Billy Cox interviews

[Ayler]

"When Jimi Hendrix died, he left such a void. His music was very much ahead of its time," declares Billy Cox. "It's really hard for me to believe that this music is 40 years old. It still sounds so fresh today. His music really is everlasting."

Of course, Cox knows Hendrix's music better than most — he helped make a lot of that music as the bassist in the Band of Gypsys with drummer Buddy Miles and as a member of the final incarnation of the Jimi Hendrix Experience with drummer Mitch Mitchell.

But he first met Hendrix and played with him long before Hendrix earned his reputation as a superstar guitar god.

"It was destiny," Cox says quietly. "And destiny had blessed me."

It happened back in 1961 at Fort Campbell, Ky., where they were both stationed as members of the 101st Airborne Division. "I went into the service club, and I heard this guy playing guitar," recalls the bassist. "My ears heard something that no one else heard — I heard what he was going to sound like. We started jamming, we became friends and started a band. We were discharged together, and we started gigging together on the chitlin' circuit. He knew that destiny was calling him. He joined this little band, and he'd get stranded. Then he joined another band and got stranded. Finally one day he told me that some guy was going to send him to England and make him a star, and he wanted me to go, too. But I had fallen on hard times. I was renting an amp, and I only had three good strings on my bass. The fourth was tied together with a square knot. So he said, 'That's alright. I'll make it, and I'll send for you.' And he did. That's a real friend."

Of course, Cox was there for Hendrix's legendary performance at the 1969 Woodstock festival. "It was just incredible," Cox recalls. "Everything was going along great until Jimi got to 'The Star Spangled Banner.' If you listen to the live recording of that song you'll hear me playing along on the first eight or nine notes, but we'd never rehearsed that song, and something just told me to lay back. So I did. I just stood there and listened like everybody else. What an incredible performance that was."

Tonight at the Palace Theatre, Cox and Mitch Mitchell will be reunited as the key performers in "Experience Hendrix," the all-star tribute that also features a nonstop parade of such great guitarslingers as Buddy Guy, Jonny Lang, Aerosmith's Brad Whitford, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Eric Johnson, Hubert Sumlin, Bernard Allison and others.

"Not only was I Jimi's bandmate," Cox explains, "but I was also one of his fans." But ask him to pick his favorite Hendrix song, and Cox is flummoxed. "All of them. I love 'Foxey Lady.' I love 'Red House.' I love 'In From the Storm.' I can't pick just one."

He'll get the chance to play those songs and more tonight. But he's also proud of the fact that he also gets the opportunity to expose a whole new generation to the wild and wonderful music of Jimi Hendrix.

"The kids who come up to me after the show asking for autographs are all 14 and 15 years old, so his music has transcended yet another new generation of music fans who know that if you're going to play a guitar, you have to go through Jimi Hendrix. No ifs, ands or buts about that. He was a genius."

Source: http://timesunion.com/AspStories/sto...&category=ARTS