Jimi Hendrix Was So Broke He Pawned His Guitar for Food — Until the Isley Brothers Took Him In and Let Him Practice With No Amp in Their Living Room

A Black family in New Jersey bought Jimi Hendrix guitars when his kept getting stolen. The Isley Brothers took him in, fed him, and let him practice electric guitar in their living room with no amplifier. On February 9, 1964, he sat on their couch next to a kid named Ernie and watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

That kid grew up to be a guitar legend too.

The guitar kept ending up in a pawnshop. He would hand it over for a few dollars, buy something to eat, then scrape the money back together and get it out again.

A week or two later, it went back in.

This was New York at the start of the 1960s. The broke young man doing the pawning called himself Jimmy James, and sometimes Maurice James.

The world would learn his real name soon enough.

It was Jimi Hendrix.

He was about to change what an electric guitar could do, in a way nobody had managed before him and few have managed since. In these same years, he could barely afford to keep one in his hands.

He had taught himself the instrument as a boy in Seattle. First on a one-string contraption, then on a cheap acoustic, then on his first real electric at fifteen.

In 1961 he enlisted in the Army and trained as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell. An ankle gave out on a jump, and he was discharged in 1962.

He did not have the money to get home to Seattle, so he stayed in the South, around Clarksville and then Nashville.

He started doing the only thing he did well. He played guitar for whoever would pay him.

The work was the chitlin circuit, the chain of clubs and theaters across the segregated South and up into the northern cities that booked Black performers because the white rooms would not.

It was a hard road, low pay and long drives, two shows a night and a new town before sunup.

He backed a run of legends out there, men like Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, Jackie Wilson, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, and Chuck Jackson.

Over about three years he played with more than two dozen bands in more than a hundred cities. He almost never led one of them.

The standing in the back was not the part that hurt. The hunger was.

Years later he described those days to a magazine called Rave, and he did not dress it up.

“We’d get a gig once every twelfth of never,” he said. “We even tried eating orange peel and tomato paste.”

Then he kept going.

“Sleeping outside them tall tenements was hell. Rats running all across your chest, cockroaches stealing your last candy bar out of your pocket.”

The man who would headline the biggest festivals on earth once slept on the ground while rats crossed his chest in the dark.

He owned almost nothing. A borrowed winter coat and the guitar he kept pawning to stay fed.

He won a talent contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and took home twenty-five dollars. That money was a real event in his life that week.

He hung around the clubs hoping a house band would let him sit in. He was looking for the next meal and the next chance to play, in that order, because one paid for the other.

Somewhere in that stretch he sat down and wrote home to his father, Al, back in Seattle.

The note was not a cry for help. It was the opposite.

“I still have my guitar and amp,” he wrote, “and as long as I have that, no fool can keep me from living.”

The big break that looked like a break came when he landed a touring spot with Little Richard.

Little Richard was already a star, the architect of half of rock and roll, and he ran his band with rules.

Be on time. Do not upstage the man whose name is on the marquee.

Hendrix had trouble with both rules, and the second one was not really his fault.

He had started doing things with the guitar that nobody in the band could ignore. He played it behind his back, played it with his teeth, pulled sounds out of it that turned heads away from the star and toward the kid in the back line.

In 1965 the British group the Hollies were on a bill with Little Richard at a theater in Brooklyn. A young Graham Nash watched Little Richard come offstage in a fury, screaming at his own guitarist never to play behind his head again, never to upstage him, because he was Little Richard.

That guitarist was Jimi Hendrix.

Then there was the matter of the clothes. Hendrix told it that the final straw was a ruffled shirt he wore on stage, something with a little flash to it.

The way Hendrix told the story, Little Richard fired him with a line that says everything about the world he was trying to grow inside of. “I’m the only one allowed to dress pretty.”

Richard’s people remembered the parting differently.

His brother Robert, who ran the road, said the problem was simpler, that Hendrix was a good guitar player but was always late for the bus and chasing the girls.

