Imagine this: it is 1968, a darkness-at-noon February winter, and you are about to see Jimi Hendrix at the Chicago Auditorium Theatre. You have just turned sixteen.

You have seen the opening act, Soft Machine, and they are remarkable; you weren’t expecting greatness from an opening act, why should you?  But there it was. Years will go by and you will still remember that set. But as you are sixteen, you are young and stupid enough to be distracted by a disconcerting thought: maybe the light show that obscured the musicians during their entire set will continue through Jimi Hendrix and that won’t be good, not good at all.

A couple of things: don’t be thrown off by ‘1968.’  The year is earlier than it sounds, particularly in the Midwest, even Chicago. Sure, the Monterrey Pop festival took place in 1967, the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper was 1967, but in the Midwest, the Summer of Love, marijuana and flying your freak flag was still just a Time Magazine cover. The whole era arrived eventually, of course, but sometimes culture travel time operates on a seven second delay and sometimes it’s dragged along by a team of oxen. Cultural time travel speeds up and slows down.  It’s not straight-line linear, as the Democratic National Convention melee just blocks from the Auditorium proved a mere six months later: the critical intersection where Change and Chicago got sped up.

So Jimi is in the wings. His debut album, Are You Experienced, has been out since last fall. Quite frankly it had taken that long for most people to really absorb it. Here’s why: it was Charlie Parker, it was David Hockney, it was Nureyev, it was Thomas Pynchon. It was any and every time that an artist comes out of freaking nowhere with a concept and voice so completely realized yet so totally new that your only emotion is a blend of awe and suspicion.  Where the hell did that come from? And is it really any good? Or is it noise, meaningless movement, grandstanding, not really ‘art/writing/dance/music’…fill in the blank.  On top of all this, Jimi seemed to be having a very good time.

Are You Experienced marked the absolute first time in rock music that fluid, no back-beat, jazz rhythms (drummer Mitch Mitchell) were ever layered under distorted, harmonically sophisticated, screaming guitar melodies.

Guitar note as expression, note as animate object, note as mammal, note as pure machine, note as pure pleasure: it changed everything. Tone became as important as the actual note selection; in fact tone becomes the determiner of Old World versus New World, elect versus preterite.

Guitar strings are no longer plucked with a short decay, they become an Air Force of one, screaming and bending, harsh, beautiful, all in one 16-bar solo, all in one Fender air raid siren aria.

Now I will tell you exactly how this was done. Ready?

One Fuzzface fuzztone and one Vox Wah-wah. Two little pedals on the floor and the whammy bar on Jimi’s Fender Stratocaster. That’s it. Guitarists today, with all the studio quality rack effects and even guitar synthesizers, not to mention forty years to backwards engineer him, have trouble duplicating Jimi. Of course, we can no longer land a man on the moon either, but what the heck.

Hey 1968, I’ll see your BB King, I’ll see your Al Jardine, I’ll see your Keith Richards, I’ll even see your Eric Clapton, I’m all in.  If I am not mistaken the future has just arrived. Apparently by air.

It is mindful of Sun-Ra, black jazz band leader extraordinaire, shepherding and transforming his small post 1940’s be-bop band into the 1960’s Sun Ra Intergalactic Arkestra, now with African robes and a female choir. Behind the music in background, then in foreground, the choir would rhythmically chant: “If you are not a myth then who’s reality are you?” over and over, then reverse it, “If you are not a reality then who’s myth are you?” (Hypnotic yet prescient — this being, of course, the perfect analog metaphor for Hendrix.)  Sun Ra, who also pioneered electronic instruments, moving years ago from piano to primitive electric organ, introduces his tenor saxaphonist in concert: “And now Danny Davis would like to tell you about life on Saturn.”  Then Danny Davis Coltranes his way through the extended solo, his sax bleating and shrieking, telling you in fact about life on Saturn.

So Jimi is in the wings, ready to go on. The crowd and the Sunn Amplifiers hum in unison. Before the curtain goes up, while the lame local disk jockey begins the introduction, Jimi plays the theme to the then very tired Pepsodent toothpaste commercial as the perfect musical joke and the crowd goes crazy. We are going to have fun.

Onstage, jazz meets feedback, meets noise as art, meets melody as noise, all in some loose song construct. Not to mention every roadhouse circuit guitar behind-the-back trick in the book, all his now famous clichés.  Jimi’s singing voice, while totally defining and wonderful, is merely a background vocal, a snatch of vocal really, to get the verse out of the way and on to the business of playing.

Some cultural icons evolve.  Critics and fans watch their progress and comment on different or favorite periods of development. Brian Wilson, Picasso, Coltrane.

Some artists arrive fully formed: the Beatles are a great example, as Meet the Beatles is in many ways a better album than Sgt Pepper.  But Jimi Hendrix didn’t just arrive fully formed — he arrived with a sonic boom. One strained to see the landing craft. His 1966 album Are You Experienced sounds like it was recorded yesterday, recorded tomorrow. 1966!  Life on Saturn.

In the late 1960’s three years apparently was a lifetime. Maybe the light shone that bright, I’m not sure. From the ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ the Beatles’ shining new faces and “Sorry Girls He’s Married” in bad television graphics — to Sgt Pepper and “A Day in the Life” — scotch and coke to LSD, mop tops to mustaches. Three years.

The Beatles’ non-stop musical output in that span was ridiculous. Meet the Beatles, The Beatles’ Second Album, Something New, Yesterday and Today, Beatles VI, Hard Day’s Night, Help, Beatles ‘65, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Strawberry Fields, right up to Sgt Pepper. From 1964 to 1967, their 108 original tracks were written, recorded and served up to the giant ear. All under the hottest searchlight imaginable.

With Hendrix it was the same thing.  Three major albums: Are you Experienced, Axis Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland, all created in three years while fulfilling never-ending, nonsensical, non-geographic touring thanks to Hendrix’s despot manager, Mike Jeffries. It was complete and utter crazytown touring that took a toll in every way imaginable. But in spite of all that, the musical output, still so completely compelling forty years later, forms a musical lifetime and imprint. 1966 to 1969: three years.

In 1967, the Monterrey Pop Musical Festival did Jimi Hendrix what would turn out to be the biggest favor and the biggest disservice at the same time. He became famous in a single stroke, but he also created a non-musical expectation. At the back of everyone’s mind in the Chicago Auditorium audience that night in 1968 was the question: will he destroy his guitar? If he doesn’t, are we shortchanged? Does it mean he wasn’t totally into it? If he does is it now is it just a bit? Is it just stagecraft? Is it showbiz?

That was Jimi’s conundrum, way oversimplified but true, and despite his genius he never quite escaped it. Was the crowd there to see the bump and grind, guitar slammed into the amps or smashed, or were they there to hear the future? Jimi played with God and everybody including even God Jr., Miles Davis, but it’s too bad he wasn’t asked to join the Sun Ra Arkestra. I am betting he could have happily helped Danny Davis tell the world about “life on Saturn.”  Again and again.

Music has de-evolved so completely that today even mid-sixties surf music has aged into something somewhat listenable, tragic though that may be. But it is much more fun to still pretend that it isn’t, ignore the slide, ignore the musical entropy and decay and still obey Jimi’s stern command found on ‘Third Stone from the Sun‘ — a cinematic, Armageddon-y seven minute instrumental with its now famous beautiful fuzz guitar melody over Mitch Mitchell’s swirling rhythms where he instructs us to “Never to listen to Surf Music again.”

At least on this planet.

John Trimble     Sept 2007 / Indianapolis

 

 

 

 

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