Jimi Hendrix, & Why the Little Dykes Understand
TEENAGERS find reasons to live and die in popular music. The aging process grinds this passion to a halt, as we become cynical and cautious. But a former teenager never forgets her first, and my first was Jimi Hendrix.
Hendrix is one of the most compelling legends of the ‘60s. He was a virtuoso musician, and he died at the height of our country’s discontent, an estrangement he described many times in his lyrics. He deliberately commented on society’s rules and wages of war. He was an army veteran who was not a stranger to colonialism. For these reasons, I idolized him, not as a revolutionary guitarist, but as a revolutionary and an ax man.
There was something about Jimi’s sound, rather than the lyrics or the times he lived in, that made young people, men and women, want to be stone free. No inhibitions, no limits, no authority.
When I talk to guitarists of my generation who revere Hendrix, they often rap about his technical mastery and mysteries. But the largest mystery to me about Hendrix was not how he achieved his outlandish distortion, but how he made my world seem so distorted— why my body responded to his voice, why “If six turned out to be nine," I didn't mind. I’ve been playing Electric Ladyland for fifty years now, but I didn’t examine what Jimi meant to me until a very weird flashback of the mid-1980s . . .