Post 70: Happy Birthday JH
Another Hendrix blue plaque
So Jimi would have be 72 today but of course he died at 27. Whilst it is heartbreaking that he died so young it is equally impossible to imagine Hendrix at 72. Another anniversary worth noting was yesterday, when 48 years ago, at the Bag o’Nails Club on Kingly Street in London, the Jimi Hendrix Experience first played in public. http://www.guitarplayer.com/artists/1013/londoners-got-their-first-experience-of-jimi-hendrix-today-in-1966/49660
By coincidence, this week one of Handel House’s most senior volunteers both in terms of age and experience gave me a carefully copied, handwritten note of a Hendrix quote from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Not only is it a fantastic quote but also gave this conscientious volunteer, previously a Hendrix sceptic, a “Hendrix-ine conversion” as he described it. Surely no better birthday present for Jimi.
“A musician, if he’s a messenger, is like a child who hasn’t been handled too many times by man, hasn’t had too many fingerprints across his brain.”
Comments
Hi Sarah
The Bag O’Nails was Jimi’s first paid performance but a few days before then Chas Chandler took him to a small club – then called Knuckles – but is now called the Toucan, the Guinness Bar just off Soho Square where they went downstairs to listened to the house band. Jimi – being Jimi – sat in for a couple of numbers. That was actually the first time he played in public in the UK. All he got for that set was a free drink or two.
Keep up the good work
Derek Legg
Thanks for the information and kind message Derek. Good to hear from you.
Sarah