Long time readers may recall that I’ve made a personal practice of pausing and noting on each September 18th the anniversary of the day that American guitarist Jimi Hendrix died. This observation has taken various forms over the years, though plugging in and playing electric guitar has usually been one of them. Playing music would seem to be an appropriate way to observe the passing of player that we wish was still able continue playing and composing music.
The Stratocaster I’ll play later today is heard at the very end of today’s story audio. The original lineup of Television rehearses circa 1974, Lloyd is the guitarist in the center. On either side are the two poet/musicians who founded that band: Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, Billy Ficca is the drummer. Hendrix in the lower right.
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However, today I’ve decided to do something different, a bit opposite really. There’s a story I’ve heard in interviews and through various tellings that includes another guitarist whose playing I admire. That guitarist, Richard Lloyd,* while still an uncelebrated teenager and nascent guitarist, met Jimi Hendrix. I’ve always thought it was one of the great rock’n’roll stories, so I decided to tell it to you in my own words. No music this time, just me telling the story, audio-book style.
You can hear it below with a graphical audio player. No player visible? This highlighted link will play it.
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*Lloyd was a guitarist in a great New York City based rock group Television, whose debut album Marquee Moon stands toe-to-toe with Patti Smith’s Horses as an expression of the remarkable originality that launched what we now call Indie Rock. He went on to record solo records and contribute to other records, notably Matthew Sweet’s Nineties landmark Girlfriend. Lloyd has a 2017 autobiography Everything Is Combustible ISBN: 9780997693768 (or ISBN10: 0997693762). One line I remember from a Richard Lloyd guitar tutorial went something like this. “So the student said, I don’t know much, I’ve only been playing for a few months.” Lloyd replied “No, if you’ve played guitar for a few months, that’s over 2,000 hours! You should be able to develop a lot of skills in that much time.”
I move back and forth with musical instruments and intent here, but since I started as a guitarist, there’s a lot of guitar playing in the Parlando Project pieces. When someone asks about my musical stuff, such as what I play, I often redirect, and make it a point to call myself “a composer” even though the poet in me knows that word’s connotations are fraught.
“Composer” risks putting the listener either in mind of some long past-tense powdered wig guy or a highly serious and educated modern theoretician. I’m neither. What I mean is that my intents with music are to invoke certain sonic combinations. I use various instruments to do that, and often that’s a struggle as I’m not as skilled as many players. Every note I play here comes after a committee meeting between the composer and the musician where the composer asks for things the musician can’t do and the musician suggests to the composer alternatives it can accomplish. Sometimes these are drawn-out affairs, and sometimes they are small latencies as I am asked to improvise then and there.
My poor guitars sit silently in the middle of this struggle, in days between pieces being finished, or in the moments between notes. These two sides win and lose and compromise. I’d certainly be a better composer if I could experiment in areas which my musicianship cannot empirically enter. I think I become a better musician in the times when the composer pushes me to think thematically or to not make the reflex choice.
If all that above seems dreary, it’s not. Yes, there’s friction, but each side enjoys it most of the time. And making music and hearing it are both sensuous acts. Thinking and scheming are involved, but what happens after that, when the next note is sounded, that just feels.
I mentioned last time that every September 18th I take some time to play an electric guitar and commemorate the date that Jimi Hendrix died after likely mistaking the dosage of some foreign sleeping pills. Think for a moment during this paragraph about the troubled history of musicians and drugs. Drugs to stay up, drugs to mellow out, drugs to excite creativity, drugs to sleep fast and deep. In terms of the life the composer asks so much, and the musician abuses the body’s instrument trying to extract those timbres and notes. It’s unavoidable for the composer and musician to struggle, but sometimes external and internal factors let this get out of control.
I played for a couple hours this Saturday, as much as I could spare. I had no ready words to include until I read on the same day an interview in Premier Guitar magazine with a band called Squid.* Squid is a British post-rock/math-rock kind of band, and that’s a genre I have some interest in, as bands that get those labels often are seeking new solutions to using conventional rock combo instruments. The band’s two guitarists had some interesting things to say about the electric guitar as it stands in 2021, more than 50 years after Jimi Hendrix helped redefine its parameters. So, I copied out a couple of quotes from the interview** and read them along with what occurred to me on the guitar in that hour and time.***
Today’s piece is what resulted. In the text, Squid guitarist Louis Borlase opens with an abstract theoretical statement, but soon offers a testimony affirming the expressiveness of the instrument, and for all of Squid’s make-it-new Modernism he ends by saying that that expressive voice allows you to aspire to “those people who came before you.”
Borlase implies a lot into what for someone of my age seems objectively a short amount of history for the electric guitar, which was only about 20 years old when I was born, and then whose extraordinary timbral variations were first exploited in my lifetime. But he’s not wrong, electric guitarists have stuffed a lot into that time since Hendrix’s. And electric guitar is also just another instrument, something to make music with, and we know we’ve done that since someone drilled some holes in a hollow bone or reed.
