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Wednesday, November 26, 2008
MANIC DEPRESSION (instrumental)
Jimi Hendrix
1967
Unreleased
SPANISH CASTLE MAGIC (instrumental)
Jimi Hendrix
1967
Unreleased
CAT TALKIN' TO ME (instrumental)
Jimi Hendrix
1968
Unreleased
ELECTRIC LADYLAND (instrumental)
Jimi Hendrix
1968
Unreleased
51st ANNIVERSARY (alternate)
Jimi Hendrix
1967
Unreleased
When Mitch Mitchell died earlier this month I spent a few days listening to his music as tribute--and by his music, of course, I mean Jimi Hendrix's music. Mitchell was on the drums for much of Hendrix's career; his jazz leanings were a major influence on the Jimi Hendrix Experience's sound and direction; after Hendrix's death, he helped oversee "Rainbow Bridge" and "The Cry of Love." Hendrix was never one of my favorite artists. I didn't have the problems with him that I had with, say, the Doors or Cream or Bruce Springsteen, and I willingly gave him a place in the pantheon, but off to the side. He wasn't John Fogerty. He wasn't Neil Young. He wasn't Smokey Robinson or Aretha Franklin or the Kinks or the Rolling Stones or even Curtis Mayfield. I guess you could make the case that what I wanted was songs, and then I could make the case that it's because songs teach things, and then you could make the case that all music teaches but that I have a hard time listening to anything but songs. We would go back and forth but I wouldn't waver on Hendrix. His lyrics weren't obtrusive, but most weren't revelatory either, and after a little while, his vocals started to trip me up: I had read in a thousand different places that Hendrix never liked his own voice, and I wanted to disagree, but I couldn't. I never exactly set Hendrix aside--there's always a reason to fire up "Dolly Dagger"--but I never drew him close, either.
Somewhere along the way, for reasons that are obscure if not exactly mysterious, I acquired a bunch of discs stuffed with Hendrix outtakes, rarities, and demos, a good number of which were instrumentals. During this most recent stretch, after Mitch Mitchell's death, I started listening to those instrumentals more avidly, because that somehow seemed fairer to Mitchell. By a happy coincidence, they reminded me of my favorite thing about Hendrix, which were the way he took basic R&B compositions and sent them into the deepest reaches of space. R&B is structurally rigid. There are beams and there are spaces between those beams. Hendrix filled those spaces with the most unimaginable things. He also wrote beautiful ballads and meandering lyrical open-ended jams, but you can only be in a angel or a merman mood so often. The R&B compositions, on the other hand, were like doors, sturdy and square, but Hendrix--with the help of Noel Redding and especially Mitchell--was a visionary when it came to decorating the spandrels over them. At some level, he was all about space, because space is what gives you the possibility of shape and the possibility of color. Listening to Hendrix without the words is like looking at a beautiful girl without talking to her. Here, by beautiful, I mean not necessarily possessed of full lips or deep cleavage or legs that look good in boots. I mean a girl with a face that has many things playing across it at once. That's a face you want to look into for as long as you're permitted, which is why I put the instrumental version of "Spanish Castle Magic" on repeat past the point where I forgot the words, to a point where I was never sure I knew them. "Cat Talkin' To Me" was played live in the spring of 1967 with Mitch Mitchell singing; this is a studio instrumental from the following year. And "Electric Ladyland," which doesn't appear released on the album of the same name, has eventual California Raisin vocalist Buddy Miles on drums instead of Mitchell; forty years later, it still sounds like the future.
Mitch Mitchell died in a hotel room less than a month ago. Jimi Hendrix died in a hotel room more than thirty-eight years ago. Today, November 27, Hendrix would have been sixty-six. Happy Birthday. Make a wish. May you have all the happiness etc. Had he lived, he would have been...well, there's no way to know what he would have been: whether he would have arrived at the rubedo where Freddie King and Bob Dylan melted into Sun Ra or whether he'd be an oldies act appearing alongside Eric Clapton in Prince's Trust shows or whether drugs and sex and ego would have scaled him until he was smooth. It's exciting to think that he would have continued to evolve at the same rate, but impossible to imagine. Hendrix may have been all about space, but he was also all about time, about always wanting (or needing) more of it to get his business done: "If I Don't Live Today," "Wait Until Tomorrow." "Burning of the Midnight Lamp." Revisionists, who are faced the wrong way, like to think that he precognized his early end. Of all the songs about time and its passage, "51st Anniversary" isn't the best-known -- a version was released, as the British B-Side for "Are You Experienced?"--but it's apropos:Fifty years they've been married
And they can't wait for their fifty first to roll around
Thirty years they've been married
And now they're old and happy and they settle down
Settle down, yeah!
Twenty years they've been married
And they did everything that could be done
You know they had their fun
And then you come along and talk about
So you say you wanna be married
I'm gonna change your mind
Oh got to change
That was the good side baby
Here comes the bad side It's a lovely, compact, earthy, bluesy case for youth's need for time both to speed by and to stop in its tracks, and for age's need to hold onto that aspect of youth: "Settle down, yeah!" But Hendrix isn't done. He has all the time in the world to prove to his girlfriend that she should seize the day, and he doesn't let up:So now you're seventeen
Running around hanging out and havin' your fun
Life for you has just begun, baby
And then you come saying
So you, you say you wanna be married
Oh baby trying to put me on a chain
You sure got a lot of nerve
Ain't that some shame
You must be losing your weak little mind
I ain't ready yet, baby, I ain't ready
I'm gonna change your mind
Oooh look out baby
I ain't ready
I ain't ready
I ain't ready
Let me live
Let me live
Let me live a little longer A reasonable request unreasonably granted.Labels: ben, rock
posted by Ben
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