DB's Song of the Day (day 330): "RED HOUSE" (1969) The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Tomorrow, Thanksgiving, is the birthday of James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix. This is my third post on Hendrix and today’s song is one of the earliest he recorded with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, for their first album. The song was worked out in live performances with his earlier bands, so that, in a sense, this is the early sound of Hendrix, using the blues in a way that he would later return to, but which isn’t much in evidence on the first album otherwise. The track I’m mainly referencing, however, is the one that appears in 1969 on Smash Hits in the U.S., not the version that appeared on Are You Experienced in the UK.

I choose that version because that’s the one that was burned into my brain that summer (1970) when I first heard Smash Hits as my introduction to Hendrix. And it’s the vocal I like best of the versions I’ve heard. But the song has many variants, particularly many live versions online. The song is perhaps the quintessential Hendrix song, allowing him to fully work out his distinctive sound within a familiar twelve bar blues format. It’s a song that shows where Hendrix has come from, musically, but it also is full of a dense, rich, almost over-ripe texture that you don’t quite find anywhere else.

It’s also a song that demonstrates that Hendrix, when he’s this hot, is having the time of his life. Learning, to his dismay, that “this key I’m holding won’t unlock this door,” he surmises “I got a bad, bad feeling, my baby don’t live here no more,” then interjects, “that’s alright, I still got my git-tar, look out now!” And then proceeds to tear it up for about thirty seconds, but they are immensely satisfying seconds, showing why he might not be so concerned with being locked out of his former lover’s place. He's got lots to keep him occupied. So, he then reflects, “I may as well go back over yonder / Way back yonder 'cross the hill / Looks like my baby don’t love me no more / But I know her sister will.” No flies on this guy.

That insouciance is what you take away from the song, much more than any sense of the blues tearing this guy’s heart out. It’s not that “Red House” doesn’t live up to the notion, common to the blues, that the guitar playing is the only possible palliative for the sorrow and heartache and mean cussedness that the singer/player is feeling, but it adds a radiance, as the unique complexity of Hendrix’s guitar shows how to rise above the shock to one’s pride and to one’s hopes—of getting laid at least—that are dashed by being, as so many blues songs express it, one way or another, turned away from “your door.” Generally, the idea is, if the woman won’t take the man in he’s doomed to prowl like some kind of locked-out alley cat, getting into trouble and up to no good. Hendrix’s speaker, we imagine, heads on down the road describing graceful arabesques of sound, a kind of Pied Piper ready for to fade into his own parade, heading off to a woman who will be happy to get what her sister doesn’t want any longer, in a lively play of musical beds.

The U.S. release of Are You Experienced is made strong by inclusion of the hits “Purple Haze,” “Hey Joe,” and “The Wind Cries Mary” and I have to say I have a hard time imagining the album without those tracks, but it still seems an injustice that “Red House” isn’t included. Then again, Smash Hits is in some ways the most satisfying collection of Hendrix studio tracks, and would be perfect if it included “Little Wing” and “If 6 Was 9.” The re-packaging of Hendrix runs on apace, and the best bet for a collection of the most essential studio tracks with a few famous live tracks is The Ultimate Experience, from 1992, which is CD only, but even there, I’d trim some of the Axis and Ladyland tracks in favor of a few favorites from the unfinished final album. Anyway, let's give thanks for what Jimi got around to recording in his time here.

Maybe it’s time I got around to my own essential studio Hendrix playlist . . .

DB's Song of the Day (day 261): "IF 6 WAS 9" (1967) Jimi Hendrix Experience

Today’s the deathday of James Marshal Hendrix—Jimi—one of the truly great musicians of the Sixties whose career ended dismayingly early. Hendrix arose to prominence in the psychedelic period—1967-68—and didn’t even live long enough to finish and release his post-psychedelic album which was probably going to be called Strate Ahead but which now exists, mostly, as First Rays of the New Rising Sun. That and the performances released as Band of Gypsies (1970) and from the “Cry of Love” tour are the end of the road.

What song to use as tribute? I had a few in mind, not least the song known as “Hey Baby (First Rays of the New Rising Sun)” because, even though the vocal on the track is just a rough demo, the guitar part is one of those bits that gets into the mind and stays, full of moody power.  But today I put on Axis: Bold as Love (1967) to hear “Little Wing” (another contender) and “If 6 Was 9” sorta self-selected itself.

In part because it’s a song of fierce individualism and nonconformism and a defiant indifference to what passes for received wisdom, and the way Jimi says “hippies!” in “Now if all the hippies cut off all their hair / I don’t care” has such a sardonic edge to it. Just as telling as the condescension toward “white collar conservatives” (which wasn’t a common phrase yet)—“you can’t dress like me”—as it were shrugging off both their houses. Hip freaks, uptight squares. And sure enough, many of those hippies would become conservatives eventually. Of course the song was famously used in the soundtrack of Easy Rider (1969), helping to add a certain heroism to the exploits of Captain America and Billy.

“If 6 turned out to be 9 / I don’t mind.” Yeah, I guess it’s kinda Zen.

And the shifting sounds of the song are Hendrix more or less overloading the circuitry. The riff is classic, and much imitated, and the phase shifts and reverb and fuzzbox of the mix come at us through distortion due to the fact that the track had to be reconstructed from a tape of the original tape—since Hendrix managed to lose the original tape mix, allegedly in the back of a cab. Now, doesn’t that make you wonder where that ended up?

Anyway, it seems a fitting song for the day when Hendrix didn’t wake up, since it says, with a rather bemused, laconic delivery, “I’m the one that’s got to die when it’s time for me to die / So let me live my life the way I want to.”

Hendrix, apparently, lived the way he wanted to, recorded the way he wanted to, and played the way he wanted to. Certainly he played like no one else. And his singing on today’s song has such attitude, chuckling—“fall mountains, just don’t fall on me”—as he gives the masses yearning to breathe free some hope in advancing beneath his freak flag flying high—HIGH! The guitar and effects in the long close seem to be happening in an alternate universe, let's call it “Electric Ladyland.”

I got my own world to live through / And I ain’t gonna copy you

DB's Song of the Day (day 12):"THE WIND CRIES MARY" (1967) Jimi Hendrix Experience

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.