The second part quotes the other guitarist, Anton Pearson, who speaks theoretically again. Pearson says that the electric guitar is the “perfect marriage of technology and a gestural nature” which I believe at this time is true. Just as the invention of the modern drum set allowed for one drummer and their four limbs to command a combination of percussion voices and roles, the modern electric guitarist can use the fingers of both hands and foot-operated devices to create a large amount of playing instructions and sounds.
As beautiful and fundamental as wind instruments are to music, no one has extended them to that level. Keyboards come very close, including their modern use to control synthesizer timbral range and their ability to use all the fingers and limbs at once, but Pearson wisely restates his “gestural nature” of the guitar to include “visceral nature.” I have seen Keith Emerson stab knives into his keyboard and wrestle it to the ground. I have heard the groans and watched the creative agony on Keith Jarrett’s face while he played acoustic piano. Yet, they never touch the strings directly with either hand in various ways, they never move the instrument into the spot where the amp starts to possess the note.
“Is this a crime against the state? No! Someone controls electric guitar”
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Are we past all that, is the electric guitar now a long-tail, trailing instrument tied to a passing era? The very thing I pedantically call myself, a composer, is now often modified to “beat maker” as folks think of new ways to order and modify sound, often without touching a conventional instrument. As listeners the instrumentation is immaterial after all. As I wrestle compositionally with my drum tracks, I know that rewards care, and succeeds or fails just as playing an instrument does.
But does anyone just power up and make beats for the sheer joy of it, not for recording or an audience, but just for the physical feel of the sounds being made, and made in real time, and for the ambiguity of the aches in my old finger joints after a session of fretting and neck wrangling? Does Jimi Hendrix, if and wherever his consciousness resides, miss that feel of that neck and the strings under his fingertips?
*If this sort of music sounds interesting to you, you can hear some of the actual sounds of Squid, touring dates, etc. at their web site at this link. Not your thing? I understand. It’s just one of the kinds of music that interests me personally.
**The full interview conducted by Tzvi Gluckin is available on Premier Guitar’s website at this hyperlink.
***Toolkit and process? Here’s details for guitar nerds. Everyone else is excused and can go home early. The drums are a software drum machine, which I intended to improve and then didn’t. I laid down the electric bass part with a Squier Jaguar bass. I did two passes and picked the best one. Last year I bought a set of TI flat-wound bass strings for this bass, which cost about a third of what the bass is worth, but I have old fingers and the soft feel of the TI strings are what they like. The guitar I naturally was drawn to on this day is my current Fender Stratocaster, a “reverse Strat” which emulates the pickup array and neck that lefty Hendrix would have on a regular right-handed Strat flipped upside down.
I tuned up and played for a couple of minutes to reacquaint my hands after playing bass, and then hit record and played for a bit over 16 minutes with the bass and drums. The lead guitar in the right channel is going through a reissue EH Triangle Big Muff fuzz pedal and a Cry Baby wah-wah pedal, though for some of what you’ll hear the wah pedal is left partway down for that Tallulah Bankhead “cocked wah” sound. Rather than emulating Hendrix (something I do sometimes on September 18th) I was aiming this time for the guitar to speak in different voices and over the 16 minutes it sort of does, but I decided to trim the piece down to mostly the parts where I read the Squid guys quotes about electric guitar. At over 6 minutes, even the edited piece is longer than I like to present for the Parlando Project.
The last track I laid down was the left channel rhythm guitar part. I used the same Stratocaster guitar, but it’s compressed with a Boss CS-3 compressor pedal and running through a Walrus Audio Lillian phaser, which even bought used is the most expensive guitar pedal I own. That track sounds almost like a modulated electric piano comping away, but it’s just electric guitar being versatile.
Both of the guitar parts are one pass, “live in the studio” parts. I didn’t have much time to do otherwise. The guitar amp for both electric guitar tracks is a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe.
My recording computer in my studio space is still an 11-year-old Mac Mini running an older version of Apple Logic Pro X.
We are over half-way through Black History month and I’ve mostly spoken obliquely about it. I think that’s my nature. As poet I’m often doomed to reader response that they just don’t get it, and that bothers me, because in my mind I’m intending to link disparate things because I think that’s powerful. But in intending to do that, I make myself obscure—and painfully, some fine people who’ve heard or read my work think that’s my intent or my error.
So, when I speak about one of my discoveries, a law I think is strangely comforting: “All Artists Fail,” I’m speaking from personal experience. You may think, that’s not true about famous artist X or highly revered artist Y, but it is. Even those that are—for a time or for a long time—popular, many will not hear of them, many will not care for their work when exposed to it, and even those that are treasured and ranked highly, how many will understand what they are trying to do sufficiently? Some? Perhaps. Many? One hopes. All? Never. It’s good to aim for the some and honorable to hope for the many. Be prepared for the never-all however. Sequester or armor yourself against that or be prepared to take comfort in it.
That’s part of why this project has a principle of “Other People’s Stories.” More than 90% of the time the words I’m presenting and talking about here are not mine. Trying to encounter those words a couple times a week with an open heart and whatever limitations or strengths I have is the goal. I’ve done that here over the 420 audio pieces and the over 500 posts in the last few years.
