With a great and very active producer like Miller.

Hendrix was great, but his influence is overstated, imo.
Pop music has mostly stayed in the groove the Beatles and other acts, including the Stones, established or continued. Guitar-expert based rock is still a minor offshoot.

So we're going to cut down Sgt. Peppers? It is a pop masterpiece, hitting a before unknown sweet spot of timeliness and ultimate song writing. Revolver, for all its greatness has some gloopy drippiness like Good Day Sunshine.

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wonderboy

Hendrix was great, but his influence is overstated, imo.
Pop music has mostly stayed in the groove the Beatles and other acts, including the Stones, established or continued. Guitar-expert based rock is still a minor offshoot.

Tell that to the millions and zillions of kids (and adults) who yearned to play guitar because of Hendrix - not to mention the hundreds and thousands of established musicians he had an impact on.
Hendrix's influence went way beyond 'guitar-expert based rock'.

Billy Gibbons: "Here was a guy that took his favorite guitar, the Fender Stratocaster, and was figuring out ways to do things that had never been done before. It was a remarkable period, which he brought forth. Thankfully, his recordings live on, and his memory is just as fresh and vital today as it seems like it ever was."

Robby Krieger: " definitely thought he was the best. I think he's the best ever at singing and playing a guitar at the same time … The stuff he does while he's singing just blew me away."

Keith Richards: “Everybody else just screwed it up, and thought wailing away is the answer. But it ain’t; you’ve got to be a Jimi to do that, you’ve got to be one of the special cats.”

Eric Clapton: “What I found refreshing about him was his intensely self-critical attitude toward his music. He had this enormous gift and a fantastic technique, like that of someone who spent all day playing and practicing, yet he didn’t seem that aware of it".

Bob Dylan (on Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower): "It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day." In the booklet accompanying his Biograph album, Dylan said: "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way... Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

Stevie ray Vaughan: “I loved Jimi a lot. He was so much more than just a blues guitarist. He could do anything. I was about sixteen when he died. I could do some of his stuff by then but actually I’ve been trying to find out what he was doing moreso lately than I was then. Now I'm really learning how to do it and I'm trying to expand on it ... not that I can expand on it a whole bunch. But I try."

Albert Collins: “He played his own shit, he didn’t play nobody else’s stuff like they do now. Jimi was original.”

Peter Frampton: "He, in his way, reinvented the guitar. He made it more into a gymnasium … and just put the notes in different places … And, as inspirational as Eric [Clapton] has been to us all, Jimi, in a slightly different way, was too, and still is."

Warren Haynes: "I don't like saying who's the greatest guitar player, because it's not about that, but when they do these [lists] and put Jimi at the top, I don't know anybody that could argue with that … He changed [music] for the better and when you listen to what he did and how he went about it, it was so groundbreaking and refreshing."

Poncho Sampedro (Crazy Horse): "I could say my number-one favorite band is Jimi Hendrix, and number-two is Jimi Hendrix and number-three is Jimi Hendrix … When you listen to his music … if you really start breaking down the lines and all that … he really wasn't playing things that were that difficult. But, all in all, just his sound, his moves, his lyrics … his whole thing was really something special. And when you put it all together, no one's come close to it yet."

Freddie Mercury: “Jimi Hendrix is very important. He’s my idol. He sort of epitomizes, from his presentation on stage, the whole works of a rock star. There’s no way you can compare him. You either have the magic or you don’t. There’s no way you can work up to it. There’s nobody who can take his place.”

Kirk Hammett: “After months of playing air guitar to ‘Free Bird’, what really got me into guitar was watching a documentary about Jimi Hendrix and picking up the Woodstock soundtrack. Listening to his version of ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and ‘Purple Haze.’ My brother played acoustic guitar and, idolising him, I thought, ‘I’m going to get a guitar.’”

Roy Wood: “The best thing I ever heard was in the ’60s. I heard Jimi Hendrix play ‘I Can Hear The Grass Grow’ after a rehearsal, and it was brilliant.”

Joe Satriani: “I started out playing guitar because Jimi Hendrix was my hero, so my roots were really based on Jimi Hendrix and his style of playing.”

Paul McCartney: “He was very self-effacing about his music but then when he picked up that guitar he was just a monster.”

Kurt Cobain: “They’re claiming that [the grunge bands] finally put Seattle on the map, but, like, what map? …I mean, we had Jimi Hendrix. Heck, what more do we want?”

Robert Smith: “Jimi Hendrix changed my life. Each generation influences the following one and as a consequence brings it back to the past.”

