 | ||||||
By
Nona
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Jimi Hendrix ~
I know what you’re thinking.
You’re thinking, “Jesus Christ, why doesn’t the silly bitch just phone this one in. Hendrix? How trite.”
Either that, or you’re thinking, “Shouldn’t Grace be doing this one? Nona doesn’t know shit about music. What a stupid fucking idea for a column, and what a cheapening of Jimi Hendrix’s memory. Shouldn’t she be doing, like, Teddy Roosevelt or something?”
Well, screw you. You didn’t know Jimi Hendrix, any more than I did. What do you think of when you think of Jimi Hendrix? If you’re a guitar player, more than likely you picture a really high bar, set by someone born with abilities you yourself will simply never possess. If you’re nearly anybody else, you think about a crazy hippie who dropped liquid LSD in his eyeballs, partied all the time and overdosed himself to death.
And you’d be wrong either way. Because what made Jimi Hendrix a rebel wasn’t about what he appeared to be, but what he WAS, and how far the reality of his life was from the legend that sprang from his untimely and alarmingly early death.
The phrase “dead rebel” is a two-parter. In order to fit the description, a subject has to be both dead, and prior to being dead, been a rebel. With me so far? Somehow I doubt that sometimes. This particular tribute begs a little explanation, best achieved by parsing this phrase out in two parts.
First off, Jimi Hendrix is, of course, dead. But why? Conventional wisdom, along with the coroner’s report, states that the reason was an overdose of drugs and alcohol that caused him to choke on his own puke. I can’t really claim to dispute this here; as I already said, it’s a matter of record. Some say that he was, technically, killed by the responding ambulance crew. They strapped him to gurney for the short ride to the nearest hospital, and restrained him when he tried to sit up to vomit. Had he been able to sit upright he probably wouldn’t have choked. But either way, these are mere details, technicalities - the unfortunate end to a chain of events that were working against Hendrix. They only reflect part of what really happened.
What really happened was this: Jimi Hendrix worked himself to death. He was not born with supernatural musical abilities, his prowess was not conferred upon him by God. Like the rest of us, he had to practice to get better at what he did, and practice he did. All the time. On the day of his death alone, he logged a mind-boggling nineteen hours in a recording studio. He had played a show the previous evening and was due to play another the following day. He spent what was supposed to be a day off from touring, recording instead - and during breaks in recording he played some more. This was pretty much a standard schedule for him – he lived his life in this pattern for the entirety of his final five years. His entire adult life was consumed with playing guitar. He’d take occasional breaks to drop acid or have sex with (a lot of) white women, but these activities didn’t engage him as playing did.
Jimi Hendrix loved playing guitar to the point that it was a compulsive mania that sucked the life out of him. A photograph of him, taken hours prior to his death – during a ten-minute break when he was finally persuaded to put down his instrument and step outside into the sun, shows a Hendrix image completely unfamiliar to fans of his erroneous legend. His usually milk-chocolate skin is ashen, greenish; his eyes are puffy and bleary. He smiles, but it looks as though it takes every ounce of his strength. It is a portrait of the face of exhaustion; of a man who has pushed himself as far as he can, then one extra mile.
The guitar monkey on Hendrix’s back was there for many years before he actually began making a living at it. From the start, there was nothing else he could do. He had already played in two different bands by the time he turned eighteen, and although he did make an attempt at learning a trade in the Army – which he joined at nineteen in order to dance out of jail time after being caught boosting a car with some other youths – the effort was significantly less than half-hearted. He made it six months in the Army without his guitar, finally becoming so lonesome for it that he wrote his father, pleading with him to send the instrument. He received frequent reprimands for sneaking out of training and duties to practice, but it was his insistence on playing with another sort of “instrument” that got him dishonorably discharged in 1962. He got caught masturbating on MP duty – multiple times.
None of this indicates any real rebellion by the standards set by Hendrix’s generation, however. Getting kicked out of the Army doesn’t exactly make one a big anti-hero for the “make love not war” generation. Join the club. Hendrix’s rebellion was of a quieter nature than that, stemming as it did from the quiet values system he learned from his father, Al, but it was the very reserved nature of this rebellion that also made it so profound.
Race may have played a small role in his rebellion – Jimi Hendrix was a black man who excelled in a very small, impenetrable market made up entirely of white people. His fans would tell you that his musical gifts transcended race, but Hendrix felt differently, which was part of his drive. He was fully aware that to be accepted in the musical genre in which he played, he had to work twice as hard, for half as much recognition, as white guys did. He never lost the feeling of being an outsider among outsiders, of standing a bit apart from the rest. He never got comfortable with the lavish praise heaped on him by his peers, feeling the sting of condescension in every compliment. Whether it was actually there, or not, was beside the point – he couldn’t escape his own perceptions.
But at the end of the day it came down to a simple schism of values systems – Jimi Hendrix was the product of a conservative working-class upbringing, and even as he sat uneasily in the eye of the storm of the sixties generation, he held onto that background. He supported the war in Vietnam. He understood the military mindset, even though he’d rejected it and been rejected by it. He believed in honest work for honest pay. His honest work just happened to be playing rock and roll guitar. And that honest work ethic was what ultimately made him, so far, the best rock and roll guitar player ever.
In the vast rogue’s gallery of all dead rebels, Jimi Hendrix is probably the only one who scored a triple bank shot by rebelling against the establishment, the counterculture, and the military all at once. He couldn’t be confined to the traditional boundaries of race or musical genre – or military regulations.