The great majority of those that I present here are now dead, many long so. As my son points out to me, mostly white men too. One needs to interrogate the past to form the future. I have a culture I inherited. One that spoke English, was based in the middle of the U.S., and was as blinkered as any. Everyone inherits a culture. It’s inevitable, as inevitable as “All Artists Fail.” What do you draw from it for strength and inspiration, what do you oppose, what do you seek to add?
What can you find in what is not you? All those things. The future is not made of one heart alone, no matter how perfect, it’s made of many hearts. Good art can tear open our boney-caged chests and let us glimpse the beautiful glistening ooze within all of us: Chinese, African, Irish, English, indigenous, immigrant, and on and on. It’s right and wrong—yes, in some proportion, inside all of us—but it’s always beating as music and poetry does.
Long dead CIS white man Phillip Sidney wrote “Fool, said my Muse to me, ‘Look in thy heart, and write.” That can work. That can fail. My muse said, “Look in another’s heart, and no matter how dim your vision inside that swooshing pump, write there.”
More new audio pieces soon. But I was heartened today by a post over on the Yip Abides blog linking to a post from a couple of years ago here. Bob Roman has some very nice things to say about what’s attempted with the Parlando Project, things that reminded me why I do this. He also recomends that the archives here have a lot for those who’d like to find something different any day. The particular piece he linked to had Jimi Hendrix’s SciFi parable about an alien scout-ship dealing with observing life on the “Third Stone from the Sun.” The alien gets it wrong, or sees that we get it wrong: the prime Earth species is a bird, not us warm blooded mammals.
I started out this January trying to translate Rimbaud, and it’s only as the month is ending that I’ve finally got something to present. Why was this such a struggle?
Well, some of it’s me. I’m having a harder time this winter keeping up this project, and by focusing recently on translation I’ve only made it harder on myself. Why do I do these translations on top of composing, recording, and playing most of the instruments in the pieces? That’s more than a rhetorical question, I’ve sincerely asked myself that this month. I’m not a speaker of any of the native languages of the poets I’ve translated, so I work with the highly welcome online dictionaries and computer translators available—but I’m not a literary scholar or expert on any of these poets, and I’ve never lived as part of their culture. I worry about getting it wrong, doubly so in that I present them publicly.
I think I have three reasons. First is that it expands what I can present here. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s difficult to get permission to do what I do for work that’s not in the public domain, and I don’t want to use other people’s translations that are in copyright without permission. Second, I think this is a great practice to improve one’s own poetry. Do any creative writing programs these days require or assign translation of poetry?* I don’t know, but if not, I’d encourage that. The struggle to find the best English word, to not harm the strength of an image, and to shape the poem so that its word-music works are directly transferable to writing one’s own poems. And here’s the last reason: I think performing a poem illuminates it for the reader/performer, it makes it part of your breath. Translating it imbeds it even more so in one’s mind.
So why was Rimbaud a tougher task?
Unlike other poets, I’ve never been a Rimbaud fan, even though Modernist French poetry was an enthusiasm of my twenties. I think I bought a translation of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell at the same Savarns book store on the Minneapolis West Bank where I picked up poetry chap books by Patti Smith and collections of French language Surrealists. And Smith and Surrealists liked Rimbaud a lot. Smith has spoken reverently about how her copy of Rimbaud helped her through her own early twenties, but Rimbaud didn’t perform that service for me.**
Sentinel soul. Teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud
But even just as myth, Rimbaud has an inescapable pull. There’s no story like it: a bright teenager drops out of secondary school, flees to the Paris of the Paris Commune in 1871, takes up with celebrated poet Paul Verlaine. Disasters ensue, including taking the most famous non-fatal intra-author bullet from a disordered Verlaine. In the midst of this, he writes furious poetry, poetry capable of impressing the most avant garde writers of the 20th century to follow.
“Situations have ended sad/Relationships have all been bad…” Plaque marks were Verlaine shot Rimbaud.
All this as a teenager. As his teen years end, he stops writing and moves to Africa to work as a commercial trader, never returning to the writing life and by accounts actively distaining it. He dies of cancer at the age of 37.
As we’ve seen recently here, there are other teenaged poets who’ve produced work we still read today. But very few of them produced their greatest work at that age—and arguably none of their youthful work was as influential as Arthur Rimbaud’s.
I’ve dealt with the trouble that hard-to-grasp, obscure, and Surrealist poets present to translations. Rimbaud was as tough as Mallarmé in that regard. In one Rimbaud poem I finished a complete translation draft, but was left with an “is that all there is” feeling that the result wasn’t all that compelling. I started another and then another, but again the early results didn’t seem like I’d grasped them or that they’d work here.
Then it hit me, at least with his poem “Eternity,” part of its power is incantatory, it’s in the metrical and rhyming effects in the original French! This shouldn’t have surprised me. While there are other ways to achieve similar effects: parallelism, repetition, old-English alliteration, even a certain kind of intellectual rhyme in imagery itself, rhyme is still used in most songs and hip-hop rap flows, not because there’s some kind of rule about it, but because the expectation of return to the rhyme gives a certain fatalistic drive to the verse. And “Eternity’s” meter is also unusual, it’s a very short line, just five beats.
