Jimi Hendrix
Died 1970, aged 27
I wish not to be alone,
So I must respect my other heart.
Oh, the story of Jesus is the story
Of you and me.
No use in feeling lonely,
I am sending you to be free.
The story of life is quicker
Than the wink of an eye
The story of love is hello and goodbye
Until we meet again.
These are the last lines of a song called The Story of Life, which Jimi
Hendrix wrote on the eve of his death. Like Chidiock Tichborne in the Tower
of London in 1586, Hendrix was writing his own elegy, though, unlike Tichborne,
he didn’t know that he’d be dead upon the morrow. And yet this song - with
its earlier references to Jesus on the cross, to the soul of man which roams
after he has fallen in battle, and to God being at our side at the moment
we die – this song does suggest a man who is making peace with his “God,”
and preparing himself for immortality. Hendrix hoped that he would achieve
immortality in his music. “When I die,” he said, “I want people to just
play my music.” Today, over thirty years later, Jimi Hendrix is idolized
by millions of discerning young music lovers, many of whom weren’t even
born at the time of his death. Unlike those of my generation, they cannot
claim a nostalgic attachment to a second “Elizabethan” Golden Age of “English”
music, in which the émigré Hendrix was the brightest star
in a glittering, celestial panoply of musical splendor. For them, Hendrix’s
music speaks on its own terms, not only as a virtuosic assault on the senses,
but also as a profound cry of sincerity and, ultimately, of faith, hope,
and love.
True genius is also something acknowledged by the other bright lights in
the current celestial panoply, regardless of the weight or absence of popular
and critical acclaim, which can often be very fickle and misguided. It took
a genius of the stature of Franz Josef Haydn to acknowledge that young Wolfgang
Mozart was the greatest musician of the era, at a time when Haydn himself
was basking in sustained popularity and Mozart was subject to the whims
of his public. Hendrix had no shortage of gifted peers who recognized that
he was the brightest star amongst them. “No one else was in the same building!”
is the blunt judgment of Neil Young. I had the honor of hearing a similar
though more elaborate judgment directly from the mouth of Mick Taylor, who,
back in 1966, the year Hendrix arrived in England, was a precocious sixteen-year
old guitar wizard launching his career with the John Mayall Bluesbreakers.
“Hendrix,” Taylor told me “was without doubt the single greatest musical
genius of that period, in terms of the sounds he created, his experimentation
with electronics, and his sheer virtuosity.” In the summer of 1969, Taylor
joined The Rolling Stones, replacing Hendrix’ close friend Brian Jones, who
had been one of the first musical celebrities in London to realize that a
messenger had come among them.
But if Hendrix was the “Mozart” of his period, then without question his
“Haydn” was Eric Clapton, who had preceded young Mick Taylor as the resident
guitar virtuoso with the John Mayall Bluesbreakers. In fact, a famous condition
set down by Hendrix for his sudden and epoch-making move from New York to
London was the opportunity to meet and perhaps to play with Eric Clapton,
whom he revered, as Mozart revered Haydn. Sure enough, within a week of
his arrival in London, his tough, straight-shooting manager Chas Chandler
fulfilled the promise. On October 1, 1966, Hendrix met Eric Clapton on the
stage of the Central London Polytechnic, where he jammed along with Clapton,
Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker. It just happened to be the first public performance
of Cream, which, to this day, is regarded by many as the finest ensemble
of virtuoso musicians in the entire history of rock and roll. Not only did
Hendrix perform with these Titans, he left them in awe. “I’ll never forget
Eric’s face,” says Chas Chandler. “He just walked off to the side of the
stage and watched.” Within a week of his arrival in England, Hendrix had
established with Clapton the intense rivalry and love of Mozart/Haydn soul
brothers that for the next four years fueled the fire in each of their souls,
and turned the fire that was already burning brightly in the British music
scene into a full-blown conflagration. All the established greats of British
rock music – The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and other guitar virtuosos
such as Jeff Beck – all now realized that the music they played would have
to be held accountable at an even higher artistic level.
