Who wrote the book of rock? NO. 8: Jimi Hendrix

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This article was published 10/06/2012 (5215 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In this 10-part series, we pay tribute to the rock ‘n’ roll-era visionaries who came up with the musical vocabulary we’re still hearing today, the ones without whom the language of rock ‘n’ roll would not sound the same.

 

MONTREAL — In a typically cranky interview, seen in the 2009 DVD documentary Jimi Hendrix: The Guitar Hero, Cream drummer Ginger Baker dismissed Hendrix as a “great showman.” In his view, the late guitar player wasn’t in the same league as Baker’s former bandmate Eric Clapton.

Baker was right about the showmanship part. But his damning of Hendrix with the faintest of praise couldn’t have been more off the mark.

When Cream brought the newly arrived Hendrix onstage to jam at a 1966 London concert, Clapton walked off in the middle of the song. Backstage, a visibly shaken Clapton was visited by a puzzled Chas Chandler, who managed Hendrix. “You never told me he was that (expletive) good,” Clapton complained.

We now take it for granted that every aspiring axeman who wants to stretch out on a rock solo owes Hendrix big-time. Even if this generation’s more immediate sources are often guitar gods such as Steve Vai or Yngwie Malmsteen, we see the gleam in Hendrix’s eye with every flash of feedback and each go-for-broke bending of a string.

More than 40 years after his death, guitarists still obsess online over Hendrix minutiae, such as how he got that bend-and-echo effect 43 seconds into Voodoo Child (Slight Return) and again at the 4:55 mark. And you certainly don’t have to look far to find a breathless analysis of how playing a right-handed guitar upside down allowed the southpaw musician to fiddle with the instrument’s volume controls more easily.

But while discussion, debate and dissection of technique speak volumes about Hendrix’s unfathomable contribution to the vocabulary of rock ‘n’ roll’s defining instrument, it’s an anachronism.

When the Seattle-born former army paratrooper and hotshot session musician reinvented himself in Swinging London in 1966, he was like nothing anyone had ever seen or heard.

But the shock had to do with more than his playing.

At that time, there were no guitar-god rock-fusion albums with wild, rambling instrumentals. You had to have songs. And some of them had to be memorable enough to release as a single.

Hendrix had ’em. If his three completed studio albums — Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland — weren’t so full of fascinating, deeply layered and instantly memorable tracks, and if the melodies implied under Hendrix’s wry, half-spoken drawl weren’t there, we wouldn’t be talking about him nearly as much today. And excitement over posthumous releases probably wouldn’t have inflated his catalogue to an absurd 50-plus albums.

The image, of course, didn’t hurt — the wild, gypsy-on-acid wardrobe, the burning of the guitar at Monterey, the too-hip-to-believe demeanour all made people turn their heads on a visceral level — but it’s not why we celebrate Jimi Hendrix today.

We remember and love Jimi Hendrix for the great records.

Those glorious slices of vinyl were, admittedly, elevated by his playing. He acknowledged his blues roots in his phrasing, but was less intimidated by his influences than his peers were.

Hendrix had no qualms about taking the 12-bar language that had inspired him and creating his own version. The explosions of feedback and the war-zone soundscapes were brilliantly balanced with lyrical beauty and a tuneful delicacy that is often completely missed by heavy-metal Hendrix revisionists. In only four years, Hendrix created a sonic universe that guitarists and non-musicians alike will never get past. If anyone ever came close to being rock’s Miles Davis, he was the one.

 

— Postmedia News

Frank Marino

on Jimi Hendrix

 

WHEN I was in Town of Mount Royal as a kid, a friend came back from England with this record. We went over to his basement and he put the headphones on my head and played a song from this album that had not yet come out in Canada by this weird guy named Jimi Hendrix. It was Are You Experienced, the song. When I heard that, I was instantly changed. I didn’t become a guitar player until years later. It was just the music itself.

Today, people automatically equate Jimi Hendrix with guitar, but in those days, that really wasn’t an issue. Nobody said, “Wow! The guitar!” It was the songs with the sounds and the attitude of it. Nobody thought of the instrumentation. Nobody in 1967 was comparing one guitarist to another. It wasn’t part of the daily conversation.

It gave me this unbelievable change in my life about where music was going. It was quite a time — 1967. We had Sgt. Pepper and things were rapidly morphing into this weird version of what we heard before.

Richie Havens spoke to me once about Hendrix, and he said Hendrix didn’t play the guitar, he played the amplifier. And it dawned on me that it’s absolutely true. There’s no shortage of guitar players who are more technically adept, but when you put sound into the equation, that’s what sets Jimi Hendrix apart. He occupies a singular space in that no one prior to him or after him — present company included — has approached that kind of uniqueness and influence.

That doesn’t detract from Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page or any of the other great players, but there’s a special place for that guy — and it’s because of the combination of player, sound, ideas and, quite honestly, innocence. He’s playing from the heart, from the ears and then it comes out as it comes out. That’s why he’s so influential: he’s uncopyable.

 

Frank Marino, once considered Montreal’s answer to Jimi Hendrix, is still performing with Mahogany Rush. He is now at work completing the editing on his first live DVD, filmed in Cleveland. Over the years, he’s added a thing or two of his own to the vocabulary of guitar.

 

— Postmedia News

KEY JIMI HENDRIX TRACKS:

1. Purple Haze

2. Red House

3. Little Wing

4. All Along the

Watchtower

5. Machine Gun