I woke up this morning with a phone call from the Pittsburgh School Board to teach at one of the worst high schools in Pittsburgh. I’ve been there before but today I could not bring myself to endure the pain of teaching there. I just needed a day off. The phone rang at 5:30 in the morning. Its nice when you can refuse a day like this when teaching is just your hobby. Its nice to have a regular job. I could not go back to sleep so early in the morning, so I put on the radio. And this radio station was interviewing some guy who wrote a book about Jimmy Hendrix. I was in that never, neverland right before you fall back to sleep. They mentioned how he grew up in extreme poverty and he was given an F in music in grade school. Interestingly he did not start playing guitar until he was 15 years old. And he became the greatest guitar player in a few short years. He was thrown out of the army for not performing his duties quite right. But he credited the sound the wind made through his parachute during his time as a paratrooper for some of the sounds he made on his guitar. And he never thought much of his voice, until he heard Bob Dylan sing in Blond on Blond. Dylan’s raspy voice encouraged him to try singing. Its amazing all the influences that motivated him. Growing up it was almost a right of passage to go to the movie “Woodstock” and hear Jimmy’s rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner”. Jimmy played at Woodstock with a right- handed guitar(he was left-handed) and played it upside down sounding like screaming, and planes crashing, and bombs going off. His favorite guitar was a stratocastor the kind with a gear shift below the strings that you pumped to create distortion to the sounds from the strings. He restrung the guitar the opposite way that a right-handed person would play it. This was a strange time for young people. On the one hand you had the Vince Lombardi football era which was all macho, caveman mentality, and on the other side you had the flower children coming on strong as a backlash against the war in Vietnam. And when you listen to Jimmy Hendrix at the Woodstock concert, he combines all the elements of both cultures, macho and hippy. Come to think of it so did Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. All musical miracles that surprisingly all three musicians died at 27 years of age.