Jimi Hendrix deep within the blues and alive onstage at Woodstock - 25 years after death

African American Review, Summer, 1995 by David Henderson

I wrote the book as the result of a promise I made to Hendrix at a nightclub in Manhattan in 1969. I had seen him go head to head with Sly Stone, who was then at his height, at the Fillmore East. They both blew me away so bad that I immediately revised my thinking about black music. While Amiri Baraka had gone from Blues People to Black Music, dealing with blues and jazz as art forms, I felt he had not really dealt with all that black expression in between. Not too many black writers were writing about the popular black music at that time.

While Sly Stone's music was eminently danceable, Hendrix's was not, although he himself had no trouble dancing to it. And also singing and playing and doing feats with his guitar - all at the same time. Hendrix was then playing a highly refined art music under the aegis of rock. If you listened beyond the standard drums and bass routines, there emerged an amazing virtuoso artist on guitar. Many heard it then, many hear it now. People have not stopped listening to Hendrix, because his shit is the real deal.

Recent events have shown that Hendrix's spirit is still very much involved in this world. The day in April of 1993 when a touring art show that featured representations of Hendrix's image, entitled "The Jimi Hendrix Exhibition," opened at a gallery in New York City's Soho district, Al Hendrix, his father, launched a lawsuit against the organizers of the show, who control the Hendrix Estate and who are also therefore the "legal" owners of Jimi Hendrix - all he had produced, including his image. Those anonymous entities purchased Jimi Hendrix some years ago. If this is not posthumous slavery, pop zombie-ism, then I don't know what is. The word out at this show was that they were not interested in anything about the strange circumstances of Hendrix's death. They were celebrating his life.

While those anonymous owners of Hendrix's oeuvre were avoiding talk or images of his death, a former girl friend, Kathy Etchingham, sought to have the original racist inquest reopened in England, where Hendrix was pronounced dead under mysterious circumstances in September of 1970. The inquest allowed an "open verdict" that meant they could not really say how he died, but many people who testified told conflicting stories before and after their testimonies. And the ambulance drivers, who apparently were not listened to at the time, recently stated that, when the ambulance got to the Samarkand Hotel, the flat was empty except for Hendrix's dead body, a wine-soaked towel around his neck. Of course, the inquest was not allowed to be re-opened, but Etchingham may continue to defy those who would not enjoy such access to the rewards of Hendrix's genius if it were discovered that he was actually murdered. A girlfriend who was near him at the end stated soon afterwards on a radio program that the Mafia had killed him.

Hendrix once said that rock 'n' roll was simply blues. Perhaps if he had waxed more extendedly on that subject black musicians might have heard it. It took the Black Rock Coalition behind Vernon Reid's band, Living Colors, to pound that point home way later.

But no matter how you designate the music, what matters in the end is how well it is played, be it for the dancers on a postage-sized dance floor or for a venue the size of Woodstock, a rolling expanse of earth as far as the eye can see. To listen to Hendrix today is constantly to be reminded of his gifts. His precise and rapid picking, his recognizance of sound and noise (from the most common blues rhythm guitar run, to the walls of distortion he created, to his ability to range between pure blues and avant-garde jazz forms), and more importantly his improvisational ability - all point out the totality of his delivery. While nearly all guitarists today have gone through his licks, they cannot get near to what he was unless they actually play his compositions (and that's what they are - compositions), and there you see how impossible it is for one guitarist to get the sound he got. I always wondered how it would be if an entire symphony were to play his compositions the way he played them. Not the way, it turned out, Gil Evans arranged them at Carnegie Hall either. It was a good effort, but it just pointed out how difficult the work really is. Hendrix made it sound easy. But if one feat of his remains paramount it would be his ability to play with feedback, control it, and make it melodic. I had heard Peter Townsend of the Who say that he had pioneered the use of feedback. I spent a few hours going through all of the Who's shit without ever hearing anything that approached Hendrix's control or melodic use of feedback within a song.

Just about all of the music released on two recent CDs - Jimi Hendrix: Woodstock (MCAD 11063) and Jimi Hendrix: Blues (MACD 11060) - ave been available for some time to collectors or aficionados via bootlegs, often from those friends of various music industry personnel who have had access to board tapes of concerts or dubs or out-takes from recording sessions, or copies of jams and audience-taped performances recorded on a wide array of sound machinery.