I’ve always had reservations about this Hendrix fella. Sure, he was probably the most brilliant and innovative rocker to ever set fire to an electric guitar, and he looked cool as shit and was cool as shit, no doubt about it, but here’s the thing—great guitar players have never been my thing.
Eric Clapton bores me. Jeff Beck gives me a bad case of diarrhea. That Mahavishnu dude is okay, in small doses. Rory Gallagher, Stevie Ray Vaughn and all those other white blues guys can suck it. I’ll take Ron Asheton or Greg Ginn or Glen Buxton or J. Mascis any day of the week including Mumsday, which falls between Tuesday and Wednesday on the Galician calendar. Evidently it’s as difficult to learn Galician as it is to learn how to play guitar as well as Jimi Hendrix.
And I’m not the only guy with reservations about this Hendrix cat. Genius can be annoying, and nobody likes a showoff. Guy lit his eyebrows on fire and played a solo while his guitar was in another state once. Well, okay. The guy’s immense talent led Chuck Eddy to write (in his 1991 book Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe) “Hendrix was a humorless blowhard as given to onanistic showboat puke as any of his metallic heirs, and by knowing a million chords and displaying every last one of ‘em to mooncalves too stoned to get up and walk the other way, he initiated rock’s cult of virtuosity for its own sake, turning a once-vernacular music into something it was never meant to be.”
In short, he was Emerson, Lake & Palmer in a single psychedelic headband!
So yeah, I’ve never found myself attracted to his music, but here’s the thing—the music I DID HEAR WAS THE WRONG MUSIC, aka the kind of music that made Hendrix the prodigy, the virtuoso, the GOD I had no interest in worshiping, which I only discovered the other day when his version of “Wild Thing” from 1986’s LP Jimi Plays Monterey came on the car radio.
And I realized I was an idiot of the blithering variety, and had been blithering idiotically virtually my whole life, and in print no less! In short, my blithering footprint is large, and there for the entire world to see!
Because Jimi wasn’t playing a million chords, wasn’t sonically showboating, wasn’t whipping it on you Jim, wasn’t telling Rover to move over and let Jimi take over—he was playing pure unfettered-by-genius feedback, squalls and squalls of the stuff like he’d just bought it in bulk, and listening to the beginning I wondered if he (although I didn’t know it was him) was going to bother to play a song at all (which would have been fine by me).
Until he finally played the iconic opening chords of “Wild Thing,” and I thought my head was going to split wide open, which is what Lou Reed says at one point in “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the only song I’ve ever heard that could compete with this one in the hideous noise department.
If you watch the film he’s VISUALLY showboating, hamming it up and playing the chitlins’ circuit for all its worth, but that’s fine by me—his “Come on kids, let’s put on a show!” attitude is inspiring. He bends over backwards, covers his face with his puffy electric yellow sleeve like he can’t stand to watch himself play, drops to his knees, does a psychedelic backwards roll (inventing a new sushi option in the process), plays his ax behind his back, fucks the speakers so as to horny up the feedback process, hunkers down and places his guitar between his knees, humps the mutha, and does this spooky voodoo chile bit with his fingers, all before establishing himself in legend and fact by setting his guitar on fire. Jerry Lee Lewis may or may not have done the same thing with his piano several years earlier.
Why, Hendrix does everything but juggle chainsaws while riding the shoulders of an untrained Kodiak bear, and he has to because (as the film makes clear) most of the people in the audience look singularly unimpressed (unconscious even) until he produces the butane. The bored hipster is not a recent invention.
Hell, Hendrix even chews gum and plays the electric guitar at the same time!
Sonically, he’s gone completely garage rock, and he’s giving “Louie Louie” a run for its money, and “Louie Louie” is without a doubt the greatest song never recorded by Chuck Berry, whose “Johnny B. Goode” Hendrix also turns into a feedback monster. He keeps things as simple as he ever would, which is to say he’s still producing sounds no one else ever will, but he sacrifices none of the original song’s barbaric yawp. Hendrix can play the Neanderthal cave dweller as well as the Troggs, and unlike them, he’s smart enough to invent fire in the process.
And the amazing thing is that I like the parts where he deviates from the song, which is the first rule of “Louie Louie Club”—never get out of the boat, to quote Chef from Apocalypse Now. But he does! He gets out of the goddamn boat! And only IMPROVES the song in the process! Chef lost his goddamn head!
Like Chuck Eddy, I will always prefer The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s 1969 Smash Hits to anything else Hendrix ever did, because I prefer him reined in—adapting himself to the constraints of the hit single did him good. But “Wild Thing,” damn. There’s no hit single in there. It’s all chaos, feedback, and the invention of the electric barbecue grill, with a stone age stomper of Godzilla proportions attached. Perfection in short.
As for the rest of Jimi Plays Monterey—I betcha it’s great!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