Jeff Beck: "He wasn’t one of those staid, insular kinds of blues players; he would listen to everything. And that alone thrilled me. He’d also seen the Yardbirds live in 1965/1966 when he was playing sideman to Little Richard, I believe. It was amazing to see him play, and I’d met him before I saw him perform. I saw him at this tiny little club in London, with all of these “dolly birds,” which is what they called girls dressed in their miniskirts. I think they all thought he was going to be a folky, Bob Dylan–type of character [laughs], and he blew the place apart with his version of [Dylan’s] “Like a Rolling Stone.” I just went, “Ah…this is so great!” It overshadowed any feelings of inferiority or competiveness. It was so amazing. To see someone doing what I wanted to do… I came out a little crestfallen, but on the positive side, here was this guy opening big doors for us. Instead of looking on the negative side and saying, “We’re finished,” I was thinking, No, we’ve just started"!


And finally this tribute from John Mayer:

Jimi Hendrix is one of those extraordinary hubs of music where everybody lands at some point. Every musician passes through Hendrix International Airport eventually. He is the common denominator of every style of popular music. Was he a bluesman? Listen to "Voodoo Chile" and you'll hear some of the eeriest blues you can find. Was he a rock musician? He used volume as a device. That's rock. Was he a sensitive singer-songwriter? In "Bold As Love," he sings, "My yellow in this case is not so mellow/In fact I'm trying to say it's frightened like me" — that is a man who knows the shape of his heart.

So often, he's portrayed as a loud, psychedelic rock star lighting his guitar on fire. But when I think of Hendrix, I think of some of the most placid, lovely guitar sounds on songs like "One Rainy Wish," "Little Wing" and "Drifting." "Little Wing" is painfully short and painfully beautiful. It's like your grandfather coming back from the dead and hanging out with you for a couple of minutes and then going away. It's perfect, then it's gone.

I think the reason musicians love Hendrix's playing so much is that the language of it was so native to his head and heart. He had a secret relationship with playing the guitar, and though it was incredibly technical and based in theory, it was his theory. All you heard was the color. The math is what's been applied ever since.

I discovered Hendrix by way of Stevie Ray Vaughan. I heard Stevie Ray do "Little Wing," and I started working my way backward to Hendrix. The first Hendrix record I bought was Axis: Bold As Love, because it had "Little Wing" on it. I remember staring at the album cover for hours. Then I remember spending months listening to Electric Ladyland, which was very creepy. There's something dark about it in certain places that maybe Hendrix was too honest to hide.

Hendrix invented a kind of cool. The cool of a big conch-shell belt. The cool of boots that your jeans are tucked into. If Jimi Hendrix is an influence on somebody, you can immediately tell. Give me a guy who's got some kind of weird-ass goatee and an applejack hat, and you just go, "He got to you, didn't he?"

Hendrix has the allure of the tragic figure: We all wish we were genius enough to die before we're 28. People want to paint him as this lonely, shy figure who managed to let himself open up on the stage and play straight colors through the crowd. There's something heroic about it, but there's nothing human about it. Everybody is so caught up in his otherworldliness. I prefer to think about his human side. He was a man who had a Social Security number, not an alien. The merchandising companies put Jimi Hendrix's face on a tie-dyed T-shirt, and somehow that's what he became. But when I listen to Hendrix, I just hear a man, and that's when it's most beautiful — when you remember that another human being was capable of what he achieved. Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix. However far you stop on your climb to be like him, that's who you are.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2017-05-08 18:38 by Hairball.

Wow. First time I've seen most of these comments from other players re Hendrix. The quote from John Mayer, IMHO, is akin to someone expressing the poetry of their soul. So well written. Thanks for posting, Hairball.

That's a great, great post Hairball; thank you for taking so much time and doing so much research and pasting. I hadn 't really seen anything like that, all those players in one place, and such a diverse group, giving direct, thoughtful and personal statements. Even Keith I'd think would be dismissive because it's so 'out there,'t but nope, he gets it too, as does Ron. Thanks man, that was super.

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dmay
Wow. First time I've seen most of these comments from other players re Hendrix. The quote from John Mayer, IMHO, is akin to someone expressing the poetry of their soul. So well written. Thanks for posting, Hairball.

You're welcome dmay.

And there's plenty more of these comments out there, but due to time restraints and space limitations,
I thought that was more than enough to establish a good counterargument to the thought that Jimi's "influence is overstated".

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2017-05-08 19:42 by Hairball.

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wonderboy
Hendrix was great, but his influence is overstated, imo.
Pop music has mostly stayed in the groove the Beatles and other acts, including the Stones, established or continued. Guitar-expert based rock is still a minor offshoot.

Yeah, if we really going to talk of mainstream pop music, it could be that Hendrix didn't have much influence on Abba, Michael Jackson (?), Madonna, or 2Cent, but for those people who think that electric guitar is a sort of central instrument in a department of pop music called rock music, and some sort of ability to play that is not a bad thing - not probably many any longer, but there use to be quite a lot of people like that - I don't think Hendrix's significance is over-estimated.

