Jimi Hendrix

**Bkflip** · 01-08-2005, 04:16 PM

Im a jimi hendrix fan,

consult my avatar

Playin an instrument is a great way to expand your mind and I play the guitar so hez kind

of my hero. Even though he died before 30 -I doubt anyone will read the whole

thing

Born Johnny Allen Hendrix in 1942, one of the most unusual pop musicians of

recent times got off to an unpromising start. The son of a fun loving woman and an army private, he grew up, often

under the care of aunts and uncles, in an atmosphere of poverty and lack of opportunity.

Expelled from school, and

experiencing minor brushes with the law, he joined the army for a brief stint as a paratrooper, after which he

decided to commit himself to being a musician. Having started playing at the age of 12, and by now a proficient, if

unexceptional, guitarist, he drifted from band to band, criss-crossing the USA and gradually playing alongside

leading names such as Sam Cooke, Wilson Picket, Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, and the Isley Brothers, and

eventually forming his own band in 1965, among the colourful individuals of New York's Greenwich Village. He seemed

able to absorb both the better qualities of musicians he met, and more generally the musical styles he immersed

himself in.

Fellow musicians declared him

to be fast at picking up new material and able to produce radical new sounds, even at a time (in the early 60's)

when sound effects for guitars were very limited beyond basic amplification. Perpetually broke, he would often pawn

his guitar before gigs, knowing that the other band members would have to bail him out if they wanted him to

play.

Discovered in desperate circumstances at the age of 24 in

New York in 1966 by Chas Chandler, an ex-member of The Animals, he had the chance to fly to England for a proper

attempt at recording music. Already he had an strikingly unusual style, with a sound resembling musical electricity,

a strong talent for composition, and a dramatic ability to combine physical movement and emotion with his improvised

music. By now his playing did not resemble any contemporary sound, perhaps explaining his remarkable lack of success

as a solo artist. His performance was made more baffling by his left-handedness, which required him to play a right

handed guitar upside down and backwards, although re-strung for a left-handed

player.

Recordings from these early days reveal a fantastic

vibrato, enabled by his oversized hands, and strange chord structures made possible by a double jointed thumb which

served as a fifth finger and could stretch right across the fretboard. Part of his sound was created by his

de-tuning the strings by a semi tone, which enabled more co-operation with the horn section. He was seen to borrow

guitars strung right or left handed, and to play both with equal facility. As part of his stage act, he would play

with the guitar behind his back, behind his head, or even with his teeth. He mastered feedback, dazzlingly fast

blues runs, and started to absorb the songwriting styles of Bob Dylan. Less known was his fondness for Wagner, jazz,

and classical music.

The highly respected musician Les Paul saw

Hendrix auditioning at a club in 1965, and was struck by the sheer force of the performance. "Yes sir, he sure knew

how to shake those strings," Paul remembers. Dispensing as fast as possible with his errand, he returned to the club

to sign the 23 year old to a contract, but discovered to his dismay he had drifted on. Despite much effort, Paul was

unable to trace him, and could find no-one who even knew the young guitarist's name. "He was just too loud and too

crazy for this place", said the club owner, who had quickly turned him

down.

The personality difficulties which were to make Hendrix'

life so difficult had already showed themselves. Desperate for recording work, yet totally unable to absorb the

business implications, he had already signed contract after contract in New York, encouraged by various shady

characters who then owned "exclusive rights" to all future recordings, in return for playing opportunities at their

cheap studios. These were rapidly bought up by Chandler before leaving New York, except one, which he missed. This

contract had been made with a litigous enterpreneur named Ed Chalpin, who later, after Hendrix had achieved

worldwide fame, sued for ownership of all Hendrix' professional recording work. This property was, even in the late

1960's, worth millions of dollars. But the contract had netted Hendrix the sum of exactly one

dollar.

As a performer, Hendrix was, and still is, unrivalled. In

the early days, his hit-or-miss act either left an indelible impression on audiences or, occasionally, failed

entirely; during his four year career as Jimi Hendrix, his growing reputation would compensate for lack of ideas, at

least in the minds of his audience, although as a creative genius, he eventually found the repetitive charade

unsatisfying, and realised he had sacrificed his artistic freedom for commerical success. His management,

mob-linked, did not tolerate musical experimentation, and went as far as to stage his own kidnapping to emphasise

his dependence on them. Perpetually pressured for new product, and put on a treadmill of endless live shows, he

played or recorded virtually every night from the age of 24 to his death at

28.

The Electric Ladyland studio built with proceeds from his

product was not his to use as he wanted, and nor were his black friends from his Harlem days always welcome with

management, who preferred a musical product for the white middle-class youth, on which his fortune had been built.

Massive amounts of money were generated from the Hendrix machine, but relatively small amounts of cash found their

way to the band: enough to keep them in the style to which they were accustomed and not much more. To this day, Noel

Redding maintains a fruitless search for royalties and funds owing to him from his Hendrix-linked days (at one

American meeting, no less than 27 lawyers were present, to advise him that no money remained in the

accounts!).

