CHAPTER 20 JIMMY’S BLUES

The Northwest rock ’n’ roll scene was so robust by the late 1950s that scores of teenage bands were forming in the hopes of becoming the next Dave Lewis Combo or the next Wailers. Thus did hundreds of young players experience forming those bands and rocking a few dances. Most of those kids grew up and moved on to “real” careers. Among those who persisted, only a small percentage were blessed with the talent required to make a lifelong go of music, and a tiny fraction of that subset would ever attain mastery of their chosen instruments.

But only one individual among them all was fated to become the most globally famed guitarist of his generation: James Marshall Hendrix.

From the humblest beginnings—a childhood of hardship and neglect—Hendrix early on chose a path of self-soothing creative outlets: art and music. Young Hendrix came from a troubled home that long struggled to make ends meet. His parents, Al and Lucille Hendrix, had met on a warm summer evening in 1941 while walking to the Moore Theatre at 936 Second Avenue to see the boogie-woogie piano star Fats Waller making his first-ever appearance in Seattle. They started dating and then, months later, in March 1942, Al received his draft notice and Lucille informed him she was pregnant. They married on March 31, three days later he shipped out, and, right on schedule, Lucille gave birth to their son on November 27.

The wartime circumstances were tough. Feeling overwhelmed, the still-teenaged mother handed her baby off to others for safekeeping while she took on work as a server at various Jackson Street joints, including the infamous Bucket of Blood (inside the Hong Kong Chinese Society Club), where Lucille occasionally sang for tips. Upon Al’s return from service in 1945, he finally met his son and the couple tried to make things work.

The years went by with Al working six nights a week as a janitor at the Pike Place Market; the couple liked to party and have friends over, though they often fought after drinking heavily. Meanwhile, young Hendrix found respite from this domestic tension in music—specifically the tunes in his parents’ modest record collection.

“I was upstairs while the grownups had parties listening to Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, and Ray Charles,” Hendrix once recalled. “I’d sneak down after and eat potato chips and smoke butts. That sound was really—not evil—just a thick sound. The first guitarist I was aware of was Muddy Waters. I heard one of his records when I was little boy and it scared me to death, because I heard all these sounds. Wow, what is that all about? It was great.”

But life in the Hendrix home was not all that great. Al and Lucille battled and she eventually moved out. Al began working as a gardener and often his young son worked alongside him. He and Lucille filed for divorce in 1951, and although he won child custody rights, he did not seem be a strong parent. Hendrix’s boyhood pal Terry Johnson recalled how the neglected kid didn’t have his own key and was often locked out of his own home well into the evenings. The two young friends would traipse over to the Mount Baker Tavern on Jackson Street, where, by peering in a window, they would find Al hunkered down at the bar and then go back to Johnson’s home and play. Luckily, Hendrix’s friends’ mothers and grandmothers could tell from his shabby shoes and clothing—let alone the neighborhood tales about physical abuse at home—that the shy boy’s needs were not being properly met, so they tried to watch over him as best they could.

Hendrix would later confess to his youthful frustrations: “I ran away from home a couple of times because I was so miserable. When my dad found out I’d gone he went pretty mad with worry.” Asked when did he return home, Hendrix replied, “When I realized my dad was upset. Not that I cared, but well, he is my dad.” It was on February 1, 1958, that Lucille was found unconscious in an alley behind a Skid Road bar just off Yesler Way and died hours later of a ruptured spleen. Al refused to allow Jimmy to attend her funeral. A year and a half later, Hendrix dropped out of Garfield High School.

“School wasn’t for me,” he explained. “According to my father, I had to go working. I had done it for a few weeks with my father. He had a not-so-good running contract firm, and in me he saw a cheap laborer. I didn’t see it that way. I had to carry stones and cement all day, and he pocketed the money.” Beyond that, by most accounts Al never did fully support his son’s musical aspirations. But he did recall the first indication of his son’s interest in guitars back when the two were living in a shabby rooming house: “We had one room there, and I asked Jimmy to ‘clean up the bedroom there; sweep up a bit.’ And I went out, and anyway I come back and I seen a little pile of broom straw. And I said, ‘I told you to sweep up. What all these straws doing here?’ And, he said, ‘I swept up and I was sitting here just playing the broom.’ He was just making believe that the broom was a guitar.”