Do you remember me saying that I almost never try to bring over the sound of the original verse into my translations, that I’d rather focus on making the images vivid and for the poem to have whatever good word-music in English? That’s still a practical rule, which may go double when translating from a language like French which has the benefit of so many more rhyming words; but in this short poem I decided to move over to respecting the syllable count of the original line and to a ABCB rhyming scheme.
For good or ill, this did cause me to play more fast-and-loose with some of the more difficult images and phrases in Rimbaud’s poem, ones where other translators had other readings. If it sounded good, if it kept to the scheme, if it seemed to advance some overall flow to the poem’s meaning from image to image, I judged it “close enough for rock’n’roll.”
In the end, my main diversion from other translations of “Eternity” I’ve seen is that many other translations make this poem more of a brag that Rimbaud has absorbed the infinity of the titular eternity and is now it’s master. My version has a more elusive eternity and a sense that others are seeking to apprehend it, much like a search for an underground partisan. Because the other translators may be Rimbaud scholars with a greater mastery of French, there’s a good chance they’re more correct—but if there’s a possibility that the “I is another” in Rimbaud’s poem, there may be an element I’m bringing out that was always there. Here’s a link to the poem in the original French for those who’d like to check.
Musically, this is rock in the ragged sense that rock’n’roll is a loose and inclusive form. There’s no tight backbeat, the bass is a bowed contrabass with some filtering, and the guitar won’t really play the blues—but the overall guitar timbres are from the rock palette. For the chord cadence I made a nod to some of those who did help me get through my 20s. The line in Rimbaud’s poem that ended up being translated (loosely in this instance) as “I see no escape” brought to mind “All Along the Watchtower” sideways to me, and the chord cadence I use is also somewhat similar to Patti Smith/Bruce Springsteen’s “Because the Night.” The lines in my translation “Murmur our desire/Night that is nothing/A day that’s on fire” could well fit into that sort of expression. Some of you know the drill to hear it: the player gadget’s below, but what if you don’t see a player? Here’s an alternative, this highlighted hyperlink will also play my performance.
*I know in the past students were assigned translations from classical Greek and Latin poets as part of general studies. While this came from the idea that classical grammar and vocabulary were the basis for mastery of English (a suspect notion) I think it must have helped many a budding poet.
**It was poet/musicians did that for me: Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and Smith herself. All of these are controversial figures in purely literary circles. I can tell you that none of them helped my standing in those 1970s years when I should have been establishing the peripatetic poetry career that I didn’t have. It would have been better for me, influences-wise, if I could have said Rimbaud instead.
It’s perhaps my favorite scene in D. A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back. Pennebaker has setup this narrative as Dylan tours England in 1965, introduced with shots of British music newspapers touting the teen-aged Donovan as Dylan’s rival. My well-remembered scene is shot in Dylan’s Savoy hotel room, where boffins can pick out various UK music figures sitting about and talking. In the background, there’s Donovan himself, tuning an acoustic guitar as Dylan asks if there’s anyone in the British Isles that is a poet like unto Allen Ginsberg. Dominic Behan is offered. Dylan says nah. Donovan has tuned up and launches into his “I’ll Sing a Song for You.”
“That’s a good song” Dylan chimes in as Donovan sings, and though eyes behind Ray-Ban shades he still seems to be paying respectful attention. Someone says “He plays like Jack man,” not a slur, but referring to Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, the legendary folkie and predecessor to Dylan in the Woody-Guthrie-continuation field.
Dylan takes the guitar from Donovan and launches into “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” The guitar has gathered a capo and Dylan has lost the shades. Donovan lights another filter cigarette and chews on his nails, figures how to be cool.
Now, “rating” Dylan songs is subjective and subject to mood, even for any one person. For this one person, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” gets a lot of respect: a song about love using politics as a metaphor or a song about politics using love as a metaphor? The best metaphors are like that, the thing and the representation can flip places.
So besides the people-watching and the music in a movie about a songwriter that actually has little music in it,* the gist that’s often drawn from this scene is an unhelpful but crucial tip: if you’re ever in a song pull, don’t sing your song just before 1965-vintage Bob Dylan if you can help it.
OK, so I’ve already drifted back to 1965, let’s keep drifting backwards to 1922, and you’re a Modernist poet, not a singer-songwriter. You’re about to be published in The Dial, the sort-of-successor to the mid-19th century American Transcendentalist house organ, now publishing the cream of Modernism in art and literature. Let’s get specific, the “you” you’re playing as you travel back in time is Mina Loy, a woman who’s au fait with the avant garde and whose poetry remains strikingly original even today. Yes, the Modernist movement is going to have its problems with women as artists, but Loy seems fierce.
And the Mina Loy poem that goes into that issue of The Dial is a glorious ode to a visual Modernist: one of Constantin Brâncuși’s series of bird sculptures “The Golden Bird.” Loy’s poem has something the pre-WWI Modernists often had, a joy at the new way of looking and expression.**
The lesson of the Dylan’s Savoy Hotel room is true but unhelpful here. The November 1922 issue of the Dial leads off with a new publication of a poem called “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot. You might have heard of it.
