When Graham Nash saw Jimi Hendrix being cursed off stage
Arriving in London in late 1966, Jimi Hendrix almost seemed to ascend to the music world via divine intervention, arriving fully realised in all his velvet-jacketed saunter and a force of guitar nature that made even the likes of Eric Clapton’s jaw drop in disbelief.
While later enduring as an icon of Woodstock and the US counterculture with his Band of Gypsys final chapter, Hendrix’s initial explosion was as a primarily UK act. Based in the nation’s capital and recruiting Englishmen Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell for his famed Experience trio, the guitar maestro’s new venture landed in swinging London like a psychedelic whirlwind, pulling everybody from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who as gobsmacked converts to the Seattle Johnny-come-lately. Before the Are You Experienced debut was even out, Hendrix’s legendry was already cemented.
The road to wowing the rock vanguard’s big names at Soho’s The Bag O’Nails was a storied, albeit brief, one. Not long after discharge from a half-hearted stint in the US Army, Hendrix would travel the country’s South playing the live circuit before eventually eking out a respectable backing guitarist position for the R&B likes of Ike & Tina Turner, Sam Cooke, and Jackie Wilson. Before long, Hendrix would cut his teeth as a supporter of one of rock and roll’s pioneering flames.
Joining The Upsetters backing band in 1964, Hendrix found himself performing with ‘Tutti Frutti’ singer Little Richard, even cutting several records with the Macon church deacon’s son. While his stature had taken a knock a decade on from his ‘Long Tall Sally’ heyday, Richard still proved to be the consummate showman, treating the audience to his signature theatrics and animated bottlerocket energy.
Trouble was, Hendrix too was beginning to embrace the spotlight, already flaunting his on-stage antics, he’d enter rock immortality within a few short years.
Organised by comedian and TV personality Soupy Sales in April 1965, a multi-billing jamboree at New York’s Paramount Theater saw The Hollies share the programme with Richard and his Upsetters. Gleaning a rare insight into the future of rock, Hollies frontman Graham Nash witnessed the young Hendrix in full, showboating virtuosity, stealing the show a little too much for the band captain’s liking.
“Little Richard was the star of the bill,” Nash recalled on The Howard Stern Show in 2024. “I mean, he was kickass. I mean, Little Richard is phenomenal. After the show, he comes out. He’s screaming, ‘You motherfucker, don’t you ever play guitar with your teeth again, you mother! And it was Jimi”.
Hendrix’s famed teeth-playing was a little trick he’d picked up as early as 1962, witnessing Butch Snipes take a mouth to his strings, as well as former band King Kasuals’ Alphonso ‘Baby Boo’ Young similarly disobeying dentists’ orders with such on-stage trickery. Such mystique and mythmaking were forged from an early age and on display to a wide-eyed Nash when rock was shifting toward headier realms, Hendrix inexorably helping pull music along to the kaleidoscopic heights he’d stand at the centre of.
