The Jimi Hendrix Solo Show—Entitled Opinions 06/20/2009

06/20/2009

The Jimi Hendrix Solo Show

If a lion could speak, we could not understand them.

Fidkin's style in the philosophical investigations.

I'm not suggesting that Jimmy Hendricks was a lion, but what kind of a creature was he?

I'm Nehi, the Greek or my seed, the Spetius, in the U.S.

Aquinas is a step-in-tion of angels.

Every angel is a little species unto itself.

Jimmy's guitar certainly spoke a weird language.

There are some words we can understand.

Oh, strange, beautiful grass of green with your majestic silken scenes.

Your mysterious mountains, I wish to see closer.

May I land my kinky machine.

I wonder where that machine is going to land.

There she is, landing.

If a horse could speak, we could not understand them, especially a celestial horse.

It must be a celestial horse.

Aliens, about to say hello.

Oh, the new world is amazing, but you're majestic.

You're a good buddy, not my name.

Although your world wonders me with your majestic superior and cackling head,

your people I do not understand.

So to you, I shall put it in, and you'll never hear surf music again.

That's what happened to me when I heard Jimmy Hendrix for the first time.

I never listened to surf music again.

I never thought that the cackling hen was the most majestic thing on this planet of ours,

but it's not for me to argue with the superior wisdom of the entities.

Hello friends, this is Robert Harris and wrapping up the spring season of entitled opinions

with the show on Jimmy Hendrix that I promised you a while back,

and you know by now that I do my best to fulfill my promises,

yet I'll confess to you that I feel a certain trepidation today about the challenges I'm facing.

I mean the challenge of trying to speak about this musician, this phenomenon,

this human being, was he a human being really?

Named Jimmy Hendrix, I feel that the best thing one can do is let his music and his lyric speak for themselves.

You may have gathered already that I believe there's something in Hendrix's music that accesses a language that is not human,

or that is transhuman, a language that is from some points of view at least, completely unearthly and alien.

For me to use my merely human speech to try to make sense of the Hendrix phenomenon is like trying to understand how the gods make love.

Who knows what that sounds like?

If the gods could speak, could we understand them?

And when they make love, well, good luck.

I think I'll fade out that first track from electrically and land before it comes to an end.

Because speaking of music and speech, I have to make an effort today to keep speaking over the tracks I'm going to play because I don't want the Jimmy Hendrix's estate to come down on me and sue me for everything I have.

You can't sue Stanford by the way. This is strictly an entitled opinions podcast, so don't go after Stanford if you have a problem with Robert Harris and using the Jimmy Hendrix corpus.

Another anxiety I have about the show today is one of method. How do you begin to account for this other language that Jimmy Hendrix spoke through his guitar? What sort of means do we have at our disposal for that?

In preparation for the show, I read up on Jimmy's biography. I watched some DVDs about his upbringing in Seattle. I learned about his erratic mother and erratic father. His brothers, his truncated high school education, the poverty in which he grew up, the heavy drinking of his parents, the awful fights they would get into, the abuse.

He sometimes suffered from his otherwise kind and loving father, Al, who actually really raised him for a good portion of his youth.

I learned a lot about Jimmy Hendrix's life in Seattle until he left that place at age 19. It's quite surprising when you think about it that he spent two thirds of his life in Seattle.

Of course, it's the other one third that gives us the Jimmy Hendrix we all know and love, but the amazing thing for me is that nothing as far as I can tell.

Or let me not say nothing, but very little in his biography can account for what Jimmy Hendrix went on to become in the last seven years of his life.

It's true that there is one or two things like what happened to him at age 15 that has real significance for his evolution as an alien phenomenon, but we'll get into that in a moment.

One day I might do a show on the doors and in that case it will be crucial when trying to understand the music and lyrics of Jim Morrison to go into his biography because it's very difficult to make sense of what Morrison was trying to convey in his lyrics without referring to the hostility of the edible complex that dominated so much of his psyche.

And his relationship not only to his biological father but to certain father figures like Ray Manzerac or his producer Paul Rothchild and so forth.

Not the case with Jimmy Hendrix, at least not as far as I can tell.

We may one day do a show on Pink Floyd as well and there we could speak about Space Rock and talking about method.

There's a good deal to be said about a sociological analysis when you're dealing with Pink Floyd about the times, the late 60s, early 70s, the effect that the landing on the moon had in the general human psyche of the times, drugs.

All these sort of things can provide a very compelling context and framework to understand Space Rock.

But my feeling is that Jimmy Hendrix was not just another space rocker that his music did not represent anything.

It was the thing itself.

And speaking of Space Rock, he called what he was doing science fiction rock.

It's not clear to me exactly what he meant by that.

But that's what he thought he was doing.

Those of you familiar with the biography know that Jimmy Hendrix was an avid reader of science fiction literature.

I read that he had more science fiction books in his possession in London than he had clothes, which is actually saying quite a bit.

