WILD THINGS IN SEARCH OF JIMI’S STRATS
Jimi Hendrix arrived in London from New York City in September 1966 with his new manager, Chas Chandler, the ex-bass player from The Animals. They soon put together Jimi’s new band, the Experience, with Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass, and by the middle of October that year they were playing their first proper gigs on a brief tour supporting Johnny Hallyday in France.
It’s not clear if Jimi brought with him to London the guitar he was playing during those early months. It was an Olympic White finish Fender Stratocaster with a maple neck and rosewood fingerboard, made most likely between ’63 and ’65. Perhaps he bought it in London? It was unlikely that he or Chas had the cash to buy a new one – a brand new custom-colour Strat similar to this white one listed at £168 at the time. That’s a lot of money for a musician still to prove himself. If he bought it secondhand in one of London’s music shops in late ’66, he’d have needed a more manageable sum, between about £60 and £90. The Selmer shop in Charing Cross Road, for example, advertised “Strats, all finishes, from £75” at the time.
Wherever it came from, Jimi’s first white Strat served him well for a while, alongside a secondhand black one with rosewood ’board that he got around November. By February of the following year, things were looking up. The Experience had played the Marquee and the Saville Theatre in London and a number of other gigs in Britain, plus a few in Germany and France. Work on recording a follow-up single to Hey Joe had begun – and Purple Haze would go to No 3 in the UK. Reports suggest that, during February, Jimi had a black Strat stolen from a gig in Darlington and a white Strat from London’s Roundhouse. He soon acquired at least one more white one and at least one sunburst model, all with rosewood ’boards.
Jimi was, of course, left-handed, and all his Strats were regular guitars that he would flip over and restring to accommodate that. It’s a matter of debate how much difference this made to his sound – the reversed nut, the angled bridge pickup accentuating different strings than intended, the vibrato handled differently
