Jimi Hendrix and Martial Music

‘The martial music of every sideburned delinquent who ever walked the face of the earth’.  Frank Sinatra (on rock ’n’ roll)

In the mid 1960s, American guitar and amplifier manufacturers ruled the roost in popular music. In the UK, big brands like Gibson and Fender were expensive and not readily available to import. Jim Marshall, a British music-shop owner in Hanwell, West London, first had the idea of copying the circuits of American amplifiers to sell at his shop. In consultation with leading British musicians such as Eric Clapton and Pete Townsend, Marshall’s home-grown reproductions evolved a distinctive rough-textured sound that was ideal for the emerging ‘rock’ direction in popular music. Economic necessity brought a sonic revolution whose time had come.

Jimi Hendrix met Jim Marshall soon after arriving in London in late 1966. With his otherworldly manner and outlandish image, Jimi appeared to have arrived from another planet, but despite the difference in their ages and backgrounds, the two ‘James Marshalls’ struck a rapport. Jimi arranged to rent Marshall amplifiers wherever in the world he was performing, and for a team of technicians to look after them for him (with the Node and Fortuna in his Eighth House, Jimi always did well out of shared resources).

As iconic as his white Fender Stratocaster guitar, no onstage Hendrix picture would henceforth be complete without a background wall of Marshall stacks. It is facile to say that choice of amp was at the heart of Hendrix’s sound, but the aggressive, feral tone that he became famous for was Marshall Amplification’s stock in trade. Call it synchronicity, serendipity, or nominative determinism, James Marshall Hendrix became Marshall Amplification’s chief ambassador.

Mars stands out in like a beacon in Hendrix’s chart. Dignified, angular and elevated, it controls the life path unavoidably and martial imagery followed him through his short, spectacular career. That Jimi served time in the US Airborne Division is just one part of his great enigma – think of the unlikeliest profession for a future rock and roll star and the military surely tops the list. Like fellow singing soldier Elvis, Mars in the Tenth house makes one wonder whether they chose the army, or the army chose them.

Mars is also the only planet in Hendrix’s chart not finally disposited by the Moon in Cancer. His playing was very lunar and intuitive and seemed to come from a deep psychic channel. By all accounts, Jimi had many Cancerian traits: he was fond of his stomach, preferred women’s company over hanging out with the boys, and he always charmed people’s mothers. He had a maternal streak and the lyrics of ballads like Little Wing fantasize about a protective female saviour figure. Certainly he was moody, and his natal Saturn-Uranus conjunction opposite the Sun suggests the manic depression referenced in his wild waltz-time song.

This article first appeared in the Astrological Association Journal, 2009.