{"id":2526,"date":"2022-05-20T00:40:44","date_gmt":"2022-05-20T00:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2526"},"modified":"2022-05-20T00:45:40","modified_gmt":"2022-05-20T00:45:40","slug":"ftv-johnny-allen-hendrix-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2526","title":{"rendered":"FTV: Johnny Allen Hendrix – Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0We left Part 1 with Jimmy Hendrix newly discharged from the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army.\u00a0 As soon as his bass playing buddy, Billy Cox, was turned loose, they changed the name of their band from the Kasuals to the King Kasuals.\u00a0 As Jimmy\u2019s hair returned, he styled it into a \u2018conk\u2019 (see early 1960s Little Richard and James Brown photos for reference) and they gigged as much as they could in a radius that included Tennessee, Indiana, and North Carolina.\u00a0 While they tried to subsist on a $10 nightly fee between them (sometimes they got paid, sometimes not), the King Kasuals played everything from standard R&B, blues, and even the new \u2018surfing sound\u2019 coming from California\u2019s Beach Boys.\u00a0 Jimmy practiced so much between gigs, his bandmates called him \u2018Marbles\u2019 as in \u2018he must be losing them\u2019.\u00a0 While the other guys in the band found it necessary to take day jobs, Jimmy did not.\u00a0 Billy Cox says, \u201cHe put twenty-five years on the guitar into about five years.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The King Kasuals were struggling to make a living on their meager gig pay until Billy Cox got them a residency at a club in Nashville\u2019s Printer\u2019s Alley.\u00a0 The Club Del Morocco was owned by a well known Nashville character named \u2018Uncle\u2019 Teddy Acklen.\u00a0 The Club\u2019s clientele included baseball heroes Jackie Robinson and Roy Campenella among other notable Nashville cats.\u00a0 Acklen paid the band $11 each per week to perform on their own and to back up visiting artists like Carla Thomas, Nappy Brown, and Ironing Board Sam.\u00a0 Brown-bagging liquor to the club (Tennessee was still a prohibition state), the customers were never hassled by the police who chose to overlook the ban.\u00a0 It would seem Jimmy would have been out of place in the capital of country and western music, but he was too keen a student of guitar music to let any racial boundaries get in his way.\u00a0 In his Seattle days, he never missed the weekly broadcasts of the Grand Ol\u2019 Opry coming from Nashville\u2019s fabled Ryman Auditorium.\u00a0 Not only was Jimmy a big Chet Atkins fan, he was what author Philip Nornam describes as,\u00a0 \u201cA genre-busting player equally at ease playing rockabilly, the fusion of rock and \u2018hillbilly that Elvis Presley had first unloosed at the Opry and elsewhere.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The other Printer\u2019s Alley hotspot was the more impressive Club Baron, an R&B venue whose house band was known as the Imperials.\u00a0 The Imperials\u2019 own virtuoso guitar player, Johnny Jones, took Jimmy under his wing as a friend and offered him much encouragement.\u00a0 Jones went out of his way to introduce Jimmy to the likes of Albert King and B.B.King when they passed through town to perform at Club Baron.\u00a0 Billy Cox and Jimmy were denied entry to the club when they asked if they could watch Bobby \u2018Blue\u2019 Bland rehearse, but they got in anyway.\u00a0 They raided a broom closet and with mop and bucket in hand, took it all in while pretending to be janitors.\u00a0 Jimmy was still feeling his way along and learning some tough lessons like when he challenged the Imperial\u2019s Jones to a \u2018guitar duel\u2019.\u00a0 Think of Fast Eddie (played by Paul Newman) taking on Minnesota Fats in a \u2018pool duel\u2019 in <\/span>The Hustler <\/span><\/i>and getting waxed in the process<\/span>.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>Jones mopped the floor with Jimmy that night (remember, he only pretended to be a janitor) and as another of Hendrix\u2019s friends (Larry Lee) would recall, \u201cHe came looking for a shoot-out but he was the one who got himself shot.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0At the end of 1962, Jimmy took a break from the King Kasuals and returned to the northwest, but not to visit with his father Al or girlfriend Betty-Jean.\u00a0 Jimmy\u2019s aim was to visit his grandmother, Zenora, and while there, he hooked up with a local band called Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers.\u00a0 Playing their regular gigs at a club called Dante\u2019s Inferno, Jimmy joined in as they covered everything from the new Motown sounds coming out of Detroit to surf music.\u00a0 In the Vancouvers, Hendrix ended up playing rhythm guitar behind the band\u2019s hotshot lead guitar player, a part-Chinese kid named Tommy Chong (who would later find wider fame as part of the Cheech and Chong comedy duo).