The show-off in the synagogue in 1959: When Jimi Hendrix was fired from his first-ever gig
When Jimi Hendrix was just a young whippersnapper in the US Army, Sgt Louis Hoekstra recommended that he be discharged rather promptly.
The disgruntled Sgt Hoekstra wryly wrote: “Pvt Hendrix plays a musical instrument during his off-duty hours, or so he says. This is one of his faults, because his mind apparently cannot function while performing duties and thinking about his guitar.”
This fascinating insight surely forecasted the inevitable brilliance about to shine over the horizon. While it might be something about Hoekstra’s wording makes it seem as though he knew that he was winking at the future when he scribbled “or so he says”. While the Sgt doesn’t quite predict that he looked set for inevitable greatness, there are more than a few corroborated reports that suggest for Pvt Hendrix, it was the six-string or bust.
Yet, it didn’t always seem like his dream would come to fruition despite his evident ability and passion. As Linda Keith recalled when she dragged Chas Chandler of The Animals – his future manager – along to see the little-known guitarist in 1966, “I couldn’t believe nobody had picked up on him before because he’d obviously been around.”
He’d actually been gigging for half a decade, but Keith was one of the first champions he had acquired along the way. “He was astonishing,” she recalled, “the moods he could bring to music, his charisma, his skill and stage presence. Yet nobody was leaping about with excitement. I couldn’t believe it.”
A similar peculiarity pervaded his first-ever gig way back on the 20th of February 1959, when the prodigy was only 17-years-old. He still somehow managed to swagger with such virtuosity that he got canned mid-show.
In the basement of a synagogue, Seattle’s Temple De Hirsch to be precise, Hendrix took to the stage with an unnamed band and started as he intended to go on. Far from being a tentative teenage recital of simple chord progressions, Hendrix expressed himself with the liquid bravura and unrivalled skill for which he would later become known.
He might have been a kid, but he was like Pele at the 1958 World Cup, outsizing everyone around him. Naturally, for a young band just trying their best not to mess up, this proved very intimidating.
“I was fired between sets,” Hendrix once told Lily Brett. “I was trying to play from my soul and the other band members thought I was showing off.” Interestingly, this soul-bearing persona was one that only ever came to the fore when he was on stage.
Paul McCartney once said, “He was very self-effacing about his music, but when he picked up that guitar, he was just a monster.” It would seem the same was true in his younger years as his old childhood friend Sammy Drain recalled in conversation with Classic Rock, “Butch was his nickname for a while, because he was so shy. But he wasn’t shy about learning licks from other guys.”
This passion and natural charisma still only blossomed under the sun of a spotlight. Even before that very first show, his then-girlfriend Carmen Goudy recalled him charmingly asking, “Do you really think I’ll have fans?” while simultaneously looking like he was about to throw up.
“During his set, Jimi did his thing,” Goudy goes on to say, “He did all this wild playing. And when they introduced the band members and the spotlight was on him he became even wilder.”
The pleasant pop music that the band were reciting had no cause for flashy solos in an era whereby a song had to be three minutes or less to be in with a hope of being played on the radio, thus the band objected. During a cagey interval, they asked him to settle down or hit the highway. “That’s not my style,” Hendrix protested and never has a truer word been spoken as he headed for the hills.
He may have been fired, but in that moment back in ‘59, he had discovered his natural niche, and it forecasted the future. As he said himself, “You never know what shape clouds are going to be before you see them.” The niche he forged on that day was one that would soon change the sound of the world and influence anyone who would pick up an electric guitar thereafter.
He wasn’t just going to noodle around with chords and stay in line with rules. He knew that much at 17, and he knew it in all the years he failed to be signed after that, too. Befittingly, this birth of a demigod was in a religious temple, as the punk poet John Cooper Clarke humorously remarked, “All the best musicians started out in church; Jesus invented rock ‘n’ roll.”
