Sunday, May 2, 2010
Quotes
"Don't use your brain to play it, let your feelings guide your fingers."
I'd like to do a song dedicated to maybe a soldier in the army singing about this old lady he dreams about, and hold that machine gun instead, or it could be a cat, maybe... Tryna fall in love with a girl, maybe but - a little bit too scared! That's the problem sometimes, isn't it? I mean they can't really interfere a little bit so they call girls groupies, and they call girls this, and they call passive people hippies, and blah blah woof woof, all down the line. Thats because they're talking nothing love man, that's what's happening. (Woodstock 69, before playing song "Izabella")
"Music is Magic. Magic is Life" (part of the lyrics to an unfinished song - found written on a piece of paper after his death)
"Well, I might be living in the wrong time but I don't go by comparisons. I go by the truthfulness of the whole thing. Forget about comparing, it's the biggest mistake trying to put your ego against the other person's."
"We're not trying to take away the greatness that America is supposed to have, but we're playing it [ Star-Spangled Banner ] the way the air is in America today... The air is slightly static, isn't it?"
"I wouldn't say that I'm the greatest guitarist ever. I'd say probably that I'm the greatest guitarist sitting in this chair."
"We call it 'Electric Church Music' because to us music is a religion."
"You can leave if you want, we're just jammin' that's all."
"When you die you're just getting rid of that old body."
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 want our sound to go into the soul of the audience, and see if it can awaken some little thing in their minds... Cause there are so many sleeping people.
Anybody can do anything, it's up to themselves. All it takes is the right intentions.
"Technically, I am not a guitar player, all I play is truth and emotion."
I feel guilty when people say I`m the greatest on the scene. What`s good or bad doesn`t matter to me; what does matter is feeling and not feeling. If only people would take more of a true view and think in terms of feelings. Your name doesn`t mean a damn,...
I will be dead in five years` time, but while I am here, I will travel many highways and I will, of necessity, die at a time when my message of love, peace, and freedom can be shared with people all over the world.
I guess it would be if I wanted to, just lay back and predominantly write songs when I can't go on a stage anymore.
We should only collect enough as where we can pay the expenses from the last town to the next town.
Everybody goes through those stages the first time around, and you'd wear all these different things.
All they did was let me do what I wanted to do, one of them kind of scenes.
I have to get involved in my own kind of way 'cause I always want to respect my own judgments. I have to respect my own time.
We're tryin' to get a tour of England together now, that's definitely gonna call for another bass player.
I think it would count more, if we did less personal appearances.
There was a period when I stopped talking so much, because I was just going through certain things. I just did the gigs and just stayed in, tried to stay away.
Sometimes the music people put you into these big, rush things.
Some people should just start ideas and other ones should carry them out.
Promotion with my name only, that's all I have to do with it.
It's up to the people. If they really want to keep it going, they'll keep it going... they'll appreciate the music.
I wanted to be listened to. I don't know if they were or not, though.
It's really hard to know what people want around here sometimes.
It's not really into the big mass movement in music that I want to do, you know.
When I finally do get into it, the whole world's gonna know about it.
Maybe I was just feeling all nice and enthusiastic. Wait a minute! I can't take back on that 'cause it is a nice thought.
I found myself in too much of a box situation.
With any new civilization... they have to have their own officers and police and governments and all that.
My nature just changes.
The artist draws the people. The whole idea is for people to dig themselves, just mingle around meeting different other people. That's cool.
In World War II all these countries were completely against each other, complete opposite. Now we're getting them all together, through the idea of music.
I didn't know it was anger until they told me that it was, you know, with the destruction and all that.
If I had anything to say I'd have a say to everybody.
They should have not only music, but theatre and selling things, and circuses.
Astro Man says something about living in peace of mind. Well, Astro Man will leave you in piece.
I was just playing loud. They let it bother them, they wouldn't even be around today.
Festivals shouldn't worry about getting so many people. It's a big ego trip now. They didn't do all that kind of mess with Monterey.
I was thinking too fast. It seems like a person has the tendency to get bored, because he always wants to try to do all these accomplishments.
There's a lot of political things happening out there that I'd really have to get away from.
The way things been goin' lately, I think it's gonna take a lot more time.
A person would have to change himself in order to be a living example of what he's singing about.
I can't feel anything right now because there's a few things that's just happened. I just have to lay back and think about it all.
Spiritually, it's always there. It gets better and better all the time. One of these days I'll just finally release all that out.
Be respected as being new, and probably a decent change or a help for the human race or whatever, instead of keep carrying the same old burdens around with you.
