(Talkin’ About) My Jimi Hendrix Experience

Strangely enough, I’ve never written about Jimi Hendrix before now.

I’ve certainly, in clichéd critspeak, dropped the odd reference to something as Hendrixian, but nothing on the man himself or his work. You would think that after twenty-five years of musing in print over various Black musical icons this wouldn’t be the case.

For reasons yet to be divined neither the fates nor the furies have seen fit to bind us together before now. Certainly it has not been for lack of topical product to essay on in one of the rags I write for—The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Vibe, The New York Times, to namedrop a few. Over the past quarter century the Hendrix legend has cattleprodded into being a small memorial library of biographies, hagiographies, graphic novels, critical reckonings, companions, almanacs, omnibuses, artist and photographer monographs, tribute albums, family albums, posthumous releases, remixes, repackaged remixed and remastered reissues, interview CDs, instructional tapes, bootlegs, concert films, a Showtime biopic, a new coroner’s inquest, and now even a Frank Gehry-designed theme park/museum, the Experience Music Project, opened by Microsoft’s Paul Allen in Seattle

If there is any twentieth-century figure who seems less in need of further prose assault from another blathering idiot about the meaning of his life, death, and music it would be our man James. But Hendrix After Death is a growth industry—a seemingly inexhaustible project with indefatigable entrepreneurial momentum, moxie, hustle, and drive. We simply did not get enough of this man while he was alive, and our insatiable appetite for him has ensured him a vigorous afterlife in our hypercapitalist hogheaven. (On the recording “Somewhere,” he prophetically sang, “My mildew mixes with my dreams, / Can’t even tell my feet from the sawdust on the floor. / Maybe they’ll try to wrap me in cellophane and sell me, / Brothers help me, and don’t worry about looking at the score.")

As it was for many African American males of my generation, Band of Gypsys was the first Hendrix album I acquired during the otherwise uneventful Summer of ’71. A rite of passage among my Dayton, Ohio, homeboys was shoplifting the aforementioned album from the local mall. Whether intended or not it is still the Hendrix album whose detractors and devotees tend to split along racial lines. The reason Black people groove to it instantaneously is because it’s got so much rumpshaker appeal going for it, courtesy of Billy Cox and Buddy Miles. And though everyone references “Machine Gun,” as they should, as the definitive musical statement about the Vietnam War, you’d be hard-pressed to find an African American guitarist or bass player who does not, in spare moments, noodle over the very phonky riff for “Who Knows,” which precedes it on the album. Both Vernon Reid’s Living Colour and Me’Shell NdegéOcello’s band have covered the intricate and inspirationally upsurging “Power of Soul” in their live concerts. Hendrix’s solos on Miles’s “Them Changes” and his own “Message of Love” are slinkier than anything he ever played with the Experience. Those who pan the album single out Miles’s drumming for its heavyhanded consistency and note that even Hendrix thought Miles’s screamin’-and-testifyin’ vocals were a tad over the top. But the firmament provided by Miles and Cox’s teamwork definitely pushed Hendrix’s guitar playing into some novel places rhythmically, sonically, and emotively. “Machine Gun” is the culminating proof, a twelve-minute blues drone that reminded my grandfather of John Lee Hooker, and has provoked many others to hear an improvisatory display of will, imagination, and stamina comparable to the Coltrane of Meditations and A Love Supreme. The solo begins where most guitar solos climax, on a bawling high note that builds in pummeling, incantatory caterwauling fury from there. The song’s climax, with its echoes of strafe bombs, remote control weaponry, and desiccated human cries, belies the effect of many other screaming Hendrix denouements. This time he offers up a preview of nuclear winter, an apocalypse of fire and ice, and because of how it’s programmatically and thematically linked to making war not love, we hear something far more chilling than the stagy auto-da-fé he unleashed at Monterey only three years earlier. Lenny Kravitz once joked that after listening to “Machine Gun” he’s usually so drained he has to go sleep for a week. For anyone who knows the

