Table Of ContentJIMI HENDRIX
The Reverb series looks at the connections between music, artists and performers,
musical cultures and places. It explores how our cultural and historical understanding
of times and places may help us to appreciate a wide variety of music, and vice versa.
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Already published
The Beatles in Hamburg
Ian Inglis
Brazilian Jive: From Samba to Bossa and Rap
David Treece
Easy Riders, Rolling Stones: On the Road in America, from Delta Blues to ’70s Rock
John Scanlan
Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin
Tobias Rüther
Jimi Hendrix: Soundscapes
Marie-Paule Macdonald
Neil Young: American Traveller
Martin Halliwell
Nick Drake: Dreaming England
Nathan Wiseman-Trowse
Remixology: Tracing the Dub Diaspora
Paul Sullivan
Tango: Sex and Rhythm of the City
Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes
Van Halen: Exuberant California, Zen Rock’n’roll
John Scanlan
JIMI HENDRIX
SOUNDSCAPES
MARIE-PAULE MACDONALD
reaktion books
To Thérèse Ruest Lévesque and M. C. Bernadette Macdonald
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2016
Copyright © Marie-Paule Macdonald 2016
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78023 530 1
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: EXTRATERRESTRIAL BLUES 7
1 WEST: VANCOUVER, SEATTLE, MONTEREY, SAN FRANCISCO,
LOS ANGELES 13
2 SOUTH: NASHVILLE, MEMPHIS, ATLANTA, NEW ORLEANS 63
3 EAST: HARLEM, NEW YORK, NEW JERSEY 83
4 LONDON: A PSYCHEDELIC SCENE 107
5 T HE NEW YORK–LONDON AXIS: A SERIES OF RETURNS 147
6 HEAVY TOURING 183
CONCLUSION 236
Chronology 243
References 253
Select Bibliography 285
Discography 291
Acknowledgements 293
Photo Acknowledgements 295
Index 297
INTRODUCTION: EXTRATERRESTRIAL BLUES
I want a big band . . . I mean a big band full of
competent musicians that I can conduct and write for. And
with the music we will paint pictures of earth and space,
so that the listener can be taken somewhere.
Jimi Hendrix, London, 5 September 19701
If an alien were to come down to study the American, European
and African cities and landscapes that Hendrix frequented, what
kind of impression would they make? What roles do urban and
architectural locations play in musical experience, in collective
meaning? The Vancouver-based science fiction writer William
Gibson said: ‘The future is already here – it’s just not very
evenly distributed.’2 Is the future embedded in sound and its
environments? That seems to be the case for the Hendrix sound,
which is so often described as a sound of the future.
Out of nowhere, and traversing boundaries, Hendrix was a
virtuoso guitarist who avidly refined his craft, and his influence
lives on in recordings, texts and imagery. There is consensus in
the collective perception that his legacy remains culturally fresh
and relevant. At first there was criticism that the mass reception
of his band’s music was primarily by a targeted white youth
market, but in 2010 the Pop Matters journalist Mark Reynolds
stated: ‘Hendrix has been claimed by the black mainstream as a
cultural innovator of the highest order.’3 With recent reworkings
of disciplinary barriers, classical musicians, as well as blues, rock,
rap and folk artists, admire and draw inspiration from Hendrix’s
sonic innovation and composition.
Just as there are many diverse audiences, so there are many
possible approaches to the work and legacy of Jimi Hendrix,
7
jimi hendrix
from biographical and historical to musicological or sociological,
to this contemporary perspective, informed by current, shifting
ideas about music, sound and media communication in our
technological society. This approach reflects on the particular
resonance of Hendrix and his influential performing and
recording career in terms of soundscape, environment, landscape,
place, geography and built form. It relates issues of location
to perceptions of digitally produced placeless sound and the
repercussions, in the Obama era, of an extended reception by
a mass audience listening for innovative sound.
The notion of soundscape, which varies with place and
climate, presents a frame for perceiving the aural textures that
Hendrix heard, invented, composed, edited and incorporated
into his guitar and recording vocabulary. In his formative years,
Hendrix lived in Seattle and Vancouver. His acoustic environment
was a moist soundscape whose keynote sound is the sound of
wood, in the words of the composer R. Murray Schafer, who
coined the term ‘soundscape’. The forested ocean-side climate
of the Pacific Northwest endures as a dampened, rained-on
mountainous landscape, often with a horizon of heavy cloud,
punctuated by a linear, continuous sound of running water.
Humour about the rainforest often invokes Noah.
Along with the environment-based notion of soundscape, the
conceptual framework for the history of the blues, no longer
constrained by state lines, has overflowed into bioregions.
Blues historians emphasize that the migration that defined the
lives of blues musicians was more sympathetic to geography:
lowlands; bottomlands; deltas or watersheds, like that of the
vast Mississippi River; smaller towns; crossroads; migration hubs
along rivers, railways or highways.4 William Gibson’s quip about
the distribution of the future could launch a riff on the places of
a particular time, in the manner of the literary theorist Mikhail
8
introduction: extraterrestrial blues
Bakhtin, whose notion of chronotope fused a cultural moment
and its location.5 The idea of long duration, or longue durée, in the
terminology of the historian Fernand Braudel, marks a parallel
approach to rooting events to specific locations.6 In the case of
Hendrix, the intensity of his migratory life introduced a new
paradigm, a meteoric, moveable geography of sound.
Hendrix emerged from a specific coastal environment, and
within that from a disparate set of homes. In his brief adult life he
moved constantly, from many different houses in the early years
in Seattle to many anonymous hotel rooms, then on to slightly
more personal recording studios and several apartments on two
continents. At the beginning of the twentieth century the
German architect Paul Scheerbart wrote: ‘We live for the most
part within enclosed spaces. These form the environment from
which our culture grows.’7 Hendrix roamed city streets. When
he did check into a lodging, he tended to stay inside the rooms,
practising guitar riffs, recording and dreaming sounds. With the
intense, sensual perception of a musical being, he digested his world
of sound, that is, of corporeal vibrations bouncing off immediate
surroundings, mingled with smells, humidity and illumination.
Hendrix’s body of work has been expanding continuously,
as its own particular universe. He was born at the very start of
the Second World War baby boom and was part of a generation
that gave rise to numerous youth movements and cultural
phenomena. The influence of his generation has begun to fade
even as his audience continues to grow. There is a continuing
lively business aspect: the album Valleys of Neptune charted at
number four in the United States in 2010, and that year Hendrix
sold more than a million albums altogether.8
In search of places to play music, Hendrix began performing
wherever he could, and as his notoriety grew he began to be
booked in both conventional and unconventional venues.
Part of the reason for this was the effect of the youth movement
9