Are these all psychedelic? I don't even know what that word means, really.
I believe everybody should have a room where they get rid of all their releases. So my room was a stage.
After a while I started getting aware too much of what was going down. It started to bring me down a little bit.
“Music is the most important thing. I'm thinking of my future. There has to be something new, and I want to be part of it. I want to lead an orchestra with excellent musicians. I want to play music which draws pictures of the world and its space.”
“Music is a safe type of high. It's more the way it was supposed to be. That's where highness came, I guess, from anyway. It's nothing but rhythm and motion.”
All I'm gonna do is just go on and do what I feel.
Jimi Hendrix
All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.
Jimi Hendrix
Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.
Jimi Hendrix
Even Castles made of sand, fall into the sea, eventually.
Jimi Hendrix
Every city in the world always has a gang, a street gang, or the so-called outcasts.
Jimi Hendrix
Excuse me while I kiss the sky.
Jimi Hendrix
I don't have nothing to regret at all in the past, except that I might've unintentionally hurt somebody else or something.
Jimi Hendrix
I got a pet monkey called Charlie Chan.
Jimi Hendrix
I have this one little saying, when things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.
Jimi Hendrix
I just hate to be in one corner. I hate to be put as only a guitar player, or either only as a songwriter, or only as a tap dancer. I like to move around.
Jimi Hendrix
I try to use my music to move these people to act.
Jimi Hendrix
I used to live in a room full of mirrors; all I could see was me. I take my spirit and I crash my mirrors, now the whole world is here for me to see.
Jimi Hendrix
I was trying to do too many things at the same time, which is my nature. But I was enjoying it, and I still do enjoy it.
Jimi Hendrix
I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.
Jimi Hendrix
I'm gonna put a curse on you and all your kids will be born completely naked.
Jimi Hendrix
I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to.
Jimi Hendrix
I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.
Jimi Hendrix
If I'm free, it's because I'm always running.
Jimi Hendrix
If it was up to me, there wouldn't be no such thing as the establishment.
Jimi Hendrix
Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.
Jimi Hendrix
In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first.
Jimi Hendrix
It all has to come from inside, though, I guess.
Jimi Hendrix
It's funny how most people love the dead, once you're dead your made for life.
Jimi Hendrix
It's funny the way most people love the dead. Once you are dead, you are made for life.
Jimi Hendrix
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
Jimi Hendrix
Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.
Jimi Hendrix
Music is a safe kind of high.
Jimi Hendrix
Music is my religion.
Jimi Hendrix
Music makes me high on stage, and that's the truth. It's like being almost addicted to music.
Jimi Hendrix
My goal is to be one with the music. I just dedicate my whole life to this art.
Jimi Hendrix
My nature just changes.
Jimi Hendrix
Rock is so much fun. That's what it's all about - filling up the chest cavities and empty kneecaps and elbows.
Jimi Hendrix
See, that's nothing but blues, that's all I'm singing about. It's today's blues.
Jimi Hendrix
Sometimes you want to give up the guitar, you'll hate the guitar. But if you stick with it, you're gonna be rewarded.
Jimi Hendrix
The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.
Jimi Hendrix
The story of life is quicker then the blink of an eye, the story of love is hello, goodbye.
Jimi Hendrix
The time I burned my guitar it was like a sacrifice. You sacrifice the things you love. I love my guitar.
Jimi Hendrix
To be with the others, you have to have your hair short and wear ties. So we're trying to make a third world happen, you know what I mean?
Jimi Hendrix
We have time, there's no big rush.
Jimi Hendrix
When I die, I want people to play my music, go wild and freak out and do anything they want to do.
Jimi Hendrix
When I die, just keep playing the records.
Jimi Hendrix
When I played God Bless The Queen, I was wondering if they was gonna dig us, then quite naturally I'd go on and try to get it together.
Jimi Hendrix
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
Jimi Hendrix
When things get too heavy, just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.
Jimi Hendrix
When we go to play, you flip around and flash around and everything, and then they're not gonna see nothin' but what their eyes see. Forget about their ears.
Jimi Hendrix
White collar conservative flashin down the street, pointing that plastic finger at me, they all assume my kind will drop and die, but I'm gonna wave my freak flag high.
Jimi Hendrix
You don't have to be singing about love all the time in order to give love to the people. You don't have to keep flashing those words all the time.
Jimi Hendrix
You have to forget about what other people say, when you're supposed to die, or when you're supposed to be loving. You have to forget about all these things.
Jimi Hendrix
You have to give people something to dream on.
