Jimi Hendrix died 50 years ago under unexplained circumstances;
the exceptional musician has become an icon of rock music
It's the proverbial irony of history: Today, the likeness of Jimi Hendrix is one of the most famous faces in the world.
You can see it on posters, T-shirts, even tattooed on the skin of rock fans.
A guitar god with an afro hairstyle as a halo.
But when Hendrix was found in a shabby London hotel room late in the morning on September 18, 1970, nobody recognized him.
Not the doctors, not the police, who make no effort to secure the location of the corpse.
It is believed that another black junkie blew out the light here.
The circumstances under which the greatest guitarist on God's earth died remain unresolved.
Jimi Hendrix never cared about racist resentment - his explosive game cannot be reduced to "black music" either.
It is rooted in blues and soul, but Hendrix plays hard rock, incorporating interference such as the whistling of feedback into his performance.
In addition, he has spectacular antics - he operates his guitar behind his back, plays it with his teeth, even his tongue.
And he is lucky that in 1966 he came to “swinging London” at exactly the right time.
Bands like the Rolling Stones and the Animals made the blues popular with the British - now the African American, who lets his instrument howl and sing like you've never heard it, is paying back.
During his first guest appearance with the band Cream, their successful guitarist Eric Clapton drops his arms in the middle of the song and trots ashamed off the stage.
It's making waves - London's pop celebrities want to witness the phenomenon.
In Philip Norman's new Hendrix biography “Jimi”, singer Terry Reid recalls the second appearance: “There's Mick Jagger ... Keith Richards ... Paul McCartney comes in.
Then Jeff Beck.
I thought: what's going on here?
Is that where the whole guild meets? ”At the end of the concert: paralysis.
“Guitarists everywhere who burst into tears.
In the shop they had to go through with the mop. "
The dervish takes off: The first single from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Hey Joe", makes it to number six in the British charts.
The band released three albums with classics like "Purple Haze", "Crosstown Traffic" or "Voodoo Chile".
In 1968 the LP "Electric Ladyland" topped the US Billboard charts.
In 1967 Hendrix lights his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival, in 1969 he tears up the US anthem in Woodstock - his instrument simulates bomb strikes and screams of pain and thus becomes a beacon against the war in Vietnam.
However, Hendrix is never politically active.
His trance-like solos, the ritual destruction of his instrument - just like his drug use - can be interpreted as coping with trauma.
Born in Seattle in 1942, Hendrix has little of his mother.
She flees from everyday duties and bitter poverty into alcohol and dies early.
Jimi is at the mercy of the violent father who thinks nothing of his artistic talent.
He gets his first guitar from his aunt.
Jimi Hendrix loves women - and women love the shy, sloppy guy: “He was so gentle, whispered rather than spoken and moved like a cat.
Extra-terrestrial! “, The pretty Munich commune Uschi Obermaier raves looking back.
Even when he was still unknown, women kept teasing him.
The aristocratic daughter Linda Keith discovers the broken guitarist in New York in the summer of 1966 and introduces him to his manager.
Initially, the quiet musician was marketed as a “wild man” - which is still harmless compared to the racist hostility that met him in the USA.
The virtuoso played with an incredible number of stars in the early sixties - Ray Charles, Ike and Tina Turner, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding.
But all the legends were black themselves - they were also denied the big concert halls.
Even when Hendrix is famous, his manager, an ex-spy with a shotgun under the sofa, takes him out like a Christmas goose.
So it is no wonder that rumors promptly arise that Hendrix, who, according to official reports, suffocated on his vomit after an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol, was murdered by his manager, the mafia or even the US government.
In any case, he is now part of the "Club of 27".
At the age of 27, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison died shortly afterwards, and later Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.
“People don't like you until you've died,” Hendrix once said in an interview.
Apart from the fact that this is not true, he was right about one thing: he stepped down at the zenith of his art, we only know inspirational, exciting music from him.
That is why he remains today what he was 50 years ago: the eternal guitar god, with the Afro hairstyle as a halo.
Philip Norman:
"Jimi".
Translated from the English by Stefan Rohmig.
Piper Verlag, Munich,
432 pages;
24 euros.
