Friday, February 14, 2014

KLEM FM

The excerpt below is from a book I'm reading called "Hendrix: Setting The Record Straight" by John McDermott with Eddie Kramer. Just to set the stage a bit, by the summer of 1969, the original Jimi Hendrix Experience had broken up. Hendrix had moved out of NYC to upstate New York near Woodstock where he rented a house.
Though Hendrix may have sought a quiet retreat among Woodstock's fabled wilds, he managed to stand out as much as he had in Harlem. 'Jimi used to drive through town in his red Corvette,' recalls Leslie Aday, an employee of Albert Grossman, who became friendly with Hendrix during his extended period upstate. 'He'd have the top down and be dressed in all his glory. Nobody in Woodstock had a red Corvette. These people were into growing organic vegetables and making their own clothes!' 
The musicians Hendrix had invited to the house were no mere motley crew. Hendrix, recalls Aday, had expressed his concept of a band that comprised musicians from a variety of racial backgrounds. The timing for such a concept, he explained, couldn't be better. Aside from Jimi's own celebrated mixture of Cherokee Indian and Negro heritage, percussionist Jerry Velez was an Hispanic from New York's Lower East Side; [Mitch] Mitchell (who would rejoin Hendrix) a white Briton; [Billy] Cox and [Larry] Lee were African Americans steeped in the Delta blues tradition; and Juma Sultan an African American who had embraced Africa's vast cultural heritage. 
Juma Sultan was well known within the Woodstock artistic community, a respected percussionist actively involved with the Aboriginal Music Society, which presented a broad mosaic of musical influences in semiconcert form on Sunday evenings at the Tinker Street Cinema. Sultan introduced Hendrix to the aggregation of local musicians, but when they played together, Hendrix couldn't help plowing through their delicate, polyrhythmic patterns. He had not yet integrated softer elements into his live music, volume and feedback remaining the essential ingredients of his style. Even his rhythm playing, while not as bombastic as his solo work, was still delivered with great force. It would be this simple fact, plus a lack of adequate rehearsal time, that would doom the Gypsys Suns & Rainbow, the moniker he invented for his new band.
A brief summer of spontaneous jamming turned to serious rehearsals after Hendrix was signed to headline the musical festival in August which became Woodstock. Hendrix and his jam buddies closed the event at dawn on a Monday morning, several hours after the festival was supposed to have ended. Only a fraction of the fans actually witnessed his performance. This is how they sounded, playing one of the few original songs not belonging to the Jimi Hendrix Experience; it's called Jam Back at the House:

 

Eddie Kramer, hired to record the entire festival, was not impressed:
Tracks such as "Jam Back at the House" -- born from incessant jamming -- did more to showcase the band's deficiencies than strengths. Larry Lee was a close friend and an accomplished player, but he was not in a league to be trading solos with Jimi Hendrix.
That song has long been my personal favorite from that performance. It's deceptively simple -- seemingly just an endless riff driven over and over. Only a real genius like Hendrix could make that interesting. I especially like how he plugs in and comes back at around 4 min 40sec, puffing his cigarette no handed, breathing like a dragon.  But now I see Kramer's point. Hendrix overwhelmed the other players. Of those on stage, only Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox would stick with him.  Only they could keep up. 

13 comments:

Icepick said...

Mitchell was amazing. I'm still surprised he never really caught on with another successful group.

The Dude said...

That was horrible sounding. I am thankful I stayed in my tent with Carol Herman.

Michael Haz said...

Dead at age 27 of vomit aspiration secondary to barbiturate intoxication.

AllenS said...

Hard for me to admire anyone so reckless.

chickelit said...

Hmm. I never held up the cause of Hendrix' death as his salient point.

If we go down that road in a general way, that's too many people to put on a shit list.

Thanks, but no thanks.

chickelit said...

@AllenS: Did you know that Hendrix was a paratrooper? He and Billy Cox at Fort Campbell.

chickelit said...

Icepick said...
Mitchell was amazing. I'm still surprised he never really caught on with another successful group.

Agree

chickelit said...

@Sixty: I thought that might have been Carol at 1m20s, but if you say you were "tenting" with her at the time, well, I gotta believe you.

The Dude said...

Holy Carp, CL, you are correct! Who the hell was in my tent? Damn brown acid...

deborah said...

There's this thing I go through with Hendrix's music, and others who died young. Part of his music was the drugs...

Aridog said...

ChickenLittle ....Hendrix was honorably discharged from the Army inside of one year for "unsuitability"...so not exactly a paratrooper in the ordinary sense of the word.

MamaM said...

Part of his music was the drugs...

Which led me to look for the quote by Huxley about the brain being a reducing value, which in turn led to this, with a connect to Morrison:

"More than half a century ago, author Aldous Huxley titled his book on his experience with hallucinogens The Doors of Perception, borrowing a phrase from a 1790 William Blake poem (which, yes, also lent Jim Morrison’s band its moniker).

Blake wrote:

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

Based on this idea, Huxley posited that ordinary consciousness represents only a fraction of what the mind can take in. In order to keep us focused on survival, Huxley claimed, the brain must act as a “reducing valve” on the flood of potentially overwhelming sights, sounds and sensations. What remains, Huxley wrote, is a 'measly trickle of the kind of consciousness' necessary to 'help us to stay alive'.

A new study by British researchers supports this theory. It shows for the first time how psilocybin — the drug contained in magic mushrooms — affects the connectivity of the brain...Under the influence of mushrooms, overall brain activity drops, particularly in certain regions that are densely connected to sensory areas of the brain. When functioning normally, these connective 'hubs' appear to help constrain the way we see, hear and experience the world, grounding us in reality. They are also the key nodes of a brain network linked to self-consciousness and depression. Psilocybin cuts activity in these nodes and severs their connection to other brain areas, allowing the senses to run free.

'The results seem to imply that a lot of brain activity is actually dedicated to keeping the world very stable and ordinary and familiar and unsurprising,' says Robin Carhart-Harris, lead author of the study.

Indeed, Huxley and Blake had predicted what turns out to be a key finding of modern neuroscience: many of the human brain’s highest achievements involve preventing actions instead of initiating them, and sifting out useless information rather than collecting and presenting it for conscious consideration."

from Magic Mushrooms Expand the Mind By Dampening Brain Activity

AllenS said...

I did know that he was a paratrooper. I also knew that they gave him the boot. It was a pattern. I doubt if the Army these days would even consider him as a recruit.

He could play the guitar, so there's that.