Hendrix disciple performing music he calls timeless in tribute tour

By Jerry Fink

Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Rain was pouring down that night when bass player Billy Cox sought shelter on the porch of a service club in Fort Campbell, Ky.

The 1961 storm would change his life forever.

A window on the porch was ajar and he heard guitar music coming from inside Service Club No. 1, a place where soldiers came for relaxation after a hard day of work.

“Immediately I sensed something about the playing,” Cox recalled during a telephone interview from Omaha, Neb. “I didn’t know exactly what it was — sort of a mixture of Beethoven and John Lee Hooker.”

He went inside and introduced himself to the enigmatic young GI with the guitar, whom the world would later know as Jimi Hendrix.

“I had played in a marching band and in the high school symphony and when I introduced myself he said, ‘I’m just sitting here jammin’. You play bass, why don’t you check one out and we’ll do some jammin’ together.’ So I did and when we started playing some songs it was like I’d been playing with him for years.”

It was the start of a lifelong friendship. Unfortunately, the life was too short for Hendrix, who died in 1970 at age 27.

Cox will be among the artists performing Saturday when the Experience Hendrix Tour comes to The Pearl at the Palms.

“I saw him put 25 years on a guitar in five years, because with him it was a night and day affair,” Cox says. “He intuitively knew that one day he was going to make it.”

He says there was a difference between the public and the private Hendrix.

“Privately he was an introvert who was wise well beyond his years,” Cox says. “He only had a high school education but he knew things about the universe, about religion and the stars. I think God had anointed him.”

They formed an R&B band called the King Kasuals and after their discharge got a gig nearby in Tennessee.

“We played at Fort Campbell and at all the little service clubs and we got pretty decent,” Cox says. “Jimi was discharged a month before I was and we wound up playing at the Pink Poodle in Clarksville. We made enough money to rent a little house. We knew at that time that when you reached 18 you got out of the house, you left your home. We knew we couldn’t go back home, we had to make our way in the world. So we got the little house, but we knew that was a small city and the world was waiting for what we were doing. We were just trying to figure out how we were going to present this thing.”

They knocked around the East and ended up in Nashville, which had a thriving R&B scene.

“We were with the band in Nashville for three or four years and then Jimi finally got itchy feet,” Cox says. “He knew destiny was calling him.”

He left Cox’s band four or five times and finally didn’t return.

“The last time he called me he said this guy in New York had discovered him and was going to send him to Europe and make a star out of him,” Cox says. “He wanted me to go with him, but I told him, ‘Jimi, I’ve fallen on bad times. I’m renting an amp, I have three strings on my bass and the fourth string is tied in a square knot.’ He said, ‘That’s OK. I’ll make it and I’ll send for you.’

“And you know what, he did. He was a man of his word.”

It was for the Woodstock Festival in 1969. Hendrix’s bass player, Noel Redding, left the group and Cox was recruited to join Hendrix’s new group — a short lived rock band called Gypsy Sun and Rainbows.

Sun and Rainbows is not to be confused with Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys, a temporary group he formed to play four concerts at Fillmore East in New York — two on New Year’s Eve in 1969 and two on New Year’s Day in 1970. After the four concerts, Hendrix went back to the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Cox — who now produces gospel television shows in Nashville — has the distinction of having performed with Hendrix in four bands.

“It was an incredible experience,” Cox says. “What a ride, like being on a roller coaster.”

Almost 40 years have passed since Hendrix died unexpectedly after a night of drinking in London in September 1970. But his music is still very much alive.

“This tour bears witness to the musical genius of Jimi Hendrix,” Cox says. “It helps to confirm something I have been saying since he died — and that was that Jimi Hendrix would one day go in the category of the masters such as Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. His music has become timeless.”

The tour has been an annual event since 2000 and has been growing every year.

“Last year we had eight or nine dates and we doubled that this year — and every one of them have been sold out,” Cox says. “Hopefully next year we will triple the number of dates.”

He says the fan base keeps growing. “We’re playing for four generations now.”

Cox believes Hendrix’s music will be around 500 years from now.

“He was a creator, not just a musician,” he says. “Every now and then a spirit slips through the portal of time into this reality and whey they slip through they blow your mind — people like Shakespeare and Mozart. Jimi Hendrix was one of those people.”