Remembering Jimi

Two Hendrix enthusiasts talk about his life, his music, and his relevance in today's rock world

September 18 marked the 26th anniversary of the death of Jimi Hendrix, who died at 27, ending a short career -- only three studio albums were released in his lifetime -- as one of the greatest and most influential guitarists in rock-and-roll history. It's also been just over a year since his family captured the rights, after a court battle, of ownership of Hendrix's material. Joel Brattin is a Worcester Polytechnic Institute English professor, who has devoted most of his career to Dickins scholarship. He has also published extensively on Hendrix, served as a consultant on various Hendrix projects, and is a contributing editor of Univibes. Brattin recently sat down with Leland Stein, a 1978 Clark University graduate, who has produced several radio programs devoted to Hendrix, including a three-hour WGBH program. He now works at Rounder Records, in Cambridge. Stein and Brattin talked at length about Hendrix's life, his music, and the enthusiasm that still endures for Hendrix's songs. The following are excerpts from their conversation:

Brattin: For me, it's always been primarily the guitar playing. That's always first although there are ever so many other elements to Hendrix, the singing, the song writing, the masterful use of the studio, and so on. But the guitar playing is first for me. And the guitar playing itself includes so many different elements. I think the thing that stood out for me first when I was a kid and still seems incredibly important is Hendrix's control of tone -- his mastery of tone -- and the way that he shapes tone and creates an individual voice, not only for each individual song but for each different part of the song.

Stein: And it's really a sound that tests the limits -- it's the distortion and the feedback and the overtones, and he was pushing the limits of the guitar and the limits of rock music and blues. I think in many ways, if you have to categorize, Hendrix is a category by himself because he brought so many different elements to a new sound, which still reverberate today.

Brattin: The first note of "Foxy Lady," at the Isle of Wight, has always been very moving for me. It's one pitch that he holds, sustains and shapes, and, in fact, pitch is the wrong word for it. It's not about pitch. There is no harmony. The bass and drums aren't playing either.

Stein: It's almost like a sound, like a primal sound coming from within him, and the guitar is a vehicle for this sound; and it just kind of comes up from the earth or down from the sky.

Brattin: The earth, the sky, compassion, feeling -- all those things are in it, and yet all the elements that we usually expect in conventional music are gone. There's no melody, there's no harmony, there's no rhythm. It's pure tone and feeling.

Stein: Just before he died, he was evolving musically -- when people asked him, "Where do you want to go from here?" he said that he heard symphonies. He wanted to compose sound portraits. Things that were beyond the three-minute pop song. And you can hear some of that in some of the music that he was putting together. A lot of the stuff that he recorded in the studio was quite a bit longer than versions that end up on the actual albums.

Brattin: We know a lot about Hendrix and what he was like as a musician. He was a perfectionist in the sense that he only wanted the things that he felt were his best work to come out to the general public. So he would be appalled if he knew people were after the official releases of things that were fragments of songs or things that were ideas that never were completed while he was alive. But we find the partial Hendrix songs, or a fragment of something where the back-up musicians haven't really learned the song, fascinating. We get more enjoyment out of that than a finished product from somebody else.

Stein: Just as he sought perfection in the studio, he tried to present his music live that way, too. But he was constantly frustrated by the technical difficulties and limitations of the time -- blown amplifiers, for example.

Brattin: And inadequate monitoring. It was the days before stage monitors and PAs. It was all coming through the amplifiers, and he was playing at a tremendously loud volume, and the technology was just catching up to him so that, a lot of times, there were concerts where they were picking up radio transmissions through the speakers.

Stein: At the Isle of Wight Festival, they were getting the festival security walkie-talkies, security personnel coming through the speakers. So here is an artist with incredible talent, who is doing what he does best, and yet there's something that he has no control over that is interfering like that and that was something that was frustrating. Besides the technical things, another frustration for Hendrix developed when the audience came to expect certain things out of his performance. You want to go to a performance and hear the songs you're familiar with. Well, Hendrix was constantly wanting to break into new territory and to expose his fans to new sounds. Now, of course, some people are always interested, but there are always the people in the front yelling, "Purple Haze," "Hey Joe." And he tried to, you know, do as much as he could to make those people happy, but at the same time, he would say, "Why do you want to hear all those oldies but baddies?" In one of his TV interviews he said, "it's like a circus that comes through town, and whatever it's going on people will go out to see and then move on to the next thing." So you could sense that frustration. But then the next thing he said was, "but that's okay, I'm digging it anyway." I think as time went on it became more and more difficult to shrug off these feelings -- to let those frustrations just fall away. And I think they got more into his soul and bothered him. He played loud, and it was difficult to get that sound because there was no monitoring in those days -- particularly during his heavy touring schedule in '67 and '68

Brattin: Early in 1968, the touring schedule was unbelievable. When he played in Worcester in the spring of '68, he was playing dozens of cities with two performances per night. And the tours weren't planned rationally. Before the 15th of March, he played New York City; Columbus, Ohio; Providence, Rhode Island; Long Island, New York; then shows at the Hilton in Washington, DC. After he played in Worcester, he went to Maine, went out of the country to Ontario, and performed in nine other cities in six states -- all in March. It was more typical to rush into a city, play a show or two, and then rush back out. He started extremely late because of problems -- as always. Transportation problems were part of the picture in Worcester, I'm sure. And there was a film crew from the BBC -- no doubt setting things up for the film crew took some time as well.