One of Hendrix’s earliest neighborhood buddies, Pernell Alexander, also remembered the early days: “We were friends even before music. We were friends even before we were playin’ brooms! [laughter] It was grade school at Leschi. It wasn’t even thinkin’ about music—it was, I guess, tryin’ to have girlfriends and learn how to dance!”

“My dad danced and played the spoons,” said Hendrix. “My first instrument was a harmonica, which I got when I was about four. Next it was a violin. I always dug string instruments and pianos. Then I started digging guitars—it was the instrument that always seemed to be around. Everybody’s house that you went to seemed to have one lying around. I was 14 or 15 when I started playing guitar.”

Hendrix managed to acquire his own used acoustic guitar and plucked along while learning little licks from any possible source, including radio and television. A few of his favorites were “Summertime Blues” by Eddie Cochran, “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens, and “Sleep Walk” by Santo and Johnny—all songs with exceptional electric guitar riffs. “I learned all the riffs I could. I never had any lessons. I learned guitar from records and the radio. I loved my music, man. I’d go out to the back porch there in Seattle … and I’d play guitar to a Muddy Waters record. You see, I wasn’t ever interested in any other things, just the music. I was trying to play like Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. Trying to learn everything and anything.” Friends later recalled that among the first songs he mastered was the Wailers’ “Tall Cool One.”

His father remembered that one of the very first tunes his son gleaned from TV was the Peter Gunn theme, and Hendrix himself once told an interviewer of a more surprising source of TV inspiration: “The Grand Ole Opry used to come on, and I would watch that. They used to have some pretty heavy guitar players. But I didn’t try to copy anybody. Those were just the people who gave me the feeling to get my own thing together.” But Hendrix’s other source of guitar tips and techniques was a few neighborhood men, as he shared with Beat Instrumental magazine:

I learned to play on a guitar that belonged to one of my father’s friends who came to play cards. While the two men played, I would creep out onto the porch with the friend’s guitar and see what I could get out of it. I didn’t know that I would have to put the strings around the other way because I was left handed, but it just didn’t feel right. I remember thinking to myself, “There’s something wrong here.” One night my dad’s friend was stoned and he sold me the guitar for five dollars. I changed the strings around but it was way out of tune when I’d finished. I didn’t know a thing about tuning so I went to the store and I run my fingers across the strings on a guitar they had there.

Hendrix also began picking up blues tricks from a hobbyist bluesman, John Williams, who lived at Twenty-Sixth Avenue and Marion Street, near the Hendrix home just off South Jackson, at 2603 South Washington Street. “He played the blues,” Alexander remembered. “And Jimmy used to hang around Mr. Williams’s porch a lot. And he learned to play, ’cause that’s what Jimmy loved: the blues.”

It was back around 1957 that Alexander—and Hendrix, thanks to the generosity of some of his friends’ parents—were able to begin attending Sunday afternoon shows downtown at the Eagles Auditorium. In particular, they were excited to watch the great bands led by Hank Ballard, Bill Doggett, and Little Richard, whose Upsetters included a killer guitarist, Nathaniel “Buster” Douglas, who totally wowed the guys with his Fender Stratocaster.

Hendrix and Alexander sat in the front row for that show and afterward met up with Little Richard and talked with Douglas about his guitar. Another night, and after a Bill Doggett show, they met up with his guitarist, Bill Butler, who’d done the killer guitar work on their 1956 hit “Honky Tonk.”

Another memorable rock ’n’ roll concert Hendrix attended was Elvis Presley’s show at Sick’s Stadium on September 1, 1957. Then, a month or two later, Big Jay McNeely’s combo was booked to headline a two-week engagement at the Birdland when he also agreed to perform an underage matinee show just up the street at the CD’s YMCA. It was at this show that Hendrix and Alexander were wowed by brother Dillard McNeely’s booming Fender electric bass guitar. After the show, they swarmed McNeely asking questions about the novel instrument.

Alexander also recalled that he and Hendrix were witnesses to a show by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, whose guitarist Arthur Porter and bassist Alonzo Tucker made big impressions on the lads. But then the night took an unforgettable turn. This occurred on July 3, 1959, when Ballard’s band were engaged in a playful little skit based around their 1954 hit “Annie Had a Baby.” In an act that the band had been doing without incident for years, a costumed Ballard sang the tune while goofing around as Annie—and right on cue he reached under his skirt and pulled out a baby doll. The audience roared with laughter, but an outraged Seattle Police Department security squad stormed the stage, halted the show, arrested Ballard, and sent home the disappointed audience.

