Jimi Hendrix (1942 – 1970)
Born Johnny Allen Hendrix, was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter.
I don't really live on compliments. As a matter of fact, they have a way of distracting me. I know a whole lot of musicians, artists out there who hears the compliments and thinks "wow, I must have been really great" and so they get fat and satisfied and they get lost and forget about their actual talent and start living in another world.
We started from the premise that music was a mission, not a competition … That the basis was the blues, but that the framework of the blues was too tight. We'd talk first about what he wanted the emotion of the song to be. What's the vision? He would talk in colours and my job was to give him the electronic palette which would engineer those colours so he could paint the canvas.
Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand?
Hey Joe, I said where you goin' with that gun in your hand?
Alright. I'm goin down to shoot my old lady,
You know I caught her messin' 'round with another man.
Yeah,! I'm goin' down to shoot my old lady,
You know I caught her messin' 'round with another man.
Huh! And that ain't too cool.
I try to get up every day.
Listen here, baby
And stop acting so crazy
You say your mum ain't home,
it ain't my concern,
Just play with me and you won't get burned.
I have only one itching desire:
Let me stand next to your fire.
Have you ever been experienced?
Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful.
Jimi Hendrix is very important. He's my idol. He sort of epitomizes, from his presentation on stage, the whole works of a rock star. There's no way you can compare him. You either have the magic or you don't. There's no way you can work up to it. There's nobody who can take his place.
I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.
Sorry for the tune up between time, but what the hell, cowboys are the only ones who stay in tune, anyway...
You're just like crosstown traffic
So hard to get through to you.
Crosstown traffic.
I don't need to run over you.
Crosstown traffic.
All you do is slow me down.
And I'm tryin' to get on the other side of town.
I got a bad, bad feeling my baby don't live here no more...
But that's alright i still got my guitar.
Well she's walking through the clouds
With a circus mind, that's running round.
Butterflies and Zebras, and moonbeams, and fairytales-
That's all she ever thinks about. Riding with the wind.
Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations. Misses bed check: sleeps while supposed to be working: unsatisfactory duty performance.
When you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form … The electronics we used were 'feed forward', which means that the input from the player projects forward – the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing – so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive – it is speed-forward analogue, a non-repetitive wave form, and that is the definition of pure music and therefore the diametric opposite of digital.
Look, if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples – it depends on how you throw the stone, or the wind. Digital makes the false presumption that you can predict those ripples, but Jimi and I were always looking for the warning signs. The brain knows when it hears repetition that this is no longer music and what you hear when you listen to Hendrix is pure music. It took discussion and experiment, and some frustrations, but then that moment would come, we'd put the headphones down and say, "Got it. That's the one."
White collar conservative flashin' down the street,
Pointing that plastic finger at me,
Hoping soon my kind will drop and die,
But I'm gonna wave my freak flag high.
Waterfall, nothing can harm me at all
My worries seem so very small
With my waterfall.
I want him to be remembered for what he was – not this tragic figure he has been turned into by nit-pickers and people who used to stalk us and collect photographs and 'evidence' of what we were doing on a certain day. He could be grumpy, and he could be terrible in the studio, getting exactly what he wanted – but he was fun, he was charming. I want people to remember the man I knew.
Anger he smiles towering in shiney metallic purple armour,
Queen jealousy envy waits behind him,
Her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground.
We’ll hold hands and then we’ll watch the sunrise
From the bottom of the sea
But first, are you experienced?
Uh-have you ever been experienced? Well, I have
Hendrix had conjured – with his vision and sense of sound, his personality and genius – the most extraordinary guitar music ever played, the most remarkable sound-scape ever created; of that there is little argument. Opinion varies only over the effect his music has on people: elation, fear, sexual stimulation, sublimation, disgust – all or none of these – but always drop-jawed amazement.