CHAPTER 49

 

 

#52: THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE

"Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)"

 from the album Electric Ladyland

(also released as a posthumous single, October 1970)

 Released: October 1968

1970 was the year when heavy metal collided with pop; both Black Sabbath and Deep Purple just missed number one, with “Paranoid” and “Black Night” respectively. And the singles market-ignoring Led Zeppelin reigned supreme. The primary colours of psychedelia gradually faded, to make way for workaday dungarees, blue jeans, check shirts, five-day growths and no spitting at the back. Suddenly music transported you not to the gates of the unnameable but to a plumber’s shed.

But 1970 was also one of those halcyon years where everything contrived to collide with everything else, specifically in terms of forward-thinking jazz and improvised music and the more intelligent end of progressive rock; and the music generated from this surprisingly natural symbiosis – on account of younger musicians who had not grown up with The Tradition, were drawing away from The Blues and observed the Beatles as closely as Coleman or Coltrane, who were up for anything – is among that music which dwells nearest to my heart. Soft Machine, King Crimson and others threw the rock(ist) cards into the eager air, and through musician overlaps and enterprising mavericks connected with the astonishing explosion of punctum in British – and, indirectly, American – jazz and improv, as personified by the likes of Keith Tippett, Mike Westbrook, John Surman, Chris McGregor and the South Africans, and (in the extremist improv corner) Bailey, Oxley, Rutherford inter alia. And via transatlantic travellers such as Jack Bruce, Dave Holland and John McLaughlin, this feeling permeated, most obviously into the music of Miles and his descendents (e.g. Tony Williams’ Lifetime) and thereby into a very different bloodstream which eventually flowed into the glorious sea that is Carla Bley and Paul Haines’ Escalator Over The Hill, which in my musical world is the centre of everything; an undying and magical index of what music can achieve.

The twin axes of these developments were Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, and Hendrix was also the indirect tributary for the development of metal. But, as I’ve been hinting for some time, 1970 also marked An End Of Everything; that autumn, Albert Ayler, Janis Joplin and Hendrix all passed away within about a month of each other, painfully prematurely (probable suicide, accidental OD and another accidental OD respectively). I can still recall at the time that everyone felt music to have died. At the time of Hendrix’s stupid accident he was about to travel to New York to record some tracks with Gil Evans, who had expressed a strong interest in arranging Hendrix’s tunes for his orchestra, Evans having just eased into his “electric” period.

In light of all of the above, “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” might scarcely count as a “single”; it was the closing track of the two-year-old Electric Ladyland, was rushed out as a single with undue haste after Hendrix’s death, in a picture sleeve (still rare in those days) at a bargain price. Yet it sped to number one immediately; was it an equally rare accident that “Voodoo Chile” included itself in this list? For it stands out so starkly against everything else that went to number one, in 1970 or at any other time, in that…well, it seems to come nearer the truth.

This “Slight Return” of course ideally needs to be experienced (!) in the context of what came before it on Ladyland; the huge, pulsating 15-minute take of the song, with Steve Winwood’s organ and Jack Casady’s bass relentlessly pushing and prodding its lubriciously slow tempo; the still unrivalled sea dreams of the “1983/Merman” sequence; the timebomb pop of “Crosstown Traffic” and “Watchtower.” So it stands as the culmination of – what? Jazz and blues and rock and pop and everything any of these could hope to achieve?

“Well, I stand up next to a mountain/And I chop it down with the edge of my hand,” he intones, as Waters or Wolf did a lifetime before, but he swoons the blues into a spectacle which is terrifying yet exhilarating. “If I don’t meet you no more in this world” – or is he singing “I don’t figure no more in this world”? – “I’ll see you on the next one/So don’t be late.” It’s a threnody, a wake and a seduction all at once (just as Public Image Ltd's “Death Disco” would prove at the other end of the decade). Hendrix exalts in his imminent annihilation, and the consequent annihilation of rock, and finally engulfs himself in the astute flames of his guitar…

…and that guitar, it cuts, threads, kisses you in and from all directions, smashing in from the side, caressing from behind; and finally, when Hendrix dips out of tonality and vaults into screams of orgasm, we realise that here is something so mind-fuckingly close to…the truth? It is so much more than standing up and shouting FUCK in St Patrick’s Cathedral on Sunday morning; it is everything the Four Tops and Marvin still kept partially pent up, sonically it bursts as radiantly as “Telstar,” radiant as in the rising light of the first sun (Hendrix produces the track like a child given the job of producer for Christmas – from the initial wah-wah stuttering which indirectly invents ‘70s funk, through to the crazily high panning of guitars, voices and percussion from left to right channel and back again which actually does sound like bombers turning into butterflies), rhythmically it tears down the walls as smoothly as “Mony Mony,” emotionally it hurts and comforts as profoundly as “Those Were The Days.” It goes so far beyond the standard dick-waving of 95% of all heavy metal and post-Hendrix pop (by his generosity he feminises the phallus of guitarism) and makes a lot of “pop” sound – greasy! Incomplete! “Voodoo Chile” makes you want to kiss motorways, cause pile-ups in Wal-Mart, consider at least taking tea with God. It is Coltrane’s transcendence, Robert Johnson’s all-too-human post-humanity, BORGES FOREVER!…so powerful a number one record that it sustained beyond the artist’s physical life. It is immutable and immortal.