The ways they died personified their era at its most offensive. It is tough to think of the '60s without conjuring up their images. Their position as African-American men on the forefront of change during that turbulent decade inextricably links them together in many people's minds.
"I think of Hendrix," Black Rock Coalition founder and former Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid told the Los Angeles Times, "in the same context as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. To me, he was one of the seminal black figures."
Both men changed the way America perceived the scions of slavery. In 1963, during his most famous address after the March on Washington, King asserted that he dreamed of his four children living in a nation where they were not judged "by the color of their skin, but the content of their character." The idea of eschewing racial identity seemed to appeal to Hendrix.
"I don't think Jimi really looked at the Band of Gypsys as being all black," Billy Cox, bassist from the all-African-American band notes. "It just happened that there were some black guys playing. I don't believe it was intentional."
"Jimi saw no racial differences," Hendrix's English girlfriend Kathy Etchingham told New Statesman & Society's Mark Prendergast. "The music was something he did. Here, in those days, a lot of people couldn't see color. It wasn't a point of contention at the time. He once said to me that 'racism cuts both ways.' You've got to remember that Jimi was very aware; he chose to be very proud of being black, yet at the same time chose to be above it."
This made Hendrix a groundbreaking artist in many respects. Like rock pioneers such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley, Hendrix appealed to a white audience. In the decade between those founders of rock 'n' roll and Hendrix, however, the racial atmosphere had changed. Hendrix could generally play without the hassles and harassment that greeted the African-American performers from the '50s. This doesn't mean that Hendrix never felt the sting of racial tension. He toured the "chitlin' circuit" early in the '60s, making music in the segregated South.
However, Hendrix's success came at a time when a great gulf existed between races musically. Rock music had divorced itself from its African-American roots, and lost the "roll" in the process. White people listened to rock, black people listened to soul. White performers played rock, black performers played soul. As an artist who chose to play in the rock arena, the vast majority of Hendrix's audience was white.
"'Many times while I was younger,'" reads the article on Hendrix in the Prodigy P*Funk Review, "'I heard the lament from black folk, "we invented rock and roll and whitey stole it from us." Well, Jimi Hendrix snatched it right back from 'em and did so with style and flair. Unfortunately for Hendrix, during his lifetime black people never really accepted him."
"The most powerful thing of it all was that he became a pop artist," notes guitarist Jean Paul Bourelly, who just released his Tribute To Hendrix album in America. "If he was never able to get into that pop stardom, it wouldn't have been so powerful. You can set up a safety zone for regular people, but what you're actually giving them is something much more complex and rich and detailed and sophisticated. It's like a coup. It's a brilliant thing. It's a powerful thing."
"Rock music," as the late great Derek Taylor, a fixture in the English music business for a quarter century, wrote in the liner notes to the re-release of Electric Ladyland, "was surpassingly segregated then, sometimes by lax custom, sometimes by outright prejudice. Jimi's eclecticism did a lot to change that mode. When he went back a hero to the US there were unprecedented white audiences."
On Friday, April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, Hendrix was scheduled to play two concerts at the Town Hall theater in Newark, New Jersey. The previous night, according to that day's New York Times, police had arrested a dozen people across the Hudson River in New York City. When New York's mayor went up to Harlem to try and defuse the situation, he "was caught in the midst of an unruly crowd and had to be hustled into a limousine by bodyguards," according to the Times. In Memphis, where King's assassination took place, 4,000 National Guardsmen were brought in.
The previous summer, 26 people died, 1,500 were injured, and 1,000 arrested when Newark burst into flames and riot. On the night of April 4, the Times reported, "Bottles and rocks were thrown in two parts of the city's Central Ward...but the police said they had quieted the disturbances quickly. There were no arrests or injuries."
When the Jimi Hendrix Experience pulled into Newark, however, it was like nothing any of them had seen before. "I remember this vividly," recalls Experience bass player Noel Redding. "We got down to Newark, to the venue, and there were tanks in the street. It was the first time I'd actually seen that."
That night, the Jimi Hendrix Experience only played one short set and canceled the second one. Many assumed it was Hendrix's reaction to Dr. King's violent death. After all, Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Armstrong, Sidney Poitier, and Diahann Caroll had all already announced they would not participate in the following Monday night's Oscar presentations in deference to the death of Dr. King.
"My impression of that Newark thing, it was that we came and saw tanks on the street," Redding continues. "We were supposed to do two shows. The police and the Army advised us to do one show and get out of town. So we did exactly that."
