Jimi Hendrix is remembered as the most visually extraordinary performer in rock history. The guitar played with his teeth. The guitar played behind his back. The guitar set on fire at Monterey in 1967 — a moment so perfectly theatrical that it has been discussed for fifty years as the ultimate act of rock showmanship. The physical performance of his guitar playing was inseparable from the guitar playing itself in the public reception of who he was.
What is less discussed is where those physical techniques came from. Because they did not come from showmanship. They came from necessity and from survival and from the specific circumstances of a childhood in Seattle that had very little to do with rock stardom.
James Marshall Hendrix grew up in a household defined by instability. His mother Lucille and his father Al had a difficult relationship that resulted in Jimi being raised inconsistently by both parents and by other family members during periods when neither parent was available. The material circumstances of his childhood were poor. The emotional circumstances were unpredictable. He found the guitar the way children who need something find what they need — through instinct and through the specific desperation of someone who has discovered that one thing in the world makes sense when nothing else does.
He was left-handed. His guitar was right-handed. The reversal — the upside-down restringing that became famous — was a practical response to the unavailability of a left-handed instrument for a child without money to buy a replacement.
His father did not initially support the guitar playing. Al Hendrix was a practical man who understood the world in the terms that the world had given him — a Black man in 1950s Seattle with limited resources and a son who needed to be prepared for a life that was not going to provide many openings. Music was not preparation. Music was distraction. The guitar was something to be discouraged.
Hendrix played anyway. In the specific way that people who have found the one necessary thing play it — privately, persistently, in the spaces where he would not be observed and discouraged. He played in his room. He played when his father was not home. He developed technique in private.
The playing behind his back began, by his own account in one of the few interviews where he discussed his childhood directly, as a concealment technique. A way of playing without being visible to someone who did not want him to be playing. He had developed sufficient facility with the instrument that he could sustain the playing while reducing the visibility of it — while holding the guitar in positions that obscured what he was doing from someone entering the room.
The concealment became fluency. He had played behind his back in small rooms in Seattle for enough hours that by the time he was playing in front of audiences the technique was simply available to him. It was part of his relationship with the instrument. The specific geography of his early playing had given him access to the guitar from positions and angles that other players had never needed to develop.
He made it spectacular because everything he did became spectacular. But it started as a small boy in Seattle not letting his father see what he was doing.
The most theatrical image in rock history was a child hiding his most necessary thing from the person who would have taken it from him.
He played behind his back because once there had been a reason to. By the time there was no longer a reason, the playing was there. He gave it to the world because that is what you do with the thing you learned in hiding.
You bring it out. You make it as large as you can make it.
You make sure everyone can see it.