Jimi Hendrix

The following contains excerpts from Jimi Hendrix (Starting at Zero) (Jimi Hendrix, Peter Neal).

Although this book was not officially an auto-biography, or even an interview, the author Peter Neal, compiled a chronological list of quotes from Jimi Hendrix throughout his lifetime, which ends up being a full autobiographical picture of Hendrix’ life, struggles, triumphs and inner convictions.  “There was a superabundance of material, since during his four years in the spotlight, he was constantly giving interviews.  He was also a compulsive writer, using hotel stationery, scraps of paper, cigarette cartons, napkins- anything that came to hand.”

Regarding Jimi’s upbringing, he states, “Dad was very strict and levelheaded, but my mother used to like dressing up and having a good time.  She used to drink a lot and didn’t take care of herself, but she was a groovy mother.  There were family troubles between my mother and father.  They used to break up all the time, and my brother and I used to go to different homes…Mostly my dad took care of me.  He was religious, and I used to go to Sunday school.  He taught me that I must respect my elders always.  I couldn’t speak unless I was spoken to first by grown-ups.  So I’ve always been very quiet.”

Jimi experienced his first taste of racism, when being reprimanded about his school girlfriend.  The teacher said, “‘Mr. Hendrix, I’ll see you in the cloakroom in three seconds please.’  In the cloakroom she said, ‘What do you mean talking to that white woman like that?’  I said, ‘What are you, jealous?’  She started crying, and I got thrown out.  I cry easy.”  (Jimmi dropped out of Garfield High School in October 1960, at the age of seventeen.)

Jimi’s musical taste was varied.  “My first instrument was a harmonica, which I got when I was about four, I suppose.  Next it was a violin.  I always dug string instruments and pianos, but I wanted something I could take home or anywhere, and I couldn’t take home a piano.  Then I started digging guitars.”  He was strongly influenced, like many great blues guitarist of his generation, by such artists as Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry.  After re-stringing his guitar to be left-handed, he started listening to records and learning these artists’ guitar riffs by ear.  When he was seventeen, he formed a group with some other friends.  “I started looking around for places to play.  I remember my first gig was at an armory, a National Guard place, and we earned thirty-five cents apiece and three hamburgers…I was all shaky, so I had to play behind the curtains.”  We encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas not to despise humble beginnings.

Jimi eventually joined the armed forces, “I joined the air-born.  I did it because I was bored, but the army taught me what boredom is.  There’s nothing more monotonous than spending a whole day peeling potatoes….The training was really tough.  It was the worst thing I’ve ever been through.  They were always trying to see how much you could take…They tried to make us tough- so we had to sleep in the mud.  The whole idea was to see how much you could take.  I took it.  I was determined not to crack.”

When He got out of the services, he took up the guitar again.  “I played in cafes, clubs and on the streets.  It was pretty tough at first.  I lived in very miserable circumstances.  I slept where I could, and when I needed to eat I had to steal it.  I earned some money, but I didn’t like it at all.  Then I started a group called the King Kasuals…I used to have a childhood ambition to stand on my own feet, without being afraid to get hit in the face if I went into a ‘white’ restaurant and ordered a ‘white’ steak.”

Still studying ‘folk blues’ artists, like Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert Johnson, along with Muddy Waters, he continued to hone his guitar skills, spending some time in Nashville.  “After that I traveled all over the States, playing in different groups.  Oh God, I can’t remember all their names.  I used to join a group and quit them so fast!  There I was, playing in this Top 40 R&B Soul Hit Parade Package, with the patent leather shoes and hairdo combined.  But when you’re running around starving on the road, you’ll play almost anything.  I got so tired of feeding back on The Midnight Hour.  I didn’t hear any guitar players doing anything new, and I was bored out of my mind…The trouble was too many leaders didn’t’ seem to want to pay anybody…Then I went to New York and won first place in the Apollo amateur contest, you know, twenty-five dollars…I’d get a gig once every twelfth of never.  I lived in very miserable circumstances.  Sleeping among the garbage cans between them tall tenements was hell.  Rats running’ all across your chest, cockroaches stealin’ you last candy bar from your very pockets.  I even tried to eat orange peel and tomato paste.  People would say, ‘If you don’t get a job you’ll just starve to death.’  But I didn’t want to take a job outside music.  I tried a few, including car delivery, but I always quit after a week or two.”

