Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Fifty Years of Jimi Hendrix
Dec 14th 2016, 15:19
BY J.T.
The Economist

THERE WAS no wailing “wah-wah” pedal, no rasping distortion, no shrieking feedback from an oversized speaker. The opening bluesy licks of “Hey Joe”, the first single recorded by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, which was released on December 16th 1966, could have been played on an acoustic guitar. They gave little indication that the band’s front man would quickly become a sonorous sensation.  In an era of great electric guitarists—Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, The Who’s Pete Townshend and The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, to name a select few—one was widely acknowledged as the instrument’s most expressive practitioner. Mr Page called him “the best guitarist any of us ever had”. On seeing him play for the first time, Mr Clapton is said to have mumbled: “You never told me he was that fucking good.” Few could make a six-string chatter like Jimi Hendrix.

“Hey Joe” was a lively rendition of a folk standard and rose to sixth place in the British charts. It was chosen for the group by their manager Chas Chandler, who had spotted a 23-year-old Hendrix strumming in New York’s nightclubs and convinced him to move to Britain and start a band. But the clean, polished recording bore little resemblance to the frenzied playing that was winning the American admirers at gigs in London. “Purple Haze”, the next single, offered a glimpse of that energy with its brash opening riff and cacophonous ending.

It would take a full album, however, to show off Hendrix’s tricks. “Are You Experienced” arrived in May 1967, and was only denied the top spot in the British charts by The Beatles and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. The titular track used reverse taping, with Hendrix’s guitar and the drum parts playing backwards as if sucked through a black hole. “Third Stone from the Sun” concluded with a lengthy free-form solo, at turns jazzy and psychedelic, incorporating the whistles and groans of feedback from the amplifier. So did “I Don’t Live Today”, which also introduced the wah-wah effect: a signature Hendrix sound, turning each note into an oscillating “wah” syllable. It would return in his most famous tunes, notably the climactic solo of “All Along the Watchtower” and the swaggering start of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”.

Other guitarists had tried these modifications before. Mr Clapton dabbled with a wah-wah pedal, George Harrison used reverse taping on a handful of Beatles’ recordings and Mr Townshend occasionally allowed feedback into his tracks. Hendrix used them copiously. Though a decent singer, the guitar was typically the lead voice in his songs, whether growling or weeping.

He could (and frequently did) play the guitar behind his head and give the illusion of picking it with his teeth. Lots of rock stars smashed their instruments, but Hendrix set his on fire first. After leaving school, James—not yet “Jimi”—completed eight months of training as a paratrooper before dropping out of the army; in concert, he echoed the swoops of planes and explosions of bombs. His most famous live performance, as the closing act at Woodstock Festival in 1969, included a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” charged with the howls of war.

His obvious musical impact was turning the electric guitar into a weapon, rather than an accompaniment. But it would be wrong to think that he was merely loud and chaotic. Hendrix had a unique and influential way of playing mellow tunes, too.

Traditionally a guitarist had placed the thumb of his fretting hand behind the neck of the instrument and used his four fingers to produce a chord. Hendrix’s large hands meant that he could use an obscure blues technique: wrapping his thumb around to play the bass notes while freeing up his fingers to jump between the treble strings. Furthermore, as a left-hander he would restring right-handed guitars “the wrong way up”, which dulled the high notes and brightened the low ones. The result of these innovations was a warm, textured rhythm that rarely required any extra effects, as in “Little Wing”, “Bold as Love” and “The Wind Cries Mary”.  The thumb-around-the-neck technique became standard. The mellow bass-and-treble combination found favour with Prince, Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others.

Within four years of his arrival in London and with only three studio albums to his name Hendrix was dead. He choked on his own vomit after an overdose of sleeping pills on September 18th 1970, aged 27. The son of an abusive drunk himself, alcohol often made him violent: he was arrested after an intoxicated brawl in 1968, and allegedly threw a bottle at a girlfriend. He was also a heavy drug user and was tried (and eventually acquitted) in Canada for possession of heroin in 1969.

While many of his contemporaries produced some of their finest work in the 1970s and after, fans of the “voodoo child” had to make do with a series of posthumous releases, cobbled together from a slew of unfinished projects and outtakes. But Hendrix’s legacy was greater than his songs. He changed the way the instrument is played. 

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