The Jimmi Hendrix Experience

The Jimmi Hendrix Experience

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:24

I hear a guitar, one guitar, playing the national anthem, alone, without accompaniment, in a way that sounds like the instrument is being asked to carry something it was never designed to carry.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Go further.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

It sounds like a building on fire. It sounds like a question that has been asked so many times, it has curdled into grief. It sounds like someone who loves the country and is furious at the country and cannot separate the two feelings, so instead of trying, he bends the string until the note breaks and something underneath it comes out. It lasts three and a half minutes, and it is, I would argue, the most honest three and a half minutes of music the 1960s produced. And the person playing it? James Marshall Hendricks, born in Seattle, the 27th of November 1942. Left-handed in a right-handed world, which will become a metaphor we are going to use very carefully. Black man in an industry that did not know what to do with him. Guitar player of such ability that the word guitar player does not cover it. He died on the 18th of September 1970. He was 27 years old. And in the four years between his first major performance and his death, he changed what it was possible for music to do, what it was possible for a black man to be in American popular culture, and what the national anthem meant. That is a very compressed timeline for that much history.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

And today we are going to find out what it all means. Before we go in, I want to name what makes this episode slightly different from our usual approach. Because normally we bring you a historical figure who has been flattened by the official story. And Hendricks has been flattened, but in a specific way. He has been flattened upward. He has been turned into a monument of pure genius, untethered from everything that made the genius possible and everything the genius cost. We talk about the guitar playing, and we stop there. We do not always talk about what it meant to be the person doing the playing in the country that was doing the watching in the decade that was doing all of this simultaneously.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

And we are going to talk about all of it. The music, the race, the drugs, the women in his life, including Janice Joplin, who is her own complete story and not a footnote to his. The relationship with Bob Dylan, which is one of the more interesting artistic conversations of the 20th century, even though much of it happened without the two of them in the same room. And the death, which is not separate from the life, which is in certain respects the last chapter of the same story.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

We are going to take this seriously.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

We are going to take this very seriously. Welcome back to the Mike and Mark History Experience, the show where we pull history off the page and ask the questions the textbooks are too polite to raise. I am Mike Williams, coming to you from Los Angeles, where my daughter Monica has just asked me whether Jimi Hendrix was the greatest guitar player who ever lived. And I told her that is exactly the wrong question.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

What is the right question?

SPEAKER_00 3:25

The right question is, what was he doing with the guitar? Because if you ask whether he was the greatest, you end up arguing about technique. And technique is not the story. The story is what he used the technique for. And that story begins in Seattle in 1942, and it begins, as most American stories begin, with a family that has been shaped by forces much larger than itself.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Tell me about the family.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

His mother is Lucille. She is 17 when James is born. She is, by most accounts, a vivid, troubled, beautiful woman who loves to dance and has difficulty with the demands of daily life. She and his father Al are together intermittently, separated, reunited, separated again. Jimmy, as a small child, is sometimes passed between relatives, sometimes in his father's custody, sometimes living with family friends. His mother dies of cirrhosis of the liver when he is fifteen. He is not told immediately. He finds out later. He does not attend the funeral. Al does not take him.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

That is a significant wound to carry.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

It is a wound he carries into everything he does, including the music. And I want to be careful here because we are not going to do the thing where we explain genius entirely through trauma. Plenty of people have traumatic childhoods and do not play guitar the way Jimi Hendrix played guitar. But the shape of that childhood, the instability, the sense that the world is not reliably there, the intense loneliness of a child who is moving through other people's houses, that shape is audible in the music. The yearning in it, the excess of it. The way the songs keep pushing past the point where a more settled person might stop.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

And the guitar itself, when does it enter?

