Light On Dark Water

Rediscovering Jimi Hendrix

A few months ago, writing about the pleasures of driving, I
described myself listening to a Jimi Hendrix album on my daily
commute. As soon as I wrote that sentence I felt slightly
embarrassed: what a stereotypical baby boomer pop fan, on the far
side of middle age, tooling down the highway to the nostalgic
accompaniment of the music that was new when he was in college
and has long since passed into the realm of the conventional. I
considered changing or removing the reference, but in the
interests of honesty left it in; it was, after all, what I was
listening to on the day I was describing.

But I can also, in honesty, say that I was not indulging in
nostalgia. In fact, at the time it was current Hendrix’s
music never really meant that much to me. There was a period of
six months or so when Are You Experienced? was
inescapable, at least in certain circles, and although I was,
like everyone else who was interested in pop music, pretty amazed
and intrigued by the guitar work on it, this was not music that
really touched my emotions. His second album was a disappointment
and the third a mixed bag, and by the time of his death in 1970 I
had pretty much lost interest in his music and didn’t hear
it again for many years, except for the few songs that had become
staples of classic rock radio.

At some point in the ‘80s I had a yen to hear Hendrix
again and discovered that I had lost my copy of Are You
Experienced? and gained a copy of a greatest hits compilation
which included most of the more popular songs from
Experienced. Listening to it, I found I had completely
lost the little taste I had ever had for the noisy riff songs of
sexual bravado like “Foxy Lady,” but the album
contained a gem I had missed in the ‘60s, a straight-up
blues called “Red House.” I had always heard that
Hendrix could play the blues when he wanted to, but I
hadn’t known he did it with genius. This cut was timeless,
unlike a lot of Hendrix’s recorded work.

It was only this year that I discovered the existence of an
entire CD of Hendrix playing the blues (called simply
Blues). After one hearing it took its place in my mind as
one of the great blues albums of all time, even though it’s
mostly comprised of jams and outtakes that were never meant to be
released. Hendrix’s guitar work is just staggering. A song
like “Once I Had a Woman” begins with fairly
straightforward blues licks, then with every verse gets more
imaginative and further out until it’s full of the
intensely expressive screams and roars and wails that only he at
the time could produce and few have matched since, even with
electronics that can produce similar tones at the touch of a
button.

The blues vocabulary is of course fundamentally limited, and
even Hendrix doesn’t avoid clichés and repetition
completely. I find myself wondering what it is about his playing
that sets it apart. I think part of the explanation is in the
rhythms, which somehow manage to be simultaneously tight and
loose, heavy and light. It’s as if the temporal space in
which he places each note is larger than it is for other players;
as if he has some extra room to work with, and doesn’t have
to be in a rush to put the note exactly where he wants it, so
that there is a underlying relaxed quality even when he’s
playing fast and intensely. Someone like Eric Clapton, who is
equally quick, seems a bit four-square, almost stiff in
comparison. Someone like Stevie Ray Vaughan seems like he’s
working really hard. Almost everything Hendrix does seems
effortless, unstrained, as if he has as much speed and power in
reserve as he is actually using at any moment.

And then there’s the tone, or rather there are the
tones. Few others have (and nobody at the time had) as wide a
range, and yet most electric guitar aficionados need only a few
notes to recognize the Hendrix sound. To compare him to his
contemporary Eric Clapton again (and no criticism of Clapton
intended, because he’s a great guitarist), Clapton’s
tone is very pure and clean, while Hendrix’s is scuffed up,
richer, thicker, and more varied. His playing in the middle and
higher range of the instrument has a liquid quality which as far
as I’ve heard has not been duplicated by anybody. And of
course there are what might be called the post-guitar tones.
Hendrix was the first pop musician to find a way to make an
expressive tool out of what at first seems to be sheer noise.

It’s when Hendrix combines the controlled noise of
feedback and whatever else he stirred into the mix with ventures
into melodic territory well outside the blues vocabulary that
people trying to describe it come up with terms like “blues
from Mars.” It’s a combination of earthiness and
abstraction that to me is nothing less than gripping. There are
people who play faster and louder and with more complexity, but I
don’t know of anyone whose playing has more emotional power
than Hendrix at his best.

This blues album sent me back to some of the other Hendrix
albums for the first time in many years. I have to say that most
of his songs don’t really amount to a great deal as
anything except guitar vehicles, and you have to overlook a lot
of gimmicky lust and psychedelia to enjoy them. The tracks that I
keep going back to are the longer mostly instrumental ones, like
“Voodoo Chile” on Electric Ladyland (the less
said about the title song the better), or the strange ones like
“Third Stone from the Sun” on Are You
Experienced?. One wishes he had recorded more covers, as
“All Along the Watchtower” has probably had wider
popularity than anything else he recorded. Speaking of which, its
famous solo is a perfect example of that intense-but-relaxed
quality, with moments where many notes are dropped into a small
space and yet still have plenty of room. And I downloaded from
iTunes a copy of the famous Woodstock “Star Spangled
Banner” (I have no desire at all to hear the whole album)
and it strikes me as some kind of unique American
masterpiece.

Like anybody who admires the work of Jimi Hendrix, I find
myself wondering what might have been. I suppose drugs had a lot
to do with the wildness of some of his experimentation, but I
find it hard to believe that they did not also limit and hamper
him musically (aside from the fact, of course, that they also
killed him.) I find myself thinking of him less as a pop star who
stumbled into moments of brilliance than as an innovator who was
too bogged down in the stupid and destructive aspects of stardom
and hippie culture to flower fully before his untimely death.

Attempting to be realistic in one’s speculations, one
must suppose that had he lived, his subsequent development would
probably have been like that of most of his contemporaries: an
increasingly uninspired recapitulation of his early achievements.
But there are moments in some of the pop songs on Are You
Experienced? and his other official releases when it almost
sounds like John Coltrane has dropped in on a recording session
of the Rolling Stones, and I wonder if the work of a
forty-year-old Hendrix might have had more in common with that of
later musicians whom he helped to inspire, such as Bill Frissel,
than with what he did at twenty-five.