"I've got my diary in front of me," he adds. "It says, 'All riots. Only did one show instead of two. We came back to the hotel and went clubbing. Went to bed at 6 a.m.'"
"The city administrators said, 'You can't do a concert here now because it's volatile,'" reflects Velvert Turner, a longtime friend of Hendrix's. "Jimi was accepted by the white majority in terms of the rock 'n' roll establishment. When you talk about having a concert in Newark, the next question would be, 'Who would attend the concert in Newark, which is a predominantly black constituency, as well as Town Hall being in a black neighborhood? Who would need to come there?' Jimi's acceptance at that time was among predominantly white rock 'n' roll fans. You are asking white rock 'n' roll fans to walk into a beehive of activity, a powder-keg that was just exploding."
"I come from Bloomfield, New Jersey, which is the next town," notes Bob Cianci, author of Great Rock Drummers of the Sixties and correspondent for Modern Drummer and Blues Review, who was at the show in Newark. "There had been riots in Newark that past summer. Of course, being in the next town, I knew what was going on back there. The night of that show, however, I didn't see any tanks, I didn't see any crowds, I didn't see any problems."
"We went on and did one show," Redding recollects. "It was very short as far as I can recall, probably about 45 minutes. There had been a lot of rioting going on."
"I think we were going to take the bus down to Newark," Cianci says. "And then, of course, Martin Luther King was killed. There was a lot of trepidation on the part of our parents about us going down to Newark to see this show. So my friend's father somehow bought a ticket the day of the show. He drove us down to Newark and took us to the show. I think, if he hadn't done that, we probably would not have been able to go."
In keeping with Hendrix's following at the time, as well as Turner's comments, the audience that night in Newark was "overwhelmingly white," Cianci says, adding that the hall was half or two thirds empty. "As soon as Jimi came on, he said, 'Everybody c'mon and move down to the front.' I can tell you some of the songs they did do. They did 'Fire.' They did 'Foxy Lady.' They did 'Red House.' And I know they ended with 'I Don't Live Today.' I don't have total recollection of this. It's been thirty years. I remember quite a bit of it. They did a lot of the first album."
Ironically, Redding recalls, "We did the one show, which was more of a jam as far as I can recollect, than one of our proper shows. We basically played a load of blues for 45 minutes, then we went straight back to New York."
"I don't think it was much more than a 45-minute set," Cianci agrees. "I don't recall whether he mentioned (about the assassination). The thing I remember most about their performance is that it was very subdued. There were no histrionics, at least not until the end of the show. Jimi just kind of stood there and played. He really played that night. I feel I was kind of fortunate to see him doing that, under unfortunate circumstances. But to see him hang back and play...
"At the end, there was the big feedback guitar thing, and I remember Jimi taking his Strat off and throwing it into his Marshall amps. He had one of these coiled guitar chords and pulled it back. I remember him stretching that all the way out and then just flinging his guitar into the amps. And then he turned around, grinned at the audience. I think that was the end of the show.
"I can tell you with confidence," he concludes, "that there was no violence. There was no trouble. We didn't hear or see anything that would lead us to believe that there was going to be trouble that night. It was just an enjoyable experience. No problems at all."
Turner knew there wouldn't be. While the police and the National Guard might have had concerns about the ability of Hendrix's music to incite the crowd, Turner discerned the truth. "My experience with Jimi was the music had the ability to unite and to heal. It acted as a balm as opposed to a bomb," he says, adding, "Jimi might have been a person who philosophically would say the place you need to be the day after Martin Luther King's death would be Newark."
Then, philosophically, maybe not. Hendrix took an aggressively apolitical stance. "Jimi was a musician first and foremost," says Cox. "He believed that musicians should be musicians, politicians should be politicians."
"None of us were really political," his predecessor, Redding, agrees.
Hendrix gave money to the King Memorial Fund, but did not offer his services. He felt that might be counterproductive for everyone. "I just want to do what I'm doing," is how Hendrix himself explained his feelings on the matter to Melody Maker's Alan Walsh, "without getting involved in racial or political matters."
However, he couldn't ignore the fire and smoke from Newark (right across the river from his home in Greenwich Village) the summer before. He must have felt the evil vibes coming off of the police and guardsmen the night after Martin Luther King's assassination. He saw the turmoil and tanks on the street. These bubbled out of him during the creation of Electric Ladyland. "House Burning Down," while not necessarily only about the King slaying, certainly draws from it. It also reflects the Watts riots of 1965, as well as the Newark and Detroit riots of 1967.
