Death May Be Your Santa Claus

As Told To Lester Bangs

Needless to say, it took us a lot of legwork, both on and off the astro-turf, to track Jimi down; he's been a pretty reclusive dude for about five years now. But finally, using every means and pulling every string at his disposal, one of our star reporters managed not only to locate Jimi, but rap with him for several light-years. What follows is a direct, verbatim transcription of a very spacy rap recorded in his plush and exceedingly far-out lair, with one of the titans of modern rock — the immortal Jimi Hendrix. — Ed.

MORT: Jimi, you used to sing a lot about astral planes, the cosmos and such when you were on earth. Now that you're out here, how does it stack up against what you originally envisioned? JIMI: Well, I'll tell ya, Mort, it's not like the advertisements. [Laughs] But then, neither was I. Because see, a lot of people got the wrong idea about me. Like who?

Me, for starters. I didn't know what the fuck I was doing, except I dug R&B and Dylan, and found out howta get all these weird sounds outa my axe. That's where things got confused, just a little bit. Like I'm jammin' my ass off one night onstage at the Fillmore, playin' some kinda dirt bike ride round the rings of Saturn, and I look out at the crowd and they're like one big pinball machine I'm lighting up, making 'em go buzz and tilt by playing "See See Rider" backwards or something I didn't know because my fingers were turning into celery stalks and I'm afraid to look at that, so I shut my eyes a second but there was some kinda Marvel Comic S&M Thor's Mistress flashing this whip and snorting at me in there so I open 'em up again fast as I can and now everybody in the audience is Bob Denver.

What? What do you mean?

I mean that every face out there looked identical, like Bob Denver on Gilligan's Island, with the little hat and the ratty

"No dead niggers are suicides. But it's got nothing to do with me now. There ain*t no races Out Here."

shirt and everything, and they were all staring up at me with that goofy Gilligan look like "What're we supposed to do now?" so I screamed out right in the middle of a chorus of another song I'd forgot anyway "I'm the Skipper and I want you to go get Marianne and bring her here to me! I want that bitch on her KNEES!" It seemed to make sense in the context of the lyrics at the time. Well, it was a time of great experiment and innovation, after all.

I know I changed some things, not nearly as much as some people seem to give me credit for, but I coulda really CHANGED things, I think, if I knew then what I know now. But at the time the alternative was so irresistibly tempting, and I ended up takin' the easy way out with jive and shit. So like on the night I was tellin' ya about, screamin' my lungs out at Gilligan, I had no idea in hell what the fuck Noel and Mitch were doing, they coulda been on a Greyhound to Tucson, Arizona for ail I knew or cared. So I just tore up into a long high note, held it, tore it off and decided to get the hell out of there.

Now, no sooner do I get off the stage than who do I practically slam foreheads with but Bill Graham. Asshole's been standin' there on the side of the stage watchin' me this whole time. Now he just blocks my way, grabs my arm, stares deep into my eyes and says: "Jimi. Why do you go out and play shit like that, when we both know you're capable of some of the best blues I've ever heard in my life, man."

Well, I hate to say it, but I just niggered out, played even more spaced than I was, because I didn't wanna hassle with the cat, I just wanted outa there. But if I'd been physically and psychologically capable of staying, man, I woulda said: "Because there are times when I Strongly suspect, deep down inside, that I hate the fuckin' blues. Every broke-down nigger behind a mule he don't own can sing the blues. I only do blues because it's fun and easy to get into once in awhile, and because I know all them ofays don't think a music show by a black person is their money's worth unless they get to hear some." Yeah, but what about cuts like "Red House" and "Voodoo Chile?" They were incredible songs, fantastically played!

They weren't exactly what you would call original compositions. They were good takes, especially the second "Voodoo Chile."

The long version had a nice feel, but it was there to fill out a double album, and Winwood played the same damn solo he played in "Pearly Queen" and every other damn session he did for about three years. I played good blues on "Red House," but it got way more attention than it deserved, probably because it was so hard to get in America for a long time. 1 mean, "I Don't Live Today" is real blues, modern blues — it's what happens when you drop a hydrogen bomb on the blues, which is what it deserves.