\u00a0 Upon returning to the King Kasuals in early 1963, they added two horn players and an emcee to try their hand at being more of a \u2018revue\u2019 band (replete with jokes and impressions from the emcee).\u00a0 Things didn’t go well for the band when they lost their spot at the Club Del Morocco.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Five of the six King Kasuals were again forced to take part time employment to make ends meet, but as before, not Jimmy.\u00a0 Larry Lee, who had joined the band when their other guitarist, Alphonso Young left, said, \u201c[Jimmy] always used to say that when he was famous one day, he would have a thousand guitars.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t say \u2018if\u2019, he said, \u2018when\u2019.\u00a0 At that time I figured that if he made it, he would do it on the guitar alone.\u00a0 I had not idea he would ever sing.\u201d\u00a0 Jimmy\u2019s hand-to-mouth existence in Nashville wasn\u2019t so much different than his childhood in Seattle.\u00a0 He even spent some weeks sleeping in a building under construction, making sure to slip out each morning before work resumed.\u00a0 The King Kasuals finally folded up for good, but Cox, Lee, and Hendrix stuck together and hired themselves out to other bands touring the Chitlin\u2019 Circuit.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Chitlin\u2019 Circuit had been around since the 1920\u2019s.\u00a0 The name was a \u201chumorous self-depreciation taken from \u2018chitterlings\u2019 (pig\u2019s intestines) that were part of the soul food dishes sold at such establishments,\u201d Norman explained in his book <\/span>Wild Thing – The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix, <\/span><\/i>2020, Ballantine Books).\u00a0 Some of the higher-rent establishments became famous (like the Apollo in NYC\u2019s Harlem district), but the common thread in this string of venues was the opportunity for black musicians to perform regularly, especially in the still segregated south.\u00a0 One of their first post King Kasuals gigs was with Bob Fisher and the Bonnevilles backing up The Marvelettes (one of Motown\u2019s first successful female vocal groups), and the Impressions.\u00a0 The soon-to-go-solo leader of the Impressions, Curtis Mayfield, influenced Jimmy in a big way.\u00a0 Billy Cox says, \u201cYou can hear Curtis in <\/span>Little Wing<\/span><\/i> and in <\/span>Castles Made of Sand<\/span><\/i>.\u201d\u00a0 Cox is referencing Mayfield\u2019s `creamy-sweet guitar style\u2019 that is featured prominently in these Hendrix compositions (both found on <\/span>Axis Bold as Love <\/span><\/i>released December 1, 1967).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When Cox and Lee returned to Nashville for session work and a less nomadic life, Jimmy soldiered on alone.\u00a0 Leon recalled, \u201c[Jimmy] always had good jobs because when he joined one band, a better one would always come along and steal him.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, the year before he turned 21, Jimmy played with Circuit vets like Chuck Jackson, Carla Thomas, Slim Harpo, Tommy Tucker, Jerry Butler, and Marion James.\u00a0 Leon added, \u201cJimmy really didn\u2019t care if he was in a good band or not – he just wanted to play.\u00a0 All he\u2019d asked them was \u2018Where are we on, how do I get there, and can you please get my guitar out of the pawnshop?\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0No matter if a band he was in at the bottom of the bill was good, bad, or otherwise, Jimmy studied the stagecraft and showmanship of the headliners.\u00a0 Like a sponge, he absorbed his stage lessons from artists like Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and Otis Redding.\u00a0 He learned a lot from the first true star Jimmy backed up, the 250 pound Solomon Burke.\u00a0 Burke would perform\u00a0 seated on a throne wearing an ermine-trimmed robe and a crown.\u00a0 Between sets, he would hock his own pork sandwiches and \u2018Solomon Burke Majic Popcorn\u2019 out in the lobby.\u00a0 Many of the headliners ran their band\u2019s like the army, levying fines for infractions like dirty shoes, ($5), being late ($10), or any number of things.\u00a0 Jimmy was routinely fired and at times left behind when he didn\u2019t make the bus departure time.\u00a0 Sometimes he was let go for an even bigger sin:\u00a0 stealing his employer\u2019s limelight on stage.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Here is a brief peek at a small slice of Jimmy\u2019s life on the Circuit:\u00a0 \u201cCurtis Mayfield expelled him for accidentally damaging an amplifier,\u00a0 On a tour with Bobby Womack, his behavior was so exasperating that Womanck\u2019s road manager brother threw his guitar out of the the bus window\u00a0 while JImmy was asleep.