OF FREAKS, DEATH, AND THE BLUES JIMI HENDRIX

There is no way to write about James Marshall Hendrix without sentimentalizing the myth, yet at the same time, there is no way to write about him without revealing a desire to debunk that myth. It is a problem that writers have always faced when dealing with a legend, but particularly when that legend has set himself up (or been set up) as a visionary. Dead at the age of 27 on September 18, 1970, after having choked on his own vomit, Jimi Hendrix expired at his peak just when, so legend reads, he was about to fashion his most monumental work. Until then, not since Buddy Holly’s tragic death had a rock ’n’ roll artist attained the truly mystical status of "if he’d oply lived.”

With this legendary aura in mind, perhaps my own critical opinions should initially be laid on the table. First, nothing that has been written or ever will be written about Hendrix can eclipse David Henderson’s exhaustive study, Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child Of The Aquarian Age, published in 1978 by Doubleday (now available in paperback under the title Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky). Thus, as best as possible, I tried to ignore it as a source so that at least an attempt can be made to examine Hendrix from another angle.

Second, I think, that, despite his public role as a shaman, Hendrix genuinely was a visionary; in fact, he belonged to that special artistic community because to see him as anything less would be to see him merely as a sideshow freak. In the age of psychedelic self-indulgence, Hendrix reached for transformation: he chose to go beyond the self. Although it’s true he often succumbed to the trends of his era, never did he allow them to consume his work (as did the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Love, and scores of other silly, and not so silly, bands); instead, those very trends catalyzed his art—he could use the sounds and colors of an era but he also had to tear them apart. Whatever the term “psychedelic rock” meant then, Hendrix was its chief interpreter—he took the hippies’ cultural debris and threw it back in their faces. As a result, the epithets hurled after him were usually harsh—from “charlatan” to “bullshitter” to Christgau’s “psychedelic Uncle Tom”—ye( to some extent, all true. But no matter how many scattered voices decried Hendrix’s integrity as an artist, few could challenge his nerve: a black man refuting soul music, defying the rules (both whites’ and blacks’) of how to play the blues. Put simply, Hendrix defined rock ’n’ roll in terms of blues and jazz in the profound and remarkable manner of many other musical visionaries. What Howlin’ Wolf was to the electric blues, Bob Dylan to folk, Augustus Pablo to dub, Ray Charles and Otis Redding to soul, George Clinton to funk (such a list is endless), Jimi Hendrix was to the formless electric music affectionately labeled acid-rock.

It seems odd today, but during the course of his rise to stardom, Hendrix was usually billed as an anomaly, the perfect symbol for those who perceived themselves as freaks. Hendrix, though, was not so much a freak as he was an innovator, but he had his own P.T. Barnum in manager and “discoverer” Chas Chandler, former bassist for the Animals.

Chandler had first heard about Hendrix in 1966 via Linda Keith (then Keith Richards’ girlfriend) and first caught his act at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village. At the time, Hendrix was about 23; he’d already been cruising America several years, playing backup guitar for over 40 various R&B bands—some dues-paying chores; other rewarding experiences, i.e., with the Isley Brothers, Wilson Pickett, Jackie Wilson, King Curtis, Don Covay, and Little Richard. (The awful Capitol releases by the dreadful Curtis Knight and the Squires are prime examples of Hendrix putting in his time, whereas Richard Penniman must have inspired or encouraged the young guitarist—check our Little Richard’s “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got But It’s Got Me” for some mighty tasty Hendrix licks.)

Not surprisingly (as Chandler reports to writer Chris Welch in the biography Hendrix), Hendrix’s 1966 act in no way resembled the frantic mind-destruction of 1967’s Experience (a band that would chart three albums in the Top Ten in slightly over a year), for basically he was then playing the blues. (One of the first things Hendrix supposedly asked Chandler was if he knew Eric Clapton.)

