In November 1961, Jimi Hendrix and Billy Cox drove into Indianapolis in a beat-up Plymouth. Everything was moving forward, even their car, which was unable to go in reverse.

The two Army buddies were looking for a gig. They had driven all the way from Clarksville, Tenn., to compete in a battle of the bands at George's Place on Indiana Avenue. By the time the two musicians arrived in town, their car was dead; they were stuck.

They stayed in Saint Mary's Hotel for a few days, searching for a back-up band for the competition. When their money ran out, they moved into the broken-down Plymouth, parked nearby.

Jimi and Billy subsisted on chili for breakfast, lunch and often dinner, crumbling as many free crackers into the bowl as they could fit. Eventually sickened by this diet, Billy promised Jimi he would never eat chili again. But on those cold November nights, with Thanksgiving right around the bend, the two young men had little else.

Their only hope to escape this poverty was to win the competition and make enough money to get home. Second place offered plenty of consolation, but no financial rewards.

And so it was that Jimi Hendrix squared off with one of Indianapolis' most popular bands, the Presidents, and lost. Jimi and Billy remained in town a while longer, waiting for their girlfriends to rescue them.

Perhaps because of its ignominious ending, Jimi's brief stay in Indianapolis became nothing but a footnote to his glorified career. And nowhere is it mentioned that the man who bested Jimi Hendrix in that battle of the bands was Indianapolis' own Alphonso Young.

Alphonso Young laughs — a booming laugh that starts deep in his stomach and rattles the glass in his curio cabinets. It's carried him through his entire life. In fact, shortly after he was born, his piercing infant cries earned him the life-long nickname "Baby Boo."

Young sits on an ornately carved wooden chair in a room outfitted with red and black-lacquered furniture. Surrounded by this Oriental opulence, he looks like a Chinese emperor disguised in Tommy Hilfiger clothing.

I am sitting here with Young because he once played guitar with Jimi Hendrix. As it turns out, Young has never been interviewed before, and those old memories have been corked inside his brain for almost 40 years.

Young pulls out a basket of old photographs and begins to tell his story. His speech, halting and unsure at first, gradually quickens as he recalls more details. Soon, he is talking at high speed, slipping in and out of the Southern drawl he picked up while living in Louisville and Nashville. Frequent booms of laughter punctuate his story. What Young relates is a lost history of how two bands collided in the middle of a fall night, shortly before the Thanksgiving of 1961.

The Presidents invade Indiana Avenue

In early 1960, rock and roll began to overshadow well-established genres like jazz and blues. The British hadn't invaded yet, and rock was still a homegrown commodity.

Alphonso Young had been playing guitar in Louisville for years, but when he formed the Presidents there in '60, things really started to take off for the young musician.

The Presidents had a loyal following and they enjoyed both friendship and rivalry with bands like the High-Hatters and the Imperials. Their sometimes bizarre variety shows included everything from soft-porn strip teases by exotic dancers to acts of freakish strength. According to legend, one of their friends could hold a table in his teeth, while a young lady danced on top.

Playing in bars like Mo's place and Yeager's Hilltop Inn, Young honed his craft, blending early blues-rock with a tender ear for country-western music. Rock was ready to break through in a big way, and the Presidents wanted to be a part of the new sound.

Hoping to score a hit, the band headed to Detroit, where they planned to cut a record at the then-fledgling Motown studios. But on the way, they decided to stop in Indianapolis.

The streets of Indiana Avenue were dimly lit the night they arrived; the band began to search for a gig immediately. They found a willing host in the owner of The Place to Play, a small club tucked into the thriving jazz scene. Guitar giant Wes Montgomery was playing that night.

"The owner looked at us and we looked at him," recalls Young. "I told the guys, 'You know what, I don't think we're going to make it in this town. Everybody listens to jazz.'"

But the band's perseverance eventually persuaded the reluctant club owner to give them a break. "Well, everybody is through playing here at 1 o'clock," he told them. "You can come upstairs and play."