But that said, I think Jimi Hendrix 'suffers' - how funny that sounds - a bit too much of his 'guitar hero' status - or that thanks to so many guitar heroes inpired by him and having followed some rather one-dimensional path of his, Hendrix's real genius and uniqueness gets hidden easily. For me his great skills and innovative way to handle the axis (the technical part) is just one - though very distinctive - trait of his musical greatness. It his pure musicality, vision, the aim for artistic expression, with that incredible talent, is the one which sets him to the rank of his own among rock musicians. If Dylan was the one who gave pop music the lyrical ambition, and thereby, as Springsteen once said, gave rock music a "mind", and the British pop musicians, lead by The Beatles, the beat and the drive for original song structures, it was Hendrix in whom all that came in one package, with a musicianship that set the standard way higher than before. In Jimi, there was Bob, Mick and Eric, among others, in one person (though the mix was original); he was the first pure rock musician. To put it simply, in Jimi and due his example, 'rock' was finally established conceptually as a different thing as 'pop', adding there musical depth and seriousness there was not before him. (For some people that 60's created distinction still signifies something.) It could be that the time was on Jimi's side as well - he just entered to the world in which pop music was going through its most creative and innovative period in which everything was possible - it was like created to be taken over by such a musical hurricane...

Well, despite his historical significance, I think one crucial part of Jimi's uniqueness in the long run is that he transcends the boundaries of rock music even still today. I mean, the people who might not respect rock music generally very much, do recognize the share talent of this guy. Of that I have had lots of experience with many people deriving from many different genres of music (from jazz via flamenco (!!!) to classic music). His musicianship and creativity just shines through. A great, timeless representative of rock music at its best...

- Doxa

I recognize that guitar players love him and I have friends who sing his praises, but I stand by the comment that you don't hear his successors in today's pop music world.
You take somebody like Jeff Beck, who heard Hendrix and was inspired, but ultimately the listeners didn't want to go in that direction.

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wonderboy
I recognize that guitar players love him and I have friends who sing his praises, but I stand by the comment that you don't hear his successors in today's pop music world.
You take somebody like Jeff Beck, who heard Hendrix and was inspired, but ultimately the listeners didn't want to go in that direction.

You are right. But you could also say that you don't hear rock music in today's pop world. It's yesterday's papers in that sense.

- Doxa



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2017-05-08 20:07 by Doxa.

Interesting Eric Burdon's take on him; as he was right there at Monterey, knew him closely. I stumbled across this segment I'm pulling here from the excellent Animals Documentary on a current thread:
[youtu.be]

It occured to me in passing on this thread somewhere that his 'experience' as a paratrooper US Army was a significant factor in his expression, it got me thinking about Bill's RAF service too, and the discipline to mission inherent in that for anyone in that kind of service, but Eric was right there with him when kids protesting WAR were attacked violently, happening right in front of them in the streets and talking with him about it.
Jimi wasn't singing the chorus of Street Fighting Man, he was singing the lyrics to All Along The Watchtower. And the guitar was also 'singing' those lyrics; and/or creating more dimensional thrust from them, and into them. Dylan heard this immediately and copped the arrangement, he is directly quoted saying so earlier in this thread.
This is a very intesresting piece; There are clickable samples as he demonstrates the points he is making:
[www.reasontorock.com]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2017-05-08 22:19 by hopkins.

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wonderboy
I recognize that guitar players love him and I have friends who sing his praises, but I stand by the comment that you don't hear his successors in today's pop music world.
You take somebody like Jeff Beck, who heard Hendrix and was inspired, but ultimately the listeners didn't want to go in that direction.

I was simply responding to your comment that 'Hendrix was great, but his influence is overstated'.
If we're talking about his role and influence in todays 'pop' world, I might tend to agree with you. But the '70's and '80's (and even the 90's) 'rock' scene was a different time and most everyone tipped their hat to Hendrix one way or another - at least as far as rock and roll is concerned. Even in the '00's to the present day, he's influencing guitar players - might not be 'pop' and topping the charts, but the legacy lives on. Just because todays 'pop' scene might be more popular than 'classic' or 'traditional' rock doesn't diminish the massive influence he once had and still does have for alot of people outside of todays 'pop' scene. To say his 'influence is overstated' just doesn't make any sense to me.

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Doxa

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wonderboy
I recognize that guitar players love him and I have friends who sing his praises, but I stand by the comment that you don't hear his successors in today's pop music world.
You take somebody like Jeff Beck, who heard Hendrix and was inspired, but ultimately the listeners didn't want to go in that direction.

You are right. But you could also say that you don't hear rock music in today's pop world. It's yesterday's papers in that sense.

