by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show was a two-hour PBS American Masters documentary on Jimi Hendrix, given the name of one
of his lesser known songs, the blues “Hear My Train A-Comin’” (though given the
protean character of Hendrix’ music another, even more obscure Hendrix song,
“Room Full of Mirrors,” might have been a better title). The film was directed
by Bob Smeaton, who’d made two Hendrix documentaries previously: Jimi
Hendrix: Band of Gypsies (1998) —
interestingly he normalized the spelling of “Gypsys,” the version Hendrix
actually used in the name of his second band — and Jimi Hendrix:
Voodoo Child (2010), which like this one is
a bio-doc on Hendrix’ entire career. (This probably is the source of the
interview footage with the other two members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience,
bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, who both died recently.)
What’s interesting about this film is what it leaves out: it runs through the
basics of the Hendrix life story — his childhood in Seattle (mostly raised by
his father, Al Hendrix, because his mom Louise drifted in and out of the family
— like her son, she refused to be tied down to any one environment or any one
romantic or sexual partner), his interest in music (he was five when Al bought
him his first guitar — an acoustic — though it was later, when he got an electric guitar, that he became the obsessive practicer
described throughout the film; one interviewee recalled Hendrix as carrying a
guitar everywhere — even into the
bathroom! — and continually strumming it whether it was connected to an amp or
not), his stint as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army (one writer on Hendrix
suggested that some of the “whooshing” sounds he made with his guitar were an
attempt to duplicate what you hear when you rush through the air in free fall
before your parachute opens), his discharge for medical reasons after he broke
his leg on a jump landing (one of the occupational hazards of parachuting; the
chute slows you down enough so the fall doesn’t kill you but you don’t always
land with all your body parts intact), his attempts to put together a musical
career, his stints on the “chit’lin’ circuit” with Little Richard and the Isley
Brothers, his discovery by former Animals bassist Chas Chandler while he was
playing in Greenwich Village at a skuzzy coffeehouse (not a bar, as it’s described here) called the Café Wha?,
and Chandler’s taking him to England, putting two white musicians behind him,
and winning the praise of such established rock “names” as John Lennon, Paul
McCartney and Mick Jagger to promote him and get him prestigious gigs (he made
his official British debut at the Savile Theatre, run by Brian Epstein in the
last year of his drug-shortened
life).
The film is already almost half over before Hendrix makes his triumphant
return to the States at the Monterey Pop Festival (Paul McCartney, whom Smeaton
landed for a fresh interview, recalled that the Monterey Pop organizers
contacted him to see if the Beatles would play the festival; Paul told them
that the Beatles were too busy in the studio to consider a live gig, then said,
“But I know who you should get —
the Jimi Hendrix Experience!,” to which the organizers responded, “Who?”),
where he set his guitar on fire, and then mentions the abortive experiment of
having him tour with the Monkees as their opening act. “Someone thought that would be a good idea,” the film’s
narrator says rather snippily — in fact the “someone” was Micky Dolenz of the
Monkees, who had seen Hendrix in the U.K., fallen in love with his act and
wanted to do what he could to promote it. (Ironically, Hendrix would later fall
victim to a similar attempt to boost an act he liked by having it open for him;
the band was the British pop-rock ensemble the Move, and their concerts
together failed for the opposite reason Hendrix had flopped as an opening act
for the Monkees: Hendrix’ audience wasn’t interested in a group as pop-oriented
as the Move, even though they took a pretty twisted attitude towards pop, and
the Move wouldn’t become major international stars until the 1970’s, after they
changed their name to Electric Light Orchestra.) According to the PBS Web site,
Smeaton was originally inspired to make this film by the discovery of a
complete (or nearly so) film of Hendrix’ performance at the 1968 Miami Pop
Festival and his desire to make this available after 45 years — which, if true,
would probably have been better served if he’d merely released the Miami film
as is rather than build yet another talking-heads movie around it. (We can
hope, can’t we?) The Miami Pop Festival was an open-air affair in a stadium and
it was supposed to present Hendrix two days in a row, but the second day was
rained out (and inspired Hendrix’ song “Rainy Day, Dream Away” on Electric
Ladyland) and it’s hard to get much of an
idea of the performance that did
take place from the film we have, with the camera miles away from the stage and
Hendrix, Mitchell and Redding as little silhouettes against a big sky (though
at least the sound quality was excellent; Hendrix’ engineer, Eddie Kramer,
recorded the show on fully professional multitrack equipment).
