The band Jimi Hendrix said had American musicians “starving to death”
When Jimi Hendrix burst onto the scene, no one was ready. After catching the eye performing in the clubs of New York, he was whisked to the UK by former bassist of The Animals, Chas Chandler, who would become his manager. There, they formed The Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966, and within two short years, the American guitarist had risen to become one of the most significant artists of all time. As is well known, Hendrix passed away aged 27 in 1970, but in his brief time in the limelight, he changed the parameters of what a rock musician could be.
Although he was American, Hendrix found a home with the British Invasion, with the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who conceding that they needed to improve their art’s quality after he arrived. “What Jimi was doing was sublime. It was an epiphany in the actual dictionary definition of the word. You felt pained because in his presence and in the presence of that music, you felt small. And you realised how far you had to go,” Pete Townshend, guitarist of The Who, later recalled to Rolling Stone.
As Hendrix became the example of what to aspire to for musicians, his thoughts on music became intellectual gold dust for fans, and in his time, he offered numerous accounts of some of his most prominent peers. One of these was The Monkees, the American answer to The Beatles, and a band he made no bones about hating.
Per History Channel, Hendrix once said of The Monkees: “Oh God, I hate them! Dishwater….You can’t knock anybody for making it, but people like the Monkees?” In short, he could not have been more clear in his hatred of the former sitcom group.
Ironically, one of his most stinging readings of The Monkees came when discussing The Beatles, the group widely hailed as the most important of their generation. In reaching his final point, he explained that he believed John Lennon and his band were so good that they were essentially indefinable and that they put The Monkees to shame. He then called Davy Jones’ quartet “fairies” and said that American groups were “starving to death” to get a break when they had risen to the top, which he perceived as a great injustice.
“Oh, yes, I think it’s good,” Hendrix told Steve Baker in 1967 regarding The Beatles’ recent material. “They’re one group that you can’t really put down because they’re just too much. And it’s so embarrassing, man, when America is sending over the Monkees – oh, God, that kills me!”
The American guitarist continued: “I’m so embarrassed that America could be so stupid as to make somebody like that. They could have at least done it with a group that has something to offer. They got groups in the States starving to death trying to get breaks, and then these fairies come up.”