- Doxa

Simplified.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2017-05-08 20:19 by Hairball.

I just see him as more of a Mile Davis-like performer. Again, brilliant, but Miles and his contemporaries took jazz out of the mainstream.
Rock has two roads -- one road taken by artists who want to make it more complex, and the other road by those who want to take it back to the garage. So every time it gets too complex we see punk or grunge music. I think we're due for that again. Hip hop kinda took that over, because any kid with a drum machine and a microphone can make music.

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bob r
Are You Experienced, Axis, and especially Electric Ladyland are all killer albums for sure-- groundbreaking, influential,all ahead of their time...

Totally agree, they are all great! Think about what future songs we never got to hear, due to his untimely death!

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bob r
But you cant knock the Beatles...

Nor would I ever. Anyone that does instantly loses credibility as a music lover, in my book.

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wonderboy
I just see him as more of a Mile Davis-like performer. Again, brilliant, but Miles and his contemporaries took jazz out of the mainstream.
Rock has two roads -- one road taken by artists who want to make it more complex, and the other road by those who want to take it back to the garage. So every time it gets too complex we see punk or grunge music. I think we're due for that again. Hip hop kinda took that over, because any kid with a drum machine and a microphone can make music.

Just because Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach (for example) are no longer on the popular charts, doesn't diminish the influence they had on music in general.

And take a look at some of the visual artists throughout history.
Michelangelo - influenced millions upon millions of artists for centuries, and made an everlasting impact.
Leonardo - influenced millions upon millions of artists for centuries, and made an everlasting impact.
Van Gogh - influenced millions upon millions of artists for decades (and over a century), and made an everlasting impact.
Just because their particular styles are not popular in today's contemporary postmodern conceptual art world, does not diminish their impact and influence they made on Art in general.
As a musician, Hendrix will be looked back on in a similar same light - influencing millions and making a huge impact on music in general imo.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

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Doxa

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wonderboy
I recognize that guitar players love him and I have friends who sing his praises, but I stand by the comment that you don't hear his successors in today's pop music world.
You take somebody like Jeff Beck, who heard Hendrix and was inspired, but ultimately the listeners didn't want to go in that direction.

You are right. But you could also say that you don't hear rock music in today's pop world. It's yesterday's papers in that sense.

- Doxa

True enough, but isn't everything in 'todays pop music world' changing every 3 or so years anyway? and is it personally important to a fans of modern art if the public did not want to go in the direction of Man Ray or some abstract expressionist, would that lessen it's significance to them or their personal relationship with the art product? In this context, just for fun one could suggest that everything is a cult phenomemon some short years after it's inital presentation and exhibit. Also in Hairball's (which brang the art world into the discussion here too) post we see the direct influence for very many guitarists, many generations of artists at the top of the game commercially, in their own few years at their commercial peak, proudly attesting to being derived from their personal inpsiration listening to Jimi's music.
Jeff Beck established something extraordinarily groundbreaking & imo directly influenced the assemblage and birth of Zep, who launched ten million bands (unfortunately in many ways, brilliant in some) out of direct influence from that.
And Little Richard, haha why do I always end up dragging Little Richard into everything...because he IS in so many things. His big hits 12 or more years before Bonham cops (brilliantly and with soul power and thunder) the direct intro from Keep A Knockin' in "Rock & Roll," which for very many commercially, including myself, is their fave Zep tune, and almost everybodys who is at all into them at least likes that one. The final kicker in that regard to me personally, and I get the biggest kick out this, it has a Rolling Stone on the 88's. ! JP Jones could have dubbed that part, I give 'em credit for getting Stu in there for that, it took someone who JUST did that, to REALLY do ..THAT!! so haha, i do not know.
_______________________________
editing this in a day later about Richard. He actually directly deserves to be in the mix here because it is the respect and fame of this association that got very many musicians to lend Jimi an ear in the first regard. I didn't put together that the guy who Little Richard brought with him on stage at that revue I saw in '65 (that's where I caught The Hollies on their first trip over too) was Hendrix, he wasn't a 'name' at that point. But I distinctly remember that of the very many artists in that revue only one of the solo stars brought any other sidemen with him. They didn't need to. The supremely masterful King Curtis' band was the house-band for the show. When Richard talks of 'i discovered this one, i taught the Beatles that, i taught Paul McCartney how to go 'whoooo' and etc...and he reels off a list of incredible big names that he 'started' and etc...he is just telling the truth...even Jimi's look & approach to dress to some extent too...
____________________________________________________________________

it's all a mish mash somewhere down the line...and it all fades away and comes back in different forms. The commercial market and influence on modern pop fans of call and response gospel music and everything that came out of the cotton fields and churches for a hundred years, ended up bigtime with Sam & Dave and the Memphis Horns, the Bar Kays or Mar Keys, ...and other horn groups reflected in Jim & Bobby's work on sf & emos, and still the basis for a lot of Stones horn charts...