piece, that statement hardly reads as hyperbole. Like many English-speaking males of my generation-those born between 1945 and 1965—Hendrix and puberty came into my hands at roughly the same time and hit with about roughly the same force. Unlike many of my adolescent enthusiasms Hendrix has not withered or shriveled with age. Quite the opposite—he keeps pace with the various au courant enthusiasms that I’ve acquired along the way to middle age-musical and otherwise. Decades later, Hendrix’s art refuses the dustbin of nostalgic reverie or the obsolescence proposed by such new wrinkles as drum-and-bass, hiphop, triphop, and techno. Largely because of his willful way with guitar stompboxes and the ghosts haunting his machines, he seems a contemporary of today’s laptop abusers, a sagacious prophet of the glitch in ancestral, hippyfied trimmings. Not even the necessary and merciful demise of the guitar as the penultimate pop phallic symbol has dimmed the houselights shining from the shrine of Hendrix. Though the déclassé genre known as cockrock was largely, and inadvertently, a Hendrix invention, Hendrix continues to live on in our turntablists and digital sampler devotees because of how he charged his electronic tools—not how he displayed them. Hendrix gave his high-watt animals tongues and made them speak, scream, screech, whine, sigh, shout his name when spanked, scrawl his fame on heavenly toilet stalls, and so forth and whatnot.

And can we talk about Noise? If Noise is the spook who sits by the popular jukebox, Hendrix remains that Casper’s head shaman, conjurer, conqueror, warrior-poet, and worldly champion. This is after all the man who gave Noise license to ill in top-forty music, and for that Noise is forever grateful. If Noise is the fancy of the art-music muse, as she surely has been since Varèse, Hendrix remains her favorite little darling—with no slight intended toward fellow travelers Brian Eno, the Bomb Squad, the RZA, DJ Spooky, Tricky, Goldie, DJ Shadow, Nobekamu Takemura, Otomo Ishide, Timbaland, Vladislav Delay, Keino Haije, Acid Mothers Temple, Dan the Automator, and the Invisbl Skratch Piklz. All of whom learned from Hendrix’s example that the noisy grain of their own voices could be magically coaxed, massaged, and released from their favorite piece of hotwired audio hardware.

Though great music usually speaks of its own time first and not even Hendrix’s music is immune to showing its age, Hendrix remains a zeitgeist artist—a member in good standing to this very day of that house of common prayer the African American comedian Flip Wilson once described as the Church of What’s Happening Now. Being a man for all musical seasons and all musical reasons, Hendrix is also one of those deceased musical legends who demand we question what it was like to confront his noise in the flesh—to have it run across your skin, surge through your synapses, gallop up your ganglions, sizzle and pop from the touch of its air-crackling electromagnetism, make you brace yourself before its high decibel count. (The faces who appear in the footage of Hendrix crowds are no help really—too high, too spoiled, too anticipatory in their desire for the clown prince of guitar—smashing fools to appear. They could be any other rock god’s audience really, with responses ranging from the stunned to the staggered to the superficially enlightened to the seriously drugged, eroticized, aerobicized, clueless, indifferent—looking like anything in fact but the face of mass hysteria you’d expect.)

OK, yes, Hendrix did have less than transcendent moments on stage, more often than not if we set the bar by his own best performances. But because he was a master improviser and an irrepressible ham, his most memorable feats of derring—do and abandonment did serendipitously occur on stage as much as during his fabled anal—retentive studio visits. (How anal you ask? So anal that on Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland, Noel Redding would exit the studio for the local pub out of boredom as Hendrix tinkered on. Redding frequently returned to find that Hendrix, also a supremely proficient Jamerson/Motownstyle bassist, had gone ahead and laid the bass parts down himself. The end of the Experience probably begins there.)

You would think that an artist so invested in the studio as a medium would lose something in the translation from tapemanipulated wizardry to the concert hall, but per Michael Bloomfield, Hendrix’s warlock powers were in his fingers, not his gear.

Now that every electrified musician has some simulacrum of Hendrix toys for use on stage and in the studio we are still waiting to hear some intrepid and anointed child of god wring as much presence and surface beauty from the damn things. So much style and brio, as it were. None has come forward (though Prince has had his moments).

To speak on the presence of things not seen leads us to recognize that as a stylist Hendrix demands we start hearing him in terms of his voids as much as his volumes, his absences as much as his appearances, his natural gases as much as his vacuum-tubed and transistorized solids. Our old Russian friend Vladimir Nabokov believed that all a writer has to leave behind is her style-the discernment, flair, and discrimination that inform the artist’s choices.

The idea that what he left out was as important as what he left in suggests Hendrix sculpted sound as Michaelangelo did marble, cutting away everything from the stone of rhythm-and-blues form that was not his David.