It came apart for good in New York. They had been playing the Apollo, and Hendrix missed the bus to the next show in Washington.

However it ended, the pay had been the real wound. When Hendrix wrote his father about leaving, he laid the money out plainly.

“He didn’t pay us for five and a half weeks,” he wrote, “and you can’t live on promises when you’re on the road, so I had to cut that mess loose.”

Before Little Richard, and around all of it, there was a family in New Jersey who took him in.

The Isley Brothers had heard there was a guitarist in Greenwich Village who played better than anybody, and they brought him home. Their younger brother Ernie remembered his older brothers walking in and saying, “Ma, this is the new guitar player we just hired, Jimi Hendrix.”

Hendrix moved into the Isley house in Englewood, New Jersey, and they treated him like one of their own. He lived there on and off across 1963 to 1965, between tours.

His guitar got stolen while he was with them.

So the Isleys simply bought him another one.

That was the kind of household it was. The man had no money and no instrument, and a Black family with a little success made sure he had a guitar in his hands again.

Ernie Isley was just a kid then, drums still ahead of him, a guitar of his own years away. He sat in the same room and watched.

“He could play wonderfully without an amp,” Ernie said.

Hendrix was so broke and so locked in that he sat in a living room and practiced electric guitar with no amplifier, and a child in the room could already hear that this was something else.

Ernie watched him work out the behind-the-back and between-the-legs moves right there in the house, the same tricks he would later spring on stage. He remembered Hendrix as polite, good with the kids, quick to laugh.

On the night of February 9, 1964, the two of them sat on the living room sofa together and watched the Beatles make their American debut on Ed Sullivan. A future Isley Brothers guitar legend and the future Jimi Hendrix, side by side on a couch, watching the world tilt on a black and white screen.

In March of 1964 Hendrix made his first real studio recording as a sideman, the Isleys’ single “Testify.” You can hear him on it, the style already pushing at the edges of the song.

He toured with the Isleys for much of that year.

And then, the way he always did, he started to feel the walls of the sideman job close in.

He put it plainly in 1967. “It got very boring,” he said, “because you get very tired playing behind other people all the time.”

So he left them, in the flat way he described it, “in Nashville somewhere.”

The thing that made him impossible to keep was the same thing that would make him immortal. There was a sound in his head, and standing in the back of someone else’s band, he was never allowed to let it out.

He said as much, in one of the truest lines he ever gave about himself.

“My own thing is in my head. I hear sounds, and if I don’t get them together, nobody else will.”

For three years, nobody let him get them together.

He was hired to make other men sound good, not to be heard.

The turn came through a woman named Linda Keith, who caught him playing in a New York club in 1966 and would not let it go. She pushed him in front of a manager, Chas Chandler, who had just left the British band the Animals.

Chandler heard about ninety seconds of it and knew. He took Hendrix to London, put a band around him, and the world that had used him as wallpaper for half a decade fell over itself within a year.

In England, reporters asked the new arrival what he was after. He told them he wanted to do with his guitar what Little Richard did with his voice.

The man who fined him for a pretty shirt had become the standard he was chasing down, and passing.

In June of 1967, on his way to the Monterey Pop Festival in California, Jimi Hendrix stopped back at the Isley house in New Jersey.

He had left from that home a broke sideman with a borrowed life. He came back through it a star, carrying a white Stratocaster the Isleys had once helped put in his hands.

At Monterey he knelt over a guitar and set it on fire, and the photograph went around the world.

The kid who could not keep an instrument out of the pawnshop was now burning one because he could.

He had four more years. In them he took the electric guitar, the same machine he once handed over the counter for a meal, and made it scream and sing and weep and talk in a language nobody had heard from it before.

He had written his father that as long as he had that guitar, no fool could keep him from living.

He was right, and then some. Long after he was gone, the guitar was still doing the living for him.