Jimi Hendrix
You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven.
Jimi Hendrix
I'd like to do a song dedicated to maybe a soldier in the army singing about this old lady he dreams about, and hold that machine gun instead, or it could be a cat, maybe... Tryna fall in love with a girl, maybe but - a little bit too scared! That's the problem sometimes, isn't it? I mean they can't really interfere a little bit so they call girls groupies, and they call girls this, and they call passive people hippies, and blah blah woof woof, all down the line. Thats because they're talking nothing love man, that's what's happening. (Woodstock 69, before playing song "Izabella")
"Music is Magic. Magic is Life" (part of the lyrics to an unfinished song - found written on a piece of paper after his death)
"Well, I might be living in the wrong time but I don't go by comparisons. I go by the truthfulness of the whole thing. Forget about comparing, it's the biggest mistake trying to put your ego against the other person's."
"We're not trying to take away the greatness that America is supposed to have, but we're playing it [ Star-Spangled Banner ] the way the air is in America today... The air is slightly static, isn't it?"
"I wouldn't say that I'm the greatest guitarist ever. I'd say probably that I'm the greatest guitarist sitting in this chair."
"We call it 'Electric Church Music' because to us music is a religion."
"You can leave if you want, we're just jammin' that's all."
"When you die you're just getting rid of that old body."
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 want our sound to go into the soul of the audience, and see if it can awaken some little thing in their minds... Cause there are so many sleeping people.
Anybody can do anything, it's up to themselves. All it takes is the right intentions.
"Technically, I am not a guitar player, all I play is truth and emotion."
I feel guilty when people say I`m the greatest on the scene. What`s good or bad doesn`t matter to me; what does matter is feeling and not feeling. If only people would take more of a true view and think in terms of feelings. Your name doesn`t mean a damn,...
I will be dead in five years` time, but while I am here, I will travel many highways and I will, of necessity, die at a time when my message of love, peace, and freedom can be shared with people all over the world.
I guess it would be if I wanted to, just lay back and predominantly write songs when I can't go on a stage anymore.
We should only collect enough as where we can pay the expenses from the last town to the next town.
Everybody goes through those stages the first time around, and you'd wear all these different things.
All they did was let me do what I wanted to do, one of them kind of scenes.
I have to get involved in my own kind of way 'cause I always want to respect my own judgments. I have to respect my own time.
We're tryin' to get a tour of England together now, that's definitely gonna call for another bass player.
I think it would count more, if we did less personal appearances.
There was a period when I stopped talking so much, because I was just going through certain things. I just did the gigs and just stayed in, tried to stay away.
Sometimes the music people put you into these big, rush things.
Some people should just start ideas and other ones should carry them out.
Promotion with my name only, that's all I have to do with it.
It's up to the people. If they really want to keep it going, they'll keep it going... they'll appreciate the music.
I wanted to be listened to. I don't know if they were or not, though.
It's really hard to know what people want around here sometimes.
It's not really into the big mass movement in music that I want to do, you know.
When I finally do get into it, the whole world's gonna know about it.
Maybe I was just feeling all nice and enthusiastic. Wait a minute! I can't take back on that 'cause it is a nice thought.
I found myself in too much of a box situation.
With any new civilization... they have to have their own officers and police and governments and all that.
My nature just changes.
The artist draws the people. The whole idea is for people to dig themselves, just mingle around meeting different other people. That's cool.
In World War II all these countries were completely against each other, complete opposite. Now we're getting them all together, through the idea of music.
I didn't know it was anger until they told me that it was, you know, with the destruction and all that.
If I had anything to say I'd have a say to everybody.
They should have not only music, but theatre and selling things, and circuses.
Astro Man says something about living in peace of mind. Well, Astro Man will leave you in piece.
I was just playing loud. They let it bother them, they wouldn't even be around today.
Festivals shouldn't worry about getting so many people. It's a big ego trip now. They didn't do all that kind of mess with Monterey.
I was thinking too fast. It seems like a person has the tendency to get bored, because he always wants to try to do all these accomplishments.
There's a lot of political things happening out there that I'd really have to get away from.
The way things been goin' lately, I think it's gonna take a lot more time.
A person would have to change himself in order to be a living example of what he's singing about.
I can't feel anything right now because there's a few things that's just happened. I just have to lay back and think about it all.
Spiritually, it's always there. It gets better and better all the time. One of these days I'll just finally release all that out.
Be respected as being new, and probably a decent change or a help for the human race or whatever, instead of keep carrying the same old burdens around with you.