\u00a0 After a few days with the Solomon Burke revue, Burke bartered him on to Otis Redding in exchange for two horn players as if he was little more than a mondern-day slave.\u00a0 A couple of weeks later, there were more problems about his too-flashy playing and Redding literally ditched him, driving off and leaving him at the side of the road.\u00a0 Generally, there would be another gig for him to step into and if ever he did find himself without work and broke, he knew he could return to the inexhaustible kind-hearted, supportive Billy Cox in Nashville.\u00a0 Cox\u2019s wife Brenda recalled, \u201cBill would always take him in, give him money, and find him a job.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Jimmy tired of life on the Chitlin\u2019 Circuit, describing the treadmill-like existence as, \u201cBad pay, lousy living, and gettin\u2019 burned,\u201d yet none of it dimmed his optimistic self-belief.\u00a0 He wrote to Al, \u201cI still have my guitar and amp and as long as I have that, no fool can stop me living.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to keep hustling and scuffling until I get things to happening like they\u2019re supposed to for me.\u201d\u00a0 A booking agent approached him one night after an unmemorable show with a vague offer of work in New York.\u00a0 He arrived there in January 1964 to find no work, brutal winter weather (he had to borrow a coat) and no Billy Cox to bail him out.\u00a0 He was temporarily saved from destitution by winning the $25 prize in a contest for young musicians at the Apollo.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A chance meeting with Lithofayne \u2018Fayne\u2019 Pridgon as they milled about outside the Apollo changed his fortunes again.\u00a0 On a night when his former employer Sam Cooke was performing (Jimmy did not have the money or cred with Cooke to get into the theater), it was Fayne (who was reportedly one of Cooke\u2019s many girlfriends) who opened doors for Jimmy.\u00a0 She did have the VIP status to get Jimmy backstage to see Cooke before she took him home to meet her mother who fed him.\u00a0 The next day, he moved into the small room she shared with a friend at the Hotel Seifer with all his worldly possessions stashed in his guitar case.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t much, but at least he had a roof over his head and a place to play his guitar while looking for a place to play it for pay.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Jimmy bounced around various groups and gigs before grabbing what could have been the golden ring – the guitar slot with the Isley Brothers.\u00a0 His audition lasted for part of their hit song <\/span>Twist and Shout<\/span><\/i> after which, they gave him a place to live and bought him a white Stratocaster guitar.\u00a0 He had only been with the Isley Brothers for a couple of days before The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.\u00a0 The pop musical universe began to change but the Isley\u2019s said, \u201cOkay, they have two guitar players, but we\u2019ve got Jimmy.\u201d\u00a0 Though he did record with the Isleys, the matching white leather suits, shoes, and fines for departing from the group\u2019s routine lead to Jimmy departing New York to tour the south (again).\u00a0 This time, it was with Gorgeous George, a black artist who patterned himself after the white professional wrestler of the same name.\u00a0 On a stop in Memphis, Hendrix waited all day in the Stax Records lobby so he could meet Steve Cropper, the funky guitarist with the label\u2019s house band, Booker T and the MGs.\u00a0 Cropper didn\u2019t end up being the \u2018soul brother\u2019 Jimmy pictured listening to their music, but the two bonded over their mutual love, guitar.\u00a0 Cropper took him out to dinner and then they made their way back to the studio where they spent the night trading guitar licks and tricks.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The tour was back in Atlanta when Hendrix missed the bus but was fortuitously picked up by none other than Little Richard, who by chance, was looking for a guitar player.\u00a0 Richard let Jimmy shine some in his show and Hendrix picked up a lot of stage persona watching him front The Upsetters.\u00a0 The $200 monthly wage was the best thing about the Little Richard gig.\u00a0 When the band encamped in Los Angeles, Jimmy wrote his father that he would now be going by \u2018Mo-reece\u2019 as in \u2018Maurice James\u2019.\u00a0 On the West Coast, he got to know a pre-fame Glen Campbell and they spent a lot of time talking guitar – Jimmy recognized how talented Campbell was long before he went on to grace American TV and Top 40 radio.\u00a0 The next dust up he had with Little Richard led Hendrix to walk out the door and right into the Ike and Tina (Turner) Revue.\u00a0 Working with control freak Ike was difficult and a couple of weeks later, Jimmy (Maurice?) was back in the Upsetters who went back East to tour in the Southern states during some of the worst moments of the Civil Rights movement.