Jimi Hendrix: the Purple Haze paratrooper

Jimi Hendrix: the Purple Haze paratrooper
PRIVATE James Marshall Hendrix made his 25th parachute jump as a member of the US Army’s 101st Airborne division in early 1962.
Daily Express
By: Dominic Midgley
Published: Fri, October 25, 2013

In those days parachutes were not the high-tech canopies they are today and injuries were common.

On this occasion Hendrix broke his ankle so badly on landing that he was subsequently given an honourable discharge.

The 101st Airborne’s loss turned out to be the rock world’s gain.

Within a matter of years Private Hendrix had morphed into the flamboyant rock star Jimi Hendrix and he and his band were the highest paid act in America.

As part of year-long commemorations that have marked the 70th anniversary of the guitarist’s birth in 1942 the BBC is screening a 90-minute special devoted to the life of a man who got his first big break in the UK before returning to his homeland a conquering hero.

Everyone who ever met Hendrix was struck by how his beloved guitar was almost an extension of his body.

When he was a schoolboy in Seattle on America’s western seaboard in the mid-Fifties he took to carrying round a broom as a guitar substitute and the school social worker even made an unsuccessful attempt to have the school fund the purchase of a guitar on the basis that leaving him without one might result in psychological damage.
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