Stein: Right, 'cause they had the recording, film, and audio. And as most people know, Hendrix played extremely loud, and it's hard to do the technical side -- recording -- when things are real loud. That leads to distortion. I'll never forget, I went to Clark, and I had this French class and my French professor had his office in the main hall and was working late that night Hendrix played, and he had to walk right by Atwood Hall to go home. He said it was so loud outside of the hall, he couldn't imagine that there were actually people inside listening.

Brattin: There were people who recalled the sound as being much better outside the building than inside the building.

Stein: I think that comment is simply a reaction to the volume.

Brattin: Again, as you were saying, there was no monitoring. The drummer, Mitch Mitchell, often spoke of playing by sight. He couldn't hear what he was doing or what anyone else was doing. He just had to try to make his sticks come down to the skins in rhythm with what he saw Hendrix's hands doing. It's no surprise if on some audio tapes the drums and the guitar sound are a little off. And it's no reflection on Mitchell's drumming either; it's simply an equipment limitation. It's too bad that those BBC tapes seem to be lost -- all but a few minutes of "Wild Thing" in color film that appear in the documentary, All My Loving. There is also audio for "Purple Haze," "Wild Thing" and "Foxy Lady."

Stein: If only that footage survived. There's been a lot of interest in Hendrix's hand-written documents, too. He wrote song lyrics on scraps of paper, hotel stationary, what have you. And luckily some of those have been saved and now can be documented, and one of the interesting things about those is that many times there are significant lyric variations. Often it's very interesting to hear or to see work in progress -- the lyrics will be substantially different or a word different here or there, things that could change the whole meaning of the songs.

Brattin: It seems to me that's a huge opportunity for greater scholarship. As little as eight to 10 years ago, people did not know that there were manuscripts of Hendrix's. With the Sotheby's auctions, starting in 1990, some of those materials are beginning to be collected in a number of places such as the Experience Music Project in Seattle and in the Cleveland Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which now has the manuscript for "Purple Haze" -- which we now see was originally titled, "Purple Haze Jesus Saves."

Stein: In one of Hendrix's interviews -- Jimi's exaggerating, but he says that "Purple Haze" had 1000 verses.

Brattin: That's one of the functions that producer Chas Chandler had was seeing that Hendrix's work was packaged in pop fragments, three- or four-minute songs that were radio friendly. If "Purple Haze" indeed had 1000 verses, well it never would have been heard on AM radio in 1967. So, Chas Chandler did Hendrix a service by helping to package and deliver his work in a commercially appreciable form. But Hendrix had experience with the packaging of music for a pop audience before he ever met Chas Chandler. His first known composition, "No Such Animal," certainly reflects some of the same values Chas had.

Stein: What inspired you to write about that song?

Brattin: It was a recent discovery of the publishing contract for that song, for which "Jimmy" Hendrix received the sum of one dollar. But that contract, interesting in what it reveals about Hendrix's life in 1965-'66, was really just the jumping-off point for him. It was an opportunity to examine a song that has been little discussed. It is the earliest song we know of that Jimi Hendrix composed by himself. And though much of Jimi's early work has been endlessly recycled on vinyl LPs and on CDs, "No Such Animal" remains, for reasons I can't explain, only rarely reissued. Very few people have actually heard the song. It's an interesting and engaging piece, musically. So my article not only looks at the historical context for the song (that is, at details of the contract, the recording, and so on), but also provides a bit of musical analysis, examining Hendrix's compositional technique in the song. Much of it is a 12-bar blues, but there's a twist or two that provide a different kind of interest.

Stein: Where was it actually recorded?

Brattin: In late 1965, in New York City.

Stein: Are there any cases where your work on Hendrix is relevant to your other scholarly work in the field of 19th-century literature?

Brattin: Well, my interest in issues of textual transmission and editing is certainly relevant to both Hendrix and literature. I helped establish the text for the first volume of the California edition of 19th-century prose writer Thomas Carlyle. That involved determining what precise words, spelling, and punctuation we wanted to present. When people produce a Hendrix CD, they are faced with similar decisions: how much of the whole concert should be released? Jimi Hendrix's entire performance at Woodstock was far too long to include on a single CD; only bits and pieces were released in his lifetime. Some of those pieces were cut in length; some were also "edited" by having certain musicians' contributions mixed out -- the additional percussion players and Larry Lee, the second guitarist. So one question about Woodstock is what sort of version of that text will be made available? Even after the release of the 1994 MCA CD, there are still songs like "Gypsy Woman" and "Mastermind" that very few people have heard. And most people don't know that Larry Lee took as many solos in "Red House" as Hendrix himself did.

Stein: So the question becomes what do you cut, and why?

Brattin: I think that there is a certain segment of the Hendrix community that wants absolutely everything released complete. They don't want Hendrix's tune-ups in between songs to be cut because they want an entire document preserved whole; and then there's another school that wants to put forth just the best music -- so that it will be a acceptable to as wide range of musical consumers as possible.