Antiquities dealers ask for more than $1,000 for this back issue
Art of course isn’t a competition. “Rating” art is a silly pastime that gets sillier the thinner you try to slice it. The emotional/intellectual transfer happens between art and audience or it doesn’t. Still the unhelpful rule would hold that if you’re trying to make an impression as a Modernist poet, holding up your “read me” sign next to what gets rated a masterpiece isn’t the way to go.
Now, almost a hundred years later, readers and critics are starting to look again at Loy, whose entire career was overshadowed compared to others she worked beside. How successful was her art? There’s no fixed record, because that assay happens every time it’s read or listened to. I think this tribute to Brâncuși stands up, even though it no longer benefits from the early 20th century shock of the new.***
Musically, today’s performance marks my annual tribute on the anniversary of the unfortunate death of the American musician and composer Jimi Hendrix. Each year for September 18th I plug in a Stratocaster electric guitar and try to channel a little of Hendrix’s bird in flight. Hendrix was enormously interested in the electric guitar’s timbral possibilities, so I tried to make my guitar part reflective, chirping with bird song, and gong-like in turn. You might easily think: this is my Savoy hotel room moment. You could be right, but I persist. My performance of Loy’s piece praising Brâncuși’s sculpture is available with the player below. The text of her poem is here if you want to follow along.
If you ever find yourself, regardless of the unhelpful rule and your careful plans, as a Donovan next to someone as a Bob Dylan, one choice is: go ahead anyway. I’m glad Loy did.
*Yup, it’s true. The movie is forever showing Dylan about to go on stage and then it cuts to another backstage scene. This may have been necessary for music-rights issues, but the movie Pennebaker got was all the more unique because of this.
**RaulDukeBlog has sagely commented here about the gloomy-gus nature of so much of 20th century High Modernism. T. S. Eliot’s poem helped turn it that way, even if it was a personal expiation to break out of that. Two World Wars and surrounding atrocities certainly didn’t help cheer up the arts, and our present state is damp with sodden things that can only be dried with some fire that joy sparks. Another reason to go back earlier in Modernism, and to look at the kindling of artists like Loy and their pure enthusiasm for breaking out of entrenched tropes.
***A famous anecdote about Brâncuși’s work has it that at one point when the statue was being transported to the U.S. the customs officials refused to believe the abstract form was a sculpture at all, and it was instead classified as a metal ingot.
Continuing on with our countdown of the most liked and listened to audio pieces during this past summer here at the Parlando Project, today we’ll look at the pieces that came in 7 through 5 as we move up the list to the most popular piece.
7. The Hunter. Maybe, with Internet audiences, it’s the cats? I’ve playfully included pictures of William Carlos Williams with said cats in a few posts, and Williams, who sometimes thought he was overlooked as an American Modernist while he was alive, seems to be holding an audience, even though his poetry doesn’t present itself with open, easily accessible sentiments. His even more difficult “St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils” almost gave Williams two appearances here this summer, falling just a couple of places back from the top ten. Or maybe it’s the informal American language that he uses? Other American Modernist contemporaries of Williams: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Wallace Stevens often liked to drop leaves from a Word of the Day calendar into their poems, while the New Jersey doctor generally didn’t. Maybe there’s something here with Williams like the cats: familiar and domestic, intriguing, but not seeking to please? After all he once said: “I didn’t ask you to understand anything, only to listen.”
6. The Apotheosis of Harlan Ellison. I’ve warned readers already that this summer’s top ten has too many pieces where I wrote the words, and that’s not representative of what this project is about—and so, here we have the second of three pieces in this summer’s top ten where I wrote the words I perform. Well, at least this one is about someone else, the long-time critic, writer and SciFi anthologist Harlan Ellison.
5. Beloved. My words again, although as I tried to explain in the original post here including it, I was inspired by a statement Bobby McFerrin once made about music, how it touches you inside on that sensitive flap of skin named the eardrum. Given that news this past week has included stories about unwelcome touches, that metaphor goes both ways.
Excuse me, while I kiss this baby. If cats and William Carlos Williams brings in readers, how about W.C.W. and babies?
Back soon with numbers 4 through 2 in our look back at Summer 2018’s most liked and listened to combinations of words and music.
Even though music takes half the time and focus of this project, I find myself talking about it hardly at all, which is probably unfair here “Where Music and Words Meet.” So, today I’m going to talk more about music. If that’s not your interest, I’m still going to ask you to keep reading, as beside the music nerditry, I’m going to touch on other things.
It was my first concert, and so of course it must be memorable. It was at the big amphitheater in Des Moines, a place where about two decades later Ozzy Osbourne would have a memorable encounter with a bat. I was a young teenager, it was the Sixties, and my dad was going along for the concert with me, driving the two-lane roads from our little farm town, just the two of us in the usually crowded Plymouth station wagon with fighter plane wings and sparkle-threaded upholstery that was already tearing in places. I believe he asked me if I wanted to go.