...God I love Sam & Dave...and commercially today, soul music as we knew it and loved it, Sam Cooke having actually co-created the entire commercial viability of the whole thing...well that's a boutique item now to many but something that still fuels me. I want the bios of everybody who ever backed them, because that is way past amazing...and here come The STones again last year marketing a sort of novelty record, & it ends up doing well w a lot of kids who never heard that material before...so is that where the commercial pop audience is, at least a fragment of it.

We're not talking Gaga or (gasp) Taylor Swift Cheese numbers but maybe there's a point in here somewhere. maybe not. Man I'm gonna listen to Sam & Dave and The Shirelles and as many great doo woppers as I can; i'm not gonna chase incredible music out of my life because someone doesn't want to buy it or promote it. That's what was special about rock 'n roll to me as a kid, and still, we don't care if someone else is a 'square,'...(Got that from Maynard G. Krebs) ...we do not care. Jagger knows how to work it both ways for effect...
even at first...not a lot of smiles, not a lot of grinnin' back at the camera ala Paulie and such. That Brad Paisley casville stuff is in some ways as grim as it is harmless fun, there's more Stones guitars all over country pop than anywhere else, and Keith Urban and those cats are cleaning up with it. It is way way more than commercially viable, it builds empires...Stones lite. Down to the haircut with K. Urban...Sort of Bon Jovi country...pillow-boy stuff. not house boy knows that he's doin' alright... and Doxa I gain perspective every time I read you...yep 50 years ago right about this time of year...it honestly seems like yesterday to me. what hits you hard stays in your memory forever...



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2017-05-09 02:24 by hopkins.

Quote
wonderboy
I recognize that guitar players love him and I have friends who sing his praises, but I stand by the comment that you don't hear his successors in today's pop music world.
You take somebody like Jeff Beck, who heard Hendrix and was inspired, but ultimately the listeners didn't want to go in that direction.

Saying that you don't hear Hendrix successors in today's pop music is kind of like saying that you don't see examples of Rembrandt in a three year olds coloring book. No kidding. Why would you?

Hendrix was a once in a lifetime artist who used musical sounds as his palate to convey experiences and emotions with his audience. Be thankful that he came along at a time when that kind of artistry was accepted and celebrated in the pop market.

Imagine what would happen if he (or someone like him) was new today... Once he finished syncing the rough tracks to the click track (so they could make a dance remix dub), by the time the engineers got done "auto-tuning" him and the producers got done compressing him, he'd end up sounding like Bieber (or maybe Adele). And that's not even taking into consideration what the A&R people and stylists would have done to him first. Co-writing songs with established hit makers, all his singles "Featuring" whichever rapper or pot-starlet an executive thinks might give him a bump in a crossover market. Clothing by the designer most likely to be viewed as cool by teenagers worldwide.

Rather than using the fact that you don't hear Hendrix influencing current pop music as proof that: a) he wasn't all that influential or b) listeners didn't want to go in that direction, you may want to lament the fact that you don't hear Hendrix influencing pop music because pop music producers, realizing that their listeners don't require any actual "art" from their artists, are fully content repackaging new versions of the same old crap for as long as there is a market willing to purchase it and believe it's the newest, latest, greatest, next big thing that everyone else is talking about. Then again, except for brief periods in the 1920s-30s, 50s, 60s-70s, that's really what "Pop Music" has always been and will generally be.

Peace,
Mr DJA

Just thinking of the sad state of todays pop music makes me want to dig out and listen to the scratchiest old Hendrix vinyl containing the worst live performance he ever gave and crank it to 10.
Guaranteed a much more rewarding and pleasurable experience than enduring the pain of listening to today's current top 10 ...even if it's on the best sound system in the universe.



_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

[www.reasontorock.com]

I had edited this into an earlier post on this page but after re-reading it, I hope u don't mind, I thought it deserves it's own post.

OMG, the name, Maynard G. Krebs, appears in this thread. Does anyone else remember the t-v show "Dobie Gillis"? I think Warren Beatty played the spoiled rich boy on it, but I may be wrong. And I digress from this thread.

What just struck me as some tunes came up in my MP3 mix is how Hendrix also influenced black musicians. Consider how Issac Hayes used pop songs on "Hot Buttered Soul" and made them his own ala Hendrix with "All Along The Watchtower", Jimi making it his own. Think of Buddy Miles doing a revamp of Neil Young's "Down By The River", the Isley Brothers channeling Hendrix on their version of "Summer Breeze". Hendrix's influence can also be seen in the early years of Parliament-Funkadelic and similar. Hendrix's music spirit, if not ghost, stretches far.

