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No one believes it is happening now…
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy.
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
-Czeslaw Milosz, 1944
The Man Who Loves Jimi Hendrix listens to Stone Free
for the eleven-thousandth time. He slips the cassette into
a beaten boom box, presses play, and personally
explodes along with the Jimi Hendrix Experience,
knowing every note, every crescendo, ever stop and
start, the feral beat of the drum kit.
The Man Who Loves Jimi Hendrix has an American
Indian name, like Thomas Builds-the-Fire or Lester
FallsApart. The Man-Who-Loves-Jimi-Hendrix.
He has every Jimi Hendrix album, from the brief years
with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding as The
Experience, to posthumous recordings of the Band of
Gypsies, to the Monterrey Pop Festival. He owns the
original vinyl, and revels in the album covers. Each of
these is self-recorded on cassette, catalogued, caressed.
His collection of bootlegs is formidable, if barely
listenable, and his library has a dozen books of
Hendrix's biography, authorized and otherwise.
He pilgrimages to the Hendrix gravesite at Greenwood
Memorial Park. There he lays black construction paper
over the marker with raised brass letters - FOREVER
IN OUR HEARTS JAMES M "JIMI" HENDRIX
1942-1970 - and makes a rubbing with a golden
Crayola. He's pleased with the execution, admiring the
upper-case type in bas-relief on his paper, serif's just so
on the name and dates, all presentation. He hums, and in
his mind invokes a lyric: drifting…on a sea of forgotten
teardrops…
Returning to his apartment, he posts the rubbing on his
living room wall, displacing for a moment a poster of
Hendrix calling forth fire from his guitar at Woodstock.
Stimulated to action, he inserts the electric Ladyland
cassette, and takes his communion with the first
cut,…And the Gods Made Love.
The Man Who Loves Jimi Hendrix is no musical
aficionado. He just knows what he likes. He doesn't
fully comprehend meter or rhythm, only understands the
voltage through his cortex, manifested in sudden spastic
knee bouncing, rapid articulation, back and forth, of his
head. The squeezing shut of his eyes. Obbligato.
He doesn't appreciate the science of chords, nor
approach the delicate and powerful pull of strings as the
science of waves. At wringing a wall of sound from the
instrument, Hendrix was the master. This is what he
knows. It is his Occam's razor: being the simplest
explanation for all things, his love of Jimi Hendrix
suffices as solution for all questions.
When he sees a beautiful woman, music comes to mind:
Ohhh…foxee laay-deee.
If a mountain blows up next to him, he's going to tell you
about the difference between Voodoo Chile and Voodoo
Child (Slight Return).
He doesn't experience road-rage. He sings instead Cross
Town Traffic. Meeting a man named Joseph, he'll
suddenly croon Hey, Joe, where you goin' with that gun
in yo hand? The man named Joseph will, invariably, be
completely freaked out by this, but the Man Who Loves
Jimi Hendrix will clasp him in firm handshake, make
eye contact, and follow with Hey, Joe, heard you shot
your woman down, shot 'er down…
As the world devolves around him he experiences
neither progress nor entropy. He is in a state of stasis.
Hendrix speaks to him from across the cosmos.
The Man Who Loves Jimi Hendrix minds his own
business, which is the business of loveing Jimi Hendrix.
Very clear-cut and uncomplicated. There is no other
avocation, no other desire. He is fully engaged with
admiration for the left-handed African-American guitar
legend.
All of this is not to say that he appreciates Hendrix to
the exclusion of other artists. But only insofar as they
relate, in terms of geneaology, to the
Left-Handed-One-Who-Drowned-In-His-Own-Vomit.
His grandfathers Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.
His counsins Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. His sons
Steve Ray Vaughn, Kenny Wayne Sheppard, The
Fabulous Thunderbirds. He does have a soft place in his
heart for other groups of musicians, blues-oriented in
their roots.
He recoils from Top 40, visibly shaken. He has never
bought a compact-disc player. Bands who have come
and gone he calls one-hit wonders, shaking his head and
rolling his eyes heavenward to Jimi's spirit.
The world convulses around him. An airliner crashes.
The Antichrist is born.
Still The Man Who Loves Jimi Hendrix loves only Jimi
Hendrix, and the rhythm of Red House floats in his
brain, and the spelling of G-L-O-R-I-A, and ever note of
every song on the Cry of Freedom album. He beats out
the rhythm of a drum intro on his chair arm, and releases
through the sacrament of air guitar. Bass explodes from
his speakers, filling his chest like a Saturn moon rocket.
A convicted sex-offender moves into his apartment
complex, the picture posted everywhere, but The Man
Who Loves Jimi Hendrix worries little as the pervert
lurks in more shadow, and regrets less, only an
unrequited pang that he's never found a serviceable
eight-track player. It's the only void in his spirituality.
Something wicked this way comes, and he dances in his
head to Gypsy Eyes. |