After playing in a few better known bands, like Little Richard and Joey Dee and the Starlights, he began to want his own band.  “I just got tired, man.  I just couldn’t stand it anymore.  I can’t tell you the number of times it hurt me to play the same notes, the same beat.  I was just a kind of shadowy figure up there, out of sight of the real meaning.  I wanted my own scene, making my own music.  I always wanted a lot, you know?  I really, really did.  I was starting to see that you could create a whole new world with an electric guitar, because there isn’t a sound like it in the whole world!”  We hope to inspire the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to pursue their artistic visions.

Chas Chandler, the bass player of the Animals heard Jimi and invited him to move to England, and get involved in the music scene there.  “I moved into a flat with Chas Chandler.  It used to belong to Ringo…The first time I played guitar in England I sat in with Cream.  I like the way Eric Clapton plays.”

While in England, he met up with Noel Redding, who played the bass, and Mitch Mitchel, who played the drums, and formed the threesome band, called Experience.  “My music isn’t pop.  It’s ME.  My guitar is my notes, our notes, regardless of where they came from.  We’re trying to create our own personal sound, our own music and our own personal being.  We are into our own personal history, what we are, until we have settled down inside of us.”  Jimi was also in contact with The Beatles, while in England.

His musical taste was diverse, and wanted his group to be diverse, as well.  “I don’t want anybody to stick a psychedelic label around my neck.  Sooner Bach and Beethoven.  Don’t misunderstand me, I love Bach and Beethoven.  I have many records by them, also by Gustav Mahler…I get accused of being electrically hung up, but I like electric sounds, feedback and so forth.  Static.  People make sound when they clap, so we make sounds back…We don’t use gimmicks for their own sake.  What happens on stage is what I do myself.  I mean, when I’m moving around out there I’m just squeezing that little bit more out of my guitar…The one thing I really hate is miming.  It’s so phony…I’m not trying to entertain the teenyboppers or the very old.  I’m trying to be honest, and I’m trying to be me…Maybe if you don’t have a very good imagination you need good looks and a flawless voice.”  We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to have a wide palette of musical taste by listening to many different styles.

Revealing his thoughts about the creative process, “Songs come from anywhere.  You see everything, experience everything as you live.  Even if you’re living in a little room, you see a lot of things, and if you have imagination the songs just come.  I spend a lot of time daydreaming.  It’s great to sit and dream.  All kinds of nice thoughts pop up, songs too…In music, you’ve got to say something real just as quick as you can.  That’s the idea of it, make it very basic.  I don’t mean my lyrics to be clever.  I just say what I feel and let them fight over it, if it’s interesting enough.  What I want is for people to listen to the music and the words, as one thing.  Maybe a lyric has only five words, and the music takes care of the rest.”

“The English music nature calls for pounds and pounds of melody, Irish folk songs call for complicated melodies.  I’m from America.  Blues is my backbone, and that doesn’t call for as much melody.  It calls for more rhythm, more down-to-earth hard feeling, whatever you call it- soul.”

“We want to be controversial.  We are not ‘nice boys,’ and we do not play ‘sweet music.’  We don’t believe in rehearing…We don’t want to plan our music.  It should be a surprise, for us as well as the audience.  Besides, there are no rehearsal halls who will accept us anymore.  They say we play too loud!  I know exactly what I’m doing when we’re onstage.  I don’t try to move an audience.  It’s up to them what they get from the music.  You can feel it as soon as you get out there.  You can actually feel it before you hit the first note.  Then, when you hit the first note, you can find out just where you’re at.  If the people help us out, we can really get it together.  But if they’re going to sit up there and pantomime themselves, well, I just don’t give a damn.  After all, I’m not trying to give out a message to anybody.  If an audience is really digging you, then naturally you get excited, and it helps.  But a bad audience doesn’t really bother me.  Then it’s a practice session, a chance to get things together.”

Paul McCartney was the one who first opened the door for Jimi to get back to America, through doing the Monterey Pop Festival.  The ‘Experience’ was soon travelling the States. 

Speaking more about his musical style, “I mean, no matter how sweet and lovely you are, there are black and ugly things deep down somewhere.  I bring mine out on stage, and that way no one gets hurt.  And we find that it works for the audience too.  We try to drain all the violence out of their systems.  We mostly build on bar patterns and emotion, not melody.  We can play violent music, and in a way it releases their violence.  It’s not like beating it out of each other, but like violent silk.”  We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas the importance of being authentic.

Jimi criticized Motown.  “Music has to go places.  That’s why we make something new.  It’s hard for me to think in terms of blues anymore.  The content of the old blues was singing about sex and booze.  Now people are saying so much more with music.  Motown isn’t the real sound of any Negro artist singing.  It’s so commercial, so put together, so beautiful, that I don’t feel anything from it…and to me it comes out so artificial.  ‘Synthetic Soul’ is what I call Motown.