Above The Place to Play, in a small bar called the Civic Club, the Presidents encountered a befuddled crowd, somewhat perplexed by their flamboyant style. By the time they finished their set, however, the crowd was dancing. The bar owner asked them to come back and play again.

The band cut a demo in Motown, which was then housed in a well-padded garage, and headed back to Louisville. When word got around that they were thinking of moving to Indianapolis, their Louisville friends laughed. The Presidents left anyway — and soon enough, the High-Hatters and the Imperials followed.

"We were the first rock band to hit Indianapolis on Indiana Avenue," boasts Young. "The clubs were real dark and the streets were real dark. There were no lights nowhere. There wasn't nobody coming and going. You would just go to the clubs and then go home. When we got done with Indiana Avenue everybody had lights outside their clubs. They had signs in the windows that flashed."

By the summer of '61, the band had moved down the street to George's Place, where crowds grew so large and fierce, the bar owner was forced to break the night into successive 45-minute sets so that crowds could be rotated through the club.

The Presidents, however, were having personnel problems.

"The band was acting up," recalls Young. "They wanted to move and go somewhere. I was satisfied, but they wanted to go on and be stars, you know."

So Young began looking for a way out. He found it a few months later, in the battle of the bands.

Musicians from all around town were gathered at George's Place, competing for the prize. After the Presidents finished their set, two young newcomers approached, asking them to be their back-up band. Young almost fell over laughing. Here were these Army boys smelling of chili. They were going to keep up with one of the city's hottest bands?

Young winked at his bandmates and whispered: "We're gonna laugh at these guys."

When Jimi asked them if they knew "Soldier Boy," Young said they did.

"He started off on that song like I've never seen anyone play before," exclaims Young. Jimi, he recalls, took him aside after the show.

"Man, I never had nobody back me up the way you backed me up," Jimi told him. "You backed me up into the wall. You know, I've been around a lot of guitar players and you play some chords. You play some good chords with rhythm. I didn't like the picking too much, but I loved the chords. If you are ever in Clarksville, come down south and see me."

Jimi was still in the Army, but he confided to Young that he would soon be out. In May of '62 Jimi broke his right ankle on a parachute jump.

"That has always bothered me to this day. How did he know he was going to get out of the Army and break his ankle? Did he do it on purpose or did he fake it? I think Billy Cox was coming out of the Army and Jimi didn't want to stay down there."

Jimi's amazing performance that night was not enough to win the competition. As usual, the Presidents won, and Jimi and Billy walked out of George's Place with nothing but spare change. They spent the night sulking in the back seat of the Plymouth. A few days later, the hungry musicians were rescued by their girlfriends.

It was shortly after this that Jimi broke his ankle — and Young broke his news to the Presidents: "I'm leaving and I'm going to Clarksville."

A few weeks later, Young headed south in a Greyhound bus, with little more than his Fender Telecaster, a Sears-Roebuck Silvertone Amplifier and a duffel bag filled with clothes.

The King Casuals

Young split with the Presidents sometime in the fall of 1962. He headed down to Clarksville, where he met up with Hendrix and Cox, and started another reincarnation of Jimi's old Army band, the Casuals. But this time, at Young's suggestion, they added the word King to the title, becoming the King Casuals.

The band quickly established itself in clubs like the Pink Poodle, playing early jukebox hits and rock-blues standards. The owner of the Poodle was named Mr. Hooker, who doubled as an embalmer at a local funeral home.

But all was not well in Clarksville. The King Casuals had unknowingly rented a house with a history.

"Guys were throwing rocks at it. The undertaker, who the house belonged to, killed a white guy. He had to move out of his private home because they were after him. When we were there we wondered why guys were running by and throwing bottles and throwing rocks at the house. We couldn't figure it out."

Once again, the band moved on. This time to Nashville, which was, at that time, the recording capitol of the world.