Another of Hendrix’s sources of blues knowledge was Elven “L.V.” Parr, a true bluesman from Arkansas who had learned to play guitar while in prison. In 1950, he began gigging around the South, playing gigs with the likes of Ray Charles, Albert King, Percy Mayfield, and Junior Parker and contributing to recording sessions at Memphis’s fabled Sun Studios with Bobby “Blue” Bland and Johnny Ace.

“I came out to Seattle in 1959,” Parr once explained. “I got into trouble with the law again, and was basically paroled to my dad, who was living out here by then. I played all over the Northwest when I got here. Things were jumping. We played at the Black and Tan, Birdland, the Drift Inn, the Cotton Club, the Mardi Gras—those clubs on Jackson Street.”

Parr also gigged with the Playboys for a spell and began hangin’ with James “Tomcat” Thomas—one of the Mello-Aires, a doo-wop group that had recorded at Joe Boles’s studio in 1958—who held regular jam sessions at his house. That’s also where “Jimmy Hendrix used to come around,” Parr recalled. “He was just a kid then. I used to practice over at 20th and Madison with James Thomas and a couple of old guys. Every time we were over there, Hendrix would come over and be asking me things, asking me to show him this or that. I don’t know if you’d call it teachin’ him or not, but I used to show him a lot.”

Like any budding musician, Hendrix took any opportunity to play anything, anywhere, with just about anybody. Terry Johnson played piano and sax, and as Mary Willix quoted him in her touching 1995 book Jimi Hendrix: Voices from Home, the two pals started learning together: “One of the songs we’d play back in those days was ‘What’d I Say,’ by Ray Charles. That was a big one. I had an electric piano then, a pink and white Wurlitzer, so we really were hot on that one. Ray Charles was one of our idols. In fact, of all the songs Jimmy and I played, that was one of our favorites.”

At about this point in time, Hendrix and Alexander met up with a couple of other musical kids: Luther Rabb (bari sax), the son of a preacher man; and Anthony Atherton (alto sax), who once recalled how “we’d sneak in to see Ray Charles play at the Birdland.… At the Mardi Gras across the street from Birdland, I was about fourteen and the lady would let me go in and sit down by the stage. A couple of times me and Jimmy went in together.”

Before long Hendrix, Alexander, Rabb, Atherton, and a couple other Meany Junior High School pals, Robert Green (piano) and Walter Jones (drums), formed their own teen-R&B band, the Velvetones. The group practiced in the basement of Green’s home, the site of much music making as his parents’ were friends with lots of southern musicians and their house had become a rest stop for numerous touring R&B stars including Junior Parker and Bobby “Blue” Bland.

“I formed this group with some other guys,” remembered Hendrix, “but they drowned me out. I didn’t know why at first, but after about three months I realized I’d have to get an electric guitar.” Both Hendrix and Alexander were begging for electric instruments, but Al stubbornly resisted his son’s pleas. There are a thousand and one stories floating around Seattle of folks taking credit for hooking Hendrix up with his first electric guitar, but it was Al who finally bought his son a white 1957 Supro Ozark in 1958: “I got a few dollars ahead and got him an electric guitar. I couldn’t afford an amplifier, so he’d practice at home and then go off to a friend’s house where they had an amp.… I never did get him an amplifier, although I’d planned on it. But he got music out of his guitar as it was.”

Pernell Alexander had happy memories of that time: “Jimmy and I both started playin’ guitar. The summer of ’58. School was out, and we had to get ’em. And we got them about the same week. We had to learn and we really didn’t know anyone to teach us so we spent that summer learning. We taught ourselves.”

But this process was made difficult by Hendrix’s ongoing lack of an amplifier. “My father was a preacher,” Luther Rabb explained. “He also played the guitar and had some equipment. Sometimes I would sneak in and borrow his equipment. Matter of fact, one of the last times Jimmy and I talked we were joking about how we left my father’s amplifier on overnight and totally melted it. My father always joked about that.”

