Jimi Hendrix Deep Within the Blues and Alive Onstage at Woodstock--25 Years after Death

Abstract

Since my bio on Jimi Hendrix was published 15 years ago, I would suppose by now that there is no danger in my becoming a critic, a designation I could never figure out, especially for an African-American writer. My bio, originally titled Jimi Hendrix . . . Voodoo Child . . . in hardcover and revised, abridged, and retitled by me to 'Scuse Me While I Kiss Sky in the early '80s for the Bantam Books mass-market paperback edition, is still very much in print and very much available having sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide. It was - at least, I like to believe - the first book to proclaim Hendrix the total genius that he is and to say why, and, most importantly, to show how he was coming from an African-American perspective. I wrote the book as the result of a promise I made to Hendrix at a nightclub in Manhattan in 1969. I had seen him go head to head with Sly Stone, who was then at his height, at the Fillmore East. They both blew me away so bad that I immediately revised my thinking about black music. While Amiri Baraka had gone from Blues People to Black Music, dealing with blues and jazz as art forms, I felt he had not really dealt with all that black expression in between. Not too many black writers were writing about the popular black music at that time. While Sly Stone's music was eminently danceable, Hendrix's was not, although he himself had no trouble dancing to it. And also singing and playing and doing feats with his guitar - all at the same time. Hendrix was then playing a highly refined art music under the aegis of rock. If you listened beyond the standard drums and bass routines, there emerged an amazing virtuoso artist on guitar. Many heard it then, many hear it now. People have not stopped listening to Hendrix, because his shit is the real deal. Recent events have shown that Hendrix's spirit is still very much involved in this world. day in April of 1993 when a touring art show that featured representations of Hendrix's image, entitled The Jimi Hendrix Exhibition, opened at a gallery in New York City's Soho district, Al Hendrix, his father, launched a lawsuit against the organizers of the show, who control the Hendrix Estate and who are also therefore the legal owners of Jimi Hendrix - all he had produced, including his image. Those anonymous entities purchased Jimi Hendrix some years ago. If this is not posthumous slavery, pop zombie-ism, then I don't know what is. word out at this show was that they were not interested in anything about the strange circumstances of Hendrix's death. They were celebrating his life. While those anonymous owners of Hendrix's oeuvre were avoiding talk or images of his death, a former girl friend, Kathy Etchingham, sought to have the original racist inquest reopened in England, where Hendrix was pronounced dead under mysterious circumstances in September of 1970. inquest allowed an open verdict that meant they could not really say how he died, but many people who testified told conflicting stories before and after their testimonies. And the ambulance drivers, who apparently were not listened to at the time, recently stated that, when the ambulance got to the Samarkand Hotel, the flat was empty except for Hendrix's dead body, a wine-soaked towel around his neck. Of course, the inquest was not allowed to be re-opened, but Etchingham may continue to defy those who would not enjoy such access to the rewards of Hendrix's genius if it were discovered that he was actually murdered. A girlfriend who was near him at the end stated soon afterwards on a radio program that the Mafia had killed him. Hendrix once said that rock 'n' roll was simply blues. Perhaps if he had waxed more extendedly on that subject black musicians might have heard it. It took the Black Rock Coalition behind Vernon Reid's band, Living Colors, to pound that point home way later. But no matter how you designate the music, what matters in the end is how well it is played, be it for the dancers on a postage-sized dance floor or for a venue the size of Woodstock, a rolling expanse of earth as far as the eye can see. …