The paradox of Hendrix is rooted in the ambiguity of his image as Mthe gentle wild man.”

In a 1967 interview with Valerie Wilmer for Hit Parader, Hendrix makes a conscious effort to ally himself with the itinerant bluesman. “I’ve written about 100 songs,” Hendrix brags (or lies—you can almost imagine the “aw-shucks” grin on his face), “but they’re all over the place, like in hotel rooms back in the States where I didn’t pay the rent. In fact, I’d like to go back and pay all the rent I owe just so’s I can get those songs back!” He numbers his favorite artists as Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and B. B. King (“Things like ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’’ were what I liked, that real primitive guitar sound”) and relates enough “rats-in-my-kitchen” anecdotes (as Wilmer puts it) to fill a book.

Clearly Hendrix saw himself as a modern bluesman, but that was not the image he would bring to the public. 1967 demanded a freak, and Chas Chandler could fill that need by fashioning a Wild Man of Borneo.

In fact, Les Paul told Guitar Player magazine about his search for the elusive “wild man with a guitar,” a mysterious performer he’d chanced upon in a nightclub in New Jersey. (Years later, he realized the “crazy black dude” had been Jimi Hendrix.) In all fairness, then, Hendrix (whether playing bad soul behind Curtis Knight or blues in folk clubs from the guie of Jimmy James and the Blue Flames) seemed different from the outset, even before Chandler got the opportunity to remodel him as a sideshow spectacle.

“Yet even the most genuine Geeks are like fakes,” Leslie Fiedler observes in Freaks: Myths And Images Of The Secret Self, “turned by their billing, the banners above their heads, and the announcer’s spiel into living metaphors for a nonexistent species that straddles the line between us and our animal brother. The Wild Men of Borneo, for instance, whose name was used in my own childhood as an epithet for ill-behaved kids, had never seen Borneo, much less torn apart unwary Western sailors who had landed in their territory, as the talkers claimed.” The same holds true for the Wild Man of Seattle, a shy young musician whose true self was more akin to that of a poet than to the brash and flashy showman his audience demanded.

The paradox of Hendrix is rooted in the ambiguity of this image as “the gentle wild man.” It wasn’t his music alone that spoke to his fans—the Experience’s first single, “Hey Joe,” didn’t even chart and the band’s subsequent 45s (Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower” excepted) never even dented the Top 40—but the enigmatic effects that went along with it. These contrivances (the burning of the guitar during “Fire,” Hendrix picking notes with his teeth, his fornication with the instrument) were the exaggerations that catapulted the talented musician beyond the underground rock scene. Before then, few rock ’n’ roll artists (Elvis, the Beatles, and maybe the Monkees) had taken full advantage of the media; fortunately for Hendrix, the psychedelic aesthetes tended to focus on the visually reckless. Everything coalesced when Hendrix made his U.S. debut in 1967 at the Monterey International Pop Festival; he ignited his guitar and then smashed it to bits, and in so doing, seemed to signify the future just as he was laying claim to it. The demolishing performance was preserved on vinyl and film, and from then on, Hendrix could not escape the apparent savagery of the image, the flamboyant freak on the brink of the wilderness.

Chandler realized Hendrix’s enormous visual appeal, particularly the smashing routine, and nurtured it. He was a promoter par excellence. When Hendrix was foolishly booked on a tour with the Monkees (a Dick Clark promotion, by the way), Chandler fabricated a marvelous lie: the Daughters of the American Revolution wanted Hendrix banned. (He might corrupt the female teenyboppers come to see the boob-tube Beatles was the plausible explanation.) The truth, though, was that the DAR had never heard of Hendrix and the kids, in their mass hysteria over the Monkeees, would probably ignore him anyway. But the results of this fiasco were golden—Hendrix instantly became hip, acid-rock’s answer to the plastic jive of commercial pop music.

