How Jimi Hendrix’s Brother Helped Him Practice the Guitar By Shocking Himself With Electricity
Jimi Hendrix and his brother Leon both grew up to be accomplished guitarists. And as children growing up in Seattle, the two aspiring rock musicians sometimes played with each other, and often had to make do with what they had.
Jimi Hendrix’s brother accompanied him on adventures
Philip Norman’s 2020 book Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix detailed Hendrix’s life from his youth to international stardom, with input from family members such as Leon. Jimi’s younger brother often stuck by his side.
“He dated all the prettiest middle-class girls in high school,” Leon said. “He’d take me with him when he went to visit them out in the suburbs. I’d have to wait outside in the bushes while he climbed in through their windows.”
The Hendrix family didn’t have much money when Jimi and Leon were growing up, and in the late 1950s, they couldn’t afford an electric guitar for the boys to play. They did, however, get an acoustic guitar — and had to improvise.
Leon Hendrix helped Jimi Hendrix practice guitar by shocking him
Norman described how Buster (Jimi’s nickname at the time) came to make a makeshift electric guitar.
“The most exciting sounds came from electric guitars, of which the cheapest seemed astronomically expensive to Buster. But if a purpose-built model was out of reach, an acoustic one could be electrified by a metal pickup attached under the base of the fretboard with an exposed jack-lead that plugged into an amplifier,” Norman explained.
“He saved enough for the pickup but, of course, had no amp: the only way to produce a similar effect was to wire it through his father’s jealously guarded record player,” he continued. “This worked as long as Leon held down a connection with one finger, which he loyally kept doing even though it gave him an electric shock. The unaccustomed power made the record-player’s speaker crackle and buzz.”
Leon, for his part, looks back on it fondly. “Not only did we have an electric guitar going,” he recalled, “but we had distortion.”
Jimi Hendrix’s career in the 1960s
Eventually, Hendrix got an electric guitar, and began performing as a backup guitarist for popular artists like Little Richard, The Isley Brothers, Ike and Tina Turner, B.B. King, and Sam Cooke in the early 1960s. He went on to form his own band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, in the mid-1960s.
Are You Experienced, The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first album, was released in February 1967. To this day, many rock fans hold it in high regard, and it’s been certified five-times platinum with over 5 million copies sold in the US. The band followed it up with Axis: Bold as Love later that year, released in December 1967. The band’s third and final album, Electric Ladyland, was released in October 1968.
Hendrix soon began developing problems with the band, and they eventually split up in early 1969. That summer, he performed at the infamous Woodstock festival as the closing set after four days of debauchery. His addiction problems worsened over the following year, and he died in September 1970 at the age of 27.
