I just read Adam Shatz’s review/essay “The Beautiful Sounds
of Jimi Hendrix” in the New York Review of Books for 9 January 2014, so today’s
song is a Hendrix song.
My introduction to Hendrix was the Reprise LP Jimi Hendrix Experience
Smash Hits, which was released in the US in July, 1969. I heard the album,
when my brother bought a copy while we were at the beach in Ocean City, MD, in June 1970 (Hendrix died that September). It was very rainy for our week vacation, I recall, and we sat on the
large open porch with a crappy portable record player and this record. For me,
there were four standout songs on that album, though there wasn’t a mediocre
song on it (I loved the whole thing): “The Wind Cries Mary,” “Hey Joe,” “All
Along the Watchtower,” all on the first side, and “Red House,” on the second.
It was hard to choose a song for today, and my first thought
was to go with “Hey Joe” because that was the one I loved best at first, and it
was the first single by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and the last song played
at the first Woodstock Festival the same year I first heard this album. But the
song that best recalls to me sitting on the porch and watching cars hydroplane
on the highway is “The Wind Cries Mary.” Something in the pace of the song
recalls windshield wipers to me. It’s in that slow intro before Hendrix, in his
most sensitive vocal, opens with “After all the jacks are in their boxes / And
the clowns have all gone to bed . . .” It’s also Hendrix’s most overtly
Dylanesque song—except of course for his majestic cover of “All Along the
Watchtower,” which I heard years before I heard Dylan’s version, so that, to
me, the song was Jimi’s before it was Bobby’s.
I’ll add that the way I heard the first verse of “Mary”
differs from the lyrics as they appear online: “you can hear happiness
staggering on down the street”—we all agree—then: “footloose, dressed in red,”
I heard. “Footprints dress in red” the internet (and Hendrix) says. My version
gave me a vision of “happiness” dressed in red and staggering home after a
party. This is not the only time I would edit lyrics if I could.
Anyway, we can all agree that this is a beautiful and
evocative song. It out-Dylans Dylan, to some extent. The other line that always
got me was “the tiny island sags downstream,” and, of course, the one we always
used to cite: “A broom is drearily sweeping.” And that lyrical and so precise
and restrained guitar break that you wish would go on forever, and yet it’s
probably more satisfying because it so perfectly fits the time allotted to it.
This was in the day when long, “exploratory” guitar solos were becoming the norm
(again, editing helps, often) and to hear a guitar passage that was truly “a
statement,” like this one, stays with you. Hendrix is painting in sound.
“Mary” is a perfect example of Hendrix’s ability—the thing I
admire about him more and more as the decades peel away—to create sonic
landscapes or soundscapes. Each song has a particular guitar sound which
creates the mood and colors of the song. In his review Shatz mentions how
Hendrix developed his technique through technology, using “feedback, sustain,
effects pedals” that were “integral to his music, adding an expressive swirl of
timbres that lent his work a symphonic richness; Hendrix, a believer in
synesthesia, often compared sounds to colors.” And I’ve often tried to capture
the palette of this song, in my mind.
There is red of course, and orange and yellow, but also crimson and purple, and
when “the traffic lights turn blue tomorrow” that blue is so electric, played
right up against a thin line of red to jump out more.
The song is one of the great songs of 1967, a pretty good
year for music that stretched beyond what had seemed the basic format of guitar
band pop. From this distance, it’s absurd to put Hendrix into that category. The
blues, jazz, R&B, rock, psychedelia, and whatever it was that Dylan had
done—Hendrix used it all and was sui generis like no one else on the scene,
and, if one dwells on it, one feels robbed by the fact that he didn’t make it
past 1970, alive. The Seventies with Hendrix recording would’ve been
revelatory, no doubt.
“The Wind Cries Mary” (with its echoes of “the answer, my
friend, blowin’ in the wind” and “they call the wind Mariah”) is an elegy,
finally, “’Cause the life they lived . . . is dead.” It’s a melancholy song but
the imagery keeps it away from bathos. There’s something very “after the
carnival” about it, like party streamers in the mud and deflating balloons and
face-paint all patchy and smudged. Like much from 1967, there is a built-in
sense of the end of an era, audible enough here and, by 1970, when I heard the
song, readily apparent. Woodstock had already been and gone. Apotheosis, and staggering on home afterward. “It
whispers, ‘No, this will be the last.’”
We were already borne back ceaselessly into the past. Where Jimi forever
shines.
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