It was 40 years ago this past December 16 that the Jimi Hendrix Experience released its first single, “Hey Joe”, in England. It took my adolescent antennae another year and a bit to pick up on the sound, but by the time I returned to England in June 1969 (”in triumph”, as I like to think of it for no particular reason), I had finally begun expanding my record collection beyond the Chipmunks, Tiny Tim and “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back” to include “Are You Experienced” and Zeppelin’s first LP.

I arrived in London hoping to catch a glimpse of Hendrix, having missed an opportunity in Toronto when he played Maple Leaf Gardens – a bit sullenly since the Mounties had just busted him at the airport with drugs and that’s all anyone wanted to talk about. In the event, all I saw in London was a bunch of hippies on Carnaby Street, although, thank Buddha, Led Zeppelin put on a concert in my honour in Manchester.

Jimi Hendrix’s comet of a career did indeed take him around the world, but I focused on London, where the actual experience began and ended, for a recent Google Earth biographette. Following are some of the highlights. The GE post is here.

In the minds of many still the greatest guitarist in history, 36 years after his death, Hendrix wasn’t the first to make the instrument talk, but he taught it a whole new language. He mixed Mississippi blues with jazz colours and acid rock and put it all through a cosmic filter.

Born Johnny Allen Hendrix on November 27, 1942, in Seattle, he was 16 when his father Al changed his name to James Marshall Hendrix and bought him a $5 acoustic guitar, then a year later an electric. Jimmy played with the Rocking Kings, then joined the army, where he formed another band called the King Kasuals, with fellow soldier Billy Cox.

Honourably discharged with an injury incurred while parachute jumping, he started doing gigs and studio sessions with the Isley Brothers, Ike and Tina Turner, Sam Cooke and Little Richard, and Richard wouldn’t be the last artist to hit the roof over being upstaged by a guy playing his guitar behind his back.

In New York in 1965 he joined Curtis Knight and the Squires, then formed a band of his own called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, featuring guitarist Randy California, later of the group Spirit. The Blue Flames had a regular gig at the Café Wha? in Greenwich Village.

That’s where Jimmy was in June 1966 when Chas Chandler, who’d just left the Animals to get into artist management, came in looking for something new.

Chandler immediately offered to take care of Jimmy and take him to London. “Do I get to meet the Beatles and Eric Clapton?” Hendrix asked.

He was going to meet them, alright.

On September 24, 1966, Chandler landed at Heathrow Airport with Jimmy Hendrix, having just rechristened him Jimi. With them was Terry McVay, the Animals’ road manager, who carried Hendrix’s guitar through Customs so no one would think he was coming to work.

They came straight here to 11 Gunterstone Road, the home of much-admired R&B performer Zoot Money, which was on the way into town. Chandler wanted to reassure Jimi that he could fit in quickly with the English players. Hendrix jammed for several hours with Money’s guitarist Andy Summers, later of the Police, and other musicians here.

Living upstairs was Kathy Etchingham, who turned down an invitation to come and meet Jimi but went to see him play onstage at Scotch of St James, where she began a four-year, on-and-off relationship with him.

Chandler checked Jimi in here at the Hyde Park Towers Hotel that first night, and over the next couple of days took him around to the clubs, introducing him to a slew of top stars. He jammed with Eric Clapton one night and Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express another.

In the audience at the latter gig was Johnny Halliday, “France’s Elvis Presley”, who begged Jimi to open a show for him at Paris’ Olympia Theatre on October 15. Hendrix needed a backup band fast.

Noel Redding came to Chandler’s office hoping to become the lead guitarist for the New Animals. Told about Jimi, he borrowed Chas’ bass and jammed with Hendrix in his hotel room, learning fast.

John “Mitch” Mitchell, who’d been the original Artful Dodger in “Oliver” on the London stage, had just left Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames when he bumped into Chandler at a club and was handed the drumming chores.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience held three days of rehearsals before heading to France for a short tour supporting Halliday that included Munich and Hamburg.

At 13 Mason’s Yard was Scotch of St James, a popular club that in September ‘66 was the scene of the Experience’s first show in London. Afterwards Jimi was introduced to Kathy Etchingham and she soon became his girlfriend.

In 2001 Etchingham organised an auction of Hendrix memorabilia, including a guitar that went for £62,000, with some of the money going to Drugscope, a non-profit that distributes information about the hazards of drugs. Also in the sale was the Stars and Stripes shirt Jimi wore onstage at the Marquee Club in 1967 to protest the Vietnam war. It fetched £18,400.