"He would talk about things," Turner explains, "and they would manifest themselves when the song popped out. ' House Burning Down' could have been changing form for years. Some of them went through radical life changes and form changes.
"There was all that kind of pressure in that song, and literally the sound of fire throughout it. The riots are captured there. But it was probably much bigger-not to trivialize the death of Dr. King-but it was much more pervasive than just, there's a leader, he got shot, people got very pissed off so they decided to tear up neighborhoods and riot. It spoke to the living. The incubator, the laboratory itself was messed up.
"'House Burning Down' more generally speaks about this litany of things that created the atmosphere, the environment. He's asking why are you burning your brother's house down? Why not go to Fifth Avenue or Beverly Hills and burn down those expensive apartments? Go to Short Hills, New Jersey. The real key to all of these problems has to do with education and growing as a person. That is the essential element of the song."
"House Burning Down" finds Hendrix using the song form and taking it further, bringing social consciousness and awareness to his message. He told the story the best way he could. Hendrix communicated ideas through his lyrics, but he expressed some of his most important thoughts and feelings through his playing.
"At the end of that song," Turner points out, "is this audio communication. Certainly Eddie (Kramer-engineer on much of Hendrix's music) and everyone else will tell you that Jimi talked in terms of sounds and colors and feelings. He didn't say, 'Give me a B flat diminished and move that over to an A minor 7.' He would talk more like, 'I want it to sound soft and cushiony. Make it sound like the sea.' Metaphoric speaking is how he communicated frequently. In the final mix of 'House Burning Down' there are some sounds that pan from speaker to speaker. It does something at the very end. It fades out and then becomes very loud. Listen to that again and think about panthers. Throughout this whole period there was this major thing going on with the Black Panthers."
Where Dr. King preached non-violent civil disobedience as a way to make changes, the Black Panther Party espoused militancy. In California, where the law still allowed it, the Panthers carried firearms in public at all times. The organization's military posture made them enemies of the police and FBI, who regarded the party as "a threat to the American way of life." Yet the party also provided free health care, free food-including a free breakfast program that fed 200,000 children every day-and educational opportunities in many poor, primarily African-American communities throughout the world. Rumors persisted of Hendrix's involvement with the organization.
"There was one incident I remember in 1969," Redding relates. "We were playing in a place called Devonshire Downs, near LA (part of 'Newport '69' at San Fernando Valley State College). It was a big gig. We had one of these Caravans back stage. I wandered into the Caravan, there were all these Black Panther type people-in my mind anyway-about six or seven of them sitting around Hendrix, and Hendrix was looking white. I sort of said to these guys, 'Hey, what are you doing in our dressing room?' And I got them thrown out. And Hendrix said, 'Thanks, man.'"
In 1970, Hendrix denied the connection in Rolling Stone. "It isn't that I don't relate to them naturally," he said. "I feel part of what they're doing in certain respects. But everyone has their own way of doing things. They get justified as they justify others, in their attempts to get personal freedom. That's all it is."
He further admitted that he was with them, "but not the aggression or violence or whatever you want to call it. I'm not for guerrilla warfare," he said, adding, "Everybody has wars within themselves."
According to an obituary in the Berkeley Tribe, Hendrix's management at the time saw a synchronicity in working with the Panthers. The Party would gain the money and cachet of Hendrix doing a benefit for the Panthers. His "advisors" saw the association with Panthers as adding a new facet of radical chic to Hendrix's persona. They liked the idea of a benefit, so long as they could film it. Otherwise, they wouldn't let him do it. The Panthers apparently saw the film as a way of exploiting them rather than helping. They did not want it made. So, the benefit never came off.
"I don't know a lot about the details," adds Turner. While he was Jimi's friend, it was more of a mentor/prot‚g‚ relationship. At the time, Turner was barely in his teens. "Thank God Jimi was kind enough and respectful enough of my innocence and naivet‚ and my youth, because all the people I met through that situation really had no respect that I was just a kid. I saw things that kids really aren't supposed to see, unless they were Roman Polanski. Jimi would dismiss me when the women would pop up, or there was drug stuff. He was like, 'Velvert, c'mon. Curfew.' He was really responsible that way, and I loved him for that. Certainly, I don't know the details about the Panthers, and other people lobbying him to try and get him to use his fame and his stature, trying to recruit him."
