Hendrix Dies at 27: Guitar's Greatest Innovator Lost

Jimi Hendrix was found unresponsive in a basement flat at the Samarkand Hotel in London’s Notting Hill on the morning of September 18, 1970. He was twenty-seven years old. The cause of death was asphyxiation from inhaling vomit while intoxicated with barbiturates, and his passing robbed popular music of perhaps the most transformative instrumentalist it has ever produced. In barely four years of international fame, Hendrix had dismantled every assumption about what an electric guitar could sound like and rebuilt the instrument’s possibilities from the ground up. James Marshall Hendrix grew up in Seattle, teaching himself guitar as a teenager on a one-dollar acoustic his father bought from a friend. He served in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, played the chitlin circuit backing Little Richard and the Isley Brothers, and drifted through New York’s Greenwich Village club scene before Chas Chandler, the bassist of the Animals, heard him play and brought him to London in September 1966. Within months, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, had conquered the British charts. His performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, climaxing with him setting his guitar on fire, announced his arrival to the American audience. The albums that followed, "Are You Experienced," "Axis: Bold as Love," and "Electric Ladyland," expanded the vocabulary of rock music with feedback, wah-wah, distortion, and studio techniques that no one had heard before and that engineers did not always understand. His performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock in August 1969 turned the national anthem into a howl of protest and longing that captured the Vietnam era’s anguish more powerfully than any speech or editorial. Hendrix spent the final months of his life in creative turmoil, dissolving the Experience, recording with new collaborators, and building Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan. His death, on the same date as the overdose that would kill his friend Janis Joplin sixteen days later, inaugurated the "27 Club" mythology. He left behind three studio albums, a handful of live recordings, and a legacy that every subsequent generation of guitarists has tried to absorb without ever quite matching.