JIMI HENDRIX Childhood Home Torn Down
March 31, 2009, 15 years ago
Seattletimes.nwsource.com is reporting:
The demolition crew has been working at a fast pace, and the tiny, 900-square-foot house where JIMI HENDRIX lived from ages 10 to 13, and first showed his love for music, was down to its shell Monday.
Despite an eight-year, $100,000-plus effort by Pete Sikov - a Seattle real-estate investor who at first wasn't a Hendrix devotee, but became one - the historic structure is gone.
If you're a fan, vanished will be the chance to drive by and imagine how it would have been in the early 1950s for Jimi Hendrix, who died in 1970 at age 27 in London, apparently choking on his vomit after an unintentional combination of sleeping pills and alcohol.
The value of the intact home, however dilapidated, was that it allowed visitors to imagine the poverty and simple beginnings of one of rock 'n' roll's greatest musicians.
That was when a young Jimi played a ukulele with one string, remembered Leon Hendrix, 61, Jimi's younger brother by five years. Leon Hendrix remembered how his brother used the ukulele to strum the hip, jazzy 'Peter Gunn Theme' from the hit TV detective show by the same name, "because you could play it using only one string."
"This is where he first discovered music," said Charles R. Cross, author of the acclaimed Hendrix biography Room Full of Mirrors.
Read more here.
(Photo: Dean Rutz from The Seattle Times)