Are these all psychedelic? I don't even know what that word means, really.
I believe everybody should have a room where they get rid of all their releases. So my room was a stage.
After a while I started getting aware too much of what was going down. It started to bring me down a little bit.
“Music is the most important thing. I'm thinking of my future. There has to be something new, and I want to be part of it. I want to lead an orchestra with excellent musicians. I want to play music which draws pictures of the world and its space.”
“Music is a safe type of high. It's more the way it was supposed to be. That's where highness came, I guess, from anyway. It's nothing but rhythm and motion.”
All I'm gonna do is just go on and do what I feel.
Jimi Hendrix
All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.
Jimi Hendrix
Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.
Jimi Hendrix
Even Castles made of sand, fall into the sea, eventually.
Jimi Hendrix
Every city in the world always has a gang, a street gang, or the so-called outcasts.
Jimi Hendrix
Excuse me while I kiss the sky.
Jimi Hendrix
I don't have nothing to regret at all in the past, except that I might've unintentionally hurt somebody else or something.
Jimi Hendrix
I got a pet monkey called Charlie Chan.
Jimi Hendrix
I have this one little saying, when things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.
Jimi Hendrix
I just hate to be in one corner. I hate to be put as only a guitar player, or either only as a songwriter, or only as a tap dancer. I like to move around.
Jimi Hendrix
I try to use my music to move these people to act.
Jimi Hendrix
I used to live in a room full of mirrors; all I could see was me. I take my spirit and I crash my mirrors, now the whole world is here for me to see.
Jimi Hendrix
I was trying to do too many things at the same time, which is my nature. But I was enjoying it, and I still do enjoy it.
Jimi Hendrix
I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.
Jimi Hendrix
I'm gonna put a curse on you and all your kids will be born completely naked.
Jimi Hendrix
I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to.
Jimi Hendrix
I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.
Jimi Hendrix
If I'm free, it's because I'm always running.
Jimi Hendrix
If it was up to me, there wouldn't be no such thing as the establishment.
Jimi Hendrix
Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.
Jimi Hendrix
In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first.
Jimi Hendrix
It all has to come from inside, though, I guess.
Jimi Hendrix
It's funny how most people love the dead, once you're dead your made for life.
Jimi Hendrix
It's funny the way most people love the dead. Once you are dead, you are made for life.
Jimi Hendrix
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
Jimi Hendrix
Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.
Jimi Hendrix
Music is a safe kind of high.
Jimi Hendrix
Music is my religion.
Jimi Hendrix
Music makes me high on stage, and that's the truth. It's like being almost addicted to music.
Jimi Hendrix
My goal is to be one with the music. I just dedicate my whole life to this art.
Jimi Hendrix
My nature just changes.
Jimi Hendrix
Rock is so much fun. That's what it's all about - filling up the chest cavities and empty kneecaps and elbows.
Jimi Hendrix
See, that's nothing but blues, that's all I'm singing about. It's today's blues.
Jimi Hendrix
Sometimes you want to give up the guitar, you'll hate the guitar. But if you stick with it, you're gonna be rewarded.
Jimi Hendrix
The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.
Jimi Hendrix
The story of life is quicker then the blink of an eye, the story of love is hello, goodbye.
Jimi Hendrix
The time I burned my guitar it was like a sacrifice. You sacrifice the things you love. I love my guitar.
Jimi Hendrix
To be with the others, you have to have your hair short and wear ties. So we're trying to make a third world happen, you know what I mean?
Jimi Hendrix
We have time, there's no big rush.
Jimi Hendrix
When I die, I want people to play my music, go wild and freak out and do anything they want to do.
Jimi Hendrix
When I die, just keep playing the records.
Jimi Hendrix
When I played God Bless The Queen, I was wondering if they was gonna dig us, then quite naturally I'd go on and try to get it together.
Jimi Hendrix
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
Jimi Hendrix
When things get too heavy, just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.
Jimi Hendrix
When we go to play, you flip around and flash around and everything, and then they're not gonna see nothin' but what their eyes see. Forget about their ears.
Jimi Hendrix
White collar conservative flashin down the street, pointing that plastic finger at me, they all assume my kind will drop and die, but I'm gonna wave my freak flag high.
Jimi Hendrix
You don't have to be singing about love all the time in order to give love to the people. You don't have to keep flashing those words all the time.
Jimi Hendrix
You have to forget about what other people say, when you're supposed to die, or when you're supposed to be loving. You have to forget about all these things.
Jimi Hendrix
You have to give people something to dream on.
Jimi Hendrix
You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven.