The clear craft that went into his recordings formed cacophonous and euphonious order out of the chaos of a sublime interior monologue where dreams of extraterrestrial surfaces bled into forlorn conversations with his dead mother. There is, then, a Zen of Hendrix. A Hendrix as comfortable with silence as with ultrasonics, the Hendrix whose life of the mind weighed as heavily on him as his meteoric rock star lifestyle. As Lisa Jones alluded, Hendrix was a quiet, confident man in conversation who had volumes ready to spill from his mouth given the properly attentive ear. Where you really get a sense of how he experienced the world of the mind is in his lyrics, which ranged wildly with respect to thematic content and whose empathy for the human comedy can only be described as novelistic.

There is, again per Ms Jones, something remarkably unrushed and lacking in urgency about Hendrix’s speaking and singing voice—even on rock-hard numbers like “Spanish Castle Magic” and “Voodoo Child,” he moves freely from the heatedly heroic to the coolly laissez-faire like it ain’t nobody’s business if he do. Who else has written songs where the narrator in one breath claims to stand up next to mountains and chop them down with the edge of his hand, then turns around, apologizes for taking up all your sweet time, politely declares he’ll give it back to you one of these days, then provides the fillip of how if he don’t see you no more in this world, he’ll meet you in the next one, so don’t be late? Foreplay, afterplay, sexplay, courtship, cocksmanship and seduction, violent penetration and volcanic eruption—Hendrix confuses it all in the paradoxically tight and porous spaces provided by his lyrics, his din, and his vocal delivery.

If his lyrics are mad-thoughtful (and very well thought out), his alternately soft-and-hard, purring-and-howling phrasing and projection of them seem even more strategic.

The advent of hiphop MCs (hands down the most musically intelligent interpreters of lyrics today) has made Hendrix’s own conversational way with a line sound like even better singing than even we fans originally thought. In music it sometimes does take a marginal device like rapping becoming a (mainstream) artform in its own right before the musicality inherent in the practice even becomes evident.

Akin to Schoenberg and Webern in twentieth-century European concert music, Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman ecstatically altered notions of legitimate pitch, rhythm, and dynamics in jazz, elevating things that were once considered the epitome of bad saxophone playing—excessive vibrato, squealy upper register squalls, hurried obbligatoes on ballads, crawling runs on uptempo numbers, and so forth. Like Hendrix, they unashamedly did damage to orthodoxy in a manner so loud, proud, and defiant that it became a new order of prowess—and one so transformative and enduring that nowadays not even the softest of commercially viable soft-jazz hacks seem unruly if they slip an out-of-tune squawk or whinnying glissando into their ad-libs. Likewise hiphop has made rhythmatized speech, Black Talk by any other name, a musically and commercially successful American songform. In light of this, Hendrix’s conversational crooning-inspired, various informants have told us, by Bob Dylan’s early embrace of the talking blues form—now comes across as even more composed and structured than it was given credit for prior to the hiphop era.

Of course the rhythm and blues tradition Hendrix was grounded in as a journeyman player always privileged the singer who could, in supple fashion, leap from a whisper to a scream. There is always so much casual and even hushed conversation going on when we hear any of soul music’s master vocalists—an Otis, an Aretha, a Marvin, an Al—deliver a secular heartache lyric back to the church. The conversational dimension of their craft too rarely receives tribute in accounts of classic soul.

Hendrix, who was such a screamer in his guitar, but hardly so Pentecostal from the throat, found his singing voice in a souped-up version of those close-up and personal frequencies. Frequencies We People Who Are of a Darker Hue associate with bluelight in the basement, winding and grinding sessions, and that subgenre of classic soul known as the slow jam. The song “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland),” his most lush and luscious rendering of the style, is a swooning and steamy paean to his two muses, electric music and electric Woman (yes, that’s with a capital dub-ya, thank you).

Visions and dreams are where Hendrix lived more vividly than the rest of us, from available testimony. Never-never land was his virtual reality. Even before his mother passed away, he recollected working on his abandonment issues there in his REM phase: “My mother was being carried away on this camel, she’s sayin’, well, I’m gonna see you now, and she’s goin’ under these trees, and you could see the shade, you know, the leaf patterns across her face when she was goin’ under… you know the sun shines through a tree and if you go under the shadow of a tree, shadows go across her face … green and yellow, and she’s sayin’, well, I won’t be seein’ you too much anymore, you know, I’ll see you, and then about two years after that she dies, you know, and I said, yeah, but where are you goin’? I will always remember that."