Jimi always had a passion for authenticity, “Everybody has soul.  Music is nobody’s soul. It’s something from somebody’s real heart.  It doesn’t necessarily mean physical notes that you hear by ear.  It could be notes that you hear by feeling or by thought or by imagination or even by emotions.  I like the words ‘feeling’ and ‘vibration.’  I get very hung up on this feeling bag.  The sounds of a funky guitar just thrill me, go all through me.  I can get inside it almost.  I’m not saying that I play that good; I’m just explaining my feeling towards it and the feelings towards the sound it produces.” (His guitar of choice was the Stratocaster.)

His passion for honest, heart-felt music, even at the expense of his career, lasted throughout his lifetime.  “I don’t care about what the critics say.  I really don’t give a damn about my future or career, I just want to make sure I can get out what I want.  Soon I’ll be going into another bag with a new sound, a new record, a new experience.  We’ll go exactly the way we feel.  Nothing will be intentional.  It’ll just happen.  We’re not going to try and keep up with the trends, because we’ve got a chance to be our own trend…Freedom is the key word to this whole thing.  People don’t understand that because their brains are too complex.  Why do you think that every single human being on this earth is so different from every other one?  There’s a purpose behind this.  Everybody has their own ways.  They can do exactly what they want.  When it’s time for you to die, you’ve got to do it all by yourself.  Nobody’s going to help you.  Sweet words don’t help nobody.”

At times, he would be at odds with the music industry bottom-line economics.  “The promoters think you’re a money-making machine, and they have no faith in you.  It’s dog-eat-dog constantly.  I can always tell the artificial people form the real music people, the ones who care about the music and what the musicians are doing.  The trouble is, in this business there are so many artificial people…I don’t really know if I have friends or not…My friends are the people who give me a belief in myself.”

Jimi shares an early experience with Church.  “A lot of kids don’t find nothing in church.  I was sent to church when I was a kid, and I remember when I got thrown out because I had improper clothes on.  I had tennis shoes and a suit, and they said, ‘Gee, that’s not proper.’  We didn’t have no money to get anything else, so I just got thrown out of church anyway.  It’s nothing by an institution, so they’re not going to find NOTHING there.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to stop people going to church…I suppose human beings have to believe in something…The only thing I believe in is music.  Music is going to break the way because music is in a spiritual thing of its own.  It’s like the waves of the ocean.  You can’t just cut out the perfect wave and take it home with you.  It’s constantly moving all the time.  Music and motion are all part of the race of man.  It’s the biggest thing electrifying the earth.  Our music is just as spiritual as going to church.  We want it to be respected as such.  Our scene is to try and wash people’s souls.”

Regarding racism, “Race isn’t a problem in my world.  I don’t look at things in terms of races.  I look at things in terms of people.  I’m not thinking about black people or white people.  I’m thinking about the obsolete and the new.  There’s no color part now, there’s no black and white.  The frustrations and riots going on today are all about more personal things.  Everybody has wars within themselves, they form different things, and it comes out as a war against other people…I don’t feel hate for anybody, because that’s nothing but taking two steps back.”

Jimi participated in the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, August 18, 1969.  His music bridged the gap between ‘black’ soul and ‘white’ rock.  “I always wanted a more open and integrated sound, and it bothers me that some black people can’t get into our music.  But they are so hung up about other things.  Sometimes when I come up to Harlem people look at my music and say, ‘Is that white or black?’  I say, ‘What are you trying to dissect it for?  Try to go by the feeling of it.’  People are too hung up on musical categories.  They won’t listen to something because it sounds completely alien.”  We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to be careful about being prejudiced against any particular style of music, simply because it seems different.

Regarding authenticity in making albums, he said, “Albums are nothing but personal diaries.  When you hear somebody making music, they are baring a naked part of their soul to you, and Are You Experienced? Was one of the most direct albums I’ve done.”

Although Jimi was seen with the ‘drug’ Rock ‘n Roll crowd, historically, he didn’t imbibe their philosophy.  “People like you to blow their minds.  Well, music can do that.  You don’t need any drugs.  Music is a safe type of high.  It’s more the way it’s supposed to be.  That’s where highness came from anyway, I guess.  It’s nothing but rhythm and motion.  Once you have some type of rhythm it can get hypnotic.  If you keep repeating it over and over again, most people will fall off after about a minute.  You do that, say for three or four or even five minutes, if you can stand it, and them it releases a certain thing inside of a person’s head.  So, all of a sudden, you can bring the rhythm down a little bit, and then say what you want to say right into that little gap…People want to be taken somewhere.  I always like to take people on trips.  When I’m playing, man, I go up in a rocket ship.  Don’t know where I’m going to go, but you can all come with me, every one of you if you want.”