And certainly his obsession with outer space and with everything that had wings, everything that flew, be it birds, be it angels.

And be it flying saucers.

All this seems to me enormously interesting, but there's very little in the biography that can account for it.

Could the elements account for it?

I believe that there's no question Jimmy Hendrix was an aerial spirit.

That there was a spirit of the air out of the four elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire.

He had a special affinity with the air, which is as much to say with the spirit world.

He certainly was obsessed with flight.

There was a great deal of fire in his nature as well.

And I think I would be even more comfortable with an elemental analysis of his music than I would be with a biographical sort of reconstructing the

of it. Hendrix was certainly elemental in the four senses of the elements, but I do believe that the air somehow prevails over the Earth.

No doubt there's a great deal of Earth in the music.

There was something terribly volcanic about it as if something from the hot core of the Earth had exposed to the earth.

He exploded out into the open air through his guitar, but in the final analysis, I think this affinity with the air that he had made him believe that he had himself extraterrestrial origins.

And we have to take him seriously when he suggests in that weird language of his that he actually came from elsewhere.

From one point of view, of course, he was entirely human.

He was the son of his biological parents. He was a kid from Seattle, Washington and so forth.

But from another point of view, things really aren't that simple.

All we know for sure is that when Jimi Hendrix burst on the London scene in the mid-60s, it seemed to everyone in that city that he had come from another planet.

Here are some testimonies from people who knew him back then.

I think the most phenomenal thing about him, apart from his looks, which were extraordinary.

Was there nobody understood none of the musicians there understood how he did it or what he did?

They just heard this extraordinary music saw this wild map on the stage.

And couldn't fathom out how he was doing it.

I mean, everything seemed to be wrong.

I was upside down and it was strong and wrong.

I mean, it was just not that the guy did it.

He was playing these leaks and looking at the guy.

What happened to him?

I said, "Wait a second. That's my guitar."

"Oh, I'm sorry, man, I didn't. I said, "Is that a bit?"

I said, "No. This is why Andy brought Andy to the drum."

And he goes, "Yeah, it's his heart. I'll tell you something."

And he turns it over the other way like this in terms.

"Yeah, it was just the same as why a place is the same exact bunch of nonsense like upside down."

I think I was a genius.

The guy was a genius.

Yeah, we know that the guy was a genius, but I think calling him a genius is saying both too much and too little.

To call him a genius is to make Hendrix the species of a genus.

But Jimmy Hendrix was not a species.

If anything, he was a species unto himself, which is why I quoted Thomas Aquinas earlier on Angels,

because Thomas Aquinas had a fascinating angelology as part of his theology,

where he theorized that the nature of angels is so singular that each angel is a

little species unto himself, omni-indivirum-seet-speccis-infima.

And the category of genius really doesn't advance the discourse very far when it comes to understanding.

Jimmy Hendrix's nature.

But let's hear another clip from one of his contemporaries.

In you, there was nobody else back in himself, and he was very happy and proud to scare the shit out of people like your

Pete Townsend, would you be back?

In fact, he was doing things so upfront and so wild and, um, chained, you know, sort of,

"That's what I wanted to do, but I've been British and infected in the class system

and whatever you only talk to your scores used to go to. I couldn't do anything."

That sounds like a bit of apology and special pleading from Jeff Beck, who's one of the guitar's.

I admire the most, but, um, there actually is a big difference between Jeff Beck and Jimmy Hendrix.

Jeff Beck, I take to be a mystic of the guitar.

When he plays guitar, there's a kind of mystical transcendence that is yearning,

longing for a union with something absolute, but in Jimmy's case, there was an immediate union with the thing itself.

There was no mystical longing for it.

But, um, I am quite interested in this notion that Jimmy knew where he was on a backwards track that he could turn a guitar upside down,

and know things forward and backwards. This is a sign of some very unusual kind of creature.

There's a song of his, I'm sure those of you who know the whole corpus better than I do will remember.

I think it's midnight lightning, if I'm not mistaken, where there's a line that says, "We have to keep moving in order to understand both sides of the sky."

They're very, very few people in our midst who can understand both sides of the sky or who can take a guitar and turn it upside down, or play a track backwards and know exactly where he is.

And, uh, we can take a listen to some of the studio engineers that participated in the production of Hendrix's first album, Are You Experience, talking about this?

That's Hendrix talking about the last track of Are You Experience?

I mean, I think that pretty much amounts everywhere. She's probably going to record the track backwards, and I said, "Oh, and do she's here to turn the tape over?"

Reaching the adult one works, yeah.

So, the track people put together these, these backwards things, segments and pieces, and we're going to make a difficult piece to do.

He made a track backwards. He would play and he'd go, "Oh, okay, boy. Now, I have to try and do so well with others. Sometimes he'd get lucky. Sometimes he can play and just go, "Oh, oh, oh, yeah, we have a ballon."

