Aquarius sounds like Jimi Hendrix. He looks like him too—right down to the lanky gait, bushy hair and flamboyantly coloured clothes.

Hendrix, an iconic figure from the late 1960s, is regarded by some as the best rock guitarist ever. He is still revered for his heavily amped sound and freewheeling technique.

Hendrix played left-handed but used a right-hand guitar that he held upside down. So does Aquarius. Hendrix could play with his teeth and with the guitar behind his back. Aquarius can too.

“I realised a long time ago, when I was real little, that I sounded like Jimi,” Aquarius says. “To look like him I had to draw moustaches on myself when I was 13 or 14. Back then Jimi wasn’t as hot as he is today. People would tell me to stop playing like him.”

Aquarius moved to Los Angeles last summer from Youngstown, Ohio. These days he performs on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, about a block from where Hendrix’s own star is encased in the sidewalk’s terrazzo. “This is where you get your A game,” he said. If you practise at home, you’re going to practise a half hour and get something to eat and then lay down and take a nap. Out here people are watching.”

Boulevard visitors seem to like what they see. “He’s good. I grew up on Janis and Jimi and Jim Morrison,” says Destiny Mitchell, a 21-year-old waitress and student from San Francisco. Among the passersby who have stopped to listen is Leon Hendrix, Jimi’s younger brother. According to Aquarius, Leon Hendrix now jams with his new group, the Anthony Aquarius Mystery.

Aquarius figures he knows each of the tunes Hendrix performed. “I’ve probably played Hey Joe more times than Hendrix ever did,” he says. He doesn’t dwell on Hendrix’s death from an accidental drug overdose in 1970 at age 27, Aquarius said. Or on Janis Joplin’s at 27. Or on the Doors’ Jim Morrison’s at 27. When asked his age, Aquarius says, with a grin, that he’s 27. And that may be where the similarity between him and Hendrix ends, he says—acknowledging that his boulevard act is for show.

“It’s really not me that people are looking at when I’m out here,” he concedes. He knows that those who are unfamiliar with Jimi Hendrix will pay no attention to Anthony Aquarius.