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Courted by the Black Panthers and the subject of an FBI file, he was a Black man whose most urgent communications to America were made in the form of heaven-scraping noise. Hendrix came out of the blues, but he harnessed feedback he cut his teeth as a road guitarist with Little Richard and the Isley Brothers, but he was drawn to the spaciest frontiers of acid rock, which he transgressed and then exploded. Charles Shaar Murray did a musicologist’s version of this with 1998’s Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Post-war Rock’n’Roll Revolution, but the canon of Hendrix biography, in my opinion, still awaits a book with the historical heft and acumen of David Remnick’s King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero-a book, in other words, capable of mapping the larger forces of which Hendrix was the electrified nexus. The other challenge with Hendrix-a challenge for us, now-is to part the beaded curtains and the veil of dope smoke, to pierce the purple haze and reckon with him politically, aesthetically, and culturally as a Black artist in his time.
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But that’s always the challenge with Hendrix: How to describe, how to even verbally gesture at, the extraordinary sounds he made? Or to reconcile this diffident, melancholy man with the Promethean audacity of his art? The best analysis in the book, rather poetically, comes from an unnamed Finnish journalist quoted by Norman, who reviewed a Hendrix show in 1967 and heard “a voice from the reality of today’s worldwide information network that effectively spreads both terror and delight.” It’s not quite as good on the precise electric-acoustic dimensions of that crater. Wild Thing is good on Hendrix’s meteoric impact on Swinging London (and then the world), the crater he left in consciousness. Norman is a veteran music journalist and biographer, best known for 1981’s Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation, a classy piece of Beatleology that was nonetheless renamed Shite! by a less-than-thrilled Paul McCartney. Read: The history of rock and roll in one song The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, at every Jimi Hendrix Experience show he attended, would punctually weep for joy: “In whatever dark London vault the Experience played,” writes Norman in a particularly beautiful sentence, Jones “would be visible as a dual glint of blond hair and tear-wet cheeks.” Clapton, terrified at first-“You never told me he was that fuckin’ good,” he protested to Hendrix’s manager, Chas Chandler, over a wobbling backstage cigarette-fell swiftly and properly in love.Īs did everybody else. Hendrix, who-let’s be real-could have destroyed Clapton with a flick of his wrist, was all humility: He reverenced Clapton’s work in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and (especially) Cream. I could see everyone’s fillings falling out.” And of them all, Clapton was the toppermost: CLAPTON IS GOD read the spray-paint legend on a wall in North London. “There were guitar players weeping,” reports the singer Terry Reid of one early Hendrix performance. Hendrix had arrived in London a year earlier, with not much more than the clothes he stood up in, and immediately induced holy dread in the city’s top guitarists.
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The fairest soul brother, we can be sure, was transported. This is one of many groovy scenes recorded in Philip Norman’s new Hendrix biography, Wild Thing. “I kissed the fairest soul brother of England, Eric Clapton-kissed him right on the lips.” “It’s so lovely now,” Jimi Hendrix said in his muzzy mumble, his topplingly elegant, close-to-gibberish, discreetly space-traveling undertone, onstage one night in 1967 at the Bag O’Nails in London.