The music rose to the new challenge during Hendrix’ first full year in
Britain. 1967 was an annus mirabilis; possibly the most creative year in
the history of popular music. The Beatles produced Seargent Pepper’s; Cream
produced D’Israeli Gears, including Sunshine of Your Love, which was
dedicated to Jimi Hendrix; an esoteric quartet from Cambridge calling itself
Pink Floyd launched its journey into outer space with an album called Piper
at the Gates of Dawn; and Jimi Hendrix, with his quickly assembled band of
brothers, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, produced two albums, Are You Experienced
and Axis: Bold As Love, that became treasured possessions for every enlightened
British youngster with an ear for what we then called “progressive music.”
For a few halcyon moments, the British musical elite basked in the glory
of having this émigré genius amongst them, as one of their
own. Even Mick Jagger, who had a rather strained personal relationship with
Hendrix, was proud to announce, “He was ours.” But he wasn’t. At the same
time Mick Taylor gave me those earlier comments, he also said of Hendrix,
“As a genius, it was hard for him to fit in anywhere.” Just as Byron called
himself a “Citizen of the World,” Hendrix was a “Citizen of the Cosmos,”
and as such he had no true home in any one place.
It was inevitable that once he had made it big in Britain, which he did
in just a few meteoric months, he would go back in triumph to conquer his
original home, America. By now, all British musicians were aware that the
only thing that mattered in the music business was success in the lucrative
American market. So Hendrix, the raw material imported from America, would
be exported, like a Rolls Royce or a Jaguar, as a very high-class piece of
“British” merchandise. The occasion on which Hendrix was introduced to his
new American audience was the Monterey International Pop Festival, staged
in June of that miraculous year, 1967. It was Paul McCartney who insisted
to the Festival organizers that any prestigious music event without Jimi Hendrix
would not be worth its name. This just six months after McCartney had first
heard Hendrix jamming in the London clubs! What greater references could
any new musician have in 1967 than The Beatles and the Rolling Stones? Fittingly,
Hendrix traveled to California with the Rolling Stones’ founder Brian Jones,
who went, specifically, to introduce to the estimated crowd of 90,000 the
man he called “… my very good friend, a fellow countryman of yours, who is
the most exciting performer I’ve ever heard.”
Once Hendrix had conquered the American market, it was obvious that he
would spend an increasing amount of time in his native land. Sentimental
patriotism aside, his two British managers were very keen to cash in on
the adulation of US audiences, though they disagreed vehemently over the
wisdom of launching Hendrix’ Post Monterey American campaign via a nationwide
tour supporting The Monkees! This madcap venture was the inspiration of
Mike Jeffrey, the more shamelessly mercenary of his two managers. Fortunately,
Chas Chandler’s greater commitment to the artistic integrity of his precious
commodity eventually prevailed, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience was able
to “withdraw” from the farrago with a minimum of fuss or damage to the fragile
egos involved. But after this farcical beginning, America provided one triumph
after another, such that Hendrix moved the center of his operations from
London back to New York, where, in the last year of his life, he opened his
own recording studio. But though America was his home, and New York a city
he loved, because of its dynamic club scene, he remained an outsider. His
sense of belonging to America was compromised by his rejection of its materialistic
values and by his uneasiness concerning the major political issues – civil
rights and the Vietnam War - that were damaging the soul of America in the
late 1960s. Hendrix was also very conscious of being a very unusual breed
of American, in a culture that hyphenates people into one ethnic category
or another. A black man from Seattle with a powerful infusion of Cherokee
Indian blood, he defied tidy classification, and it’s significant that during
his life time only a small percentage of Black Americans connected with his
music. He preferred to look upon himself as a Gypsy, and cultivated this
image both in his flamboyant dress and the lyrics of his songs, which frequently
evoke images of magic, prophecy, and erotic power in the same vein as El
Amor Brujo.
Though at heart a homeless Gypsy, Hendrix also enjoyed his time in London.
As a wanderer in Space and Time, he relished being in a city with a rich
historical tradition, all the more so when he discovered that his fashionable
Mayfair flat had been the home of George Frederick Handel. What a stroke
of Fate that two musical émigrés of genius, 250 years distant
from each other, would end up under the same roof! Hendrix saw the
hand of Providence in this. A man of eclectic musical tastes, he was far
more sensitive than the average rock musician to the importance of classical
music, especially to the intricacies and the colors of orchestral composition,
a genre to which he sincerely aspired. At the time he moved into Handel’s
old digs, he was unfamiliar with the great man’s work, though he did know
some Bach. He promptly made up for lost time and bought every available LP
recording of Handel’s music. Sadly, he never lived long enough to enjoy it
all. Perhaps at least he had a few moments of peaceful solitude in which
he could enjoy Music for the Royal Fireworks and Messiah.
