a band that included bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles, whose funk-based rhythms were vastly different from Mitch Mitchell’s jazzier style. 

The resulting album is looser and more improvisational than the Experience recordings. Hendrix veered into funk-rock and R&B territory on tracks like “Who Knows” and “Power to Love.” Its most legendary tune, “Machine Gun,” is a 12-minute Vietnam War protest with staccato drum blasts designed to resemble gunfire and solos from Hendrix employing a full arsenal of effects pedals. Reportedly, Fillmore East promoter Bill Graham encouraged Hendrix to cut down on the gimmickry: “You played it with your teeth, you stuck it behind your back. You just forget to play.”

When the album arrived in March 1970, it sold well and seemed like the dawn of a new era in Hendrix’s career. Instead, it proved to be a swan song. The legendary musician died just six months later.