"It wasn't anything to see a star because that is where everyone came to make their records," says Young.

The King Casuals' hot sound landed them a permanent gig at the Del Morroco club on Jefferson Street where they played every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The owner, Uncle Teddy, owned a hair styling college called The House of Glamour as well as a fried chicken joint called The Golden Bird.

Uncle Teddy treated the band well, setting them up rent-free in an apartment above The House of Glamour. There was no kitchen in the place, but it had a tub and a sink. Behind the restroom was The Dungeon, a secret room known to only a few. It was a favorite hiding place for Jimi, who was often in trouble with his many girlfriends.

When the band wasn't practicing, Young held a part-time job at The House of Glamour, where he folded towels and cleaned up for Milton, a saxophone-playing barber who once played with Guitar Slim.

Uncle Teddy bought the band new instruments. Young traded in his Telecaster for a Gibson SG-2 and Jimi bought a Silvertone Amplifier because he liked Young's so much.

Cox made Jimi a 100-foot guitar cord, so that Jimi could do flips from the stage and even play outside of the club. Jimi began picking the guitar with his teeth, something he may have learned from Young, who had been playing guitar that way since his early years with the Presidents. His tongue would hang out of his mouth and drape over the strings as he ogled women in the audience.

Jimi and Young's friendship thrived on mutual admiration. Jimi often fed off Young's rhythmic guitar playing. Young occasionally played solos, but it was Jimi's show.

There weren't enough rooms in the band's apartment, so Jimi and Young decided to share a bed — a practice that became delicate, especially when Jimi brought his main girlfriend, Joyce Lucas, to stay the night.

"He trusted me so much, that he knew that I wouldn't touch his girlfriend," says Young. "He would get up in the morning and go on out and his girlfriend would still be in bed; he had that much confidence in me. "

Young recalls Jimi would disappear for days at a time — usually it meant that he had met a new woman and was cheating on Joyce. But Jimi always returned to play and Joyce would let it slide. She knew that she was Jimi's main girl, and that it was just his way to stay out late and bring home different women.

One night, when Young was cruising through the campus of a local medical college, he spotted Joyce, dazed and staggering down the middle of the road.

"I thought she was drunk," remembers Young. They stopped the car and asked her what was wrong, but all she could mumble was something about Jimi.

"You're drunk!" Young exclaimed.

"No, I took a bottle of aspirin," retorted Joyce.

She survived, but it was one of the last times she ever visited the band above The House of Glamour.

"When it came to wine, women and song, yeah, he was pretty wild," Young says solemnly. "He was into drugs then, but it was all this cheap stuff. He couldn't afford the expensive stuff.

"I would tell him, 'Jimi you shouldn't be taking that stuff, 'cause when you get old you want your health.'"

"Yeah," Jimi would reply sheepishly, "well, I'm having fun."

Jimi's erratic behavior and frequent partying did little to dampen the success of the King Casuals. In fact, his wild life became a local legend, and the popularity of the band only increased.

In 1963, Jimi felt that destiny was calling. He moved to New York, and spent the next several years playing with musical luminaries like Tina Turner, the Isley Brothers and Little Richard.

The King Casuals struggled on without him, but things weren't the same. A few months after Jimi left, Young moved back to Indianapolis, where he rejoined the Presidents.

The two never had a chance to speak again. Jimi died of a barbiturate overdose in September of 1970.

The decision not to follow Jimi to New York is one that Young will never forget.

"I wish that I was still in the music business. If I'd went to New York and England with him, he'd be alive today. I'm almost sure," Young sighs.

"I took care of him."

For the first time in two hours, the room is quiet. I look up from my notepad.

Young is staring at a tattered photo of the Presidents. "We're getting back together," he says suddenly. Then he tells me that he has been practicing guitar lately, getting ready for the day that he can get back into the music business.

"Yeah," he says, holding the photo in his big hands. "I'll be getting out there again."

      jyoder@nuvo.net