It’s so simple yet commanding. The lyrics and overall vibe of the song are liberating. The sound is terrible. It’s hard to tell what these pasty-faced British kids were feeling while watching this. Was their a language for this kind of rock yet? During his performance of “Like a Rolling Stone”, never my favorite Hendrix cover but impressive for its powerful guitar fills, Jimi performs like the embodiment of Bowie’s Major Tom, lonely but engaged in his own musical mission. Anyhow, without sounding like anymore of the schoolgirl that I was sitting in that short films room, let’s just say I was moved a few times over. And seeing Eric Burdon speak about Jimi is always a treat. He’s like those burnout guys in high school who used to make me a little uncomfortable despite my sharing much of their sincere appreciation of the musicianship of Hendrix.
After spending a good 1:15 in the Hendrix part of EMP, I had to hustle through some other exhibits. There was an interactive room, which I was not up for interacting with. It did have a bunch of computer monitors set up with anecdotes from artists organized by theme. I sat down and watched a very cool clip of Graham Parker talking about the album-saving role producer Jack Nitzsche played on Squeezing Out Sparks. Parker was refreshingly gracious about the contributions of The Rumour, even while discussing the overplaying and ego-strutting that Nitzsche had to break them of. The best part of the story may have been Parker regretting that he’d just turned the band onto Little Feat prior to entering the studio, which he said inspired them to new heights of overplaying.
I wish I’d had more time to spend in the guitar room. As BigSteve noted, it had examples of just about every kind of guitar, including headless ones at the end of the chronological arrangement. I enjoyed seeing Bo Diddley‘s guitar and Kurt Cobain‘s blue Jazzmaster guitar up close. The monitor playing nothing but clips of guitarists was excellent. I didn’t get to see the Roy Buchanan video that so moved BigSteve, but I dug a lot of other clips, including one of Merle Travis, I guy I’ve never known anything about, playing some mostly unaccompanied piece.
The Northwest Passage exhibit, as I think the permanent collection on music from the area was called, was pretty cool if a bit short on things that personally interested me. Seeing the Paul Revere & the Raiders gear and costumes up close hit home. Those costumes they wore looked so heavy that I began to sweat just thinking about what it would be like to wear them in concert. Another thing I liked in this exhibit was seeing the same Otari 8-track our band owns and has used to record over the years in a display on the equipment used to record the first Mudhoney record. There was stuff on The Wipers as well. I’ll have to check out that stuff again. It never makes any sense to me when I try to listen to it. I was expecting more on Nirvana, Pearl Jam, et al, but maybe I just passed it all without much interest.
“That whole guitar-smashing/amp-humping routine of Jimi’s, as slightly embarrassing and calculated it would seem when artists following his footsteps would try it, seemed sincere and even necessary for the evolution of rock when Pete Townshend and then Hendrix did it”
Was Cobain brave or foolish for attempting to walk with giants?
Cobain was brave for many other things, in my opinion, but his guitar-smashing/amp-humping routine seemed no more powerful than what any of us might have done out of a desire to be part of that tradition. What do you think?
I’m truly ambivalent but I did think it was funny how indignant people were about that SNL appearance, often making a big show of re-enacting how bored they were by it. Even if their reactions were more nuanced, they seemed just as peeved as my parents would be.
On the other hand, the whole tradition has a privileged, “carpenter disrespectful to his tools” quality that bugs the grandson of the Depression in me.
Still, if he was only aiming to get himself in the footnotes of rock history, Cobain must be pleased somewhere that no discussion on the politics of guitar-smashing can be held without mentioning his name.
-db
(just finishing up his vacation and getting into the swing of things….)
Yeah I’m not really interested in science fiction, so I forgot all about that part of the museum. It’s true that the inside is not as out there as the exterior of the building. It seems like there’s a lot of wasted space, like they haven’t quite figured out yet all of what’s going in there.
One thing that exhibit does in reinforce the once-in-a-lifetime aspect of Hendrix. Even with all the artifacts of his upbringing and apprenticeship, he still seems to have come out of nowhere. Genius is always a quality that cannot be adequately explained, but Hendrix is a special case.
That EMF building is ugly as all heck. It looks like a melted Visible V-8 Engine model kit.
Jim said “…Hendrix (who played on a Covay single I don’t know)”
I say: What Covey track did he play on besides Mercy Mercy? Do you recall the name?
I don’t recall the name. I’ve been meaning to look it up.