Jimi Hendrix
Friday, April 30, 2010
Manic Depression
Words and Music by Jimi Hendrix
Manic Depression’s touching my soul,
I know what I want,
but I just don't know how to go about getting it.
Feeling, sweet felling
drops from my finger, fingers
Manic Depression’s captured my soul.
Woman so willing the sweet cause in vain,
you make love,
you break love,
it's-a all the same when it’s…
when it’s over.
Music sweet music,
I wish I could caress, caress, caress.
Manic Depression’s a frustrating mess.
Well, I think I’ll go turn myself off an’ go on down.
Really ain’t no use me hangin’ around.
Oh, I gotta see you.
Manic Depression’s touching my soul,
I know what I want,
but I just don't know how to go about getting it.
Feeling, sweet felling
drops from my finger, fingers
Manic Depression’s captured my soul.
Woman so willing the sweet cause in vain,
you make love,
you break love,
it's-a all the same when it’s…
when it’s over.
Music sweet music,
I wish I could caress, caress, caress.
Manic Depression’s a frustrating mess.
Well, I think I’ll go turn myself off an’ go on down.
Really ain’t no use me hangin’ around.
Oh, I gotta see you.
Purple Haze
Words and Music by Jimi Hendrix
Purple Haze all in my brain,
lately things they don't seem the same,
actin’ funny but I don't know why
‘scuse me while I kiss the sky.
Purple Haze all around,
don't know if I’m coming up or down.
Am I happy or in misery?
Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me.
Purple Haze all in my eyes,
don't know if it’s day or night,
you've got me blowin’, blowin’ my mind
is it tomorrow or just the end of time?
Purple Haze all in my brain,
lately things they don't seem the same,
actin’ funny but I don't know why
‘scuse me while I kiss the sky.
Purple Haze all around,
don't know if I’m coming up or down.
Am I happy or in misery?
Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me.
Purple Haze all in my eyes,
don't know if it’s day or night,
you've got me blowin’, blowin’ my mind
is it tomorrow or just the end of time?
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Jimi Hendrix
Guitar and Vocal
Born Seatle, Washington
November 27, 1942. Left school early and joined the Army-Airborne, but was invalided out with a broken ankle and injured back. Started hitching around the Southern States, guitar pickin’. One night one of the Isley Brothers heard him playing and offered him a place in their band. “Yeah, I’ll gig. May as well, man, sleeping outside between them tall tenements was hell. Rats running all across your chest, cockroaches stealin’ your last candy bar from you very pockets.”
But he soon turned in his silk stage suit and patching patent boots and headed once more for Nashville. A tour came through town headed by B.B. King, Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, Chuck Jackson and Jackie Wilson.
Jimi managed to join the show and toured all over the States, backing these great artists, learning much of his artistry on the way. One day he missed the tour bus and found himself stranded in Kansas City, penniless. He scraped together enough money to make it to Atlanta, Georgia, where he joined the Little Richard package tour, again touring all over, finally playing with Ike and Tina Turner on the West Coast. When the tour arrived in New York Jimi left Little Richard and became one of Joey Dee’s Starlighters, at a time when this band was big news internationally. In August 1966 Jimi went solo with a backing band, playing in Greenwich Village for the pricey sum of fifteen dollars a night.
Ex-Animal Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffery, the Animal’s Manager persuaded him to come to England, and he arrived in September, since which time he has already excited many audiences up and down the country.
“I came to England, picked out the two best musicians, the best equipment, and all we are trying to do now is create, create, create, music, our own personal sound, our own personal being…”
Mitch Mitchell, Drummer
Mitch is a product of Acts Educational and The Corona Stage School. He joined the Coronets, Chris Sandfords’ backing group. “Not too Little, Not Too Much” became a hit but the group disbanded due to Chris’s many acting commitments. Mitch then had a year’s spell with Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, which lasted until October 1966. A chance meeting with Chas Chandler in November last yer resulted in Mitch joining The Experience.
Young and refreshing in ideas but truly a well seasoned professional drummer Mitch plays a key role in the sound of this exciting trio.
Noel Redding
Bass Guitar and Vocal
Noel has been playing guitar with various groups since he left school five years ago. Nowl formed “The Loving Kind” in October 1965
Unhappy at the group’s lack of recording success, and being not a little bit ambitious, Noel went his own way and attended an audition Jimi was holding in October 1966. He was persuaded to change from guitar to bass guitar, wich he managed to do very successfully, making a strong contribution to the driving rhythm behind Jimi’s extraordinary lead guitar.