Perhaps this was meant to be a father-son bonding experience. Maybe he’d noticed that I had this somewhat solitary interest in music, but I have my doubts. I had no demonstrable musical talents, and the only music I made was singing, which I did off-key. My father had a pleasant voice—my mother said it was as good as Perry Como’s—and I had heard him singing occasional solos or leading a congregation in church. I don’t think we talked much about it before, after, or during the nearly two hour drive that day.
Like I said, he asked me if I wanted to go. I was warned, or perhaps it was a stipulation if I accepted, that the concert would be long, and I’d have to be patient.
We went to our seats, far back from the stage, and I remember the slope of the seating and our height in the building as being oddly scary to me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I leaned forward in my seat I might tumble over the rows in front of me all the way down to the floor hundreds of feet below.
I came to see why I’d been warned about the concert’s length. It was perhaps two to three hours long, more than twice the length of a church service. I fidgeted some, but I also wanted to listen and understand the music, a performance by a massed choir and an accumulated orchestra of Handel’s Messiah.
In 1970 Jimi Hendrix died in someone else’s flat in the early morning hours of September 18th London time, of an accidental overdose of unfamiliar sleeping pills and wine. That’s a long time ago and stories differ, but it’s likely that a contributing factor was the ignorance, intoxication, or uncaring nature of that someone else. Like Handel, Hendrix had emigrated to England in his twenties to find success there. How complicated this was for Handel I don’t know, but I can speculate a bit with Hendrix.
When David Bowie died, a good deal was made of his ability to reinvent himself as a performer and artist multiple times. Of course artists invent themselves, at least most of the good ones do, but it is rarer to do that more than once or twice. But then in our twenties, artists or not, we all invent ourselves and find some accommodation in the world that we live in. To pull that change off even once should be remarkable, though some inventions are more striking and original than others.
Jimi Hendrix didn’t invent himself into moving to London, a couple of British citizens colluded to offer this to him. At the time Hendrix was having trouble with his invention of himself as a musician. His musical ideas were developing rapidly, and he had experience with the showmanship side of entertainment, if for no other reason than a short stint working in the band behind Little Richard, one of the most outrageous performers ever to tread the boards. Putting those two things together would be an invention, one he probably intended.
Britain poured gasoline on that fire, and I’ve always found some of that gasoline offensive. How much did the sideshow “Wild Man of Borneo” exotic-negro thing figure into his rise there? I’ll refrain from judging too much. After all Hendrix’s stage show at the time was not subtle, and the scene at the time expected spectacle not so much from elaborate stage sets and technical tricks as we see today, but from human movement and actions. My personal reading is that he wanted not so much the attention his act and stage persona invoked, but the safety of that ceremonial mask that would hide the fragility of its inventor. In off-stage interviews, even in his between song-patter, that inventor, still somewhat unsure of the work, would emerge.
In less than a year he took that still forming invention back to the US: the uninhibited, no-boundaries performer combined with the flash guitarist, and it sort of worked there too after the alchemy of his London sojourn. Not everyone was convinced state-side however. Early rock critic Robert Christgau capped off an often-perceptive report from the Monterey Pop Festival with this review of Jimi Hendrix’s American debut:
Hendrix is a psychedelic Uncle Tom. Don’t believe me, believe Sam Silver of The East Village Other: “Jimi did a beautiful Spade routine.” Hendrix earned that capital S. Dressed in English fop mod, with a ruffled orange shirt and red pants that outlined his crotch to the thirtieth row, Jimi really, as Silver phrased it, “socked it to them.” Grunting and groaning on the brink of sham orgasm, he made his way through five or six almost indistinguishable songs, occasionally flicking an anteater tongue at that great crotch in the sky. He also played what everybody seems to call “heavy” guitar; in this case, that means he was loud. He was loud with his teeth and behind his back and between his legs, and in case anyone still remembered The Who, Hendrix had a capper. With his back to the audience, Hendrix humped the amplifier and jacked the guitar around his midsection, then turned and sat astride his instrument so that its neck extended like a third leg. For a few tender moments he caressed the strings. Then, in a sacrifice that couldn’t have satisfied him more than it did me, he squirted it with lighter fluid from a can held near his crotch and set the cursed thing afire. The audience scrambled for the chunks he tossed into the front rows. He had tailored a caricature to their mythic standards and apparently didn’t even overdo it a shade. The destructiveness of The Who is consistent theater, deriving directly from the group’s defiant, lower-class stance. I suppose Hendrix’s act can be seen as a consistently vulgar parody of rock theatrics, but I don’t feel I have to like it. Anyhow, he can’t sing.”
That paragraph should hang next to the reviews of John Keats’ poetry in the all-time bone-head review hall of infamy, and yet Christgau has so much honesty that he makes it available on his website to this day, along with his later opinions. But it does point out a problem, that combining extreme showmanship with musicianship is an unstable combination. Music may be inherent to humanity, but for most audiences (including most music reviewers) the eyes ace out the ears in the race to the mind.