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dmay
OMG, the name, Maynard G. Krebs, appears in this thread. Does anyone else remember the t-v show "Dobie Gillis"?

Before he wqs Gilligan, Bob Denver was Maynard. Pretty rare for an actor to play TWO iconic TV characters.

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loog droog

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dmay
OMG, the name, Maynard G. Krebs, appears in this thread. Does anyone else remember the t-v show "Dobie Gillis"?

Before he wqs Gilligan, Bob Denver was Maynard. Pretty rare for an actor to play TWO iconic TV characters.

"Zelda Gilroy. Zelda Gilroy, portrayed by the American actress Sheila Kuehl (known by the stage name of "Sheila James"), is a character from the American sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which originally aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963."
________________
Zelda ended up going to Harvard and was a State Senator in CA. She's still an active politician in LA County and on the Board of Supervisors. Hot for Zelda would be a great band name! --- Yep sure was Warren Beatty. Clyde Barrow his-self...i was barely out of kindegarten when Dobie started...I see re-runs now and again and it's actually really a brilliantly written show.
_____ _________ ___________________
Story about Hendrix meeting Clapton
[www.youtube.com]

"...it was like wow, that kind of a thing - I knew it had a tremendous effect on Eric...Eric was a guitar player, Jimi some force of nature..."
Jack Bruce

"...and Erics hands ...just dropped, he just stood there looking at Jimi, and he walked off the stage and i thought damn i knew this was going to happen..."
Chas Chandler

"...and everybody's just going 'my God!' and words going around this guy just got up to jam with Cream and he cut Clapton, he killed god man!...."
Charles Shaar Murray
__________________________________
Eric Clapton about Jimi Hendrix death
[www.youtube.com]

"...i kept running into people who were shoving him down my throat...I'd see these young kids playing the guitar, coming up and saying, you know,
'have you heard this one' or 'I can do all this' and i said 'Forget it man it's been done!' It's the same with Robert Johnson...."
Eric



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2017-05-09 01:45 by hopkins.

Rolling Stone magazine 2017



ROCKMAN

It's very easy to sit here in 2017 and say Sgt Pepper is overrated but in 1967 it blew people's minds. It's place in R&R history is well deserved it ushered in a new sound for the Beatles and influenced everyone including the Stones.

I actually do prefer to listen to Are You Experienced but Pepper's importance should never be downplayed.

Sgt. Pepper in mono is amazing.

With hits like ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Third Stone From The Sun,’ the rock superstar’s first album is as revolutionary as ever

Are You Experienced Turns 50

By Bruce Britt
May 10, 2017

It commences with a buzz. A high-pitched drone, insistent and frenzied, like a wasp tunneling for your brain. The sound builds, intensifying until it erupts in a blast of lurching rhythm and stabbing electric guitar. A male voice, sly and insinuating, arises from the din:

You know you’re a cute little heartbreaker (foxy!)
You know you’re a sweet little lovemaker (foxy!)
I’m gonna take you home, I won’t do you no harm
You’ve got to be all mine! All mine!
Ooh! Foxy Lady …

Today, the buzzing sound that opens “Foxy Lady” seems like a metaphor for the buzz Jimi Hendrix created 50 years ago upon his arrival on the international music scene. Released May 12, 1967, “Foxy Lady” is the opening track on the U.K. edition of Are You Experienced, the debut album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience (the LP wouldn’t be issued in the U.S. until August that year). The absolute Molotov cocktail of 1960s rock recordings, Are You Experienced was so powerful, so volcanically innovative, so out there, it changed the course of music history. After its release, rock and R&B music would be harder, funkier, more street, and with an emphasis on virtuosity that rivaled the postwar bebop jazz era.

Along with mid-1960s recordings by the Beatles and Cream, Are You Experienced ushered in the age of psychedelia and high-concept albums. Widely regarded as a benchmark in the evolution of hard rock and heavy metal music, Are You Experienced was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, an honor extended to records of “lasting qualitative or historical significance.”

After all, Hendrix’s high-wire solos on Are You Experienced transformed guitar playing into a competitive sport, inspiring generations of guitarists, including Carlos Santana, Prince, Ernie Isley, Lenny Kravitz, Vernon Reid, Slash, Tom Morello, Gary Clark Jr. and countless others. Are You Experienced also signaled the arrival of the power trio, a rock threesome capable of creating a symphony-scale commotion, with the help of amplification technology. Following the Experience’s lead, influential bands such as The Police, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, Nirvana, Green Day and John Mayer Trio took the power trio concept to the bank.

