The experience
Summers of love. Sunday musical excursion #42.
It’s amazing what you can pack into 27 years, and none know that more so than did the members of the 27 Club: artists who never saw their 28th birthday. One of the famed members is Jimi Hendrix, who departed this life on 18 September 1970 in Kensington, London. He died of an overdose of barbiturates, left a catalogue that would be litigated over for almost as long as his life was short, and leaves us with so much speculation as to why he had to die, what he could have given us had he lived; he lived so carefree and could express such passion and emotion in both private and professional life, to leave us with his … Experience.
It is the last of these thoughts that should preoccupy us with him, along with his fellow club members Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison (Marc Bolan, who I talked of previously, was 29 when he was killed). For, among his many contradictions is the fact that his was a talent that, though nipped in its bud, had already greatly flourished.
His iconic, era-defining performance at Woodstock in 1968 was deliberately rescheduled by him from the last night on the Sunday to the Monday morning, because he disliked playing to large crowds: the festival’s 450,000 had by then dwindled to a mere 40,000. Here, you have him and his band fellows playing one of his most famous hits, Voodoo Child (Slight Return), in Maui in 1970, to what was a characteristically small crowd. Within three months of this performance, he’d be dead. But we can still relish the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Effortless.
Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
Written by Jimi Hendrix
Performed by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
From their 1968 album Electric Ladyland
In the clip, Hendrix is playing the Fender Stratocaster he played at Woodstock. It’s a right-handed model, but Hendrix was left-handed, and although it was simply turned upside down and strung accordingly, the treble end of the range was thereby tinnier and the bass more sombre (giving him another unique sound besides wah-wahs) because it was built with the bridge slanted so as to achieve the exact opposite effect.
