Slight Return

So the fire and the ferocity of Jimi Hendrix endure for reasons that have little to do with hippie nostalgia, radical-protest romance, or rockstar flash. Though born in time to experience the fabled and exuberant uprisings and conflagrations of the 1960s, Hendrix remains irreducible to the status of Woodstock relic or rebel-youth touchstone. We keep Hendrix close because he remains as much a contemporary as a classic. He haunts this time as sardonically as he did his own; and his sound remains the touchstone: of things being born and things falling apart, of the glitch heard round the world and the suicide bomb rocketing above the din of the disco floor.

As Street and Drayton’s testimonies attest (and those of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk confirm), Hendrix was a musician’s musician’s musician. The guy who impressed the guys who impress all the other guys. A guy responsible for one of the most readily identifiable and widely (when not tritely) imitated sounds of the twentieth century. A sound as familiar and flavorful to modern ears as the scatsongs of Louis Armstrong and the wounding horn of Miles Davis. Like Armstrong’s and Davis’s, Hendrix’s sound emphatically declares that the vagaries of human experience have been supremely, sublimely concentrated into an energized packet of racket by a staunch individualist and master musical filterer. One who’ll fire that packet through a pressure valve-nay, a supercolliderfully intending for it explode on contact with our goosebumped skin, feverish greymatter, and prehensile brainstems for maximum race-memory igniting impact.

When we speak of such musicians having a tone all their own, we mean all has been stripped away but their essence, their signature embellishments of punctuation and parable. And whether that musician is the Armstrong-Miles-Hendrix triumvirate or the Coltrane-Nusrat Khan-Milton Nascimento tripartite or the Wonder-Marley-Santana trinity, what we discover in their tone quality is a pithy storytelling vehicle designed for evocative travels through every musical culture on the planet. Hendrix is a global phenomenon and we all live in his sound universe now, wherever music and electricity come together.

His heady encounters with the world’s race, sex, style, and technology conflamma left the world louder, brighter, and boomier than the world he was born into. He obliterated the distinction between music and noise, aural pleasure and pain, and we’ve all been paying the price ever since. Heavy metal, Digital Dolby Sound—just blame Hendrix. You think would we have to put up with all that had he never been born? Except for Hendrix, louder was not just better, but a wormhole, a gateway, an interdimensional portal to the same place where Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and Coltrane took the muse Noise in their pursuits of a “Cosmic Music”; except the ecumenical Hendrix wanted to pursue a path to cosmos that would be accessible to the average American Pop fan. Unity in destruction, symmetry in chaos: these were his hallmarks. It’s why the same man who wanted you to never hear surf music again could speak of taking you to the methane seas of Jupiter. In Yoruba philosophy they eschew notions of good and evil in favor of speaking of constructive and destructive forces, forces that build up and forces that tear down. Hendrix moved along this axis freely.

The now-clichéd notion of music as melted architecture takes on a literal cast in Hendrix. Not because his vision was hallucinogenically inspired, but because of how preoccupied this superlative expressionist and sonic architect was with building up and then vaporizing traditional songform and structure. He once described the sound he heard in his head and couldn’t quite get out as a Bach-flamenco-Muddy Waters kind of thing—rolling into one the world, the flesh, and the celestial order of things.

Erotic and cosmic aspirations always seem to be vying for attention in Hendrix’s lyrics and music. The forces of nature and nurture; wine, woman, song, and spirit; sex, drugs, rock and roll, and the holy ghost are always all right there, visibly, suggestively, seductively, bubbling on the surface of a Hendrix performance. So too are the vaster regions known to motivate human curiosity: oceans, stars, planets, galaxies, waterfalls, firered moons. Sound-painting was a favorite Hendrix description of his ambient music. Sound as canvas, as primer and oils, as brushes and knives.

As Vernon Reid has intimated about “Machine Gun,” his cry of love for fallen soldiers everywhere, the theme of the song is embodied in the projected images of the improvisation.

Craig Street is provocatively fond of citing Hendrix as one of the great twentieth-century composers, and if there is anyone who has reproduced what that century screamed like more accurately than Hendrix, let him now step forth. Of course to even consider Hendrix under the banner of the much ballyhooed term composer brings us back to the problem of race and recognition in a country where Black people are still rarely given credit for intellectual capacity or conceptual contributions. Old fantasies about the Negro brain being less evolved than that of whites still prevail, having changed little since Thomas Jefferson’s infamous utterances on the subject.

Some of this underestimation derives from racism. Some of it also derives from how African American creativity is so omnivorously American in its counter-institutional refusal to wait for state approval before storming the grounds and barricades of our cultural gatekeepers. Hendrix acknowledged African and Native American influences on his work—rhythmically, melodically, and spiritually. The brandishing of so-called folk forms within cosmopolitan musical conceptions is a hallmark of twentieth-century music, from Stravinsky, Bartok, and Cage to Coltrane, Motown, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Hendrix’s reworking of his roots was less academic but no less scholarly, judicious, and lyrically disruptive of the status quo. His disturbance of same also cut mercilessly across hard and fast musical categories. For this reason he would find himself frowned upon by older blues musicians, rhythm-and-blues peers, and even champions of free jazz like Amiri Baraka and A. B. Spellmanwho once, in conversation with the author, made a disparaging comparison between Hendrix’s tone and Albert Ayler’s, describing Jimi’s as “ugly” and Albert’s as “beautiful.”