But most of all, Are You Experienced showcased Hendrix’s extraordinary musical range, from the acid-dropping euphoria of “Purple Haze” to the folklike storytelling of “Hey Joe” and the sensitive R&B balladry of original Hendrix compositions such as “May This Be Love” and “The Wind Cries Mary.” Rolling Stone ranks Experienced No. 15 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, praising Hendrix for establishing “the transcendent promise of psychedelia.” Smithsonian musicologist Reuben Jackson has said Are You Experienced changed music just like James Joyce’s Ulysses changed literature. “You read a page or two of Ulysses,” Jackson told NPR in 2006, “and then you listen to just ‘Purple Haze’ and you think, My goodness, what is this?’ ”


For Jimi Hendrix, Are You Experienced was the culmination of a lifelong musical obsession.

Born James Marshall Hendrix on Nov. 27, 1942, he took up the guitar because “every house you went into seemed to have one lying around.” Enthralled by blues and rock legends such as Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Buddy Holly, Hendrix became proficient via sheer will. Self-taught, he practiced incessantly, taking his guitar almost everywhere.

After a stint with the 101st Airborne Division, Hendrix hit the road, performing with chitlin’ circuit legends such as Little Richard, the Isley Brothers and Wilson Pickett. In 1966, Hendrix was discovered performing at New York’s famed Café Wha? by Chas Chandler, a budding British manager. Sensing he’d struck pay dirt, Chandler whisked Hendrix to England, teaming the guitarist with drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was born.

Though the trio had yet to play its first gig, the Experience had already done something revolutionary. Here was Hendrix, a foppish black man from segregation-torn America, calling the shots in a rock trio featuring two white British musicians. The Experience’s inverted chain of command was almost as jarring as its music, a symbol of racial unity and growing black empowerment amid the backdrop of the civil rights movement.
Are You Experienced was so powerful, so volcanically innovative, so out there, it changed the course of music history.

To promote his controversial new band, manager Chandler arranged a grinding European tour that found the Experience performing in England, Luxembourg, Germany, France and Holland. Initially, the band padded its set with classics such as Otis Redding’s “Respect” and Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour,” but Hendrix’s songwriting muse shifted into overdrive as the tour wore on, resulting in the original tunes that would form the Experience’s debut album. “A lot of material suddenly came out in a very short space of time,” said drummer Mitchell.

The Experience was an instant sensation, garnering the enthusiastic support of Europe’s rock elite and netting the band a recording contract with newly established Track Records. “We got a tremendous amount of help from people like Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and John Lennon,” Chandler recalled. “They would rave about Hendrix and turn the entire course of an interview around just to talk about him.”

The 11 tracks that would constitute Are You Experienced were recorded over five months in three London studios. The album’s U.K. release was preceded by the singles “Hey Joe,” “The Wind Cries Mary” and “Purple Haze,” all of which rocketed to the British Top 10. To stoke demand for Are You Experienced, it was decided that none of the aforementioned hits would be included on the album’s U.K. edition.

Are You Experienced went on to spend 33 weeks on the British music charts, peaking at No. 2, a tremendous feat for a debut artist. Pundits speculate that the only thing that prevented Hendrix’s debut from reaching No. 1 was the June 1 release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But while Hendrix had taken Europe by storm, reaction to Are You Experienced wasn’t totally enthusiastic. (“The kindest thing I can say about … Are You Experienced is that I survived one full session,” huffed Liverpool Post critic George Gregson.) Still, such scathing reviews were rare. Having conquered Britannia and its Atlantic neighbors, the Experience set its sights on the U.S.

Fifty years hence, Are You Experienced still inspires both blinding awe and head-scratching bewilderment. “Manic Depression” employs a ¾-time waltz rhythm to communicate a message of mental torment. “Love or Confusion” starts out like a cosmic Indian raga before mutating into a lithe, sexy samba. On “Third Stone from The Sun,” the Experience pits amp feedback and Wes Montgomery-style guitar chords against whirling jazz drums, creating a sound that could only be described as “space swing.” With its stun guitar and lumbering beat, “Purple Haze” sounds like Godzilla leveling Tokyo, while the album’s title track resembles a Scottish bagpipe reel transposed for the rock trio.

Song after song, the album lobs sonic grenades at the listener, leaving mind-bending psychic explosions in their wake. The album betrays Hendrix’s disdain for pop music conventions: None of the LP’s 11 tracks possesses anything close to a traditional, sing-along chorus — unless you think Hendrix frantically repeating “Stone Free!” constitutes a chorus.

Yet, for all their idiosyncrasies, Hendrix’s songs feature some of the most memorable lines in rock: “Excuse me, while I kiss the sky”… “is this love, or confusion?”… “move over, Rover, and let Jimi take over!” His seeming contempt for songwriting norms is all the more impressive considering Are You Experienced was released before underground FM radio reached critical mass, offering artists like Hendrix a platform.