Listen. The blues is white music, and so was most "free jazz." All the musicians know it, everybody in the ghetto knows it because they be boppin' to James Brown and Stanley Turrentine, don't own Muddy Waters albums much less Robert Johnson, and 98% of 'em never heard of Albert Ayler. My music was at least 70% white, if I'd played what black people wanted to hear at that time I'da been spectacularly unsuccessful in the hip rock superstar world, and if I'd gone down to the Apollo Theatre and played what I played at the Fillmore I probably woulda been laughed off the stage. And knowing that has dogged my ass all the way to this moment. That and the fact that to a certain extent and in the interests of image, I had to shuck and jive because you know niggers is just sposed to be bad and fuck good wid big dicks an' be finger-poppin' all de time. I just added a little acid and feedback. And hell, for all of that I didn't even get laid that much either, or at least not as much as I should. I mean, you would think with me bein' JIMI HENDRIX and all the big deal was made out of it, I'd be gettin' more pussy than Haile Selassie's whole harem and better quality than, I dunno, who's the hottest cunt you can think of? Uhmmmm... Wilma Flintstone. Thanks a lot. Like, 1 coulda dug gettin' into some a that Julie Christie, you know, or maybe some a that Ursula Andress, you know movie stars, continental flash class clits. Instead I get all these dopey bitches wanna read my Tarot and always gotta I Ching in the Bantam edition in their back jeans pocket ready to spring on you at any second and tell you just the exact state of the gobbledegook. Well, I got more gobbledegook than I know what to do with already, as even a passing listen at my songs will tell you. You think I wrote all them fuckin' cosmic lyrics because I had the Universal Mind on tap? Hunh. I liked Star Trek, but I ain't Paul Kantner. I got more out of it than Paul Kantner, who shoulda profited by my bad example. I just dropped this and snorted that, and pretty soon a lotta shit was swirling around my head. Same shit as hit everybody else, really, especially Dylan, who was as inspiring and as bad an influence on me as anybody. I started out sincere, but half the time I couldn't fuckin' think straight, so stuff I knew was sloppy-ass jivetime mumbo-jumbo come tumblin' out, and people jump up like whores for a blow of coke: "Oh wow, Jimi, far out ..." And maybe that's where things started to really go wrong, when I saw that folks'd buy that jive as profound, well, I just spaced it all away.

Are yon saying yon were a suicide?

"The missing component... I just forgot how to feel unless I was getting electric shocks — after awhile even electric shocks began to feel all the same."

I ain't saying nothing, man. Except maybe that no dead niggers are suicides. But it's got nothing to do with me now. 'Cause there ain't no race bullshit Out Here. Ain't no races — "Just us angels up heah, boss!" Maybe I'll come back — just once — and do a three night stint of God's Trombones as a rock opera, with Gil ScottHeron and Stevie too. 'Cause I wanna lay some shit on Stevie — that cat is off and I don't care if he's blind, I don't care if his mama sent him to seven churches for each day of the week, he is flat wrong, period. I mean, nobody should know this "Heaven" shit better'n me. I allow myself as something of an expert on the subject. It's been nothin' but blowjobs 'n' soma since I bailed out back in '70. Don't ever go ta Heaven, man, it's the shits. Only reason not to split is Hell is worse, we went down there one weekend on a binge and it's the dregs. Heaven is like total stardom with a constant-touring clause, nothin' but arenas and hotels, but Hell is like Baltimore. The whole Afterlife trip is rigged to the rimjobs, and like New York cabaret cards it's one system you can't beat.

Your rap is...well...I honestly can't think of another question right now.

That's okay, I'm on speed, I'll fill in. [Lights a cigarette, with compulsive urgency but steady hands.]

1 get a feeling you're pretty critical of your fellow musicIans, dead and living.

Yeah, but it's cool, see, because there's nobody I'm more ruthlessly critical of than myself. I was a good guitar player, no Django but I did manage to come up with a few new riffs and a few new ideas about how to finger or get some weird noises outa the thing. But there ain't much percentage in ego-tripping when you're dead, so I gotta cop that that was about it. The songs I wrote that had actual melodies, that you could hum or have a real zinger cover, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.MAngel"

I'm still proud of, as a composition, and a couple others. But the rest is mostly just metal riffs, with mostly jive lyrics that I talked instead of sang. I got a lotta credit for introducing "advanced technology" or whatever they're callin' it these days to rock, but the thing that almost everybody missed was that once the distortion and technology became a "required" part of the whole style and, like, institutionalized, then it was^ all over. Because technology is cold — so's technique, for that matter — and humans are hot.