Alexander would laugh as he recalled how the Velvetones’ approach was perfectly unschooled, and how they all still had so much to learn: “Oh, primitive wasn’t the word for it. I mean, we didn’t have a bass, and we just tuned our guitars to a piano chord in middle C, and that was it.”

After the Velvetones had built up their set list—including foundational classics like Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk” and Bobby Bland’s “Further on up the Road”—they figured they were ready for the big time. Recollections about the band’s earliest gigs vary, but a few of them were a junior high talent show, a luncheon for a local women’s club, the Rosettes club, the Yesler Terrace Neighborhood House, local National Guard armories, and an outdoor show at Vasa Park.

“I remember my first gig was at an armory, a National Guard place,” Hendrix told Melody Maker. “And we earned thirty-five cents apiece and three hamburgers.… In those days I just liked rock-and-roll I guess. We used to play stuff by people like the Coasters. Anyway, you all had to do the same things before you could join a band. You even had to do the same steps.”

That Washington National Guard Armory (in nearby Kent) was more likely the Velvetones’ third gig, and the band also started picking up others at the Rotary Boys Club, the YWCA on Cherry Street, and the YMCA on Olive Street. But regardless of where the band played, the shy Hendrix was experiencing raw stage fright: “Well, it was so very hard for me, ’cause at first man I was so scared, I wouldn’t go onstage. You know, like, I joined this band—I knew about three songs—and when it’s time for us to play onstage man, I was like this [shaking gesture], you know. And then; I had to play behind the curtains, you know, I couldn’t get up front.… Plus you get very discouraged; you hear different bands playing around you and the guitar player seems like he’s always much better than you.”

There certainly were more experienced guitarists in Seattle but Hendrix was gaining skills, and another neighborhood kid who was lucky enough to own a new Fender Stratocaster guitar was actually intimidated by his self-doubting buddy. “We started messing ’round on the guitars,” said Joe Gray, “but it kind of made me disgusted because he was musically inclined and I wasn’t, you know. I mean, I had to study and read the music before I could play. I mean, he could pick up songs and just play them. Listening to them one time! So we would practice and he would help me.”

Another tale from the early days involves the Holden family, where still another of Oscar Holden Sr.’s musical kids, Jimmy Holden, was a schoolmate and jam buddy of Hendrix’s. As Holden’s big brother, Dave, would recall, “My brother Jimmy—he also played the piano—he went to Garfield at the same time as Jimmy Hendrix, and they used to rehearse in our basement. And my dad used to sit in the middle room of our house—that’s where his TV was—and he’d say, ‘What’s all that twangin’? That’s not music. Would you guys stop that?’ He’d bang on the floor. ’Cause it wasn’t music to him. But that happened to be Jimmy Hendrix that was playin’ this guitar that was soundin’ so crazy.”

Meanwhile, Hendrix, Alexander, and Johnson had also started hanging around the back door of the Birdland. They eventually slipped their way in to watch the Dave Lewis Combo, which at that point featured Bud Brown, a seasoned guitarist who had come to town from the jazz/nightclub world and whose playing impressed everybody. Another local band the boys watched was the Sharps, which also boasted a brilliant Black electric guitarist, Ranleigh “Butch” Snipes, who was also known for putting on a wild stage show. “Butch Snipes: he’s the one that actually taught Jimmy and I,” admitted Alexander. “He’s the one that Jimmy got all the behind-the-back and playin’-with-the-teeth and all that from. Besides Buddy Brown, Butch was the only one we knew who could really play.”

In 1959, the Velvetones accepted a challenge to enter a Battle of the Bands against a Washington Junior High–based rival combo, the Rocking Kings, which included Charles Woodbury (piano and vocals), Ulysses “Junior” Heath (guitar), Walter Harris (sax), Webb Lofton (sax), and the New Orleans–born Lester Exkano (drums). Along the way, Robert Green (piano), Terry Johnson (sax and piano), and Fred Rollins (sax) also played with them. Though the battle was on the Rocking Kings’ turf—the Yesler Terrace housing project’s gym—the Velvetones pulled an upset victory and were rewarded with a monthlong gig, playing dances there every Friday and Saturday night.

