Jimi Hendrix Was So Terrified His First Time on Stage He Tried to Hide Behind the Curtains

Jimi Hendrix‘s electrifying stage performances continue to live on in history over half a century after the rock icon’s death. While he gave larger-than-life performances on stage, in person, Hendrix was notably more subdued and soft-spoken, and was a notably shy child growing up. His shyness got in the way of his music career early on.

Jimi Hendrix loved music from an early age

Jimi Hendrix had a passion for music that developed in his childhood. The first instrument he got his hands on was an old ukelele in the late 1950s. He soon was able to acquire an acoustic guitar, but couldn’t afford an electric guitar at the time, as they were too expensive. As a result, he and his brother Leon had to improvise: they electrified the acoustic guitar themselves.

“Not only did we have an electric guitar going, but we had distortion,” Leon Hendrix recalled in Philip Norman’s 2020 book Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix.

He had stage fright early in his career

Eventually Jimi Hendrix got his own electric guitar and began to take music more seriously as a teenager. At one point, he decided to try out for a local band in Seattle, but was

“According to his own — not always reliable — account, Jimmy’s first time onstage was at a National Guard armory and it terrified him so much that he tried to hide behind the curtains,” Norman wrote. “In fact, it was with some older boys in the basement of a synagogue, the Temple De Hirsch Sinai on Boylston Avenue, where regular dances were held. The appearance was merely an audition to see whether he was good enough to join the band permanently.”

“He played in their first set, but was fired in the intermission before their second one. His bandmates complained that his playing was so ‘wild,’ it stopped people from dancing,” he continued. “The same problem was often to recur in the future, although the firings would never again come quite so quickly.”

He went on to become an international superstar because of his ‘wild’ guitar skills

While Hendrix’s “wild” musicianship hurt him when he first took the stage as a performer, it would go on to become his trademark. In the early 1960s, he began working as a backup guitarist for rock icons like Little Richard, The Isley Brothers, and Ike and Tina Turner; his showmanship actually resulted in being fired by Little Richard‘s team for trying to upstage the “Good Golly Miss Molly” singer.

In the mid-1960s, Hendrix launched his own career as an artist, forming the band The Jimi Hendrix Experience. They released their first album, the five-times platinum Are You Experienced, in February 1967, an album that is held in high regard among rock fans to this day. The band quickly followed it up with their second LP, Axis: Bold as Love, in December of that year. Their third and final album, Electric Ladyland, was released in October 1968. Hendrix continued to perform over the next two years, giving an unforgettable performance at Woodstock in August 1969 infused with anti-Vietnam War sentiment.

Hendrix died in September 1970 at the age of 27 due to complications from a barbiturate overdose.