"I'd come back from the unemployment office when the phone rang. Jimi said 'Hey, what you doing? We'd like for you to come up and join us.'" The story of the Jimi Hendrix guitarist who was written out of history

It’s pushing nine on Monday morning at the Woodstock Festival, and in a messianic white jacket and a bottle-green bandana that hangs over his eyes like a visor, the guitarist Larry Lee is every inch the counter-cultural icon. He grooves on rhythms. He plays glorious lead guitar on Jam Back At The House and Spanish Castle Magic. He even steps up to the mic to sing.

Despite that, to the frazzled Bethel crowd and the documentary directors who will scrub much of his contribution from future Woodstock films and soundtracks, he is invisible. For many, there was only one guitarist on stage that morning in August 1969, and it was Jimi Hendrix, pouring petrol over The Star-Spangled Banner, in the performance that gave the 60s its defining snapshot.

A lesser man might have resented standing at the edge of the world’s hottest spotlight. Lee never seemed to. From his first meetings with Hendrix to his diplomatic exit from the line-up shortly after Woodstock, the Memphis guitarist was among the truest and most selfless compadrés to move through the star’s orbit. It speaks volumes that when Hendrix found his inner circle unravelling in the later years, and reached out to the players he trusted with his interests, as well as his material, Larry Lee was one of his first calls.

The friendship between the two guitarists had been forged long before the circus began. In the early 60s, Lee was a student at Tennessee State University in Nashville and an emerging hit-writer for Stax, having penned singles including the 1963 doo-wop-flavoured What Can It Be by The Astors. That year, the guitarist saw Hendrix at the Del Morocco, a club on the city’s chitlin’ circuit where, backed by his old army buddy Billy Cox on bass, he jammed R&B.

Lee dubbed the pre-fame Hendrix as “the worst guitar player I ever heard”, though he notes that just weeks later, a Robert Johnson-esque transformation had occurred, as Jimi broke cover with a new guitar and sufficient skill to usurp the city’s reigning ace, Johnny Jones.

Looking for a practice partner, Lee broke the ice by offering Hendrix a spare guitar string and, before long, had replaced Young to earn $11 for a four-day week playing in the King Casuals. Even in those days, Lee told Guitar World’s John McDermott in 2005, Hendrix had his sights set on bigger things: “Jimi said that when he was famous, he would have a thousand guitars. He didn’t say ‘if’, he said ‘when’. I figured if Jimi made it, he would do it with the guitar alone. I had no idea that he would sing.”

True to his prophecy, Hendrix was soon headhunted by a promoter and left town to back up R&B heavyweights including Little Richard and the Isley Brothers across the States. Periodically, he would return to Tennessee to tempt his old partner with dangled dreams of stardom in New York, but safe in his collegiate bubble, Lee didn’t bite.

“I was trying to go through school at the time,” he reasoned. “Plus, I didn’t have the nerve Jimi had; I was playing it safe. I just wanted to finish school, which I never did anyway. I hated to see him go, because he was one of my tightest buddies. I gave him my coat, because he didn’t have one, and wished him good luck.”

It had been a tight bond. “Larry and Jimi were very close friends, they palled around together a lot in Nashville,” Billy Cox told the Ultimate Guitar website in a 2005 interview with Steven Rosen. “In fact, Larry helped him get his theory together musically.”

The next few years brought mixed fortunes for Lee. He played with The Impressions and outran the draft with back-to-back academic courses – a loophole that offered students exemption from the US Army – until he was finally nabbed and posted to Vietnam, aged 26.

Magazine features on Hendrix reached the young soldier in Southeast Asia, along with rumours that his guitar-playing buddy was now an all-singing bandleader and songwriter. It wasn’t until a bullet to the head took Lee out of the combat zone and into the sick bay that a borrowed copy of 1968’s Electric Ladyland revealed just how far his old partner had come.