Stein: Where would you fall on that?

Brattin: I'd fall in both camps. I want access to everything and I think that it's important historically to have the entire document so that one can say, well what did Hendrix actually do on-stage at Woodstock. On the other hand, Larry Lee is not a very good guitar player and mixing him out is certainly defensible: if I were to listen to Jimi Hendrix play "Red House" at Woodstock, I don't always want to hear Larry Lee's three solos because they aren't very good. So there's two sides to that.

Stein: Well, what about the whole issue of his material and ownership of it? For a long time his material was being produced by Alan Douglas and there's been quite a bit of controversy as to how he's handled his stewardship of the Hendrix catalogue.

Brattin: Right, because there was product release of varying caliber over the years. Some of it was very good and some of it not so good, and there's been controversy because at times Douglas played around with erasing backing musicians, taking away the tracks of musicians that Hendrix actually recorded with and replacing those with overdubs recorded by studio musicians, who had never actually even met Hendrix.

Stein: Most of the time, it was with the best of intentions, but the results weren't always good. Within the past few years, Hendrix's family has, after a custody battle so to speak, now gained the ownership to all of the songs and the merchandise and so forth and this has all happened a little over a year ago. Still too soon to have any results. One interesting tangent is that Paul Allen, who was one of the co-founders of Microsoft, was probably one of the biggest and certainly the richest Hendrix fan out there. He was financing the family's fight to get back ownership. But it turned out that it wasn't for altruistic reasons; it was because he wanted to have rights himself, and to have first dibs, and to have his hand in the recordings and so on. When the family got wind of that they shied away. He had begun planning a Jimi Hendrix museum in Seattle, and after this happened he changed the focus to encompass music from the Northwestern part of the US -- not just Jimi Hendrix, but Bing Crosby and Pearl Jam and Quincy Jones and Ray Charles. So in Seattle, now you have Experience Hendrix, which is run by his family, and they will be the manning the ship, so to speak, and issuing anything that comes out in the way of recordings, things that haven't been out before and in charge of all the merchandise and posters. Then you have the Experience Music Project, which is building this huge multi-million dollar museum in Seattle, which, I think, is due to open in 1998.

Brattin: Nineteen-ninety-eight or 1999. And they are purchasing lots of manuscripts and so forth. They are unwilling at this point to issue a catalogue of what they've got because they don't want to drive prices up on other items that they wish to buy.

Stein: They have a quarterly newsletter to keep people informed of what's going on. The family has the tape library. The thing about it, though, I think you might agree with me, at this stage, more than a quarter century after Hendrix died -- and he was really only recording four years or less -- virtually everything that everyone would want to hear has come out. I mean, there are always new discoveries, and maybe they have some things up their sleeves, but there won't be too much more new that they can do.

Brattin: I'm not sure I do agree. I think there may indeed be new things. I think when 1994's Blues CD was released, collectors, people who knew Hendrix's work very well, were surprised at some of the things that had never been heard before. "Born Under a Bad Sign," for example, an eight-minute song, was something that I'd never heard. Nobody I knew had ever heard it before. So I think there are similar treasures in the tape vaults that we haven't heard. Also, there are a significant number of soundboard live recordings that have not been officially released. And I would look forward to those with great eagerness.

Stein: I suspect that there isn't much more there, and I also wonder why it's taking the family so long to do anything. It's been over a year since they've had control, and I don't think there's any release that I know of scheduled. So, I think there may be stuff in the vaults, but maybe that stuff belonged to Chas Chandler, who had the out-takes from his first two albums. Well, who has them now? I know the family was saying nice things about Chas after he died so maybe there is, you know, something going on and maybe we'll be hearing some of that eventually. There were some other live concerts that were supposed to come out.

Brattin: Alan Douglas has, as a result of the court ruling, retained the right to release a two-CD set, which is to be called On the Road. However, the Hendrix family retains the right to approve or disapprove the project. It's hard to say whether On the Road will be released or not, but if it is there will be some wonderful things on it. And if it isn't, then presumably the Hendrix family will release those some time. One of the things that people have been waiting years for is the soundboard of Hendrix's wonderful concert at Maui. It was his last recorded concert in the US. And not a single complete song has been released as of yet. It's extraordinary music.

Stein: The family hasn't been extremely communicative. They're kind of holding their cards close to their vests. The only thing in the news now is this big Jimi Hendrix festival in New York City that was supposed to happen October 10. There was to be a big Hendrix tribute concert at Madison Square Garden. It was less than four weeks away from the event, and the family wasn't even giving the set line-up. There are now saying they'll hold it in the spring to coincide with the reissue of the first three Jimi Hendrix Experience albums with the original artwork.

I think a lot of the real fans who had been bashing Alan Douglas are now starting to question what the family is doing. At least with Alan Douglas you were getting releases. In my opinion, the family won the legal battle and they're feeling overwhelmed. They're realizing that it's not so easy to go through the archives to put things together to be released. Maybe some things will be released and they will be quality recordings, but because they've been real secretive people like me are starting to wonder if they know what they're doing.