At the St James gig the Who’s manager, Kit Lambert, promised Chas Chandler he could have an Experience record out before Christmas. The deal was swiftly done.

The original Bag O’Nails was at 9 Kingly Street, and Jimi joined the roster of celebrated performers who held the stage when he played his second British show here in late September 1966.

It was a promotional bash for the Experience, financed by Chandler selling five of his six guitars. A lot of big names came out to see the new sensation. “Britain is really groovy,” Jimi announced afterward, just a week into his first visit to the country.

Still, the only offer Chas got for his untried talent was from the promoter of the New Animals’ tour, and the Experience headed to Croydon as a warm-up act.

On October 1, Cream were playing what was then the Regent Street Polytechnic, now the University of Westminster Regent campus.

Eric Clapton, who was at the time being hailed as God, much to his own chagrin, quickly convinced Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker to let Hendrix join them onstage, and when it was over Clapton called him “Buddy Guy on acid”.

Ringo Starr leased his ground-floor-and-basement flat here at 34 Montagu Square to Chas Chandler and the new kid in town, but soon gave them the heave-ho after they coated all the walls in black paint.

The next time Ringo rented out this pad, it was to John and Yoko just after they got married, and the place was promptly raided, and the Lennons busted for drug possession. Ringo figured he might as well unload the dump.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience recorded their first two tracks, “Hey Joe” and “Stone Free”, on October 23, at De Lane Lea Studios at 129 Kingsway, long since replaced by a supermarket. The band were back again in January to record “Purple Haze”.

Jimi played the hot Speakeasy at 48-50 Margaret Street several times during his original London sojourn, as well as the 7 1/2 Club and another night at the Bag O’ Nails. Early on at the Speakeasy he met Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, and said to her, “What are you doing with this jerk?” Faithfull supposedly later called her demurral “one of the greatest regrets of my life”. “I should have said. ‘Okay, mate, let’s go’.”

When the Jimi Hendrix Experience played the Blaises club at the long-since-demolished Imperial Hotel at 121 Queen’s Gate in early January 1967, “Hey Joe” had just been released. It reached #4 on the British charts. The band was quickly booked to appear on television’s “Ready Steady Go” and “Top of the Pops”.

The next single, “Purple Haze”, went to #3, and when the album “Are You Experienced?” came out it stayed in the top rankings throughout the next summer.

As the Rainbow Theatre, the venerable Finsbury Park Astoria at 232-236 Seven Sisters Road hosted many notable rock concerts – Beatles and Stones included – but before it was finally turned into a church, it also bore witness to Jimi’s first-ever flaming guitar.

The poster suggests otherwise, but on March 31, 1967, the Experience were the opening act on a bill that featured the Walker Brothers and Engelbert Humperdinck. The idea of Hendrix setting his Stratocaster alight was concocted in the dressing room, and despite a few trial runs backstage, Jimi still had trouble starting the fire in front of the audience, with Chas Chandler all the while trying to divert the promoter’s attention.

The other artists were singed at being upstaged, but the Experience were suddenly a very hot commodity. Road manager Gerry Stickells piloted their van across the country as they played the Odeon, ABC and Gaumont theatre chains.

Paul McCartney was in the audience at the Saville Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue on June 4 – no doubt pleased with the Beatles’ brand-new album (and deservedly so!) – when the Experience took the stage and Jimi launched into an acid version of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, the title track.

In their last UK appearance before heading to America to play the Monterey Pop Festival, the Experience shared the bill with the Move and Procol Harum. The photo shows Jimi with Animal and acid-gobbler Eric Burdon, legendary blues-band conductor Jon Mayall, Steve Winwood, then of Traffic, and Carl Wayne of the Move.

Opened in 1931, the Savile (now the Odeon Covent Garden cinema) had been sold in ‘65 to Brian Epstein, who presented both live theatre and rock shows here, including one by Chuck Berry during which police had to clear out a unruly crowd. Epstein’s little quartet, the Beatles, used the theatre to shoot their “Hello Goodbye” promotional film in ‘67.

With a frenzied set at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, the Experience went into orbit. Both “Axis: Bold as Love” and “Electric Ladyland” came out to breathless reviews in 1968 and there was a conquering US tour with dates at the Fillmore West and in Jimi’s hometown of Seattle.

On February 24, 1969, they were back in London for a gig at the Marquee Club at 90 Wardour Street (now a restaurant) and a monster show at the Royal Albert Hall, another “farewell” concert before another overseas tour.

We’re not saying farewell, just moving to Part 2.