Talk:Velvert Turner

Velvert Turner's early association with Jimi Hendrix verified

I was startled to see that some had regarded Velvert Turner's early association with Hendrix a "lie." Sha Na Na's original lead guitarist inn 1969, Henry Gross, verifies it. (Seventies hit: Shannon.) He has said it in print and I know about it from an interview with Gross c. 2011, which I really ought to publish. When Gross was in his mid-teens he used to practice guitar with Velvert. Velvert was, as the article accurately describes, a great student of the guitar, a real aficionado. They lived near each other in Brooklyn. One day Gross saw Velvert walking with somebody who looked almost like his twin. It was Hendrix, somewhat admired by insiders but not yet famous. (There's a remark in the article which makes it seem that Velvert, like some fanboy, was trying to look like Hendrix. They had looked like twins long before Hendrix was famous. Perhaps it was part of the bond.) Gross was a prodigy, eventually the youngest performer at Woodstock, and the three of them spent a memorable night together working on what one can only call advanced guitar theory, studying the unusual ways in which Hendrix was creating his chords. Gross adopted a great deal of it. Hendrix also gave them a ton of guitar strings he was playing with. Gross certainly understood Velvert and Hendrix to be longtime friends, and in any event, was present on an occasion when Hendrix was explaining new methods to Velvert Turner. In Turner, Hendrix found, before he was famous, an early sympathizer and a sympathetic scholar who appreciated how radical Hendrix's work was. If Velvert Turner really did issue some kind of course about Hendrix's method, as the article says, it should be looked at by any serious scholar of the period. Profhum (talk) 22:01, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]