Jimi Hendrix became a rock legend as an adult, but before he launched his music career in earnest, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and began training as a parachutist. At the time, the Vietnam War was beginning to escalate, and Hendrix opted to join the army. But he couldn’t focus on his work, and preferred to play guitar than train.

Jimi Hendrix enlisted in the army after facing 2 years of juvenile detention

Philip Norman’s 2020 book Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix tells the story of Hendrix’s life from his upbringing in Seattle to his becoming a global phenomenon with his music. In May 1961, when Hendrix was just a teenager, he was taken into jail after confessing to police that he took clothes from a local store. He ended up in a legal predicament where he was presented with two options: serve time in juvenile detention or enlist in the U.S. Army.

“After what he described as ‘seven days in the cooler,’ but was more likely a few hours on remand in juvenile hall, a judge gave him the choice of two years detention or joining the army,” Norman wrote. “He unhesitatingly picked the latter, which at the time hardly seemed like punishment at all. He had long felt attracted to a life in one or other armed service, not from any bellicose spirit but because it seemed to offer all the security and stability his childhood had lacked.”

“Apart from his father, who still nagged him incessantly to find  an ‘honest’ job, working ‘with his hands’ like, for example — landscape gardening — everybody he knew expected him to become a pro musician,” Norman continued. “Instead, he ended up in the US Army, training as a parachutist in its 101st Airborne Division.”

Jimi Hendrix was more focused on guitar than his army duties

The 101st Airborne Division was known for their heroic actions in Normandy during World War II. Hendrix trained as a parachutist, but his time in the Army didn’t last long: he was honorably discharged in July 1962.

“He would always claim to have been discharged on medical grounds after breaking an ankle and injuring his back in a parachute jump. In reality, he finagled his way out on spurious medical and psychiatric grounds, for he had come to hate military life and could think only of continuing his musical collaboration with [bassist] Billy Cox, who was due to be discharged after serving a full term at around the same time,” Norman wrote. “To a succession of army doctors and psychiatrists he recited a long list of symptoms, most of which his barrack-mates had never noticed: dizziness, pain and pressure in the left chest, loss of weight, frequent trouble sleeping, personal problems. He even claimed to be homosexual — something for which no tolerance yet existed in any armed service — and, almost as fancifully, to need glasses to correct faulty vision in both eyes.”

“Despite the flimsiness of his case, the 101st made little effort to keep him,” Norman continued. “His service file described him as one of the poorest [i.e. in performance] members of his platoon who carried out his duties unsatisfactorily, needed constant supervision, possessed no esprit-de-corps and seemed ‘an extreme introvert.'”

During his time in the Army, he formed a band called the Kasuals. His time with the band began getting in the way of his military duties.

“Playing with the Kasuals until all hours often made him late for bed-check and he was always tired and nodding off to sleep while on duty,” Norman wrote. “If the homosexuality also remained unproven, there was ample evidence of sexual ill health: one day, when he was meant to be in a fatigue detail, a sergeant had caught him masturbating in the showers. ‘He seems unable to conform to military rules and regulations,’ the army concluded, ‘and his mind apparently cannot function while performing duties and thinking about his guitar.'”

He began playing guitar professionally after being honorably discharged

After Hendrix’s discharge, he began playing backup guitar professionally for major artists like Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, and The Isley Brothers. In the mid-1960s, he formed his own band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience. They released their smash debut album Are You Experienced in 1967 and followed it up with Axis: Bold as Love later that year; a year later, they released their third and final album Electric Ladyland.

Hendrix’s approach to music excited rock fans everywhere both before and after his death in 1970.

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