Well, I did it again: led the Seven-Sentence Short Story workshop (created by science fiction and fantasy author James van Pelt) at a writing conference, this time, Wordbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta. Here’s the story I …
It’s time for this year’s Kickstarter to fund Shapers of Worlds Volume V, the fifth in the series of anthologies featuring science fiction and fantasy by authors who were guests on my Aurora Award-winning podcast, The …
It takes money to publish books, and most of that money flows out the door before the book is released and sales begin, so my publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, is turning to Crowdfundr to help …
Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, the fourth anthology featuring authors who were guests on my podcast, The Worldshapers, is now available everywhere, including directly from Shadowpaw Press. Here’s a handy universal URL with links to …
My publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, has three great titles coming out in the first two months of 2024, all of them science fiction or fantasy. The first two, The Good Soldier by Nir Yaniv and …
Here’s another seven-sentence short story! I ran the workshop again at Ganbatte, an anime convention in Saskatoon. It went well, and here’s the one I created, again with the instructions, created by noted SF short-story …
Previous
Next
The half-million-dollar guitar
The first guitar Jimi Hendrix set alight on stage has sold at auction for $527,044.
Which is a great excuse for an excerpt from the biography of Hendrix I wrote for Enslow Publishers, Jimi Hendrix: Kiss the Sky:
The Experience finished the album that spring, and called it Are You Experienced. Before it was released, the band did a tour of English movie theatres, as part of a revue that included Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck and headlined the Walker Brothers. (In Liverpool, when Jimi and Redding sneaked away to a pub between shows, the bartender wouldn’t serve them; he thought they were circus clowns because of their outlandish clothes.)
A fiery performance
On the first night of the tour, a journalist, Keith Altham, was talking to Jimi and Chas Chandler about what Jimi could do to make himself stand out. “It is a pity,” Altham said, “that you can’t set your guitar on fire.”
Jimi immediately got hold of some lighter fluid and began experimenting. That night, at the end of the Experience’s five-song set (the final song was, naturally, “Fire,”), he poured lighter fluid on his guitar and threw a match at it. It burst into flames (on the third attempt) and into rock music legend.
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2008/09/the-half-million-dollar-guitar/
The first guitar Jimi Hendrix set alight on stage has sold at auction for $527,044.
