The one band that turned down playing with Jimi Hendrix: “If I had only known”
It was hard to put into words what Jimi Hendrix was doing for the guitar community when he first came out.
Most people can look at what he’s doing today and not be so thrilled about what the big deal was around him, but you have to remember that during the late 1960s, there was no one else who remotely sounded like Hendrix when he first strapped on his guitar. As far as they were concerned, this was music from another dimension, but that didn’t quite endear him to every single rock and roll band that he went to see back in the day.
But while Hendrix was a one-off in rock and roll history, there had to have been something in the water in the Pacific Northwest. Some of the biggest names in music were coming from there in the 1990s, but as far back as Hendrix’s era, the fact that Quincy Jones had spent some time on that side of the country made it feel like everyone’s ears were attuned to something a lot different from what everyone else was.
There was no real scene in Seattle at the time, which is probably why Hendrix ended up moving to the UK to make his first splash, but it’s not like Seattleites didn’t have anything to listen to. The Sonics were already one of the greatest garage bands in the world, and compared to what grunge would become decades later, you can hear the seeds of that music in what they were doing.
In fact, a lot of what The Sonics were doing was a lot closer to proto-punk than what The Velvet Underground was doing. Lou Reed was interested in making art that happened to feature loud guitars half the time, but when you listen to ‘The Witch’, it was like everyone was playing with the intention of making the guitar sound a bit more mean than what they were hearing out of The Rolling Stones. But even when they caught Hendrix’s ear, they didn’t understand what kind of music he was playing.
Then again, Hendrix’s reputation before blowing up was a much different story. He had already been a great guitarist when he worked in Little Richard’s band, but given that Richard had to reprimand him for doing all of his signature moves, The Sonics’ frontman Larry Parypa remembered everyone thinking that he was just some snot-nosed kid who wanted to try and grandstand in front of their crowd.
The Sonics weren’t exactly the biggest band in the world or anything, but Parypa said that he would have let him play had he known who he was, saying, “We thought [we] were totally illegitimate. It felt like maybe we shouldn’t be here. We were playing at the Spanish Castle, and this kid comes by and asks if he can sit in, and we were trying to politely say no. I don’t know who told me this, but they said, ‘That was Jimi Hendrix.’ And he had his guitar and amp in his truck. If I only had known…”
But it’s not like getting shown up by Hendrix would have been that uncommon if The Sonics did bring him up there. Eric Clapton already found out the hard way that Hendrix could demolish even the greatest guitarists on the planet, and when he brought him out with Cream, there was no way he could have guessed that his ‘God’ status was about to be revoked by this musical angel going wild on the guitar.
So while The Sonics have become a major part of the underground side of rock and roll, the fact that they denied Hendrix would have been one of the best decisions that they ever made as well. They could have easily kept on going and had Hendrix show them up, but it’s better to be known as one of the kings of underground music than have to worry about being the band that Hendrix absolutely destroyed.