Among the things
omitted from this documentary that are crucial to understanding Hendrix are his
mixed-race ancestry; he was actually part African-Amerian and part Native
American, and while his music mostly reflected his Black roots, his lyric
writing was clearly colored by Native American spiritual traditions, and at
least two of his songs, “I Don’t Live Today” (which he deliberately intended as
a portrait of life on a reservation — “Will I live tomorrow?/Well, I just can’t
say/But one thing’s for sure/I don’t live today”) and “Castles Made of Sand,”
directly reference Native lives and traditions. I found it interesting that
Smeaton deliberately chose photos of Hendrix that emphasize his Blackness —
which wasn’t the case when he was
alive; the group photo of the Experience on the U.S. release of Are
You Experienced (the official title does not contain a question mark at the end) seems to have
been distorted and processed to minimize the visual racial differences between Hendrix and his white British
bandmates. He also doesn’t mention that the reason Hendrix broke up the
original Experience in 1969 was under pressure from Black drummer Buddy Miles,
who argued that as the leading Black rock musician in an era of Black
nationalism, Hendrix should fire his white musicians and work with his own
people instead. (In one respect that was an asset — Redding’s replacement,
Billy Cox, was not only an old Army buddy of Hendrix’ but a truly great bass player, whereas Redding was a guitarist who had
learned bass to play with Hendrix but was clearly more comfortable on guitar
and didn’t supply the formidable bottom to Hendrix’ sound that Cox did. In
another respect that was a liability; Buddy Miles himself was a dull, plodding
drummer that didn’t send the sparks flying the way Mitch Mitchell did — ironic
given all the racist crap about Blacks having “natural rhythm” that Hendrix’
white drummer should have so much better a sense of time and be so much freer
and more inspirational than his Black one.) The show demonstrates the band
Hendrix had at Woodstock, where he expanded his basic guitar-bass-drums
heavy-metal lineup with conga players and other percussionists (including Juma
Sultan, who had also performed with John Coltrane at his last concert — to my knowledge Sultan is the only
musician who ever recorded with both Coltrane and Hendrix), though it didn’t
alter the sound much because, especially under the wretched conditions of a
disorganized open-air festival, whatever the percussionists were doing was
virtually inaudible. He called this ad hoc group “Band of Gypsys, Suns and Rainbows,” shortening it to “Band of
Gypsys” when he made an official live recording with it (or at least with just
himself, Cox and Miles) in the New Year’s concert at the Fillmore East in New
York in 1969/1970.
For a documentary aimed at focusing on Hendrix the musician
rather than Hendrix the celebrity, it’s a bit surprising that Smeaton offers
almost nothing about the music beyond a few obvious observations about Hendrix’
blues roots; there’s nothing about his interest in jazz, which was quite
apparent as early as Electric Ladyland (indeed, I read that two-LP set as a deliberate attempt by Hendrix to
show his musical versatility and command of various styles: side one is blues,
side two is soul, side three is jazz and side four is rock) and even more so on
his later recordings and jam sessions. Instead, much of the footage Smeaton
shows is Hendrix in public performance at his least interesting, doing openly and blatantly sexual moves
with his guitar and coming off (at least to my mind) as the stereotypical
smiling Black entertainer, emphasizing his sexuality and playing to white
stereotypes — I wrote a column for my high-school paper about Hendrix when he
was still alive comparing him to Louis Armstrong as a Black musical genius who
sucked up to white expectations and stereotypes in his performances. Indeed, my
views about Hendrix when he was alive were surprisingly mixed; I liked some of his songs (notably the blues “Red House,”
inexplicably left off the U.S. version of Are You Experienced even though it was not only on the British version,
it opened it; “House Burning
Down” from Electric Ladyland, in
which he quotes the famous opening of Louis Armstrong’s 1928 “West End Blues”;
and his majestic cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” a magnificent
song that did what a cover version should do: expand on the original by showing a different, equally valid way
of approaching the material) but I didn’t own any Hendrix LP’s and I wasn’t a
fan. Part of the reason was that I thought Hendrix’ virtuosity was
studio-manufactured — in one clip from 1967 Hendrix is understandably defensive
about the charge that he used “gimmicks” to make himself sound like a better
musician than he was — and frankly it was only when a lot of live, undoctored,
un-gimmicked Hendrix recordings came out after his death that I listened with
fresh ears and said to myself, “Hey, he didn’t need all the gimmicks; the man could really play all that guitar!” (Indeed, Hendrix’
posthumous career is still going on; “new” Hendrix recordings continue to
appear — one gets the impression he had a tape recorder going every time he
practiced — and there was a spurt of posthumous releases when his father Al
Hendrix regained control of his estate after protracted litigation with the
estate of Hendrix’ manager, Mike Jeffery, and a lot of people who’d been
sitting on unissued Hendrix recordings allowed them to come out once it would
be Hendrix’ family, not some anonymous “suits,” who’d be getting the money.)