If his Herculean musical labors can be said to have a purpose it was to transport the rest of us into his anguished dreamworld with him. “Sky-church” became the name he would give to his ministry and audio-visual quest, somewhat in jest, but somewhat not. Having voiced severe reservations about organized Christianity, Hendrix may have believed he had seen the real mountaintop and could Moses us all back through his music. Perhaps he felt he had a transformational duty to perform with his gift, making him kin in his own way to Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Muhammad Ali, and other potent figures of the day who felt called upon to deploy their charisma and creative powers to enlighten, redeem, and reduce the African American misery index.

Lofty ideals came with the territory back then—the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and anti-establishment, anti-war youth movements had made it so. Hendrix was, by dint of skin, lifestyle, and musical idiom, a representative of that idealism and, depending on who was checking him out, a potential symbol, benefit breadwinner, rabble-rouser, messiah.

Even before Hendrix properly unpacked his gigbag or had figured out how his music could serve humanity, the avantgarde saxophonist Albert Ayler had declared music the Healing Force of the Universe while John Coltrane had recorded his spiritualized masterpieces Meditations and A Love Supreme. Historically, these are important precedents for Hendrix insofar as they locate a devotional potential in semi-popular, secular music, and music conversant with the extremes of dissonant expressionism. The combined influence of the Hendrix and Coltrane devotional streams would in turn beget Devadip Carlos Santana and Mahavishnu John McLaughlin who, under the tutelage of their prefix-naming guru Sri Chinmoy, placed rock guitar in service to G-O-D on their collaboration Love, Devotion, Surrender. The Coltrane/Hendrix axis would also predispose many to the sonic syncretism proposed by reggae, Rastafari, and Bob Marley and the Wailers, whose Rasta Revival would chant Babylon in rock arenas everywhere. Hendrix also prepares the way for Prince, who like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis before him would have us believe that Lucifer and Jesus were at war over a soul in his Hendrix-tinged rock and roll.

The cool thing about Hendrix was that he didn’t seem to believe rock and roll needed a catechism or a church doctrine to perform the task of salvation. Just a voodoo chile, a Fender guitar, and a stack of Marshall amps would do fine, thank you.

Few would argue with you if you said Hendrix was supernaturally inspired, since in his case the ratio of inspiration to perspiration, of serious preparation to serendipitous opportunity, appears to have been even. Where did he get his funk from? If we rang up George Clinton, would even he know? We might assume from the same treasure room all creative people gather theirs from. Only Hendrix seems to have stomped out of the joint hauling freight cars’ worth of the stuff while the rest of us, Miles Davis and Jean-Michel Basquiat excepted, can barely fit our booty into nickel and dime bags by comparison. Where did he get his funk from? And how did he come by so much at the same time?

Unanswerable questions these may be, and far beyond this interlocutor’s talents and grasp of the essential Mysteries. But like the salt-peter that cats in ’Nam said could make you a believer, Hendrix tells you that something else really is out there. For some of us Hendrix is the verifiable proof that this world contains far more than can be found in your calculations, Horatio. More than even the most rococo equations our most erudite mathematicians deploy to reduce the wonders of the universe to a chalkboard exercise.

Hendrix, we know, loved science fiction and, like Sun Ra, fully embodied what its devotees like to call the genre’s grand sense of wonder—though he was committed to getting us all Out There quicker than NASA ever could. For this reason, probably, my absolute favorite lyric of his is the one that goes, “I make love to you in your sleep and yet you feel no pain because I’m a million miles away and at the same time right here in your picture frame.” That’s the Jimi Hendrix I fell in love with: Jimi as incubus. Jimi as dreamfucker. Jimi the randy starman with the sensory syrynx scarier even than the one Samuel R. Delany gives his Hendrixoid character Mouse in his novel Nova.

Fell in love as hard as others would fall for the Hendrix of “Machine Gun” or the Jimi of the “Star-Spangled Banner” or “Foxy Lady” or “Angel” or “1983 … (A Merman I Should Turn to Be).” We don’t have to choose between them to wonder how so many selves got bundled up in one rail-thin guy. There is, of course, no one answer. So we shall, for our next trick, paint quite a picture, a Rod Sterlingesque tapestry, if you will, of how many sidepockets those selves flew in and out of. To do this, I’ll need some help, a few friends to guide us as we backtrack around and about the dusty roads our troubadour traveled while he was an upright and walking blues man. Toward that end we have enlisted The Twins, Ronnie Drayton, Xenobia Bailey, and Craig Street—voices chosen not because they have the last word on Hendrix (as if such a thing could be even imaginable) but because they best suit our Racial Agenda: clearly marking Hendrix as a Black man with ties to several very disparate Black communities of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s.