Are You Experinced
As the greatest, most influential debut album ever released, Are You Experienced is sort of the musical equivalent of the Big Bang that scientists belived originated the universe. In both cases, many generations later, the world is still trying to absorb, organize and make sense of what that initiating event spewed forth.
No other rock artist has, from the outset, violated so many rules while completely fulfilling so many expectations. The proof is that thirty years after it first hit our turntables, Are You Experienced still sounds not only fresh but startling. That this is true of Jimi Hendrix as a guitarist everyone knows, and it would be silly to thing that the case needed to be made again, but just to summarize: Forever after the issuance of the first Hendrix album, the electric guitar was a different instrument, with different sonic possibilities, toal characteristics, even physical properties (just for starters Jimi immediately made it clear you could play more that just the strings and fretboard).
Are You Experienced was important as an album, however, for more reasons than just Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing. Like any truly great work, it succeeded on several levels, most noteably, by featuring great compositions, played by a great band, and by using the past as a palatte from which to create its seeming future. The album’s moods are multiple: brooding, joyus, harmonius, serious. Its musical modes include flat-out rock’n’roll, pure blues, psychedelic extravaganzas, and within its own rules, elements of jazz and modernist music too. It is a marvel of recording, with layers of sound nevertheless resolving into songs that could, for the most part, be played live onstage. The singing is great rock’n’roll, not a sweet voice but on that has learned the lessons that deep study of the blues and Bob Dylan have to teach. And it is driven by a vision, the equal of any in rock’n’roll.
Are You Experienced also explored the idea of the concept album as expounded on Pet Sounds, Freak Out! and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. None of those records had been able to resolve their highest ambitions within the fundamentally raunchy context of rock’n’roll; they had sacrificed speed, power and grit for brainpower. Jimi Hendrix and company brought them all back together again, and the did it from the very first note of the very first song: The stop-time blues pulse of “Purple Haze” (outside the U.S., it was “Foxy Lady,” but point’s the same). Furthermore, the band sustained the frenzy through the entire album, even on the slower paced numbers like “Hey Joe,” “May This Be Love” and “The Wind Cries Mary.” That’s one reason why it’s fundamentally important that Eddie Kramer and John McDermott have restored the original running orders. You have to start with the Big Bang to get where Jimi wanted to take you, on a circuit of his entire personal universe, an experience that would not just entertain you or enlighten your life at it’s very core. A promise so big that only a crazed rock ‘n’ roller would make it, let alone try to deliver on it – wich he not only tried but did. For me, that moment when Jimi cries, “Lately things don’t seem the same” puts the whole event of the album into definitive perspective, because they never would again.
The other immediately noticeable thing about Are You Experienced is that Hendrix is surrounded by such tremendous support. Mitch Mitchell is the only drummer of the psychedelic period whose playing compares in power and imagination to Keith Moon’s, so much so that he is the only force on the record that in any way challenges Jimi’s dominance – though that’s a lost cause after the first solo in “ Purple Haze,” Mitchell never slacks off and in fact, one way to hear “Manic Depression” is as a psychic- musical war between Jimi and Mitch.
Noel Redding’s role is as the keeper of the bear, the basic bedrock time that the band returns to periodically throughout its excursions. In this way, the Experience funcionted more as a jazz trio, although comparisons to the Who and Cream are obvious. Redding’s bass occasionally functions as a second melodic instrument, too, but its most important role is to keep the entire Experience tethered within planetary orbit – otherwise, it might slip past our ability to comprehend it at all.
The roles of Eddie Kramer and Chas Chandler as engineer and producer were vital but too complex to summarize fairly (try Kramer and McDermott’s book, Hendrix: Setting The Record Straight or Charles Shaar Murray’s Crosstown Traffic). Nevertheless, it must be said that some of the conceptual ideas clearly emanated from Chas, and that without Eddie’s knowledge, empatha and imagination behind the board, the Hendrix sound would have been lost altogether – not just and engineer would have agreed to try to tape this kind of extravaganza, let alone pull it off.
Yet in the end, it all comes back to Jimi: His vision, his music, his guitar-playing and finally, for me, his greatness of experience expressed in terms of profound love and deeper sense of tragedy than he’s usually granted. When he sighs, “Oh, there ain’t no life nowhere,” he is declairing what he is set against – what he means to set straight.
When he requests, “If you can just get your mind together, then come across to me,” he offers the love of the most profound kind, a form of brotherhood that denies nothing, including the carnal.