Like Handel, Hendrix was a master plagiarist, not that this seemingly pejorative
label detracts one jot from the genius of either musician. Handel was perfectly
happy to snitch other composers’ tunes, certain that he could use them to
greater effect. Similarly, Hendrix would spend countless hours in the pubs
and clubs of London listening sometimes to Cream and Jeff Beck, but more
often to rather mediocre bands, which, nevertheless, might produce some little
spark of inspiration. While Chas Chandler would be tugging at his sleeve,
anxious to be rid of the tedious cacophony and to be off at the bar nursing
another pint, Hendrix would insist on staying the course, to hear and absorb
that one little flourish by an otherwise lackluster guitarist that he, Hendrix,
like Handel, could use to greater effect. And while we know Hendrix primarily
as a creative artist who wrote his own songs, he would occasionally take
great delight in covering another artist’s song, confident he could transform
it into something rich and strange. His version of the Troggs’ hit Wild Thing
was a favorite from his early days in London, to the extent that he eventually
became rather jaded of having to perform it at concerts by popular command.
With greater personal pleasure, he frequently enriched the splendor of Sunshine
Of Your Love, each time dedicating it back to the trio of master musicians
who had dedicated it to him. This he did most famously on January 4, 1969,
during a live, prime time, Saturday Nite B.B.C. show, when he interrupted
a rather labored performance of one of his own songs to announce his farewell
tribute to Cream on the occasion of its disbanding. But his greatest cover
song, indeed, one of the greatest songs he ever recorded, was of Bob Dylan’s
classic All Along The Watchtower, in which Hendrix not only displayed his
virtuosity, but also his growing spiritual awareness, voiced through Dylan’s
foreboding poetry. Dylan himself – a man never noted for his modesty – admitted
that the Hendrix cover version actually improved on the original; a noble
testament to the rich “orchestration” of the Hendrix arrangement, which
added even more vigor to the profound lyrics.
As a composer in his own right, Hendrix is remembered for a number of classic
songs that demonstrate the vast range of his technical and emotional powers.
At one extreme, he produced the delicate ballad Little Wing, almost Schubertian
in its economy and ethereal beauty, conveyed in the gossamer layers of both
its melody and its poetry,
Well she’s walking through the clouds
With a circus mind that’s running
round
Butterflies and zebras
And moonbeams and fairy tales.
That’s all she ever thinks about
Riding with the wind.
At the other extreme is the quintessential anthem of psychedelic angst,
Purple Haze, with which Hendrix announced himself as a major songwriter in
March 1967. This, his most famous song, opens with a dramatic guitar riff
that, as a motif stamped indelibly in the minds of an entire generation, is
rivaled only by the opening of the Stones’ Satisfaction. This jarring dissonance,
with which Hendrix mesmerized a whole generation, contains the musical interval
of a tritone or flattened fifth. During the Spanish Inquisition this particular
note was reviled as Diablo in Mứsica, and Church musicians were prohibited
from using it, for fear of invoking the devil! Instinctively, Hendrix clearly
knew what he was doing with his own Diablo in Mứsica, as he shows in such
anguished questions as “Am I happy or in misery?” and “Is it tomorrow or
just the end of time?” He goes some way to answering these questions in Voodoo
Chile, which is perhaps his most autobiographical statement. Gypsy imagery
abounds; his mother confirms the prophecy that the moon would turn a fire
red on the night of his birth, whereupon she “falls down right dead.” Now
motherless and abandoned, this Voodoo Chile baby is found by mountain lions,
which set him on an eagle’s back for a journey to the outskirts of infinity.
He returns to earth via “Jupiter’s sulphur mines,” where he finds William
Blake’s “arrows made of desire,” though not, surprisingly, his bow of burning
gold! Where was Jim Morrison when he was needed?
