Hearing Jimi

Jul 22, 2022

[Student art left on the chalkboard in a course in which it became clear to them how I feel about Mr. Hendrix]

Just a few thoughts on this guy, who remains for me, more than 40 years since I first heard him, one of the transcendent figures in rock music.

He’s become, I fear, something of a cliché for some, especially for younger people who’ve never properly heard him. It might then be worth recalling just how thoroughly he blew away even all the big rock stars of his day—the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, and on down the line—when he showed up.

I recall McCartney somewhere saying this about him (it’s a rough memory, as I cannot find this bit which I know I have somewhere on a cassette tape in a box): “You know, people hear him on Rainbow Thingy or whatever [Paul is talking about the Rainbow Bridge LP, a compilation of recordings Hendrix made in the last year of his life, released posthumously, and rather more mundane than his best recordings] and they think ‘Ehh.’ But they’ve haven’t heard the real thing. The fact remains that there he was, just pure talent, actually surfacing.” (A close friend and I can predictably make ourselves break into raucous laughter just by saying “Rainbow Thingy” in a Liverpudlian accent).

This too from Paul M. on Jimi listening to “Sergeant Pepper” for two days right after it was released on a Friday and then opening with it at a live show at which the Beatles were present in the audience that Sunday night is just priceless.

And this from Chris Squire of Yes is my all-time favorite Hendrix story, overflowing with great lines (“And I thought, well, this is strange, here’s this guitar player talking to a bass player, because that didn’t happen in those days!”).

I still remember the exact moment I heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time. Every single salient detail. It was the Woodstock version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” on my friend Troy’s cassette tape playing on a little portable tape player that I had, sitting on my front porch. I was probably between 6th and 7th grades or thereabouts. It was a summer evening, a bunch of us were hanging out there listening to music and he put this in. I couldn’t believe an electric guitar could make such sounds. It sounded like what my 12 year old brain imagined war sounded like.

We listened to the entire medley to which that version of the Banner is attached. They segue immediately after it into a very tasty rendition of “Purple Haze” and then conclude with a solemn, pristine blues titled “Villanova Junction,” which includes some of his most mournfully beautiful lines. I asked my friend if I could borrow his cassette. He agreed. I did not have a cassette-to-cassette recording deck, so couldn’t make my own copy, but I listened to the thing ceaselessly for the next week or so before I returned it. I would go to sleep at night with it on and then play it again first thing on waking up in the morning. “Villanova Junction” to this day instantly recalls for me sleepy summer nights of my youth—the traffic fading away on the busy street in front of our house, the frazzled energy of the day bubbling down to those serene, hypnotizing improvisations.

Something crucial had changed in my life. Yes, I know, it’s just a guy in a rock band playing electric guitar. But I’m telling you, it was that important to me.

A few years later, my sophomore or junior year of high school, I bought the LP the Jimi Hendix Concerts album about as soon as it was released.

I had heard some live Hendrix on a TV special—probably on HBO—that I saw at some point, but only tidbits, and I knew no one who owned any full live recordings, so had not yet immersed myself in this part of Hendrix’s music. The version of “Red House” on this record imprinted itself on my brain on the first listening. There are many great live versions of this song online, each one with a different guitar solo, and many of the soloes are remarkable. This one is the best.

The song is a basic 12 bar blues, and in this version, the solo lasts for 36 bars, three times through the song’s cycle. In its structure and trajectory, it is about as perfect a long guitar solo as you can find in rock music. At the start of the 25th bar, Hendrix arrives at a plateau so overwhelming it makes me have to sit down every time I hear it. At that point in the solo, from the close of the 24th bar to about the 29th bar, I feel as though I am floating dangerously high above the earth, as in a dream in which a sudden wind snatches you up and in a heartbeat you are gasping for breath in the rarefied air that borders outer space, drifting in that almost intolerably thrilling interstitial space between absolute terror and transcendent exhilaration, knowing that you might not survive but that if you do you will have passed into some new and more intense form of life beyond all fear and mortal weakness.

At the start of the track, an audibly upset Jimi tells someone in the audience “F—- off, man, let me talk!” (It wasn’t all hippie vibes at live shows in that era…see the Stones’ Altamont film if you doubt me.) Then the song begins, and he is absorbed into it like a liquid into a towel, and he channels whatever emotional energy had just been present in his heart into that molten lava tidal wave of a sonic statement.

Regrettably, I cannot link to it because I cannot find it online, so you’re just going to have to imagine the solo if you haven’t already heard it and committed it to memory, as I have.

The whole LP on which it was originally released has become almost impossible to find. Elsewhere on this Substack account, I’ve described the dreadful experience of a college friend to whom I stupidly loaned the LP disappearing with it forever. Another friend later made me a CD burn of the whole thing, so I once again have the treasure in my possession, and therefore feel only residual resentment for my other negligent friend. (But I am perfectly capable of mustering up pretty good residual resentment, given the value of the object involved…).

Hendrix was an American musician who became famous by going to England to play in the London clubs. Kind of fitting in this international scenario that it was in Paris that I first heard him play Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” in the version that’s on the Jimi Plays Berkeley LP.

At the Musée de la musique, there was an exhibit that involved a huge screen in a room with no furniture, really nothing but the screen and speakers to carry sound. It played the footage of him on the Berkeley stage, turning Chuck Berry’s rock classic into a detonating nuclear device, on continuous loop.

He was life-sized on the screen image, and, to the credit of the museum, the sound was quite loud. Not rock concert-level, certainly, but enough to aid the impression that you were in the room with him as he was playing this. I stood there and listened to the song all the way through perhaps 8 or 10 times, then walked in a dazed state around some other parts of the museum before coming back to hear it a few more times and then finally wandering stupefied out into the city.

Look in the YouTube comments; you’ll see several astute listeners referring to the note he hits at about 1:44 into the video. That note could serve as a concise summary of him for me: a guy who seems superficially to be another Earthling who reveals himself as an entity from another realm when you put a right-handed Stratocaster in his lefty grip and he makes it produce impossible sounds.