\u00a0 The inevitable final parting of ways with Little Richard landed Jimmy working again with the Isleys at a resort in New Jersey before he finally returned to New York.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Jimmy took up with his old girlfriend Fayne as he looked for session work.\u00a0 By October, he had joined Curis Knight and the Squires, another R&B band playing low-level gigs in the NY\/NJ area.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was with Curtis Knight that Jimmy first got to record Bob Dylan\u2019s<\/span> Like A Rolling Stone<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 As the year came to an end, Jimmy was poached (again) by another band, Joey Dee and the Starliters, one of the first bi-racial pop bands.\u00a0 They had made the charts during the Twist craze as the house band at the Peppermint Lounge (remember <\/span>The Peppermint Twist<\/span><\/i>?).\u00a0 The Joey Dee gig lasted until Christmas which (again) landed Jimmy back in New York, broke and unemployed.\u00a0 He would spend the next few months hanging around Fayne\u2019s apartment playing guitar, working on his hairdo, and taking whatever gigs he could find.\u00a0 In May of 1966, his fortunes would finally take a turn for the better.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With the Rolling Stones touring the states for a fifth time, Keith Richard\u2019s girlfriend Linda and her American friend Roberta caught Jimmy\u2019s act at the Cheetah Club.\u00a0 They invited him to their table which lead to them keeping company with Hendrix for much of the summer of 1966.\u00a0 When he decided to take Richie Haven\u2019s advice to try performing solo in Greenwich Village, he landed a solo gig at the Cafe Wha?\u00a0 Preferring to work with others,\u00a0 he put together a band called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames (which included a 15 year-old Randy Wolfe who would go on to greater fame as \u2018Randy California\u2019 with the band Spirit and future Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan guitarist Jeff \u2018Skunk\u2019 Baxter).\u00a0 After making the classic mistake (again) of leaving his guitar at the club where someone else took ownership, keeping company with Linda payed off when she \u2018borrowed\u2019 a white Stratocaster from Keith\u2019s collection for Jimmy to use while the Stones were off touring.\u00a0 Early in his Cafe Wha? days, Jimmy also met up with The Fugs\u2019 guitarist Pete Kearney who built him the first crude version of a distortion device called a \u2018fuzzbox\u2019.\u00a0 It was the first of the electronic gadgets Jimmy would employ to coax otherworldly sounds from his guitar across his recording career.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Besides borrowing Keith\u2019s Stratocaster for Jimmy, Linda (whose last name was Keith) did a couple of other career-defining things for Hendrix.\u00a0 First, she got him to stop his laborious hair slicking treatments and to go with a more natural Afro ala Bob Dylan.\u00a0 Having failed to get the Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham interested in working with Hendrix, she put him in touch with his future.\u00a0 During a social gathering of the Stones and the Animals, she heard the Animals\u2019 bass player Chas Chandler mention he wanted to get into managing and producing.\u00a0 Linda recalls, \u201cSo I piped up and said, I\u2019ve got just the person for you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Jimi Hendrix Experience story began with Linda Keith\u2019s comment and Jimi Hendrix\u2019s rocket-ride to stardom was ready to blast off.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t make a ripple in the States, however, until Chandler brought him to England where he set the British rock and roll royalty on their ear.\u00a0 Jimi Hendrix\u2019s invasion of England will be a story for another day.<\/span><\/p>\n

Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Sorry, hard to find actual film of Jimmy in the Chitlin’ Circuit days, but here is a track of him performing with the Isley Brothers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0We left Part 1 with Jimmy Hendrix newly discharged from the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army.\u00a0 As soon as his bass playing buddy, Billy Cox, was turned loose, they changed the name of their band from the Kasuals to the King Kasuals.\u00a0 As Jimmy\u2019s hair returned, he styled it into a \u2018conk\u2019 (see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bands-musicians","category-from-the-vaults","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2526"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2529,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2526\/revisions\/2529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}