Wild, Woolly & Wicked

Midway in Rock Singer Jimi Hendrix's concert at Cleveland's Public Music Hall last week, the master of ceremonies asked the audience to check under their seats: there had been a bomb threat. But as it turned out, the only explosion that night was onstage. Said Hendrix: "Nobody but Jimi burns a house down."

To light the fire, Jimi didn't even have to pull his stunt of burning his guitar--though a fireman was poised in the wings, ax at the ready, in case he did. Instead, he hopped, twisted and rolled over sideways without missing a twang or a moan. He slung the guitar low over swiveling hips, or raised it to pick the strings with his teeth; he thrust it between his legs and did a bump and grind, crooning: "Oh, baby, come on now, sock it to me!" Lest anybody miss his message, he looked at a girl in the front row, cried, "I want you, you, you!" and stuck his tongue out at her. For a symbolic finish, he lifted the guitar and flung it against the amplifiers.

Shouting "Stoned! Stoned!" his listeners surged forward, clawing at the kicking feet of the policemen who ringed the footlights. After the performance, they shredded curtains, ripped doors off their hinges, and generally wreaked the worst havoc on the Music Hall since it was battered three years ago by the Beatles.

Amplified Whirlpool. Such scenes have not been uncommon during the past three weeks on the latest U.S. tour by the Jimi Hendrix Experience--Hendrix plus Englishmen Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums. Their music, when Jimi pauses to concentrate on it, is a whirlpool where the currents of Negro blues and psychedelic rock meet, and it churns with all but overwhelming power from their nine amplifiers and 18 speakers. But it is no more than a conveyor on which the high-riding Hendrix projects his anti-personality: wild, woolly and wicked.

His outfit is pure hippie Latin American bandido--black boots, silver-belted denims, Navajo vest, and a purple velours gaucho hat patted down over his colossal corona of frizzy hair. On the hat is a button that reads, "Let's Brag a Little." So he does: "What I don't like about being on the road, man, is that you only remember each town by the broads. Like the blonde broad with the mole, she's from Frisco --things like that."

For a fellow of 25, Hendrix has been on the road a long time. The son of a Seattle landscape gardener, he dropped out of high school at 18, largely, he claims, because of a teacher who was "prejudiced" against him as a Negro. "I couldn't dig that scene very hard anyway," he says. By that time, he was learning the guitar to Muddy Waters records on his back porch. After a stint as a paratrooper, he toured the rhythm-and-blues circuit, working his way to Nashville, Harlem, Greenwich Village and finally London.

There, in 1966, James Marshall Hendrix became Jimi, and his band became an experience. Their first record soared on the English bestseller charts. As soon as English audiences got a look at them, London hairdressers began featuring "the Experience Look." Last year, Jimi doused his guitar in lighter fluid and set a match to it on the stage of California's Monterey Pop Festival, whereupon his career in the U.S. heated up too. His first LP was No. 6 on the U.S. charts for a while; last week his second was No. 4.

Jimi confides that he is planning a "very groovy" new musical concept for his next album. "I want to be respected in the music field," he says. And skeptics had better believe it. "When people try to call me a phony," warns Jimi, "I smash them."

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