He had a whole plan. So, it was turned around the other way, I would say at least two thirds of the stuff was what he planned on. And that's another, that's another brain, man.

I don't know, but do you have that? Somehow he knew where he was in a backwards track.

This weird environment of everything that he should be.

And all the timings around. He knew what he was doing. Most other people, that he'd probably guess were.

All these track of sounds that you're going to create, all equalizations on the guitar are going to give you a different sense of movement.

That's a way, we're into making sounds that really like the transporter people.

You know, tracks like first on from the sun. And I experienced it just miles away from what was going on at the time, even the analysis.

Now, I wouldn't say that it was miles away from what was going on, even in the innovative stuff. It was a million miles ahead of, behind underneath, on top of everyone else and everything else.

Because this weird phenomenon we call Jimmy Hendrix. The question we should be asking is not who was he? Was he a genius? Where was he from? But the question that obsessed him more than any other, namely, how was he born?

Why don't we listen to a song, "Voodoo Child," which tells the story of how Jimmy believed he was born.

Now, some of us may want to consider it a fable, but if you feel like you can hold the dividing line between fable and fact when dealing with the Jimmy Hendrix phenomenon, well, you live in a far smaller world than the one he inhabited. And that's the main reason we love him, isn't it?

He expanded the cosmos for us exponentially thanks to his cosmic birth.

With those notes, he's asking us to pay attention.

Excuse me for pausing that song for a moment here, but I want to reread those lyrics for you.

Well, the night I was born, Lord, I swear the moon turned a fire red. I swear the moon turned a fire red.

Well, my poor mother cried out, Lord, the gypsy was right, and I seen her fell down right dead.

And this connection between Jimmy's birth and his mother's death, I think, is very interesting.

And I think it goes outside of the actual literal biography of Jimmy Hendrix, but we can't discount the fact that Jimmy received his first guitar at age 15, which was the same year that his mother died.

And to me, the suggests that some kind of transfer took place at that moment from the mother to the sun, whereby the Jimmy Hendrix we know was born at the age of 15 as a guitar player.

It even suggests to me more things that there was some kind of alien colonization of Jimmy at age 15, that through his mother's death he was born into, or as a cosmic being of sorts, something extraterrestrial in origin.

And when I say that I'm not trying to be kooky, we're all in some way extraterrestrial, in the sense at least that all the molecules in our bodies have extraterrestrial origins.

Hell, even the earth itself has extraterrestrial origins.

Who was to say what is terrestrial and what is extraterrestrial when you get right down to it?

So it's not crazy to suggest that there was an extraterrestrial colonization of Jimmy at age 15, and that his mother's spirit had something to do with it.

What's interesting to us about that is that the guitar became the instrument by which this other cosmic alien language was able to find expression.

But now let's go back to our song.

If mountain lions could speak.

Set me on an eagle's way.

He took me past the Gaussker's infinity.

And when he brought me back, he gave me Venus which was free.

How do you fly on a guitar?

Well, I'll make one to you.

And love knows you'll feel no pain.

So I make love to you and your sleep.

And love knows you'll feel no pain.

I'm a million miles away and at the same time I'm right here in your picture frame.

What does a million miles away sound like inside a picture frame?

To me it sounds like a picture without any frame at all.

One thing you can say about Jimmy is that his flying saucer was his guitar

and that his Stratocaster had wings and what an appropriate word that is for this winged

creature's guitar, a Stratocaster.

And what other color could his most cherished Stratocaster have been but white?

The color that includes all other colors of the spectrum itself.

Come down from that high.

Oh those arrows flying from his guitar?

Sounds like arrows to me.

I have a hummingbird that humps so loud you think you're losing your mind.

I think those wings.

Well I make love to you and Lord knows you feel no pain.

Say I make love to you and your sleep and Lord knows you felt no pain.

Because I'm a million miles away and at the same time I'm right here in your picture frame.

Because I'm a voodoo child Lord knows I'm a voodoo child.

Well my arrows are made of desire from far away as Jupiter's sulfur mines.

Say my arrows are made of desire from far away as Jupiter's sulfur mines.

Way down by the methane sea.

I have a hummingbird and it humps so loud you think you were losing your mind.

Well I float in the liquid gardens and Arizona new red sand.

Well I taste the honey from a flower named blue.

Way down in California and the end New York drowns as we hold hands.

Well there we have a song that tells us something about Jimi Hendrix's nature in several senses of the word nature.

Which comes from the Latin word natura nashita be born.

Some people believe in a literal way that Jimi Hendrix was a Martian of sorts.

Certainly Hendrix conspired with that notion.

He once told him reporter from the New York Times that he came from Mars.

He had a habit sometimes of asking people what planet are you from brother?

And there are people, the Aleem brothers for example who worked with Jimi Hendrix on the cry of love album.

Who have no problem but believing that entities from space to possession of Jimi Hendrix

and abandoned him shortly before his death.

And in fact we can maybe give a listen to one of their testimonies.