1. Rock music has, stylistically and technically, never moved beyond Jimi Hendrix. Fact.
2. My dad was a keyboard player with a trumpet fetish who mainly listened to jazz, show tunes, and doo-wop around the house, so I actually grew up hearing very little guitar-centric music. The hair metal bands of the ’80s were mainly heard through maxed-out sound systems in cars speeding past the busy intersection where our home was located. As a child, I found those sounds off-putting, if not downright frightening. The ’90s grunge bands, to me, were even worse, all the moreso because my angsty younger brother adopted Nirvana as his band and would play their albums at deafening volumes in his room. Prissy teenage do-gooder that I was, I fucking haaaaated it. In subsequent years, my brother was eventually inspired to pick up an electric guitar of his own, and my dad optimistically viewed this as their chance to bond over music the way he and I had previously bonded over the piano. In one of his finer and more sensitive moments of parenting, he chose not to criticize the grunge that my brother loved but instead attempted to merely enhance his CD collection with recordings of other great electric guitar players. To this end he’d purchased a copy of the Hendrix compilation Jimi Hendrix: The Ultimate Experience for my brother at some point, but for whatever reason, I dubbed it onto cassette and adopted it as my own.
3. Mainly, I remember driving myself back to Indiana University after some vacation or other and listening to the tape in the car on my way down. The comp is paced really thoughtfully, and I remember getting toward the end and hearing his live recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in its entirety for what was probably the first time. I was stuck in traffic somewhere on I-465 and just sat there sobbing my eyes out.
4. After college graduation, I spent a few months bumming around Seattle, living with a dear friend who’d recently moved there for a job as a sales rep with Samsonite. The Experience Music Project Museum (now officially known as MoPOP, I guess) had just recently opened and we were eager to check it out. In one of the first exhibits that we walked through, there was a display featuring Jimi’s handwritten lyrics for “Angel.” I cried standing there in front of it.
5. Thanks to all this, it got to the point where I both considered myself and was known as A Jimi Hendrix Fan.
6. Another good friend gave me a couple Hendrix CDs for either my birthday or Christmas one year. He was a devotee of Eric Clapton and so affixed handwritten speech bubbles onto the covers that said things like, “Allison! Hey, baby. I’m just practicin’ to get better than that dandy Clapton.”
It was cute and it made me laugh but was also one of those does-not-compute moments for me. Like, literally? There are people in the world who actively prefer Clapton to Hendrix? And not only just “people” in the abstract, but one of my best friends?? How is there any contest or comparison between them at all? As Charles Shaar Murray puts it in his book Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop:
Eric Clapton, on the other hand, played the blues something like Vladimir Nabokov wrote English: with the masterful formal grasp of one who has studied so intensely that he learns the rules of his chosen language or discipline to a far greater extent than many who have always simply assumed them and instinctively operated within them. Like Nabokov—and, for that matter, like Joseph Conrad and Jack Kerouac, both of whom came to English from, respectively, Polish and French—what Clapton was able to create and express through his acquired outlet was both a revelation to and an influence on many native “speakers.” Yet the cultural distance which provides perspective also imposes isolation; and in an art form where nuance is all, sterility is the almost inevitable result.
7. Stupidly, though, I think there were times that I actually forgot Hendrix was primarily revered as a guitar player. Because I actually really loved his singing voice. I know he didn’t consider himself much of a singer and credited Bob Dylan with giving him the courage to utilize his own perfectly imperfect vocals. But, partially because I was a singer myself and partially because I didn’t have much frame of reference for what made him such a uniquely gifted guitarist, I really gravitated and responded to the good humor, ease, and mysticism in his voice.
8. In my early days working as the editorial assistant at my day job, I found myself doing some light production work on Greg Tate’s book Midnight Lightning.
Tate’s writing totally blew my mind, but the bit that really knocked me out was this quote from Albert Allen about Hendrix’s death:
While the other type of sleep, the light sleep is coming upon you, there’s two sockets where you can go into. One socket is death and one socket is the socket to live. I think they call that an “alpha-jerk.” An alpha-jerk is—have you ever felt as though, “Oh wow, I’m going into the wrong hole here”? And you really feel funny, like that’s possibly the hole to die. And the other side is to go ahead and sleep and get into your subconscious and whatnot, which we normally go into. I believe that Jimi, possibly, could have got into his alpha-jerk field and it kind of felt groovy to him because he was high, slightly high, and he said, “Damn, I’m Jimi Hendrix, I wonder if I can die?” And the alpha-jerk came on him and he just said, Fuck it, let me try the alpha, and slipped on out.
9. In early 2011, I’d been singing with the band Tiny Magnets for about a year. In part because we were such a guitar-driven band, I found myself, perhaps naturally, listening to a lot of Hendrix. I’d dump a couple of different comps and maybe Are You Experienced into a playlist on my iPhone and would set the tracks to shuffle. One day on my commute to work, “Can You See Me” somehow came up twice. And then a day or two later, I went to see a friend’s band play at the Empty Bottle and one of the other bands on the bill covered “Can You See Me.” “That’s weird,” the bass player in my band—another huge Hendrix fan—laughed. “That’s not really one of his songs that gets played that often.” We left rehearsal together one night soon thereafter and saw, in an otherwise un-graffiti’d alley, a stencil of Jimi’s face on the garage door across from where we were parked.
11. I was about six months into my formal training as a clairvoyant at that point, so I had no choice but to go into psychic meditation about all these signs and coincidences. And I discovered, with no small amount of incredulity, that Jimi kept showing up because he wanted to be my spirit guide (or tutelary ghost companion). “Hi, Jimi,” I welcomed him, deciding it was best not to let my own energetic signature slip into fawning fan girl mode. He came and sought me out, after all; I thought it was only polite to stay cool, acknowledge his presence, and carry on as equals.
12. Mostly, I called on his spirit whenever I went to band practice. He, quite naturally, loved the noise, loved the energy, and I felt that he just really missed the vibe and camaraderie that arose when a group of people were assembled to play, loudly, in a room together. It was a pleasure to invite his spirit to be present with us. We played really well that spring and through the summer when we recorded and released our album Time to Try.
13. As thanks and tribute to his spiritual influence on my life, I bought this gorgeous necklace to wear to my clairvoyant graduation:
14. My clairvoyant training ended in late September 2011, and Jimi’s energy kind of dissipated from my life after that. My band then ended up playing what would be our last gig in that four-piece configuration in late October.
15. I somehow don’t think the two of those things were unrelated. As much as we might long for him to stick around, Jimi always knows when it’s time to make an exit.
Queen of Peaches 