Again, philosophically, stated, “There are basically two kinds of music.  The blues is a reflection of life, and then there is sunshine music, which may not have so much to say lyrically but has more meaning musically.  It’s more an easier type of thing with less worries and more meaning to it.  I really don’t want to get too heavy.  I want to play sunshine music.  I have this saying that when things get too heavy, ‘Just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man!’  But music is always changing according to the attitude of the people.  When the air is static, loud and aggressive, that’s how the music gets.  When the air starts getting peaceful and harmonic, that’s how the music will get.  So it’s up to the people how it’s going to be.”

Jimi was always searching and striving for more, artistically.  At times, he seemed frustrated with a lack of ability to move beyond his own skill level as a guitar player, as well as a composer.  This statement, later in his life: “I’d like to get into more symphonic things, so the kids can respect the old musical traditions, the classics.  I’d like to mix that in with so-called rock.  But I have to get involved in my own kind of way, because I always want to respect my own judgements…I think I’m a better guitarist than I was, but I never have been really good.  Every year, like my writing, it slips further and further away.  The music I might hear I can’t get on the guitar.  It’s a thing of just laying around daydreaming or something.  You’re hearing all this music, and you just can’t get it on the guitar.  As a matter of fact, if you pick up your guitar and try to play, it spoils the whole thing.  I think tunes, I think riffs.  I can hum them.  Then there’s another melody comes into my head and then a bass melody and then another one.  On guitar, I just can’t get them out.  I can’t play guitar well enough to get all this music together.  I want to be a good writer, and I’d like to be a good guitar player.  I’ve learned a lot, but I’ve got to learn more about music because there’s a lot in this hair of mine that’s got to get out.  There’s so many songs I wrote that we haven’t done yet, that we’ll probably never do…It wouldn’t be like classical music, but I’d use strings and harps, with extreme and opposite musical textures, even greater contrasts than Holst’s Planets…I dig Strauss and Wagner, those cats are good, and I think that they are going to form the background of my music.”

“I attribute my success to God.  It all comes from God.  I go by message, and I’m really a messenger of God.  My name is nothing but a distraction.  Already this idea of living today is magic.  I’m working on music to be completely, utterly a magical science, where it’s all pure positive.  The more doubts and negatives you knock out of anything, the heavier it gets and the clearer it gets, and the deeper it gets into whoever is around it.  It’s contagious.  Bach and all those cats, they went in there, and they caught a whole lot of hell.  The deeper you get into it, the more sacrifices you have to make.  It means I’m going to have to strip myself of my identity, because this isn’t my only identity.  Really I’m just an actor.  The only difference between me and those cats in Hollywood is that I write my own script.  Someone is going to have to go back to his childhood and think about what they really felt, really wanted before the fingerprints of their fathers and mothers got a hold of them, or before the smudges of school or progress.”  We endeavor to teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas the value of drawing upon their innermost convictions, passions, and memories, in order to bring forth authenticity in their music making.

“I just dedicate my whole life to this art.  You have to forget about what other people say, when you’re supposed to die, or when you’re supposed to be living.  You have to forget about all these things.  You have to go on and be crazy.  Craziness is like heaven.  Once you reach that point where you don’t give a damn what everybody else is saying, you’re going towards heaven.  The more you get into it, they’re going to say, ‘Damn, that cat’s really flipped out.  Oh, he’s gone now.’  That’s what they call craziness.  But if you’re producing and creating, you’re getting closer to your own heaven.”

“I tell you, when I die I’m going to have a jam session.  I want people to go wild and freak out.  And knowing me, I’ll probably get busted at my own funeral.  The music will be played loud and it will be our music…It’s funny the way people love the dead.  You have to die before they think you are worth anything.  Once you are dead, you are made for life.  When I die, just keep on playing the records.”

Although Jimi Hendrix’s name is lumped in with the much dissipation of the Rock-‘n-Roll scene, I believe his motives were purely artistic and sincere.  He not only bridged the gap between ‘blues’ and ‘rock’, but also forged the new sounds of ‘distortion,’ Rock musicians would use for decades to come.  He stood directly between the worlds of the ‘white’ man and the ‘black’ man, synthesizing them into one new sound.

Probably, what I appreciate about him most is his bold creativity based upon a sense of honesty toward his artistic convictions.  He was never afraid to lose everything.  Being honest took a lifetime of courage, resulting in a bold new path for upcoming generations.