Somewhere, Francis Scott Key and Jimi Hendrix are crying. Ingrid Andress performs National Anthem at All-Star Game HR derby 2024.

Sincerest form of flattery.

I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.

 Jimi Hendrix

The Best Stratocaster In the World

Friday, November 27, 1942. Vichy Scuttles its Fleet, Jimi Hendrix born.

The Vichy French scuttled their own ships in harbor in Toulon to keep them out of German hands.  It was a brave act by Vichy, perhaps the most admirable thing it did during the war.  Operation Lila, the German offensive operation to seize the French Navy, had in fact commenced on November 19.

Three battleships, seven cruisers, fifteen destroyers, twelve submarines and thirteen torpedo boats of the French Navy went down at French hands.

Admirable though it was, it was not as admirable as what the Italian Navy would do the next year, which was to bolt to the sea so that it could join the Allies.  Indeed, in retrospect, or even at the time, the decision not to break out can be questioned, but Vichy was still making pretenses to being the de jure French government at the time, even though it was rapidly losing that status, and in fact already had.

Venezuela broke off relations with Vichy.

James ("Jimi) Marshal Hendrix, the greatest guitar player who ever lived, was born in Seattle, Washington.

Self-taught, and unable to read music, Hendrix came out of a blues saturated background and crossed over into Rock & Roll during its greatest era.  Nobody played the guitar like he did before him, and nobody has surpassed his abilities since.  Amazingly, Hendrix did not take up the guitar until he was 15.

A master of distortion at a time in which using it had not yet been figured out, Hendrix became a full time musician following his discharge from the Army in 1962.  Entering the music scene in the turmoil of the 1960s, Hendrix was unfortunately drawn to the drug culture of the era, which ended up taking his life in 1970 at age 27.  In his short musical career he established a body of music which stands out to this day.

Hendrix was just learning how to read music at the time of his death, and interestingly enough, was learning how to play wind instruments in addition to the guitar and bass that he already knew how to play.  Given that 80 years of age isn't an uncommon one, had drugs not taken his life, he could still be living today, and the music scene would have undoubtedly developed much differently than it did since 1970.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - All Along The Watchtower (Official Audio)

September 18, 1970. The death of Jimi Hendrix

The greatest guitarist of all time, James Marshall Hendricks, was a Seattle born bluesman, for all practical purposes, who crossed over into rock music just as rock guitarist were struggling with how to deal with amplification and the full range of the instrument.  Unable to read music, Hendrix (he'd changed the spelling of his last name) embraced the problems that other guitarist had been unable to deal with, principally distortion, and took the instrument far beyond the frontiers it had been in.

A fantastic natural musician, Hendrix has never been surpassed.  Unfortunately, he fell prey to the evils that so often afflict the life of musicians on the road, and which were very much in vogue in the 1970s, drugs being paramount among them.  On this day he was taken to a hospital in London suffering from the effects of a drug overdose and drowned in his own vomit, a fact that was contributed to by the fact that English ambulances typically took patients to the hospital sitting up if they could, which is what they did with Hendrix.

Hendrix had spent his early years in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada and grew up in a musical household.  His father played the saxophone, which he sold when he noticed his boy playing the air guitar with a broom.  Learning how to play the instrument without the benefit of formal musical education, Hendrix learned the blues the way thousands of African Americans had, at home and by ear.  Left handed, however, he learned how to play a right handed guitar upside down, something he did for the rest of his life.  He could, however, play right handed and left handed, and in concert sometimes did.  

After a stint in the Army, in which he was a paratrooper, Hendrix played with a lot of rock bands of the 1960s as a backup guitarist before successfully breaking out on his own.  Teamed by English producers with a backup band that was not up to his talent, dubbed the Jim Hendrix Experience, he came to fame with a series of radically advanced rock music releases, most of which were actually blues based pieces.  Purple Haze remains an emblematic piece of music, but nearly every major song released by Hendrix stands alone.  

Dissatisfied with his English back up band, Hendrix later was backed by fellow black musicians that he'd met while in the Army, and who were schooled, like he was, in the blues.  In that makeup Hendrix toured with the "Band of Gypsies".  A power house of a musician, Hendrix's psyche was increasingly impacted by drugs in later years, in which he freely indulged.  On this date, they took him and the world lost the greatest guitar player of all time.

Debbie Harry turns 75 today.

The band Blondie in 1977, Debbie Harry front and center.

Debbie Harry, the central figure for the band Blondie, turns 75 years old today.

In the 1970s I was a big fan of the band.  Blondie fit in, in terms of the evolution of my musical taste, between Rock and Roll from the 1950s, swing and jazz (all of which I liked before "New Wave"), and Jimi Hendrix and the blues.

I have eclectic musical taste.

In that period, I really liked some New Wave bands, of which I liked Blondie the best.  I still have all their original albums.  

I still like Blondie, although their star faded for me a bit in the late 1970s when I was tasked to be the music reviewer for my high school newspaper.  Taking on the task in the late 1970s very early 1980s  meant that you were going to have to review "hard rock" and "heavy metal" albums, neither of which I've ever developed a taste for.  Knowing that I didn't really know that much about them other than a passing familiarity with what was then current in those genres, I did a little research on the, which was something much, much harder to do then than now.  No Internet.

That research lead me to Jimi Hendrix, which I think some fellow musically knowledgeable student lead me to.  I had to buy an album to know anything about his music, and that frankly blew me away.  Hendrix is, to this day, by far my most favorite musician.  Hendrix in turn lead me directly to the blues, which is by far my most favorite musical genre.  In spite of how he may be remembered, Hendrix was basically a blues musician.

But I retain a soft spot for Blondie.  And even a little bit of a soft spot for music that was in the same orbit at the time.

Nothing better serves to make you feel old, than to realize that pop figures you admired are old.

Today In Wyoming's History: June 29, 1969. The End of the Experience.

Today In Wyoming's History: June 29: 1969 - The Jimi Hendrix Experience played their last concert on the last day of the Denver Pop Festival.  After this, Hendrix would play with The Band of Gypsies, whom he felt more kinship with, being composed of personal musical fellows with a similar blues background.