As a live performing artist, Hendrix had arrived in London a seasoned twenty-three-year
old, groomed in the clubs of Chicago and New York by such legendary black
musicians as The Isley Brothers, Ike and Tina Turner, and, most famously,
Little Richard. It was under Little Richard’s tutelage that Hendrix learned
all the tricks, the moves, and the gestures that make for a consummate stage
performer. In fact, young “Jimmy James,” as he was known in his pre-London
days, threatened to upstage his vainglorious paymaster, so he received his
marching orders. All of which reduced him to temporary poverty, but paved
the way for his historic flight to London. Once in England, Jimi Hendrix,
as he was now called, quickly adapted to his new environment, and within
months was discharging as much live electricity as the Rolling Stones and
The Who. More than any other artists, The Who had taken live music in Britain
to a new level of physical and emotional intensity – an intensity its surviving
members have maintained into the 21st century! By the beginning of
1967, it knew of three guys who could generate as much raw power as its four
guys. But there was a big difference: while the white heat energy of The
Who was generated by the fierce competition between its three chief firebrands
– Pete Townsend, Roger Daltry, and, especially, Keith Moon, who usually won!
– the energy of the Jimi Hendrix Experience was generated largely by Hendrix
himself.
Sadly, I never saw Hendrix perform, so any words evoking the power of his
performance art must inevitably be borrowed. Fortunately, I can borrow a
few which were written by a teenage girl from my native Yorkshire:
“The violent colours of the spotlights paled into insignificance beside
the color of the man beneath them. My eyes begged to close, but I could not
move them from his face. I watched his long fingers caress the guitar shaft.
I watched as he tore the strings viciously with his teeth. I watched as the
words flung themselves out of his throat and hung above us somewhere. I
watched Jimi being torn to shreds by his music; his skin and his mind stripped
away, leaving the skeleton of his dreams shining white and brittle in the
raw darkness. I wanted to comfort him, but I was helpless. Then he stopped
singing; stopped the sensuous movements of his lithe body; stopped time.”
At the time of his death, in September 1970, virtually all his fellow musicians
acknowledged Hendrix as the most important creative artist in rock music.
As to critical acclaim, the London Times stated in its obituary, “he was
largely responsible for whatever musical metamorphosis pop music has undergone
in the last three years.” And regarding popularity amongst the record-buying,
concert-going public, Hendrix commanded bigger audiences and fatter fees
than anyone, with the exception of the Rolling Stones.
But it’s also clear from his movements and his comments during the last
year of his life that Hendrix was not content to rest on his laurels. In fact
everything suggests that he was less than satisfied with his current accomplishments
– staggering though they were! – and that he was driven by a yearning to
explore and experiment in a variety of different and even more ambitious
musical genres. Almost certainly he would have incorporated jazz techniques
into his composition and playing, and jazz musicians into his ensemble. For
several years, he’d admired free-form jazz masters such as saxophonist Roland
Kirk, with whom he eventually had the opportunity to jam. He also jammed
with jazz guitarist John McLaughlin, who alone, perhaps, excelled Hendrix
for pure virtuosity. McLaughlin at the time was a mainstay with the Miles
Davis band, which was breaking new ground with such albums as In A Silent
Way and Bitches Brew. Sure enough, Hendrix got to meet the maestro himself,
with whom he became friendly, in spite of Davis being a bit of a musical
snob – Hendrix having no background in music theory- and in spite of Hendrix
being the cause of the separation between Davis and his wife. The potential
for a future collaboration between these two giants poses a tantalizing image
for what-might-have-been. Hendrix was also entranced by Pink Floyd, with
whom he’d shared a playbill back in May 1967 at a Cattle Auction Hall in
Lincolnshire; a remarkable gig that had also included Cream! Talking to an
interviewer just a few weeks before his death, he said that his music “…
could be on similar lines to what Pink Floyd are tackling… Western sky music
and sweet opium music…they are the mad scientists of this day and age.” And
there would also be a classical component in the future music of Jimi Hendrix.
“Strauss and Wagner are going to form the background of my music. Floating
in the sky above it will be the blues.” One esteemed classical music
ensemble – The Kronos String Quartet – has often included the music of Hendrix
in its repertoire. It’s very possible that, had he lived for another 20 or
30 years, Hendrix would have been composing on a regular basis for Kronos
and for a host of other adventurous classical musicians. He might be collaborating
with such dynamic conductors as Pierre Boulez and Esa-Peka Salonen. Without
question, he’d have written a violin concerto for Nigel Kennedy!