Or at least they should be.

Because the emotion behind the distortion is the whole thing. And what we didn't realize was that -all of us cultivating distortion so much was just digging our graves, emotionally speaking. And' literally too, I guess, in some cases.

Because as time went I began to realize that what people craved was just noise. Now, I took a lotta care with my own albums, the first three anyway — they were very carefully produced, all that shit. They were tight. But I was beginning to really, really wonder. Because when I listen to Are You Experienced?, at least half of what I hear and remember is just this really crazed unhappy desperation and pissed-offness that can't make no sense out of nothing. It's there in the lyrics and in the music too. Because that was where I was at at the time. When I said, "Ain't no life nowhere, " I meant it! Meanwhile I'm thinking do they expect me to bring the can of lighter fluid in my pocket onstage every night? Obviously something is wrong somewhere.

Well, what was it about distortion that started bothering you so much?

Well, like Graham wants blues, so do the fans, but Graham don't want distortion and they do. He thinks that's shit, and blues is "real." Well, I don't know what the fuck is "real." I never exactly did. Like, do I plav two chords or three or just fuck around with tremolo and feedback and make funny noises and burn my guitar and swallow the strings and cannibalize my sidemen and then stand there alone on the stage with the buttons poppin' off my shirt like Brock Peters singing "John Henry" and "Cotton Fields" back home and a selection of work songs personally recorded on Parchman by Alan Lomax? See, it seems to me when I look back that there was something larger that I always really, really wanted to do, but I could never quite get a firm grip on it.

On one level I'm really glad 1 got out when I did. Because it's like Kennedy, see, a legend — everybody can sit around saying, "Well, gee, nothin' happenin',-but if Jimi was around now, he'd show us where it whs all goin' next!" But they're wrong. I wouldn't have a fuckin' clue what to do now, if I was so unfortunate as to be "around." I'd probably be just like the rest of 'em, repeating my same shit over and over until everybody is as bored as I am and we mutually agree to call it quits and I'll go sit in the islands and listen to reggae or something. Or maybe, what would be even worse, I'd be one o' the ones that keeps grinding out the same old shit and doesn't know it: "Yeah, Jimi, your new album Toe Jam Asteroid is the absolute best thing you've ever done!" "Yeah, like, dig, I'm hip, pops...just be cool." Yeah, that's how I'd cop out, come on as a real jive throwback spade wearing shades all the time, a little hat and cigarette smoke, the old Lonely Unapproachable Jazz Musician routine, sitting around in smoky clubs, sidewalk cafes, talk nothin' but bebop jive shit. "Yeah, cool, ah, that was a wiggy scene. Later." [He breaks up laughing.] The Thelonious Monk of the wah wah. Either that or just go hide and do session work. Become like Louie Shelton. Because I know I couldn't do what I started out to do and make it really cook.

"...but they're wrong. I wouldn't have a clue what to do now, if I was so unfortunate as to be "around."

And it ain't that I don't still got my chops. I do. Everybody's too fucking hung up on chops, though. I think the only studio album where I really burned all the way was my first one. And that's after practicing night and day, year after year, trying to learn it all and do it 'better, coming up hard and fast and paying dues and busting your chops and out to whip ass on everybody, when suddenly one day I discovered somehow that I could be fuckin' Segovia and if that some other weird component is missing, then I might as well be Louie Shelton.

What is that component?

I wish 1 knew. I know I lost it somewhere. I take consolation in the fact that just about everybody else came up same time as I did too. Maybe we all just got too high.

How do you feel about people

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like Eric Burdon and Buddy Miles, whom some observers have accused of cashing in on your name or their association with you, after your death?

Listen, once you kick out you tend to let a lotta bad shit just go under the bridge. Fuck it, I hope they copped a few extra bucks. Besides, nobody lives forever, and I'm gonna have to sit down and have a serious talk with poor old Eric whenever he gets up here, in lieu of busting his face open. It's actually amusing, and besides, he really didn't know any better. Buddy Miles is a different case — I'd be afraid of getting my ass kicked, but anybody racks up as many bad records as that cat's probably gonna end up on the first coal cart to Hell anyway, so hopefully I'll never chance to see his fat face again. Ever see any of the others who kicked off close to the time you did, hanging around up here? Nah. I hear about them once in awhile, but I don't hang out with 'em. You wouldn't either. Morrison — I heard all about him, although I didn't see it. He put up such a big stink how he wanted into Hell and wasn't gonna accept anything else and how if they put him Here instead he was gonna make 'em all wish he'd never died, and on and on...