Hendrix’s ascent continued but, by 1969, Lee’s own situation was the polar opposite, as he was dumped onto civvy street without a job or prospects. Then came a phone call: “Jimi had my mother’s number and Billy [Cox] called me from New York City,” he recalled in Guitar World. “I had been home from Vietnam about two weeks. I’d come back from the unemployment office when the phone rang, and it was Billy. He said, ‘I’m in New York with Jimi.’ He put him on the phone. He was the same Jimi, no change. He said, ‘Hey, what you doing? We’re gonna try out a few things up here. We’d like for you to come up and join us.’”

“Jimi figured he was gonna make a big statement on this [Woodstock] and there were some people he wanted with him. Other people didn’t want him [Lee], but he wanted him,” Cox told Steven Rosen. “Jimi wanted to go into a direction that no one wanted [him] to go into. After all, this man was a composer, a genius, a futureman, and no one understood, no one would go along with what he wanted to do. This included management and some other people and I don’t think they saw the vision that he saw.”

Lee headed to New York to join the lineup for a month of chaotic rehearsals. The headline slot at Woodstock was looming, but the star didn’t illustrate the magnitude of the booking. “Jimi said, ‘We got this gig here,’” Lee told Guitar World. “He said it casually, like he did everything else. I had no idea that Woodstock was what it was.

"We were mostly playing new songs that he was trying to do. He said that he was trying to do a symphony-rock kind of thing. He didn’t have to say much. I knew he was the man and he knew I would support him. I guess early life is a trial for later life, and he knew he could depend on me as a friend and as a musician.”

For a Vietnam veteran who weeks earlier had been scrabbling for menial labour, headlining the biggest festival in America was quite an eye-opener, and Lee would sometimes sound a little perturbed in interviews as he recalled the naked couples writhing in the mud as the band arrived in a beat-up station wagon.

In truth, the two-hour set was far from the most technically polished that Hendrix had played since 1966 – a lack of monitors meant Lee couldn’t hear Jimi’s playing, and he spent much of the set receiving electric shocks from the wet stage – but it perfectly caught the zeitgeist, while the two guitarists’ sympathetic, dovetailing parts were patently the product of a true offstage friendship. “I was having fun,” said Lee.

It’s one hell of a claim to fame, but Lee’s contribution to Hendrix folklore goes beyond Woodstock. On the 2013 Hendrix compilation People, Hell And Angels, the Memphis guitarist stakes a more tangible claim with the two sublime tracks on which he plays rhythm guitar, the funky Izabella and the slow-burning Easy Blues. Both are survivors from a session at New York’s Hit Factory, produced by Eddie Kramer, on August 28, 1969, and display an interplay between the musicians that suggests a second guitarist to bounce off might have broadened Hendrix’s palette.

As we know, that’s not how it worked out. There’s still some debate as to whether Hendrix felt pressure from his management to re-form the Experience line-up, but either way, sensing friction, Lee walked away after a series of low-key gigs.

“I just know there was a conflict and that was the reason I told Jimi that I would leave,” he told Guitar World. “I could see that he was fighting a battle... They wanted a threepiece. When I told Jimi I was gonna leave, he said, ‘Well, we’ll get a drummer and get back together.’ I just came back to Memphis. He was sincere about the music. He felt he had a right to do what kind of music he wanted to. Sometimes, though, you can’t get away from yourself if you have big hits.”

The two men wouldn’t meet again until 1970, when Hendrix played in Memphis. With poignant timing, Lee went to see Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock movie later that year – and heard the following day that Hendrix was gone.

Lee’s career wasn’t only defined by his playing with Hendrix. He became a firstcall session player at Stax, worked with Al Green on classics in the 80s and 90s, then joined Elmo And The Shades, a troupe of Memphis sidemen and sessioners. Sadly, by 2006, stomach cancer had left him too weak to perform, and he passed away on October 30 the following year, aged 64.

Larry Lee’s legacy lives on, as a musician with the balls to play guitar alongside Jimi Hendrix, and a genuine friend to the star at a time when perhaps not everyone had his best interests at heart.