Jimi Hendrix was absolutely unbeatable at one board game, according to Graham Nash
It’s quite fitting that Jimi Hendrix was so good at a board game about winning territories and taking over the world, given how the fate of his real life played out.
But it’s also an odd image, the idea of rock stars sitting down to play a board game. Ozzy Osbourne scoffed at the prospect in his recent documentary when asked if they would become a staple of his retired life. Something about the vision of a person who has lived and died by the sword of sex, drugs, and hedonism getting stuck into a game of Scrabble really just doesn’t sit right at all.
Yet away from blitzing up the stage as the world’s most mind-bending guitarist, this is exactly where you would find Hendrix letting off steam – although, admittedly, Scrabble wasn’t the exact mode of choice. Instead, you could far more commonly find him behind the board of a game of Risk, leading his armies to victories as the enemy territories retreated into defeat under his thumb. There’s definitely a strong sense of poeticism to be found in that.
However, in his typical style, the guitarist was completely and utterly unbeatable in the face of any opponent who, somewhat foolishly, decided to take him on. Just ask Graham Nash. Of course, for two huge stars of the time, there was always going to be a rutting of the horns in some respects. But instead of this manifesting itself in the most physical sense, Hendrix would rather tear his rivals to shreds via a round of Risk.
Naturally, this is not an attempt to paint a portrait of Hendrix as some civilised old soul, sipping cups of tea with a blanket wrapped over his knees. There was still a fair share of the typical rocker’s lifestyle at play, which Nash can attest to – it’s just that he liked a bit of Risk in between. “Jimi would play Risk on acid, and I never — and me personally — ever beat him at all,” Nash said. “He was unbelievable at it. He was a military man, you know, he’s a paratrooper, and I don’t know whether you know that about Jimi, but no one ever beat him at Risk.”
Nash was correct to draw the parallel between Hendrix’s love for the game and his military expertise, as he started the decade of the 1960s as an army paratrooper and ended it as one of the world’s greatest bona fide stars. Having completed his service for over a year before ultimately being discharged for getting sloppy on the job, it’s clear that the regimented life was never Hendrix’s true calling.
Nevertheless, it was still evident that these memories were still stuck with him for the rest of his life, even when his surroundings had undergone a complete transformation. Whether it was through a board game or literally on the battlefield, Hendrix’s time as part of the military establishment instilled some sort of drive into him, even when that later transpired to have very different results.
Be it slinging the six-string or playing a game, one thing was always clear: this was a man who could never be beaten.