SPEAKER_00 5:06

He is around 12 or 13. His father gives him a $1 acoustic guitar, and what happens next is the thing that people who knew him as a child never forget because it is immediate. He is obsessed. He plays constantly. He figures out on his own how to restring a right-handed guitar for a left-handed player, which means he is essentially learning a technique that no teacher can teach him because no teacher is doing it the same way. He is assembling his approach from scratch, listening to the radio, listening to Blues Records, listening to Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and BB. King, who he will later describe as the first guitar player who made him realize what a guitar could do emotionally, not just technically.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

B B King as the first awakening.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

BB King as the first awakening, and then the second one is rock and roll coming up through the radio from stations in the south, Chuck Berry, Little Richard. And this is important because what young Jimmy is absorbing is not one tradition. He is absorbing the blues, which is a music of interiority, of the individual voice confronting loss, confronting the world, confronting God. And he is absorbing rock and roll, which is a music of energy and collective ecstasy and the body. And he is going to spend his entire career playing the two against each other, which is, I would argue, the source of his uniqueness. He never had to choose.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

He joins the army. This is not the most obvious chapter.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

He enlists in 1961. He is 18, he has no money, he has no prospects, and the army at least offers structure. He is assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He makes one parachute jump. He is not by any account a good soldier. He is consistently described as distracted, disinterested in following orders, and caught playing guitar during duties that required his attention elsewhere. He is honourably discharged in 1962 with a note from his commanding officer suggesting that he is unsuited to military service. This is the most accurate assessment anyone in authority ever made about Jimi Hendrix.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

And then the Road.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

And then the Road. And this is the chapter of his biography that is most invisible in the official story, because it does not fit the mythology of sudden discovered genius. From 1962 to 1966, Jimi Hendrix is working, grinding, playing as a sideman on the Chitlin circuit, which is the network of black-owned venues across the South and the Northeast where black musicians could perform without encountering the segregation that shut them out of white venues. He backs Ike Turner, he backs Little Richard, who fires him at least twice, once for wearing the wrong outfit and once for refusing to stop flamboyantly upstaging him. He backs the Isley brothers. He plays with Sam Cook. He is, in these years, developing a stage presence and a guitar vocabulary that no one else possesses, but he is doing it in rooms that white music critics are not in. For audiences that white music journalists are not writing about.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

And this matters. This is not just a biographical fact, it is a structural one.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

It is entirely structural. Because when Jimi Hendrix is discovered, the narrative will be that he was discovered by a white British man, Chaz Chandler, former bass player for the Animals, who sees him performing in a small club in Greenwich Village in 1966 and immediately understands that he is looking at something that has never existed before. And that narrative is true as far as it goes. Chandler does discover him. Chandler does bring him to London. London does make him a star, but what the narrative erases is the decade of work that preceded the discovery. The 10,000 hours played in venues that did not count toward the official history. The Chitlin Circuit did not just sustain black musicians economically, it built them. It was the laboratory, and it was invisible to the people who got to write the story of American music.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

He arrives in London in September of 1966.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

He arrives in London in September of 1966 with Chandler, with $30 and with a guitar. And what happens next is extraordinary. Within days he is playing for Eric Clapton. Clapton, who at this point is widely considered the most gifted guitarist in the world, watches Hendrix play and is, by his own account, so shaken that he briefly considers abandoning music entirely. He says it felt like someone had arrived from another planet. Within weeks, Hendrix has met Pete Townsend, Jeff Beck, the Rolling Stones. He sits in with Cream. He is immediately understood by the people who know what they are hearing as something categorically different.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Why London? Why does it happen there first?

SPEAKER_00 9:43

This is one of the central historical ironies of Jimi Hendrix's story, and it tells you something important about race in America. In 1966, the American music industry has a very clear set of categories. You are a rock act or you are an RB act. If you are black, the industry largely pushes you toward RB, towards soul, toward the market it has already constructed for black music. A black man playing loud electric guitar with psychedelic overtones and referencing Bob Dylan lyrics does not fit the existing categories. The American industry does not know what to do with him. London in 1966 has no such confusion. For two reasons. First, the British invasion has made American roots music, including black American roots music, into an object of near religious reverence. British musicians have spent five years studying and imitating and worshipping the exact tradition Hendrix comes from. Second, Britain in 1966 does not have America's specific racial architecture. It has its own forms of racism, which are real and serious. But the particular American structure in which black musicians are sorted into separate commercial categories and kept there is not operative in the same way. London hears Hendrix as a musician first. America, when it eventually catches up, will have to do more work to hear the same thing.