Hendrix as freak would never have worked, however, if there had not been a sound to reinforce that image. Pete Townshend once described the first Hendrix album as “sort of like trucks and lorries driving over you.” The description is apt enough, if not altogether uttered (so we can imagine) with a touch of envy. Hendrix clearly possessed something his predecessors, the Who and the Yardbirds, had merely explored. Although these two groups had already experimented with feedback and fuzzed-out electronics, Hendrix had the ability, as writer John Morthland had pointed out, “to harness these distortions; before him—and usually after him, for that matter—it was primarily a game of chance.”

This sense of control was Hendrix’s vision. The magic was that he could make that “harnessed distortion” last an eternity, or more importantly, the length of an album. At a time when the emergence of the LP as a form was becoming a popular notion (and when the concept of “stereo” was believed to be an end-all experience), Hendrix appeared in full regalia, taking listeners on extended and timeless soundswirling travels via the traditional routes of blues, jazz, and rock (yet by incorporating all three, breaking away from what was deemed the traditional). Consequently, his first three albums were extremely successful, charting above the *5 position (whereas his singles had been virtual flops). The freak-image and the spiritual stuff, (“I’m gonna go to Memphis, Egypt," Hendrix often said, “I had a vision and it told me to go there”) were only camouflage; the reality was the adventure Hendrix sought in sound.

Whatever the term “psychedelic rock” meant then, Hendrix was its chief interpreterhe took the hippies’ cultural debris and threw it back in their face.

You can hear this reality in its most glorious aspect on the live version of “Wild Thing” on Hendrix’s side of the Monterey Pop soundtrack LP (ironically, in another reality, foreshadowing doom, Otis Redding performs on the other side). A distorted mess, “Wild Thing” contains everything that ever made Hendrix’s music endearing: sexual swaggering, an uncertain cockiness, supersonic dissonance, noise as passion, comic relief (he briefly plays a few notes from Sinatra’s “Strangers In The Night”), and frozen moments of intense feedback. A schoolboy’s pop anthem had been stripped of its playfulness, transformed into a nihilistic outcry. “Wild Thing” as performed by the gentle wild man—hearing it on record, you do not have the image that, might somehow explain the deafening noise; instead, you have only total chaos, a distortion of a visual event, so powerful it could be misconstrued as the sound of death by electrocution.

Much has been made of this single performance of “Wild Thing,” where Hendrix caressed and fondled his guitar, almost as if it signaled the end of the socalled Summer of Love. But it wasn’t Hendrix’s lustful theatrics that killed the era as much as it was the shock of distortion. For example, the noises that can be heard on Are You Experienced?1 (that even now doesn’t sound passe) had never been utilized so freely. Obviously there is a lyrical beauty to these special effects, but this wasn’t so apparent in 1967. In fact, Warners’ executives actually thought about “correcting” the excessive distortion of Hendrix’s first LP prior to its release!

By controlling distortion and experimenting with sounds, Hendrix could break away from the traditions he felt were trapping him (i.e., the blues). In 1969, recalling his past work with R&B bands, he told Hit Parader, “Once in awhile I like to listen to that soul stuff, but I don’t like to play it too much anymore. Soul isn’t adventurous enough. It’s just the one same thing.” But Hendrix never stopped playing the blues so much as he disguised the fact that he was playing them. (The blues are all over albums like The Cry Of Love, Rainbow Bridge, Hendrix In The West, and Midnight Lightning.) Distinct blues songs such as “Red House” or “Voodoo Chile,” it can be argued, were not exceptions but instances of revelation on which Hendrix shared his deep-rooted respect (and desire) for the traditional.

The Red Lightnin’ label recently issued a recording of what is billed as the “blues side” of Jimi Hendrix, a compilation of Hendrix’s doodling with friends at the Scene Club in New York in 1968. The album’s title is Woke Up This Morning And Found Myself Dead, and it betrays what has become the popular final word on Hendrix—that his blues and his death were somehow synonymous. Mystics point to songs like “Angel” and “I Don’t Live Today” (“oh, there ain’t no life nowhere”) as evidence of a certain death wish, and they become enraptured with any of Hendrix’s lyrics associated with the cosmology. Hendrix as artist or musician is reduced to a common denominator: a cold corpse rotting in a grave.

