LAST SUNDAY, the New York Times magazine published a document so amazing, I assumed that it would set off a world-wide sensation, a great cacophony of breast-beating, disillusion, and internal crisis. It was a letter Jimmy Hendrix wrote to his father in August 1965. The letter describes the marketing strategy Hendrix planned to use to get rich. And yet the letter’s publication in one of the most-read magazines in the nation has not stirred the hue and cry I anticipated.
When he wrote the letter, Hendrix was playing as a sideman for groups like the Isley Brothers. Hendrix complained that when “you are playing behind other people you’re still not making a big name for yourself as you would if you were working for yourself.” Nonetheless, he continued, it was useful to go on the road with these groups to “see how business is taken care of.”