Jimi Hendrix’ career is one of the great enigmas of music — like Franz
Schubert, he left a lot of his work unfinished and seems to have created in an
explosive burst of energy that drained him and led to his early demise (and one
good thing this show makes clear is that though his death was certainly
drug-related, Hendrix did not die
of a heroin overdose the way Janis Joplin did; he choked on his own vomit
following an ingestion of unusually strong barbiturates — like Marilyn Monroe
and Michael Jackson, Hendrix was killed not by a drug he took to get high, but a drug he took to
get some sleep). Like James Dean (or Vincent Van Gogh), Hendrix seems in his
short life to have accomplished all he could have — it’s virtually impossible
to imagine an aging Hendrix doing MTV Unplugged shows and getting a Grammy award for an acoustic
album the way Eric Clapton did, giving normal-sounding interviews about his
career (in the interviews he did
give, he speaks in this rather spooky “stoned” voice and is as elliptical as he
was in his song lyrics) and maybe even writing a best-selling memoir like Keith
Richards. One commentator on the Dean cult in the late 1950’s noted that it was
missing a key element that usually forms around the fans of artists who die
young — there was virtually no speculation about what he could have
accomplished if he’d lived longer — and one could say the same thing about the
Hendrix cult: it almost seems as if he had more music in him than could
possibly be contained, and that no matter what was the technical cause of his
death, he really exited early because the pressure of all he had to give blew
him up inside.
And yet at the time of his death he was nearly finished with the
magnum opus he’d been recording
in bits and pieces between tours, First Rays of the New Rising Sun (a CD of that title exists, pieced together by Mitch
Mitchell and Eddie Kramer — in the film Kramer recalls the arguments he had
with Hendrix over the sound mixes of his records; Hendrix always wanted his
vocals buried in the texture and Kramer wanted them front and center, which
explains why in the posthumous releases Hendrix’ singing is clearer and more
audible than in the three studio albums released in Hendrix’ lifetime and with
his approval — but Mitchell and Kramer both said in the notes that it was
merely a compilation of some of
the material and exactly what songs Hendrix would have wanted on the album, and
in what order, were secrets Hendrix took to his grave), and he seemed to be
expanding his musical horizons beyond what rock could contain. Indeed, I’m
convinced that had Hendrix lived he would have been one of the leaders in the
jazz-rock “fusion” movement, which started impressively with fine, energetic,
highly emotional performances by Miles Davis and guitarist John McLaughlin but
soon degenerated into the antiseptic form that later got renamed “smooth jazz.”
Maybe Jimi Hendrix would have been able by the sheer force of his personality
to keep “fusion” honest — and one of the great might-have-beens is a recording
that would have paired Hendrix with Albert Ayler, the avant-garde jazz
saxophonist who died only a few months after Hendrix and whose last albums
contained tracks he recorded with mediocre rock guitarist Henry Vestine of
Canned Heat — which are O.K. but tantalize with the thought of what Ayler might
have been able to accomplish with a genuinely great rock guitarist like Hendrix, Clapton or Zappa. And by the way, the film describes Hendrix as the first Black artist to front an otherwise all-white rock band, which he wasn’t; Black singer Arthur Lee and his band Love were already appearing and recording together in Los Angeles a year before the Jimi Hendrix Experience debuted in London.