In his discovery of courage amidst a field of despair, in his invocation of celbratory rock’n’roll in the face of full human tragedy, in his belief that love could transform us but only if we took the great risk of “coming across” to one another, Jimi Hendrix placed himself not only among the great rock ‘n’ rollers, and the great bluesmen – you can practically hear Robert Johnson’s moaned “And the days keep ‘mindin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail” – but among the great African-American artists; the great American artists; the great artists. In 1957, James Baldwin wrote, in sentences that stand as nothing much less than prophetic of this music, “He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighter, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the onle light we’ve got in all this tarkness.” (“Sonny’s Blues”)
Jimi Hendrix Brought light to our darkness, so much so that it half-blinded us to the full dimmention of his accomplishments. But we have time now to understand it now, for the potency of his flame is such that it instantly ignited a sonic revolution, that it altered on the spot the direction of a stylistic revolution already in progress. Indeed, it is so powerful that is burns as brightly and powerfully after three decades as it did the day the match was struck. There may be music greater than the music here, but we will have to journey where Jimi went ultimately before us to hear it.
Dave Marsh
Jimi Hendrix
Guitar and Vocal
Born Seatle, Washington
November 27, 1942. Left school early and joined the Army-Airborne, but was invalided out with a broken ankle and injured back. Started hitching around the Southern States, guitar pickin’. One night one of the Isley Brothers heard him playing and offered him a place in their band. “Yeah, I’ll gig. May as well, man, sleeping outside between them tall tenements was hell. Rats running all across your chest, cockroaches stealin’ your last candy bar from you very pockets.”
But he soon turned in his silk stage suit and patching patent boots and headed once more for Nashville. A tour came through town headed by B.B. King, Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, Chuck Jackson and Jackie Wilson.
Jimi managed to join the show and toured all over the States, backing these great artists, learning much of his artistry on the way. One day he missed the tour bus and found himself stranded in Kansas City, penniless. He scraped together enough money to make it to Atlanta, Georgia, where he joined the Little Richard package tour, again touring all over, finally playing with Ike and Tina Turner on the West Coast. When the tour arrived in New York Jimi left Little Richard and became one of Joey Dee’s Starlighters, at a time when this band was big news internationally. In August 1966 Jimi went solo with a backing band, playing in Greenwich Village for the pricey sum of fifteen dollars a night.
Ex-Animal Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffery, the Animal’s Manager persuaded him to come to England, and he arrived in September, since which time he has already excited many audiences up and down the country.
“I came to England, picked out the two best musicians, the best equipment, and all we are trying to do now is create, create, create, music, our own personal sound, our own personal being…”
Mitch Mitchell, Drummer
Mitch is a product of Acts Educational and The Corona Stage School. He joined the Coronets, Chris Sandfords’ backing group. “Not too Little, Not Too Much” became a hit but the group disbanded due to Chris’s many acting commitments. Mitch then had a year’s spell with Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, which lasted until October 1966. A chance meeting with Chas Chandler in November last yer resulted in Mitch joining The Experience.
Young and refreshing in ideas but truly a well seasoned professional drummer Mitch plays a key role in the sound of this exciting trio.
Noel Redding
Bass Guitar and Vocal
Noel has been playing guitar with various groups since he left school five years ago. Nowl formed “The Loving Kind” in October 1965
Unhappy at the group’s lack of recording success, and being not a little bit ambitious, Noel went his own way and attended an audition Jimi was holding in October 1966. He was persuaded to change from guitar to bass guitar, wich he managed to do very successfully, making a strong contribution to the driving rhythm behind Jimi’s extraordinary lead guitar.
Are You Experinced
As the greatest, most influential debut album ever released, Are You Experienced is sort of the musical equivalent of the Big Bang that scientists belived originated the universe. In both cases, many generations later, the world is still trying to absorb, organize and make sense of what that initiating event spewed forth.
No other rock artist has, from the outset, violated so many rules while completely fulfilling so many expectations. The proof is that thirty years after it first hit our turntables, Are You Experienced still sounds not only fresh but startling. That this is true of Jimi Hendrix as a guitarist everyone knows, and it would be silly to thing that the case needed to be made again, but just to summarize: Forever after the issuance of the first Hendrix album, the electric guitar was a different instrument, with different sonic possibilities, toal characteristics, even physical properties (just for starters Jimi immediately made it clear you could play more that just the strings and fretboard).
