Profile/Copyright © 1973, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
Hendrix . . . The movie house just off Times Square has him playing his wild thing of a guitar with his teeth, behind his head, behind his back, on his back, on fire, doing God-knows-what-else with it, to it, on it, and once again the hard and flat gut you could strike a match on is revealed, and blah-blah, woof-woof, you know, for the longest time I signed my first name with an extra "i" because I dug him, and now, with this film I just saw, I can't help hearing the wind cry Jimi.
You'll recall that you couldn't sit through a Jimi Hendrix concert, anymore than you could stand through a Wagner opera. He did things with a guitar I would not otherwise have believed possible—like soloing with one hand by tooth-picking instead of finger-picking. Of course, not everyone was impressed with all that hamming.
A writer for Hi-Fi Stereo Review commented that he wished Hendrix's guitar "would bite him back." Mick Jagger, on the other hand, liked the Hendrix style so much, he says in David Dalton's Stones' book, "I think he could do it standing on his head."
His stage act was an unholy matrimony of showmanship and sex. He was genuine. He was bold as love. He made Elvis's wriggle look like a soft drink. Jimi Hendrix would wave his guitar, and to look at the face of the audience, it was as if Mandrake had gestured hypnotically. Spanish castle magic. You might call his lifestyle Early Now. Or Late Cliffhanger. Every Hendrix gesture seemed to say, "Hey, we haven't got all night, man!"
He always appeared so vitally of the moment. It was as if he spent half his life in cold showers, half in hot baths. Marshall was his middle name, and he liked to send blue electronic waves through six 4 x 12 Marshall cabinets and four 100-watt Marshall tops by doing incredible things with a Fender Stratocaster. Amplifiers (always full up to 10 tremolo, reverb, and feedback) fizzled out regularly. He didn't toe a wah-wah pedal so much as he landed on it.
The effect of all those machines on the average, non-rock, library-quiet-while-writing eardrum was articulated in the June 1967 Liverpool Post: "The kindest thing I could say about the Jimi Hendrix Experience in Are You Experienced is that I survived one full session, although it took me some time to assure myself that nothing had gone wrong with the stylus. A refreshing return to normality is proved by Liverpool's Swinging Blue Jeans. . . . "
"It's not a guitar," Jimi Hendrix used to like to say, "it's an electric lady." Jimi Hendrix was such an abundantly gifted guitarist, you could mention his name at a party, and every musician present would cheerfully place himself among the also-rans. An impeccable blues stylist, he probably never met a guitar he didn't like. He raised the performance level of rock ‘n’ roll in one blazing fell swoop.
He was virtuosity and flash. And once you saw him put the two together, the image was harder to shake than dandruff. You couldn't help demanding more from every performer you saw thereafter. It was Hendrix's special gift to know that what others regarded as a problem—amplifier feedback—was the infantile blubberings of a foreign child who has much to say.
Simply put, Hendrix taught—and listened to—the child; made central to his art what others considered problematic or marginal; raised the "electric" to be as important as the other word in "electric guitar." In so doing, he gave the instrument its full voice. He also proved himself the most creative mind around electricity since Ben Franklin.
The poet John Keats once said that the artist is the antenna of the race. With Jimi Hendrix in the late 60s, the electric guitar became a space-age antenna, catching the static of society's turmoil and the heartbeat of rock 'n' roll's rhythm, and transmitting back electronic signals that didn't contain a message, but, rather, were the message.
Jimi Hendrix gave me the feeling that guitar-playing was more than just playing to him. It seemed more like living—and therefore it burned and heaved and cried and loved and experienced as hard as he did.
It got so I think I expected too much of Jimi Hendrix. Perhaps he did, too. He didn't like his own vocals. He felt he was the million-dollar guitarist with the buck-fifty single-note voice. You'd think he'd be satisfied enough to paint pictures of the heavens with those earth-abiding words of his.
He even sang Dylan as if he knew what he was saying. Knocking the stuffin out of amplifiers and eardrums, he yearly made the Fender Guitar Corporation's Top Five assets. Like, there was just no hope for an amplifier that met up with a Hendrix clout. Which put his band, the Experience, at the mercy of every mayor in search of a headline.
They practically wanted the tickets to say This Concert May Be Hazardous to Your Health. But it was a violent streak he couldn't—or wouldn't—contain. He used to jump out of airplanes in the Army; now he jumped out of self-detonated explosions. I'm surprised he didn't spend half his life in a sling.
He lit up his guitar one night at the Astoria in Finsbury Park, London, and from there on he was less a six-string star than a shooting star—a kind of ground-level fire-balling psychedelic comet. You couldn't tell from show to show whether he'd come out with his favorite white Fender or a very large well-tuned match.
He was color-blind only till it came to changing his clothes. It must have been a glittering sight to see him sashay down Carnaby Street in foppy red and orange shirt, dapper velvet hat, huge hootchie-kootchie hairdo—like a one-man Rose Parade, or some bon vivant that just walked out of Damon Runyan. Then he'd wink his gypsy green eyes and become a wolf in sheik's clothing as well.
Conjure up such an image, and it's hard to reconcile it with his Seattle background, where he quit school to work for his father. As a kid, Jimi Hendrix listened to a lot of Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Chuck Berry, Elmore James.
To hear his father tell the story about Jimi playing a broomstick as if he were frailing a Fender, you wonder if his youth was some sort of eternal search for a lefty axe. He got a right-handed one, and restrung it, for $5 from a friend of his father's. The young Hendrix started playing at age 14. His professional debut got him 35 cents for doing Coasters-style rock 'n' roll at a National Guard Armory.
Jimi Hendrix enlisted in the Army at age 16, joined the 101st Airborne in 1963, and did parachute jumps because he got paid more. Through fourteen months, between twenty-five paratrooper jumps, he played with all-black R & B groups in Clarksville, near his Army camp.
Then he broke his ankle on his twenty-sixth jump, got discharged, and took to the road as a back-up man for all kinds of bands. He played Nashville, took in Harlem, did time with people like Ike and Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, Sam Cooke, B.B. King, the Isley Brothers, and Little Richard—who let Jimi know that Little Richard was the one who wore the fancy shirts in the pop music family.
Hendrix started his own group, Jimmy James and the Flames, in Greenwich Village. This was 1965. A year later, in August, he was making $3 a night in the Village's Cafe Wha? when a friend urged him to go to London. He did.
English doors have been quick with the welcome mats for innovative black musicians ever since Duke Ellington first visited in 1933, and by October 12, Hendrix had his Experience: two pale English boys named Noel Redding (bass) and Mitch Mitchell (drums).
