Today's birthdays:
Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970).
James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix was an American guitarist, songwriter and singer. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music."
Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at age 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville then Nashville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the chitlin' circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band and later with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965. He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", and "The Wind Cries Mary". He achieved fame in the US after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the US. The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his first and only number one album. The world's highest-paid performer, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia in September 1970.
Hendrix was inspired by American rock and roll and electric blues. He favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was instrumental in popularizing the previously undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. He was also one of the first guitarists to make extensive use of tone-altering effects units in mainstream rock, such as fuzz distortion, Octavia, wah-wah, and Uni-Vibe. He was the first musician to use stereophonic phasing effects in recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone commented: "Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began."
Hendrix was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year and in 1968, Billboard named him the Artist of the Year and Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Disc and Music Echo honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970, Guitar Player named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone ranked the band's three studio albums, Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), and Electric Ladyland (1968), among the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and they ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist and the sixth-greatest artist of all time. Hendrix was named the greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone in 2023.
On this day today:
1967 - In America, The Beatles release Magical Mystery Tour, the soundtrack to their upcoming film.
1969 - The Rolling Stones record Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! at New York City's Madison Square Garden. In the audience is Jimi Hendrix, celebrating his 27th (and last) birthday.
1970 - George Harrison releases All Things Must Pass, his first solo album since the breakup of The Beatles. The first single, "My Sweet Lord," becomes the first ex-Beatle solo #1 in the UK and also in the US.
1981 - Before file sharing, there was the dual-cassette recorder. In an effort to stop people from making copies of tapes, ads run in the British press saying, "Home taping is wiping out music."
1982 - Lionel Richie, who has already topped the Hot 100 with his group Commodores ("Three Times A Lady," "Still") and with Diana Ross ("Endless Love"), reaches the top spot on his own with his first single, "Truly."
1990 - MTV bans the video for Madonna's "Justify My Love," which is too racy for the network. The singer responds by releasing the video on VHS, which sells over a million copies.
1991 - Freddie Mercury's funeral is held in London. Just a small group of friends and family, including Elton John and Mercury's Queen bandmates, are at the private service. At the singer's request, his longtime companion Mary Austin takes his ashes - she never discloses their location.
1995 - The Beatles' Anthology I sets a first-week sales record of 1.2 million copies.
1999 - Influential independent rock icons Pavement announce they have broken up. During their show at London's Brixton Academy, bandmember Stephen Malkmus tells the crowd that the show will be the band's last.
2000 - The Beatles have the #1 album in America with a collection of their 27 chart-topping hits, appropriately titled 1, proving that their appeal spans generations.
2017 - Country singer Blake Shelton is named People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive." He's the second musician to receive the honor in the annual feature's 32-year run; the first was Adam Levine, his fellow coach on The Voice, in 2013.
2021 - Taylor Swift's extended version of "All Too Well," with a running time of 10:13, hits #1 on the Hot 100, becoming the longest song ever to top the chart. Don McLean held the record since 1972, when "American Pie," running 8:36, went to the top.