In short, Hendrix was a classic example of a genius

prostituted to the world for a quick profit, without regard to the environment required to maintain his longevity.

His notorious unreliability prevented long-term success without a strong guiding management, which his growing fame

eventually allowed him to discard without regard for the implications. First Chandler, and then his fellow

musicians, felt alienated by his independent style, which left little room for the opinions or criticisms of

others.

After two stunning albums, Are You Experienced, and Axis:

Bold as Love, which are regarded as milestones in the development of rock music, and which still sell nearly 30

years after his death, he put together a brilliant, meandering collection of music in the famous double album,

Electric Ladyland. With this product, Hendrix showed he had developed another skill, that of combining and

overlaying complex musical ideas using multi-track technology, making his recorded work as exciting and

unpredictable as his stage shows. Recording was completed while touring the USA and Europe on a massively sold-out

series of concerts, sometimes covering as many as 25 cities in a month.

Remarkably, Hendrix

was one of the only musicians to ever master playing backwards. This technique involved recording a backing track,

then playing it backwards while recording a guitar line over the top. To do this successfully requires a precise

understanding of the song's chord changes, temp, bass lines, and drum accents, in reverse. And the guitar lines

being played, of course, must be the reverse of the final sound: the solo has to be started as it will end, then

build in reverse to the starting point. To the ear, the music has to finally sound as if it was played properly,

with all the emphasis that would normally build during an expressive

melody.

This is an impossible skill to develop, even with practice: it is

absurdly difficult. And while Hendrix was busy directing the engineer to set up tapes backwards, forwards, then

backwards again, there was always the secret suspicion that the final product would have to be scrapped for being

slightly off, or, worse, a mess. But somehow it was always note

perfect.

Hendrix certainly seems to have been a perfectionist.

Bass player Redding reports that Hendrix would spend hours tuning his guitar, by ear; Redding would have time to

leave the studio, visit the pub, "pull a bird", then come back at his leisure to find Hendrix still battling away,

searching for the perfect tuning. "Oh, hours it took," he recalls. His guitar, the Stratocaster, is difficult enough

to keep in pitch even with modern electronic tuners, as the entire bridge of the guitar is sprung: as one string is

tightened, the bridge moves forward and so the other five strings de-tune very slightly. To get it note-perfect

requires many stages, each approaching the desired tone but then slightly over-compensating, so the other strings

tend to correct it towards the right pitch. In fact, no guitar is ever completely perfectly tuned up and down the

fretboard, because of the differences in tension between the open string and the played note at different points

along the neck. The final compromise can be perfect in most places, and very close in the rest, but to Hendrix's

ears, even a small difference would have been a worrying

annoyance.

Ultimately, lacking any kind of supportive management,

he was often left to his own devices, and underwent at least one suicide attempt during a tour in Europe, as noted

by his bass player, Noel Redding. His drug taking was legendary, probably doing more than anything to blunt his

creative tendencies. In many of his concerts, an unbelievable dexterity can be heard in a torrent of notes and

chords. In others, played at the same venue on another night, the same song and virtually the same notes sound

casual, clumsy or disjointed. But as a performer, Hendrix will probably never have an equal. Given his dexterity and

a colossal array of amplification, the pure emotion and energy he transmitted are still awesome thirty years

on.

Inevitably, the hedonistic and self-indulgent lifestyle which,

though common enough at the time, was completely unsuited to his sensitivity, created an atmosphere in which he

pushed himself too far once too often. Surrounded by a management voracious for new product which he was gradually

unable to produce, a crowd of fawning hangers-on, involved in complex love triangles, and having lost even the

day-to-day co-operation of his musical collaborators (drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Redding), he drifted from

performance to performance, often cutting a sad figure between shows. Returning for the last time to his Seattle

roots, during a tour of the west coast, he at once admitted to his down-to-earth relatives that his life was not all

it should be, and that he was desperate for a return to the certainty of his earlier

days.

Shortly after appearing for the last time in London in

September 1970, he was found alone in a basement hotel room, asphyxiated after vomiting in his sleep, amid

circumstances which have never been satisfactorily explained. His girlfriend at the time, Monica Danneman, recently

committed suicide; very likely the truth behind his death will never be known. The ambulance staff found a body on

its own, in a basement room with the curtains drawn shut and the door wide open. "I vaguely remember some colourful

clothing, but we had no idea who he was. His own mother wouldn't have recognised him," said the emergency doctor on

duty that night at St Mary's, Paddington.

He left behind a large number

of partially completed songs and recording works, amid an even vaster quantity of unusable tapes and half-finished

ideas. No-one has explained how an unschooled, semi-literate musician from the slums of Seattle managed to leave

such an indelible impression on popular music, via a brief recording career which despite creating enough variation

to fill some 473 albums of recorded or bootlegged material, spanned a mere four years, and was over by his 28th

birthday.

-scienceandreligion.com