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Pete's RS Essay On Hendrix
Pete's Rolling Stone magazine essay on Jimi Hendrix
http://www.rollingstone.com/features/coverstory/featuregen.asp?pid=1916
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Jimi Hendrix: The Greatest Guitarist of All Time
The bridge between the blues and modern sounds
By Pete Townshend
I feel sad for people who have to judge Jimi Hendrix on the basis of
recordings and film alone, because in the flesh he was so extraordinary.
He had a kind of alchemist's ability; when he was on the stage, he
changed. He physically changed. He became incredibly graceful and beaut-
iful. It wasn't just people taking LSD, though that was going on, there's
no question. But he had a power that almost sobered you up if you were on
an acid trip. He was bigger than LSD.
What he played was fucking loud but also incredibly lyrical and expert.
He managed to build this bridge between true blues guitar -- the kind
that Eric Clapton had been battling with for years and years -- and mod-
ern sounds, the kind of Syd Barrett-meets-Townshend sound, the wall of
screaming guitar sound that U2 popularized. He brought the two together
brilliantly. And it was supported by a visual magic that obviously you
won't get if you just listen to the music. He did this thing where he
would play a chord, and then he would sweep his left hand through the air
in a curve, and it would almost take you away from the idea that there
was a guitar player here and that the music was actually coming out of
the end of his fingers. And then people say, "Well, you were obviously on
drugs." But I wasn't, and I wasn't drunk, either. I can just remember
being taken over by this, and the images he was producing or evoking were
naturally psychedelic in tone because we were surrounded by psychedelic
graphics. All of the images that were around us at the time had this kind
of echoey, acidy quality to them. The lighting in all the clubs was
psychedelic and drippy.
He was dusty -- he had cobwebs and dust all over him. He was a very
unremarkable-looking guy with an old military jacket on that was pretty
dirty. It looked like he'd maybe slept in it a few nights running. When
he would walk toward the stage, nobody would really take much notice of
him. But when he walked off, I saw him walk up to some of the most covet-
able women in the world. Hendrix would snap his fingers, and they followed
him. Onstage, he was very erotic as well. To a man watching, he was erotic
like Mick Jagger is erotic. It wasn't "You know, I'd like to take that
guy in the bathroom and fuck him." It was a high form of eroticism, almost
spiritual in quality. There was a sense of wanting to possess him and
wanting to be a part of him, to know how he did what he did because he
was so powerfully affecting. Johnny Rotten did it, Kurt Cobain did it.
As a man, you wanted to be a part of Johnny Rotten's gang, you wanted to
be a part of Kurt Cobain's gang.
He was shy and kind and sweet, and he was fucked up and insecure. If you
were as lucky as I was, you'd spend a few hours with him after a gig and
watch him descend out of this incredibly colorful, energized face. There
was also something quite sad about watching him. There was a hedonism
about him. Toward the end of his life, he seemed to be having fun, but
maybe a little bit too much. It was happening to a lot of people, but it
was sad to see it happen to him.
With Jimi, I didn't have any envy. I never had any sense that I could ever
come close. I remember feeling quite sorry for Eric, who thought that he
might actually be able to emulate Jimi. I also felt sorry that he should
think that he needed to. Because I thought Eric was wonderful anyway.
Perhaps I make assumptions here that I shouldn't, but it's true. Once --
I think it was at a gig Jimi played at the Scotch of St. James [in London]
-- Eric and I found ourselves holding each other's hands. You know, what
we were watching was so profoundly powerful.
The third or fourth time that I saw him, he was supporting the Who at the
Saville Theatre. That was the first time I saw him set his guitar on fire.
It didn't do very much. He poured lighter fluid over the guitar and set
fire to it, and then the next day he would be playing with a guitar that
was a little bit charred. In fact, I remember teasing him, saying, "That's
not good enough -- you need a proper flame-thrower, it needs to be
com-pletely destroyed." We started getting into an argument about destroying
your guitar -- if you're going to do it, you have to do it properly. You
have to break every little piece of the guitar, and then you have to give
it away so it can't be rebuilt. Only that is proper breaking your guitar.
He was looking at me like I was fucking mad.
Trying to work out how he affected me at my ground zero, the fact is that
I felt like I was robbed. I felt the Who were in some ways quite a silly
little group, that they were indeed my art-school installation. They were
constructed ideas and images and some cool little pop songs. Some of the
music was good, but a lot of what the Who did was very tongue-in-cheek,
or we reserved the right to pretend it was tongue-in-cheek if the audience
laughed at it. The Who would always look like we didn't really mean it,
like it didn't really matter. You know, you smash a guitar, you walk off
and go, "Fuck it all. It's all a load of tripe anyway." That really was
the beginning of that punk consciousness. And Jimi arrived with proper
music.
He made the electric guitar beautiful. It had always been dangerous, it
had always been able to evoke anger. If you go right back to the beginning
of it, John Lee Hooker shoving a microphone into his guitar back in the
1940s, it made his guitar sound angry, impetuous, and dangerous. The
guitar players who worked through the Fifties and with the early rock
artists - James Burton, who worked with Ricky Nelson and the Everly
Broth-ers, Steve Cropper with Booker T. -- these Nashville-influenced
players
had a steely, flick-knife sound, really kind of spiky compared to the
beautiful sound of the six-string acoustic being played in the background.
In those great early Elvis songs, you hear Elvis himself playing guitar on
songs like "Hound Dog," and then you hear an electric guitar come in, and
it's not a pleasant sound. Early blues players, too -- Muddy Waters, Buddy
Guy, Albert King -- they did it to hurt your ears. Jimi made it beautiful
and made it OK to make it beautiful.
(From RS 931, September 18, 2003)
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- SCHRADE in Akron
Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact,
every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)