Hendrix himself was troubled by his invention and its reception. He may have wanted the mask of the showman at first, but that need seemed to fade as he asked himself what Jimi Hendrix 2.0 should be. It may have been presumptuous for Christgau to call him a “Psychedelic Uncle Tom,” but Hendrix’s Afro-American audience was slow to build. What seemed to be the forefront of his invention, the combination of the flamboyant showmanship with striking musicianship wasn’t entirely new, even if for most white audiences of his time it had stopped with Chuck Berry, who had never risked expressing the sexuality in Hendrix’s version—but there was something else there. Hendrix was inventing modern Afro-Futurism.
In saying that I’m going to (unfairly) ignore Sun Ra, and some of the occult religions and Rosicrucian-like beliefs that preceded Hendrix. That’s a big subject, but one I’ll ignore here not just for length, but because I don’t know how much Hendrix knew of these predecessors as he developed his next invention. Hendrix was living and intermittently performing in New York in the mid-Sixties during Sun Ra’s New York residency period, so I would think Hendrix might well have known something of Sun Ra, even seen him perform, but that’s not for certain. I’ve never seen Sun Ra mentioned by Hendrix, and none of the inconsistently available Sun Ra recordings are included in Hendrix’s known record collection. It’s also a reasonable belief that more of you may be reading this because I have Jimi Hendrix in the title than Sun Ra, and that says something about Hendrix’s eventual impact compared to the incomparable Sun Ra.
It’s likely that Hendrix’s source, besides his own imagination, was Science Fiction of the Fifties and Sixties. In order to be an Afro-Futurist you have to be intrigued with the future and other worlds, worlds like the vision in that rare barely-ironic Steely Dan song that says, “Any world that I’m welcome to, is better than the one that I came from.” Unlike Sun Ra or later Afro-Futurists, Hendrix didn’t express this vision with costumes; or with meaningful stage props as George Clinton would. Instead he expressed it with his least understood and appreciated talent, as a songwriter and lyricist—and that’s why Hendrix’s Afro-Futurism could be news to you, decades after his death. The cult of “Jimi Hendrix, the greatest rock guitarist ever” has a side-effect, it obscured his lyrics, which were often buried in the mix per Hendrix’s wishes (he shared Christgau’s opinion of his own singing voice).
What if James Marshall (Jimi) Hendrix had expressed his SciFi interests with an electric typewriter instead of an electric guitar?
Here the LYL Band unmasks Hendrix’s lyrics to a song from his first LP.
One obsession in the Cult of Jimi is the question of “What would have happened if he had survived the night of misadventure 48 years ago?” He could have become a mid-level act beloved by other electric guitarists or those who appreciate musical originality like unto Jeff Beck, or he could have easily succumbed to the Seventies’ decent into poly-drug abuse and contractual obligation albums hammered out between hits on the pipe. Many guitar-nerds see Hendrix moving to the jazz-fusion genre that was forming at the time of his death, and speak longingly of the collaborations with Miles Davis and Gill Evans that were being mooted in 1970. But on the evidence of his last recordings, he seemed to be doubling down on the Afro-Futurism with his great lost album First Rays of the New Rising Sun.
Last night I watched Black Panther with my son, who had seen it on release and who wanted to show the movie to me. During the scene near the end, when the two warring kings are watching the sun over Wakanda my own soundtrack in the back of my head was still playing Hendrix’s “New Rising Sun.”
More than fifty years after taking the drive to Des Moines to see Handel’s Messiah, I was visiting London and went to Mayfair and a block of flats there. You enter and pay your admission at a desk in a somewhat cramped entryway, but upstairs is the expansive apartment that George Frideric Handel used as his home as well as his composition and rehearsal studio in the 18th Century.
And further on, you come into a second, smaller 20th Century apartment, decorated in a way I could remember from my youth, with inexpensive gee-gaws and accessories, a hi-fi given its special place, a home altar to the music it played.
This is the place Hendrix lived in for a little over a year while based out of London, the place that must have been even more precious to him that it does to any visitor grasping at their nostalgia for “Swinging London.” Many of you have a place like that in your own memories. Your first apartment, or the first place you lived in with a partner, that place where you invented yourself, or some first version of yourself. But Hendrix had an extraordinarily unsettled childhood, passed from relative to relative, a half a step from foster homes, maybe a single step from homelessness. He’d washed out of the army, couch-surfed a life as an unnoticed musician. Not only was this his first place of his own, it may have been a first candidate for “home” in his life, perhaps the only such place.
As it turned out, being an Afro-American big-deal in the small world of Sixties pop music could not supply that home, but his lyrics and the Afro-Futurism that he helped engender are rich with the dreams and visions of it.
Today’s piece uses my own words to present some images regarding American musician and songwriter Jimi Hendrix. Just like William Carlos Williams meditation on a small plant last time, I pretty much follow the famous Imagist rules: direct treatment of the thing, no unnecessary words, and musical phrasing instead of mechanical metrical feet.
Each one of the images opens up what I hope is a rich question. It’s my hope that the resulting poem and audio piece assists you in remembering these questions that I see as posed in Hendrix’s life. Here is the poem I wrote and used with today’s music:
For the American Hendrix
And then he laid the guitar down, and set it afire
Which seems silly or sacred, depending on the art
He had only to keep himself alive, which would kill him.
