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My brother is also a Hendrix fan and recalls a TV interview with Eric Burden of the Animals said that "talking to Hendrix was like talking to Richard Nixon." Contrary to Hendrix's reputation as brooding and gloomy, Burden described Hendrix as cheerful and upbeat. A black friend of mine who spent a few hours with Hendrix told me the same thing and that "you'd have liked him, he was a right-winger."

The following link and excerpt from the Snopes bulletin board dispute the claim that the CIA killed Hendrix and cites a bio of Hendrix:

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=43;t=000909;p=1

"It's sincerely doubtful that the federal government would want Hendrix dead. To begin, he served in the 101st Airborne Division (stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky) as a trainee paratrooper. After breaking his ankle on his 26th parachute jump, he received a medical discharge. What the youth group of the late-60s didn't know (and probably didn’t want to know) is that Hendrix supported the war in Vietnam until his death. He would often defend the war with statements to the effect that communist China needed to be curbed, etc...

Furthermore, near the end of his life, the Black Panthers attempted to convince Hendrix to play at their rallies, to write more "Black Power" oriented music. Hendrix adamantly refused. Truth be told, much of the black community, at the time, felt Hendrix was somewhat of an Uncle Tom.

Truly a strange biography for a man generally identified as the leader of the counter-culture movement of the late-60s."

--See Jimi Hendrix : The Man, the Magic, the Truth by Sharon Lawrence.

It's been about 15 years since I was in my "Hendrix only" phase. I didn't even know what the internet was back then, so I was at the mercy of things like the Rolling Stone Rock Encyclopedia and Irwin Stambler's Encyclopedia for biographical information. They, of course, made no mention of any of this. I only knew that he seemed pro-life to me, with Belly Button Window. In an interview, he claimed this was an anti-life song, so who knows. At any rate, this is making me want to break out my albums after a long period of not having heard them. I always particularly liked Cry of Love, even though it was finished after his death and may not have fully represented what he would have wanted for the songs. Still, Angel and Drifting are just incredible. I need to get First Rays of the New Rising Sun.

This post made me think of some mildly contradictory lines in If 6 Was 9:

White collar conservative flashin' down the street
Pointin' their plastic finger at me
They're hopin' soon my kind will drop and die
But I'm gonna wave my freak flag high, high!

LOL. Okay, I know it's not a "he's a liberal, get him!" moment, but it's kind of funny. That is a cool song from a great album.

"A black friend of mine who spent a few hours with Hendrix told me the same thing and that "you'd have liked him, he was a right-winger.""

If all the HIPPIES
cut off all their hair

I DON'T CARE
I DON'T CARE

Dig..., cause I got my own world to live through

and I ain't gonna copy you.