Curiously, music was only part of the debut album’s charms. Though Hendrix reportedly hated his singing voice, his vocals, which deftly staked out the space between whispery tenor and midrange-y baritone, possessed so much gravitas he could make even the most inane lyric sound like divine writ. His lyrics were street poetry that often veered into science fiction territory. OK, so tracks like “Foxy Lady,” “Red House” and “Hey Joe” find him portraying the tongue-flicking Lothario, or the vengeful jilted lover. But on ballads such as “May This Be Love,” he exhibits the vulnerable sensitivity that made him such an expressive musician.

Some people say daydreaming’s for all the lazy-minded fools
With nothing else to do

So let them laugh, laugh at me,
So just as long as I have you, to see me through,
I have nothing to lose …

But “May This Be Love” is a rarity. The tracks that bookend that gorgeous ballad seethe with frustration, befuddlement and fear of persecution, including “Purple Haze” (“don’t know if I’m coming up or down”) and “Love or Confusion” (“my mind is so mixed up, goin’ round and round”). On the self-explanatory “Manic Depression,” Hendrix’s frustration seemingly knows no bounds.

Manic depression is searching my soul
I know what I want, but I just don’t know … how to go about getting it
Music, sweet music, I wish I could caress
Manic depression is a frustrating mess!

These tense, high-strung sentiments beg a question: Did Hendrix suffer from mental illness, perhaps bipolar disorder or worse? Though we’ll never know the answer, it’s interesting to speculate how an undiagnosed emotional disorder might have fueled the guitarist’s matchless creativity, influenced his music and fed his insatiable appetite for adventure.

The other thing “Manic Depression” underscores is Hendrix’s love of music, an affection so deep he wished he could caress it, make love to it. Are You Experienced would reveal just how close Hendrix could come to accomplishing that rhetorical goal, but first he had to endure the real-life experiences that would help sculpt him into rock’s greatest expressionist.

On June 18, 1967, The Jimi Hendrix Experience played the Monterey International Pop Festival, a first-of-its-kind showcase intended to promote artistic rock acts emanating from around the world. Performing on a roster that included Redding, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and sitar player Ravi Shankar, Hendrix and the Experience stole the show. Splendid in a ruffled orange shirt and feather boa, Hendrix pulled out all the stops, playing guitar behind his back, with his teeth, between his legs, the works. In a rock ’n’ roll sacrificial rite, the guitarist set his beloved Fender Stratocaster on fire, then smashed it during a finale performance of the rock anthem “Wild Thing.”

The shock of that set is captured in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1986 documentary Jimi Plays Monterey. As Hendrix tosses his shattered guitar into the Monterey crowd, Pennebaker’s cameras pan on some young women in the audience, their faces pallid with horror, confusion and desire.

Roughly two months after that debut U.S. performance, Are You Experienced was finally issued in the U.S. on Aug. 23, 1967. The album remained on Billboard’s Top LPs chart for 106 weeks. Unlike the U.K. edition, the album’s U.S. version included the singles “Hey Joe,” “The Wind Cries Mary” and “Purple Haze.” To date, Are You Experienced has sold more than 5 million copies in the U.S.
Here was Hendrix, a foppish black man from segregation-torn America, calling the shots in a rock trio featuring two white British musicians.

Many English rock fans today embrace Hendrix as an honorary Briton. Though he was born and raised stateside in Seattle, Hendrix was born again in the England. The country is rightfully proud to have served as the launching pad for the greatest rock musician ever. Hendrix, Mitchell and Redding are all dead now, the first classic rock band whose members are all dead. Ironically, a song from Are You Experienced suggests Hendrix may have harbored doubts about his future. Entitled “I Don’t Live Today,” the guitarist claimed the track was a paean to the world’s indigenous peoples, but the lyrics could easily be viewed as Hendrix pondering his legacy.

Will I live tomorrow?
Well, I just can’t say …

On its 50th anniversary, The Jimi Hendrix Experience is universally acclaimed. A half-century later, the Hendrix buzz still resounds.

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Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Wow. What a great read re Are You Experienced at 50 years and Hendrix. Thanks for the post Hairball.

Jimi Hendrix 'Are You Experienced' A fantasic album and one of the greats-Jimi was the man

Technically the Beatles were hacks, "3 chords wonders" at best, while Hendrix was a virtuoso.
Plus he pioneered the creative use of effect pedals, he created new voicings by fretting the low E string with his thumb, etc etc...
I'll stop here!

Quote
dcba
Technically the Beatles were hacks, "3 chords wonders" at best, while Hendrix was a virtuoso.
Plus he pioneered the creative use of effect pedals, he created new voicings by fretting the low E string with his thumb, etc etc...
I'll stop here!

What an ignorant statement all around