By this point, Hendrix’s natural talent was becoming obvious, and he was recruited by the vanquished Rocking Kings to play bass on his guitar. The band rehearsed Tuesdays in the clubroom of the Yesler Terrace Neighborhood House. However, some members still had doubts about Hendrix. As Harris, their sax man, freely admitted:

At first we were hesitant, because he didn’t have an amp. But he always managed to find someone to plug in with. Junior [Heath] was one lead guitar and Jimmy was the other. Jimmy was better than Junior, and Junior knew it. They were good friends offstage, but onstage they were total enemies because Jimmy could play better. Plus, Hendrix was plugged into Junior’s amplifier, and it wasn’t too kosher to plug into someone’s amplifier and then show them up. Junior was good, but Jimmy put more into his playing. You could see it in his face.

The Kings also performed at the Garfield Funfest’s talent show in 1959, and then they got their first chance to play the Birdland. More gigs there would follow, including one where Hendrix’ Supro guitar was stolen from the stage while he wasn’t looking. With the help of his bandmates he was able to buy a new one—a bronze Danelectro (which he later painted red); however, Hendrix never did acquire his own amplifier during his Seattle years.

One night while walking home after a Birdland gig, the guys happened by the home of James “Tomcat” Thomas, just off East Madison at 918 Twenty-Fourth Avenue, and heard raucous R&B music wafting out. They walked up and Thomas invited them in, where he and his nephew Perry Thomas (piano) were jamming with some other players. Then all the guys played a few songs together, Tomcat liked what he heard, and he offered to begin acting as the Kings’ manager.

Over the next few months, he actively booked them into different venues, including their first out-of-town gig down at the Congo Room in Tacoma. It was on February 20, 1960, that they played on the hallowed stage of Seattle’s Washington Hall. This was where some of the town’s first jazz shows had taken place in the early twentieth century and where other legendary shows by the likes of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Fats Domino had occurred.

By now, Hendrix was finding his groove and the band even began performing his first original tune, “Jimmy’s Blues.” As Terry Johnson would later recall, they started out just jamming on tunes like Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” and “Good Golly Miss Molly,” Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” and a few Elvis Presley songs. But Hendrix’s growth as a player was accelerating in a preternatural way: “I know how good he was, compared to other guitar players: They were trying to play the basic—you know, the Ventures—trying to get the licks down and concentrate on their rhythm, and trying to get the chords right and everything. And Jimmy was making his own chords up! And making his own sounds. Even back then he’d try to make it talk.”

“We all knew Jimmy was good,” Webb Lofton added. “He played behind his back and between his legs. Jimmy had a used guitar when he joined our group, but no amp. Eventually the group bought an amp, but we didn’t have one then. When Junior Heath joined the group, he had an amp, so Jimmy could plug his guitar into Junior’s amp.”

Stories abound in Seattle regarding young Hendrix’s drive to jam with anyone who would have him. Among the first to let Hendrix sit in down at the Carpenters Union at 2512 Second Avenue in the Belltown neighborhood were the Playboys. As their original singer, Ron Holden, told it:

He used to come into the Carpenters Hall when the Playboys would be playing there. He’d come in there with just his guitar and cord and say, “Hey man, let me play.” And I’d say, “OK man, but we’re playing like ‘Blueberry Hill’ so, you know, just be cool!” And so I’d count it off—a slow “Blueberry Hill” tempo—and we’d get about three bars into it and he’d go right for the throat. He’d play a solo all the way through “Blueberry Hill.” He’d play a solo all the way through “Louie Louie,” et cetera, et cetera. So finally, I just had to tell him, “Hey man! I’m sorry but you play too loud! And you’re soloing all the way through!”

Meanwhile, the Dave Lewis Combo’s yearslong Friday and Saturday after-hours gig at the Birdland had continued to attract good crowds—so good that Wilmer Morgan had begun booking the Combo to also play an earlier slot on Sundays from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m., which soon involved hosting a popular open jam session. There were always players, instruments in hand, who made pilgrimages to the gig in the hope that they might climb the bandstand and sit in. It was a good way to learn if one’s skill level would pass muster, both with Lewis the ringmaster as well as the room’s musically sophisticated audience. Among the striving players who continued to show up was Hendrix.