In this age of necrophilia (Elvis Presley is not far from being canonized), Hendrix’s legacy becomes a tanglement of posthumous tapes and scrounged artifacts (why a version of “The Little Drummer Boy?” who defines the “essential” Hendrix? what hath Alan Douglas wrought?). The postmortem hodgepodge of Hendrix’s work (which, in reference to Electric Ladyland, Greil Marcus has called “a sprawling, mighty mess”) should not detract from the immensity of his accomplishments. Ftirther, it’s scandalous to accuse him of aiming for the astral plane of the dead when in reality his primary goal was the future; because he was already so far ahead of his time, there’s, where he might have found his respite—not the jam-packed burial ground.

During his rise to stardom, Hendrix was usually billed as an anomaly, the perfect symbol for those who perceived themselves as freaks.

With The Cry Of Love, Hendrix’s finest posthumous release, we have a substantial clue as to where the artist’s vision was headed. It’s soothing, magnanimous work conveying the impression that Hendrix was at peace with himself. The colorful grandeur of his first three albums is absent as if he no longer sought a public pose, or rather, as if he chose to expose the soul beneath the surface of the freak. In short, it’s a mature expression filled with everything from the arcane (“Astro Man,” “Night Bird Flying”) to gospel and the blues (“In From The Storm,” “Belly Button Window,” “My Friend”) to the dreams of a poet (“Angel,” “Drifting”). “Freedom, that’s what I want,” he songs on the opening cut, “freedom, to live/freedom, so I can give.” For Hendrix, the future held a sense of freedom, and since he often perceived his music as a kind of healing force (“it would be incredible if you could produce music so perfect that it would filter through you like rays and ultimately cure,” he once told an interviewer), death was certainly not his object.

But in many minds, Hendrix can still only be thought of in terms of death. This mass necrophilia reminds me of a passage from a well-known science-fiction novel, George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (according to Chas Chandler, one of Hendrix’s favorite books and a source for many of his lyrics). The novel’s plot concerns a young man who, after returning alone from the mountains, discovers that his civilization, America, no longer exists. I’ve underlined these sentences in my copy of Earth Abides:

In this also we are men, that we think of the dead. Once it was not so, and when one of us died, he lay where he lay by the cave-mouth and we ran in and out there, not standing quite upright as we ran. Now we stand upright, and not we also think of the dead.

But such a continual deathwatch in our culture demands a certain amount of irreverence. In an article by Greil Marcus entitled “Rock Death In The ’70s: A Sweepstakes” published in the Village Voice, Hendrix comes in first as the past decade’s greatest dead rock hero. And in a move that could vie with the “rare, collector’s edition” tape of a seance with Elvis (“the king talks to the world from beyond the,grave”), Lester Bangs once concocted a phony interview with the deceased Hendrix (CREEM, April, 1976). Despite Bangs’ humorous intent, some serious truths ring out from the fictional Hendrix’s imagined responses: “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 rrry pocket onstage every night?” Again, Bangs’ version of Hendrix: “I 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.”

The real Hendrix, alive, speaking to Melody Maker in one of his last interviews: “I dig Strauss and Wagner—those cats are good, and I think that they are going to form the background of my music. Floating in the sky above it will be blues—I’ve still got plenty of blues...”

CREEM SPECIAL EDITION

GUITAR HEROES

RICK NIELSEN

This Cheap Trickster has more guitars than most guitar stores; this multi-neckea Hamer is just one of many. Emerging first as keyboard player with Fuse— who cut an album for Epic years ago—Nielsen went on to play every bar in the Midwest until Cheap Trick reached international fame.