jimi's music 2

yeah, jimi's music was the water i grew up swimming in, meaning i took it for granted, like "blue are the life-giving waters taken for granted / they quietly understand." i always said i liked jeff beck better, which is like saying you prefer sonny rollins over coltrane. sure, sonny and jeff each carved out their own unique niche, and they both lived a lot longer than their more famous and iconic instrumental brethren. there was certainly some mutual influence going on -- just think of "tenor madness" and the quote from "rice pudding" that ends "in from the storm." but coltrane and hendrix changed the way _everybody_ heard and played their particular instruments -- hell, the way everybody heard and played _music_.

when i was in high school, we were like kids comparing baseball teams, my muso or music-snob friends and i: the hendrix experience versus the who versus cream. (in my backwater lawn guyland town, we were still playing stupid cream and allman brothers songs at the same time punk was happening in manhattan. an older gentleman i met recently, an expat from brooklyn to texas, said it: "everybody on long island says they're '20 minutes from the city' -- even out at montauk! they _lie_!") we'd compare the cats at each position; who do _you_ dig?

to me, it was a no-brainer: on gtr, hendrix was as exciting to watch as townshend, plus he could _play_; clapton came in a weak third (couldn't play riddim). on bass, solid entwistle topped "jazzman" bruce, with his flatulent tone; noel redding was, to put it charitably, not in the same league as the other two (or his own bandleader). shame on us, we didn't even rate billy cox, who in the fullness of time i've come to realize is the reason, along with improved songwriting, that i prefer "late" to "early" hendrix -- and how absurd it seems to make such distinctions when discussing a career that only lasted four years! on drums, moon the loon won out on sheer personality, but mitch mitchell had that elvin jones thang; ginger baker was an overrated embarrassment who actually had the nerve to "battle" elvin, ha ha ha. (to those of you who are thinking, "the obvious answer is bonham," my surly claque didn't even rate zeppelin back in '74, and they remain fairly irrelevant to my life even now.)

i lied when i said i couldn't listen to jimi's music for 20 yrs after college; it was more like 12, until labels and producers started figuring out what to do with cd's (i resisted buying a player until my sister gifted me one). f'rinstance, rykodisc started releasing things like live at winterland and radio one that justified the new format's existence to me by bringing new ways to hear a muso whose work i thought i knew well, rather than just forcing me to buy the same shit yet again. plus, i'm a lazy bastard, and the digital format allowed me to hear all of electric ladyland in sequence without having to change discs.

part of me consciously avoided listening to hendrix for all those years because i was afraid that hearing him would cause me to try and imitate him (as though that were possible). now i don't worry about it because i'm long past the point of being able to imitate anybody. not that i'm an original player at all, but i have my own sets of habit patterns that are indelibly etched in my reptilian brain to the point where i execute them automatically, without thinking, whenever i pick up an instrument. and those, i now see, were formed by growing up in the _age of hendrix_ (as opposed to, um, the age of van halen or the age of cobain). no excuses, no apologies.