“Jimmy used to come to Birdland regularly when we were there,” recalled Dave Lewis:

The thing about Jimmy was … well, see, the music back in the ’50s wasn’t as technically involved as it is today. But it was formatted—in that there were certain patterns you played for, like, the blues—and when we’d have jam sessions on Sundays, Jimmy Hendrix would come up with his guitar and he was playing it as a kind of style that he played even [later] when he got popular. And we couldn’t relate to it. So a lot of times he was asked to leave the stage. And, you know, the people when they come into Birdland they wanted to dance and they couldn’t relate to the loudness and the feedback responses. And that’s what he was playing at the time. And we weren’t really receptive to him, and I don’t know, he may have resented us or thought that we weren’t giving him a fair chance, but if you were in the time you would know how it was.

As painful as that rejection must have been for Hendrix, the Birdland was becoming ever more important to him—it was the main place he could study the town’s young R&B bands. Among those was the Nitesounds, a combo formed in 1960 by his former bandmate Luther Rabb, who allowed Hendrix to join in on occasion. But other bands, including the Wailers and the Dynamics, just didn’t get the kid and are known to have rejected Hendrix’s entreaties to jam.

The latter band’s drummer Ron Woods explained that it was nothing personal, since their band seldom let anyone join them onstage: “The Dynamics turned him down. They wouldn’t let him sit in. He was just another Black guy who wanted to sit in at the dance. We didn’t let too many people jam, because it was too disorganized. We had our set [list] and nobody ever jammed with the band. The guys didn’t know Jimmy, and he wasn’t my best buddy, he was just a guy at Garfield that I knew by sight rather than name.”

A lot has been made over the years about Hendrix’s mixed feelings about his hometown, and such recollections from some of the town’s top musicians indicate there may well be something to it. Such eyewitness statements seem to suggest that Hendrix was already a remarkable—if undisciplined—player. So Hendrix was likely frustrated that he was already exploring a unique style that clashed with the established aesthetic parameters of that era’s R&B traditions.

It was 1960 when the Rocking Kings’ manager, James Thomas, decided to form his own band, Thomas and His Tomcats. He would be the singer, and he recruited two of the Rocking Kings—Hendrix and Charles Woodbury (piano)—along with Richard Gayswood (sax), Leroy Toots (bass), and Bill Rinnick (drums). Perry Thomas also played piano at times. Thomas had an in with the military officers’ club circuit so his band got steady work at venues like the US Naval Reserve Base at Pier 91, Larson Air Force Base in Moses Lake, Paine Field in Everett, Fort Worden in Port Townsend, and the American Legion Hall on Union Street. In addition, the Tomcats also gigged at the Masonic Temple, Cottage Lake Resort in Bothell, Vasa Park in Issaquah, as well as various dates in Ballard, Bellingham, and up in Vancouver, BC. The Tomcats also landed the gig for Seattle’s annual summer Seafair Festival’s picnic and dance. Soon the band was good enough to score a booking at the Birdland.

Though the Tomcats were working their way up, Hendrix’s days as a Northwest player were numbered. From here on his story is well known. After transferring from Franklin High School to Garfield—and then dropping out altogether—he began to have minor run-ins with the law. More than once, according to friends, Hendrix participated in break-ins at area clothing shops and finally, in May 1961 and at the age of eighteen, he was arrested on two occasions while joyriding in stolen cars with his runnin’ buddies. After spending a week in youth detention, Hendrix—in a typical scenario for a lad in his circumstances—faced a judge who offered him the choice of jail time or “joining” the army.

So, boarding a southbound train at the King Street Station on May 31, 1961, off he went to basic training at Fort Ord, California. In September, he returned to Seattle on furlough and caught up with his homies. What Hendrix would presumably learn is that Thomas and his Tomcats had caught a few breaks in his absence. Only a couple months after he’d split town, the band had signed a record contract with Tom Ogilvy, and a session at Joe Boles’s studio led to the August release of their excellent Nolta R&B single “Drive, Drive, Drive”—a record that, according to Anthony Atherton, would soon catch the attention and earn the support of Bob Summerrise: “There was this disc jockey from KZAM by the name of Bob Summerrise who used to come by and listen and sometimes tape us to later play on the air.”

In the wake of that exposure, the Rocking Kings soon hit what they thought was the big time: a regular Thursday night gig at the Birdland. But Hendrix’s timing was off. So, while his former bandmates were now reveling in their successes, PFC James Marshall Hendrix dutifully returned to Fort Ord and then continued training for the infantry with the 101st Airborne Division down in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. ⋆