In the end, though, Turner sees Hendrix having more in common with the peaceful warrior, Dr. King. "Jimi started with sex on vinyl, but listen to the last tape. It's all about God and spirituality and life and death and people aspiring to their higher stuff as opposed to the lower stuff. It's not, 'I'm gonna take you home and do ya.' It went on to another place. Home is heaven and home is about the rainbow bridge. It became much more mature. It was spirituality dealing with more than death and the after-world. It was spirituality dealing with how we could live here together. In that sense, 'Power Of Soul' or '1983,' what a wonderful metaphor, what imagery for war versus a much safer life. That one did speak directly of a better life beyond this planet."
"More than anything else," Cox asserts, "I think Jimi Hendrix was a spiritual individual who was sometimes unaware of what was happening to him. I believe he was a messenger, subconsciously, and a lot of times, his writing...I know he worked better at 2,3,4 o'clock in the morning, especially when there were not a lot of outside noises. I think there are a lot of people who are into automatic writing and things like that. I think Jimi was into that. That happened to him. A lot of times he couldn't explain it."
No discussion of the American Civil Rights Movement would be complete without coming to terms with the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Similarly, no treatise on the treatment and status of African-America artists in popular music would be complete without dealing with Jimi Hendrix.
"Hendrix affected the black community because he was anything but a clich‚," Bourelly asserts. "He expanded the definition of how blacks possibly saw themselves. In America, blacks, and the masses in general, have a tendency to define themselves very narrowly. That's what they see. That's what they're programmed to be. Hendrix was so expansive and so creative, in the same way as Ornette Coleman or Henry Threadgill of today, or Thelonious Monk before. They were people who come about who expand your definition of what you can do with black music or being a black person living in this country. He also had the intellectualism. He had that naturally. Lyric-wise, poetically, he was dealing with a lot of double entendres and a lot of metaphoric kind of stuff."
"Jimi Hendrix," wrote the Prodigy P*Funk Review, "had an enormous, although unspoken influence on an entire generation of people. For example, my recollection is that he was the first figure of national importance to wear an Afro in 1967."
He also had a profound influence on many musicians, both white and black. "You shall always, and I mean always, hear the ghost of Jimi Hendrix in the Gales Brothers," says blues guitarist Manny Gales, one of the three left-handed blues guitar playing Gales brothers.
"We're big fans of Jimi Hendrix," adds his brother Eugene, (also known as Little Jimmy King). "It don't get no deeper than that."
Hendrix's status as a certifiable rock star forever changed the heights to which African-American musicians could aspire. "Hendrix opened the door for guys like me," platinum recording artist Lenny Kravitz told the Los Angeles Times. "He is the perfect example of a black artist doing what he wanted to do."
"Jimi was definitely the one we held up when we wanted to reach for something," Parliament-Funkadelic leader George Clinton added in the same article. "His music gave me the freedom to go out and be anything I felt like being musically."
Thirty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, 28 years after Jimi Hendrix passed on, how much has the status of the African-American musician changed? On the one hand, "black" music unequivocally is the popular music of the 1990s. The ascent of urban voices in rap leads the way, blaring out of SUVs in both the city and the suburbs. Vocalists like Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton enjoy enormous popular success that centers on their voices rather than their skin color, and reaches all races. Reid and Clinton and Kravitz appeal to audiences that might not have given them a second look 25 years ago. Beyond that, in 1968 if anyone had heard the music produced by integrated bands led and produced by white musicians Bill Lasswell and Don Was, they would undoubtedly call it "black." However, stereotypes, prejudices, and misconceptions die hard.
"The only scary thing to me is when people assume that because of the name, The Negro Problem is a rap or R&B group," says Brian Bullen, manager of that Los Angeles rock band. "Or people say that the group reminds them of bands like the Busboys, or Hootie. The only thing these groups have in common is a black lead singer. Think about it. The Negro Problem, along with such great bands as Baby Lemonade and the Andersons will keep defying the 'black guys can't play pop music' rule that someone made up after Hendrix died."
The civil rights movement continues, a crawl toward equality. Jesse Jackson, who was talking with Dr. King when the fatal shots shook Memphis and the world, still works to bring the inequities of the system to the forefront. His latest target is the supposedly enlightened music business. His methods echo his mentor's. His organization, Operation Push, bought stock in five of the six major record companies to gain access to stockholder's meetings. Last January, on what would have been King's 69th birthday, Jackson brought together representatives from PolyGram, the Recording Industry Association of America, and other companies to discuss racism in the music business after a PolyGram executive made some unfortunate, racist remarks.
Martin Luther King, Jimi Hendrix, and dozens of others helped get the ball rolling. Both died with their work unfinished. Much has changed in the last 30 years, but much remains to be done.
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BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
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© 1995-2008 Experience Hendrix, L.L.C. All Rights Reserved. |
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