A Judge Gave Jimi Hendrix the Choice of 2 Years in Juvenile Hall or Joining the Army
Jimi Hendrix was passionate about music as a child. As he got into his high school years, the future rock legend began getting into trouble, and eventually found himself faced with the choice of juvenile hall or joining the army.
Jimi Hendrix was arrested and charged
Philip Norman’s 2020 book Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix detailed Hendrix’s life from before his birth until after his death. After dropping out of high school, he ended up in a legal predicament after he got wrapped up in a life of crime.
“Throughout a near-feral childhood he had managed to avoid gangs along with every other snare of impoverished inner-city youth,” Norman wrote of Hendrix’s mostly-innocent upbringing. “The first time he ever fell foul of Seattle’s police department was in May 1961, when he was picked up for what has passed into legend as joyriding in stolen cars. However, the written confession he made at the police station was to petty larceny: ‘A friend and I were playing around in an ally [sic] and we noticed a broken window in the back of a clothing store — we then got a clothes hanger which was lying on the ground and unbent it so we could stick it through the window and “hook” some of the clothes, which we did. The clothes that did not fit us we gave to a Christmas fund at school.'”
“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 continued. “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.”
Jimi Hendrix was given the choice to enlist in the army or go to juvenile hall
The decision to join the army made sense for Hendrix, as his needs would be provided for and it was considered to be an honorable career path. And on top of that, it would be pleasing to his father Al, who was a notably strict parent to his two kids.
“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 wrote of Hendrix. “Instead, he ended up in the US Army, training as a parachutist in its 101st Airborne Division.”
Jimi Hendrix was discharged from the army
Hendrix was originally scheduled to serve for three years in the army, but he was honorably discharged after a year when officials realized he wasn’t fit to be a soldier, as he’d rather spend time with his guitar.
Hendrix went on to make a career as a guitarist, starting out playing backup for artists like Little Richard before forming his own band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, in the mid-1960s. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was one of the hottest rock bands of the late 1960s, bolstered by the success of their albums Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland.
Hendrix died in 1970 at the age of 27.
