The wizardry of early Hendrix

By David Bennun

“You can’t use my name,” we hear Jimi Hendrix say to producer Ed Chalpin over the studio mic. It’s 1967. Hendrix is a star not so much rising as soaring. Two years previously, he signed away his rights as a recording artist to Chalpin on the misunderstanding that he was ensuring payment for a single session. Now he’s making his final contribution to Curtis Knight & The Squires, the group of which he was briefly a member, and Chalpin, even at that moment, is piggybacking upon his fame.

The leap from those songs—at last collected, remastered and officially released via the Legacy label this month—to those of the Jimi Hendrix Experience is a giant one. “You Can’t Use My Name: The RSVP/PPX Sessions” would be at best a period curio but for Hendrix’s involvement. Knight was a capable but unexceptional mid-60s R&B artist, whose most notable gift, in retrospect, appears to have been spotting greater aptitude in another. (That said, Hendrix’s familiar, soft, insistent vocals bear a striking similarity to the style of Knight’s.)