The unwillingness to accept boundaries between the music he heard in his head and the high and low forms of the day is what makes Hendrix’s contribution so deafeningly successful in the end and so damned difficult to lay to rest. The best of American culture is chauvinistically multicultural, mongrelized, and bastardized, smelted rather than melted down into some homegrown stew peppered with highly personal seasonings. Hendrix now seems like the summation of the ’60s, as each of his major appearances of the decade—Monterey in 1967, Woodstock in ’69, Band of Gypsys on New Year’s Eve that same year—have come to symbolize in broad strokes the quick transition from psychedelic freefall to edenic communalism to the short death march that wound the counterculture’s youthdance down to the creepy cocaine crawl and drawl you hear in Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. All of those performances, Hendrix’s own first and last stands, also represent Hendrix changing the segregated faces of rock and roll and rhythm and blues, setting the stage not only for the big tents of David Bowie and Led Zeppelin but for the socially conscious, sonically expansive soul music that began flooding forth from Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Earth Wind and Fire, and Funkadelic following his death. Not to mention Miles Davis and company: Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, and Chick Corea all moved to jack in, turn up, and rock out.

Hendrix took the majestic wail of the storefront gospel singer and the eviscerating, stratosphere-seeking honks and shouts of barwalking soul saxophonists, and married them to the most earthbound of American musics, the Delta blues. This is why in Hendrix we hear this strange mixture of Jackie Wilson’s eerily effeminate machismo, Pharaoh Sanders’s heaven-renting screeches, and the taildragging, dirt-slithering serpentine fire of a John Lee Hooker, a Lightning Hopkins. So scars and scares are prevalent in the Hendrix sound. Yet so is the desire for a redemptive waterworld-blatantly heard in Electric Ladyland’s epic-length underwater sonata, “1983 … A Merman I Should Turn to Be,” in Are You Experienced’s “May This Be Love,” The Cry of Love’s “Drifting,” and Axis: Bold As Love’s “Castles Made of Sand.”

His striving toward a unity of the primal and the conceptual mark him as one of the grand unifying figures of twentieth-century creativity-kin to Stravinsky, Picasso, Kahlo, Miles, and Basquiat.

That he rammed his persona through sophisticated, homemade mutant forms keeps Hendrix from ever seeming outmoded or outdated.

Artists who write themselves into the canon through force of will tend to be prodigious and hyperproductive. This seems especially to have been the case with Hendrix and Basquiat, who seemed to have known their time here was extremely limited. Hendrix’s work ethic would see him re-record a minor rhythm guitar part forty and fifty times before becoming satisfied, always seeking the telling nuance from the smallest gesture. Reminding of the Wayne Shorter who accounted for his own attention to sculptural detail in composition by saying, “You can have a penny without a million dollars but you can’t have a million dollars without a penny. If the penny ain’t in there it’s jive.” From Hendrix we expect flamboyancy, but the poetic detail, the pennies, stun us just as much.

We marvel that Hendrix evolved as quickly as he did from Are You to Axis to Electric Lady to Band of Gypsys to Cry of Love in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it span of four years. The depth of field of his productions, the swirling miasma of forms, recontextualize our ears at every turn, putting funk and etheric components together in bewildering, elegant ways. Hendrix brought the funky bass into rock as surely as he brought edgy experimentation into staid soul music.

The virtue of the accident so prized in a lot of twentieth-century music gets raised to virtuoso levels in the rock and roll of Jimi Hendrix. In his hands a host of effects once considered to be just plain wrong or at best tacky—squawking feedback, out-of-phase mastering, and so forth—go on to become the lingua franca of modernity and melody.

Like all great artists, Hendrix worked long and hard to realize the sound-paintings he heard in his head and to create a delivery system that could capture listeners of disparate degrees of education and sophistication. Per hiphop MC Rakim Allah, we have been the journal and Hendrix has been the journalist. So that three decades after his departure our inner ears, our freaking cochleas, have got Hendrix graffiti scrawled, nay, crawling all over them. Especially if we worship at the altar of the electric guitar.