I identify \^ith him on a certain level — we both came along at the rightwrong time, right to become figureheads, wrong in terms of longevity. We were like the test models for crap like Alice Cooper and David Bowie. We both got suckered, but I like to think he got suckered far worse than I did. He, like, had more complicity in his own destruction. I like to think I just got more confused, and basically confused musically as much as in life, until it was all too much of a mess and there was no way out. I let too damn many people intimidate me, for one thing, because I knew I was off but I never had the simple street-smarts to figure just maybe they were off too, maybe ten thousand times worse than me, so I just kind of ended up laying myself in everybody's hands. I mean, I was really an innocent, man. It's embarrassing in retrospect, and it wasn't comfortable then.

What about Janis?

I was hoping you weren't going to ask me that. Jeez, you fuckin' journalists, always after the next lurid headline. Well.. .she was pathetic there and she's pathetic here. It's not her fault, but she doesn't do anything, particularly, to try to improve it, either. That's all I got to say about that.

How do you feel about being a hot chart artist still, and record companies over-dubbing other accompanists on your old tapes?

My records still selling is just like Jefferson Starship being more popular then Jefferson Airplane—quality has nothing to do with it, it's just people hanging onto things they know were good and represented something once, instead of taking a chance on a dubious unknown artist.

As far as the overdubbing goes, I feel almost as much indifference there. It founds weird and egotistical for a dead guy to crow about how he was actually a one-man show, especially since his old sidemen really have no means of retorting, so obviously the smart position for me to have is no position. Why don't you go ask John Coltrane the same question, and see if connubial fidelity extends beyond the grave. You seem pretty negative about the people who've followed you musically on earth, though. Yeah. I am. Because they're cold. I may have played real dogshit some gigs, and cut some tracks that were too smooth for my taste. But I was loose. There was something bigger than me sweeping me along and it killed me in the end, but some pretty incredible music came out of it at times, too. My only regret is that I wonder how much of it, under those circumstances, was really my music, when you get right down to it. If a fucking lightning bolt strikes you, and out of it you get a

masterpiece, well, is it you or the lightning bolt? And in the final analysis it's just no contest. You know you lost control, you jet the music and the life play you, and that's why you went under. But it really happened, it was real fire and real dues, and nothing can erase that. It should be pretty obvious by now that I consider my life and my art a failure, but it whs an honest failure.

What bugs me is these cats now—no bolt. And no them either! I don't mind people copping my riffs, but they're like a buncha fuckin' college students! Most of my riffs / copped off somebody else, but then I went on and played and forgot about it. I didn't sit around with seven candles burning in a shrine to Chuck Berry. So who even cares if cats like this Trower or that guy in Canada succeed or fail, what's the fucking difference? There is more happening in any bar on Friday night when the dancefloor's full, than in all those cats' albums and concerts put together.

What's even worse is that they missed the biggest lick of all, the thing that was so discouraging to me — that I saw the end of it coming. I don't mean' rock 'n' roll or popular music or even heavy metal — just the end of the particular experimental, technological branch we riffed out on and sawed through. There's got to be something else. Because one thing I learned while killing myself was that a hell of a lot of that shit was just sound and fury kicked up to disguise the fact that we were losing our emotions, or at least the ability to convey them. Most of Electric Ladyland and the second album sound real cold to me now. I don't know what it sounded like to me then, because I was too spaced out to make any accurate judgment except that it had all the ingredients, I got some rocks off especially in things like "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)," the albums were relatively slick and I knew they would sell.

I guess that's what I was trying to get at before when I talked about the missing component. I just forgot how to feel unless I was getting electric shocks or something — and after awhile even electric shocks began to feel all the same. And even saying it like that doesn't really explain it. It's really THE great mystery, for everybody Out Here. And nobody's come up with any solid answers yet. So when you get back, when you publish this, if anybody comes up after that and tells you they got some kind of a line on it, I don't care how thin it is, well, you'd be doing me the biggest favor of my death if you'd pass it on back. I'd like that more than anything in the...cosmos.

[He laughed again, briefly, ' then stared through us into some sort of distance. It was obviously time to go.]