He took every stop on the three 21 fret train tracks,
Slid between the rails, rode them underwater,
Understood the train-whistle called his ancestors
Living in the amplifiers, that he could not shake out,
That he could not know, that were here,
Before European words, that were here,
Brought in shackles, that were here,
Building in electricity, that were here
Now, for children who did not know they were children.
Voluntary orphans, immigrants discovering new worlds,
Walking on squatters’ land, not forgetting to bring their chains.
Jimi Hendrix plays for hippies in 1967. Do you envy them or feel superior to them?
In the first stanza, I remind us that Jimi Hendrix was a consummate showman, and that he used showmanship to wrest attention for his art, specifically when he appeared at his first significant concert as a bandleader at the famous Monterey Pop Festival and burned a guitar at the conclusion of a flamboyant act. I present this performance as being consistent to Hendrix’s commitment to his art, as a rock’n’roll musician, an itinerant life with associated dangers, which in his case lead to short life and career. Worth it? Necessary for success?
Hendrix ends his first American show as a bandleader with a sacrifice to his art.
The next stanza acclaims Hendrix for expanding the vocabulary of the electric guitar, using an image of the six-string guitar fretboard, which he transcended with notes beyond the temperament of the frets and though the use of feedback where the notes from the amplifier speaker reflect back to the guitar in the musician’s hands producing sustaining overtones that can be difficult to control but produce extraordinary effects. The question here: these sounds can be harsh, discordant, even painful, but do they too have a necessity?
Next stanza: this feedback is presented as Hendrix’s ancestry: part indigenous, native-American; part Afro-American, a descendent of slaves. This makes Hendrix the point where two arcs of American heritage cross: those that were brought to American against their will, like as to livestock; and those that that were already here and were supplanted by brutal or conniving invaders. The questions here should ask themselves, don’t you think?
The final lines move from Hendrix, to his audience while he was alive and performing: largely white, largely young, many taking a hippie bohemian voyage I liken to America’s famous immigrants, choosing to leave the world of their homes for some promised new world that cannot, and will not, be exactly as promised.
Whatever generation you reside in, you cannot get on a boat or plane to visit another generation’s time; but when you look at a picture or video of a crowd watching Hendrix play, consider those faces. They may be distracted by the day, transfixed or stunned, ignorant and seeking, intoxicated but intent, pleased and puzzled—they may not look like Hendrix, many will seem by their faces to not share his heritage, and none can know the depth of that heritage—and yet, they are dealing with the experience of his art. I ask you not to feel superior or inferior to them from the position of your age or the accident of your generation, but to instead to look to your own heart and ask if there you find some blindness or power, and then to ask, as the concluding words of “For the American Hendrix” does: when coming to your new land, did you carry with you chains?
47 years ago today, Jimi Hendrix died, perhaps alone, perhaps ignored by his companion of itinerant convenience, trying to continue his art, ignorant of the strength of European sleeping pills. To hear my performance of “For the American Hendrix,” use the player below.
Here’s another piece by Dave Moore. Dave plays almost all of the keyboards on the LYL Band music you hear here on this blog, and without his contributions I’d get tired of hearing my own voice all the time myself. Today’s audio piece “Experience” started out intended as a poem, as Dave explains:
“My friend Ethna mentioned the Common Good Books poetry contest, which paid cash, on the theme of experience.
Naturally the next word in my mind was prurience, which in this version I ‘eschew.’ although I changed the printed version to ‘avoid.’ Still, I love the roll of ‘eschew prurience.’
I set out to state that every moment is an experience, and most of them are accidents, which constitutes the glory of the show. But – But seriously… When I brought this lyric to a LYL session, I draped it around a tune, trying to see how the words spilled over the dam. Thus edified, I tinkered with it some before submitting to Common Good.
Of course, I lifted ‘life is but a joke’ from Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ but it worked so well in the stanza (is it a chorus?) of philosophy. I chose to leave the ‘do’ and ‘done’ lines as ironic music which states the case.
So, am I experienced? Conclusively, I can say yes or no.”
“For those of another generation, he’s all but to make fun of,
but they do not understand the experience…” Eric Burdon
Experience is an interesting topic for this book store’s contest. William Blake titled one of his collections of short lyrics “Songs of Experience,” after which I cannot think of the word without thinking of Blake—but Blake also put much store in the auguries of innocence. Ralph Waldo Emerson toured the country as a speaker, but his contemporary Emily Dickinson famously constricted her travels as she grew up. Emerson’s mind worked best traveling widely, as in his essays. Dickinson mind produced compressed words pinned in a matrix of her famous dashes, and it’s Dickinson’s poetry that we are more likely to turn to today. “Like a dream, experience is being where you are” Dave says.
Vinyl lovers, don’t be mislead by the cover shown above, The LYL Band’s version of Dave’s “Experience” doesn’t feature Stratocasters on fire, which is not say that we won’t do that later. Use the player below to listen to “Experience,” or some innocent instrument might get hurt.
Frank Hudson 