There are electric guitar players we love because they so blatantly bring Hendrix to mind in size, scale, woofwarpwhang, and volume—Ted Nugent, Robin Trower, Neal Schon, Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Vernon Reid. There are others we adore because they remind us so little of Hendrix—James Blood Ulmer, Allan Holdsworth, Thurston Moore, Derek Bailey, Keith Richards, George Harrison, Sonny Sharrock, Bill Frisell, Keith Rowe, Keith Levene, Andy Gill, George Benson, Morgan Craft. There are the rare birds who bring as much fire to the wood as Jimi but are so much their own man as to mask the influence behind what event-singularities they set off as soloists: Jeff Beck, Duane Allman, John McLaughlin, Eddie Hazel, Carlos Santana, Pete Cosey, David Fiuczynski, Rene Akhan. Then there are those who operate somewhere in between, fellow researchers with a likeminded passion for melding melodious chords and the odd sound—Jimmy Page, Marlo Henderson, Ronnie Drayton, The Edge, Eddie Van Halen (yeah him again), Andy Summers, Dr. Know, David Byrne, Adrian Belew, Marc Ribot, Kurt Cobain, Billy Corgan, Kevin Breit, Kirk Douglas.

The funny thing is, Hendrix seems to have presaged them all at one point or another—the blatant, the mutants, the blenders, the unborn—as by the same token, Jimi’s Dalí-drippy cup spilleth over with the aged bourbon taste of all who preceded him in prominence, if not time—Charlie Christian; Django Reinhardt; B.B., Freddy, and Albert King; T-Bone Walker; Guitar Slim; Johnny Guitar Watson; Hubert Sumlin; Earl and John Lee Hooker; Chuck Berry; Scotty Moore; Buddy Holly; Les Paul; Grant Green; Wes Montgomery; Steve Cropper.

It’s not hard—no stretch at all—to hear Hendrix echoed in Miles Davis’s wah-wah and the synthesizers of Herbie Hancock, Josef Zawinul, Bernie Worrell, and Stevie Wonder or the violin of Jean-Luc Ponty or the flute of James Newton, the saxophone of David Murray, the cornets of Butch Morris and Graham Haynes; or to back-project his stank onto the prior emissions of Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Eric Dolphy, Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Lester Bowie, the Edgar Varèse of Ionisation, the Karlheinz Stockhausen of Sternklang, the Claude Debussy of Le Mer, the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony; or to underscore the links between his long-form, eclectic, stereophonic statements and Stand, Bitches Brew, Shaft, Superfly, What’s Goin On, Heroes, Dark Magus, Music for Airports, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, He Loved Him Madly, Mothership Connection, The Motor-Booty Affair, Remain in Light, Discipline, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Three Feet High and Rising, Paul’s Boutique, Ready to Die, The Chronic, What Does Your Shadow Look Like, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Superunknown, Blue Light Til Dawn (to name but a paltry Afro-American-leaning few).

If I was allowed but one Hendrix album to accompany me in my travels it would be Axis: Bold As Love. It is at once the most personal, whimsical, reckless, and inscrutable of his recordings and, except for “Little Wing” and “Spanish Castle Magic,” the one with the fewest anthologized songs. It begins apocalyptically and playfully with “EXP” and “Up from the Skies” and ends in New Jerusalem splendor with the song that gives the disc its title. The space in between is full of breaking hearts and romantic balladry, and imagery worthy of Percy Bysshe Shelley: a panoply of butterflies and moonbeams, fairy tales and gold-androse-colored dream angels, Indian braves who die unheralded in their sleep, suicidal cripples saved by serendipitous goldenwinged ships, aphrodisiacs masquerading as dragonflies. You can call it Hendrix’s Lord of the Rings album, and I won’t get mad at ya. Axis is also the album where you can spend hours trying to figure out how to move from one loopy 9th or major 7th chord to the next with the proper hammer-on/pull-off finesse while simultaneously thumbing a bass progression. It’s the album where Hendrix made rhythm-guitar playing more complicated than anyone since Blind Willie McTell and Blind Gary Davis and lead overtures more orchestral than we’ve heard in anybody’s pop music since, Brian May barely notwithstanding.

If Are You Experienced is the shock of the new and Electric Ladyland the shape of things to come, Axis is Hendrix as Stravinsky-strange composer in a strange land, reinventing rock and roll as he went along, earth, moon, and starry-eyed song. It is also the album where Mitch Mitchell and Hendrix seem to have scored every hit, roll, snap, stroke, ride, crash, and paradiddle to function like some newfangled notion of percussive harmony for every lyric epiphany, guitar detonation, and neighing, feedback-wracked orgasmic climax.

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Musicians come and musicians go. New genres rise up to claim the space in our hearts occupied by old ones, as those in turn get swallowed by the Next Big Thing to tickle our neophiliac listening fancy. And then there are the verities and holy trinities—Monk, Ellington, Mingus. Armstrong, Parker, Coltrane. Robert Johnson, Son House, Skip James. Sun Ra, Miles Davis, George Clinton. Wonder, Gaye, and Green. James Brown, Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield. Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. Iggy, Bowie, the Sex Pistols. Bad Brains, Living Colour, Fishbone.

And then there’s James. Who somehow manages to hit all the notes they hit and then some. Who we never need to go back to because he seems not to have ever departed. I joked with a friend recently that the reason we keep buying every repackaged greatest hits, outtakes, and false starts compilation is because we like to imagine that it’s really a new Jimi Hendrix album.

Hendrixian. What we ought to mean when we say love never dies and Jimi springs eternal.