Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland by Perry John

Author:Perry, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing
Published: 2010-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

More than politics, his basic disposition seems to have leant toward mysticism. Of course, half the known music world was expressing itself in quasi-mystical terms during the late 1960s and it would have been interesting, had he lived, to see how long Jimi retained that particular spacey mode of expression.

As Harry Shapiro points out in Electric Gypsy, even in this most overtly topical of Jimi’s songs, he can’t quite keep his sci-fi mystical interests at bay. Jimi holds out as long as he can . . . he tries . . . but then, in the final verse, the final couplet- what is that Giant Sound? It’s Jimi doing his “Mothership Lands” impression. Sure enough, a perfectly respectable riot turns into space opera: “a giant boat from space” lands “with eerie grace” and “taketh all the dead away”. Whereupon Jimi smoteth his whammy bar, hammering a mighty trill. So much for Soul on Ice. Of course, Jimi has a wonderful guitar effect to simulate the boat’s descent—a downward Doppler (2:51). I suppose dialectics are harder to express in sound . . .

When directly questioned about race, Jimi preferred to answer along strictly anodyne “rock’n’roll ain’t got no colour” lines, but he needed nobody to remind him about the nature of being a black man in America. Mitch Mitchell tells on-the-road stories of the mixed race Experience stopping at a roadside diner in the South. Jimi didn’t even bother stepping out of the car. He knew without looking what would happen. He wasn’t

even angry, just wryly amused. The key words in this song probably come from the character who says, “we’re tired and disgusted”.

It’s my impression that Jimi simply wasn’t interested in questions of race and preferred not to think about them. I once asked Steve Cropper about the question of mixed race bands in the South, whether the Memphis Group (Booker T and the MGs) ever ran into trouble in the early-60s mid-south—he didn’t even consider the question worth replying to.

Jimi was deeply affected by the murder of Martin Luther King. At the show he was playing in Newark after the news came through, he abandoned his usual set and just improvised instrumental blues. Though it sounds crass to say so in such a situation, it’s a shame that no tape exists, for everyone who was there says Hendrix created music of outstanding beauty that night.

King was shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the same motel used by Steve Cropper for writing sessions with visiting singers.25 Across town, in the neighbourhood where the Stax studio stood, news of the shooting triggered a very ugly mood. Ike Hayes became seriously concerned for the safety of (white musicians) Duck Dunn & Don Nix. He drove them home himself, figuring that they would never make it out of the neighbourhood unless accompanied.

There are persistent rumours of a Cropper/Hendrix studio tape. Jimi had played with Cropper, years before he set out for England (although the studio session, supposedly in Nashville or Memphis, is apocryphal).

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