But it was not be. Hendrix was summoned to Mount Olympus – or perhaps to
Valhalla if Wagner had anything to do with it! He died on September
18, 1970 in a bizarre accident, his death caused, in the words of the London
coroner, by “an inhalation of vomit due to barbiturate intoxication in the
form of quinalbarbitone.” At the time, much was made of the “drug factor”
and of the general tendency for rock musicians to indulge in heavy drug
use, leading in several celebrated cases to their early deaths. For sure,
Hendrix indulged and experimented in drugs. “He pushed things to the nth
degree,” as his drummer Mitch Mitchell said. Hendrix was a true disciple
of William Blake in believing that “the road of excess leads to the palace
of wisdom.” But, as Mitch Mitchell adds, “He exhibited no suicidal tendencies…
and if he’d taken all the drugs the papers and rock books say he took, he’d
never have lived as long as he did.” Drug use may have been the immediate
and accidental cause of his death, but it was not the symptom of a prolonged
journey towards death.
If anything did put Hendrix on a journey towards his early death it was
a deep-rooted melancholy. It was the melancholy of a gentle spirit frequently
at violent odds with the institutions and the morality of a world in which
he was not entirely at home. It was the melancholy of a free spirit, who
was both a lover of his fellow man and a man alone, tormented by doubts and
loneliness. In all of this, he was more a fellow traveler of the great Romantic
poets of the early 19th century than of the drug-crazed rock ‘n rollers of
the 1960s. He would have been perfectly at home in the company of Byron and
Shelley, especially Shelley, with whom he shared a Promethean optimism about
the capabilities of the human spirit, in spite of the melancholy that shrouded
his own spirit. Shelley’s words from Prometheus Unbound about the poetic
spirit might well be applied to Hendrix:
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aëreal kisses,
Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses.
…from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality!
Like Byron, Hendrix was a magnet to and was magnetized by women, though,
like his role model, it’s unlikely that he ever found true happiness with
any single woman. For both men the scars from childhood ran deep, especially
those cut by betrayal in love. For Byron it had been his unseen father who
had held the knife; for Hendrix it was his mother. But each man had an idealized
vision of feminine purity and beauty. In Byron’s case it was modeled clearly
on his half-sister Augusta, who became the spotless “Astarte” of his Manfred.
Hendrix’s idealized vision of Goethe’s “eternal feminine” came largely from
his mother Lucille, who, in spite of her “betrayal,” embodied for him everything
that was gentle and lovely in a woman. In The Story of Life, Hendrix writes,
We will guide the light
This time with a woman in our arms
We as men can’t explain the reason
why
The woman’s always mentioned
at the moment that we die.
Or as Goethe puts it at the conclusion of Faust,
Here insufficiency becomes fulfillment,
Here the indescribable is accomplished;
The eternal feminine draws us heavenward.
The day after Hendrix died, his friend Eric Burdon disturbed many people
by some comments he made during the BBC’s 24 Hours current affairs show.
“Jimi made his exit when he wanted to,” Burdon told veteran interviewer Kenneth
Allsop, “His death was deliberate. He was happy dying and he used the drug
to phase himself out of this life and go someplace else.” I watched that
interview, and Burdon’s words have tantalized me ever since. Burdon would
later curse himself for “being stupid enough to speak publicly about the
death of friend,” which is not to say that his original comments are devoid
of truth. In the interview, Burdon made much of the elegy which Hendrix wrote
the night before his death, and, just two weeks before he died, Hendrix himself
told a Danish journalist that he didn’t think he would live to see twenty-eight.
This same journalist cites Hendrix as telling her that he’d been dead for
a long time and had been resurrected in a new musical body.
It is possible, therefore, that in the last year of his life Hendrix reached
a stage of mystical awareness, which not even his closest friends could
understand. The one friend who might have understood this was Brian Jones,
who’d died the previous year. It may well be that all of Hendrix’ elaborate
plans for his musical future were for a future in a different plane of existence;
that the Wagner he would hear would, indeed, herald his entry into Valhalla!
And perhaps he realized that he’d already done enough to establish his immortality
in this plane. If so, he was right.
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