Are You Experienced was important as an album, however, for more reasons than just Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing. Like any truly great work, it succeeded on several levels, most noteably, by featuring great compositions, played by a great band, and by using the past as a palatte from which to create its seeming future. The album’s moods are multiple: brooding, joyus, harmonius, serious. Its musical modes include flat-out rock’n’roll, pure blues, psychedelic extravaganzas, and within its own rules, elements of jazz and modernist music too. It is a marvel of recording, with layers of sound nevertheless resolving into songs that could, for the most part, be played live onstage. The singing is great rock’n’roll, not a sweet voice but on that has learned the lessons that deep study of the blues and Bob Dylan have to teach. And it is driven by a vision, the equal of any in rock’n’roll.
Are You Experienced also explored the idea of the concept album as expounded on Pet Sounds, Freak Out! and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. None of those records had been able to resolve their highest ambitions within the fundamentally raunchy context of rock’n’roll; they had sacrificed speed, power and grit for brainpower. Jimi Hendrix and company brought them all back together again, and the did it from the very first note of the very first song: The stop-time blues pulse of “Purple Haze” (outside the U.S., it was “Foxy Lady,” but point’s the same). Furthermore, the band sustained the frenzy through the entire album, even on the slower paced numbers like “Hey Joe,” “May This Be Love” and “The Wind Cries Mary.” That’s one reason why it’s fundamentally important that Eddie Kramer and John McDermott have restored the original running orders. You have to start with the Big Bang to get where Jimi wanted to take you, on a circuit of his entire personal universe, an experience that would not just entertain you or enlighten your life at it’s very core. A promise so big that only a crazed rock ‘n’ roller would make it, let alone try to deliver on it – wich he not only tried but did. For me, that moment when Jimi cries, “Lately things don’t seem the same” puts the whole event of the album into definitive perspective, because they never would again.
The other immediately noticeable thing about Are You Experienced is that Hendrix is surrounded by such tremendous support. Mitch Mitchell is the only drummer of the psychedelic period whose playing compares in power and imagination to Keith Moon’s, so much so that he is the only force on the record that in any way challenges Jimi’s dominance – though that’s a lost cause after the first solo in “ Purple Haze,” Mitchell never slacks off and in fact, one way to hear “Manic Depression” is as a psychic- musical war between Jimi and Mitch.
Noel Redding’s role is as the keeper of the bear, the basic bedrock time that the band returns to periodically throughout its excursions. In this way, the Experience funcionted more as a jazz trio, although comparisons to the Who and Cream are obvious. Redding’s bass occasionally functions as a second melodic instrument, too, but its most important role is to keep the entire Experience tethered within planetary orbit – otherwise, it might slip past our ability to comprehend it at all.
The roles of Eddie Kramer and Chas Chandler as engineer and producer were vital but too complex to summarize fairly (try Kramer and McDermott’s book, Hendrix: Setting The Record Straight or Charles Shaar Murray’s Crosstown Traffic). Nevertheless, it must be said that some of the conceptual ideas clearly emanated from Chas, and that without Eddie’s knowledge, empatha and imagination behind the board, the Hendrix sound would have been lost altogether – not just and engineer would have agreed to try to tape this kind of extravaganza, let alone pull it off.
Yet in the end, it all comes back to Jimi: His vision, his music, his guitar-playing and finally, for me, his greatness of experience expressed in terms of profound love and deeper sense of tragedy than he’s usually granted. When he sighs, “Oh, there ain’t no life nowhere,” he is declairing what he is set against – what he means to set straight.
When he requests, “If you can just get your mind together, then come across to me,” he offers the love of the most profound kind, a form of brotherhood that denies nothing, including the carnal.
In his discovery of courage amidst a field of despair, in his invocation of celbratory rock’n’roll in the face of full human tragedy, in his belief that love could transform us but only if we took the great risk of “coming across” to one another, Jimi Hendrix placed himself not only among the great rock ‘n’ rollers, and the great bluesmen – you can practically hear Robert Johnson’s moaned “And the days keep ‘mindin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail” – but among the great African-American artists; the great American artists; the great artists. In 1957, James Baldwin wrote, in sentences that stand as nothing much less than prophetic of this music, “He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighter, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the onle light we’ve got in all this tarkness.” (“Sonny’s Blues”)
Jimi Hendrix Brought light to our darkness, so much so that it half-blinded us to the full dimmention of his accomplishments. But we have time now to understand it now, for the potency of his flame is such that it instantly ignited a sonic revolution, that it altered on the spot the direction of a stylistic revolution already in progress. Indeed, it is so powerful that is burns as brightly and powerfully after three decades as it did the day the match was struck. There may be music greater than the music here, but we will have to journey where Jimi went ultimately before us to hear it.
Dave Marsh
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