[Atomic Jukebox]

about ten minutes

Lists:

‘handy’, convenient; essential for buying vegetables, but absolutely hopeless when it comes to music, that is of course unless you ARE a vegetable…All too indicative and symptomatic of the atrophied, leprous A.D.H.D. riddled malaise of the modern mind which when flooded with such a multiplicity of choices, can’t make up its own….mind…..anyway…

I thought I would have a go at listing my favourite ten records of the decade about to close…it was difficult…very difficult…After 5 minutes I began thinking in terms of genres, then I began thinking about exactly where I was between the mock apocalypse of the millenium and circa 2005: in hell, for a while approximately. Then I began to consider artists I liked, those whose music I wanted to buy and not steal, those who were cool, those who were not..the usual self indulgent, self reflexive rubbish. During the latter half of  the decade I had been on the other side of the world with nothing much at all and had more or less stopped buying music listening to music mostly made prior to the millenium – 30`s, 40`s, 50`s, 60`, 70`s, 80` and 90`s…ad I mean from the previous 4 centuries as well…what happened to Dizzee Rascal?

1. Cheik Lho – lamp fall – click here

2. Dunjen – ta det lungt – click here

3. The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered – click here

4. Various – now is the winter of our discount tents – click here

5. Radiohead – in rainbows

6. Arctic Monkeys – f.w.n

7. Coldplay – viva la vida

8. Beck – sea change

9. The Beatles – let it be naked

10. The Streets – a grand don’t come for free

11. Townes Van Zandt – texas rain – click here

12. Kora – Kora

If there was ever a soul sacrifice made to the celestial guitar gods, it was Hendrix himself…exploding into flames at the Monterey Festival; Hendrix burnt away in a three year vapour trail of psychedelic drugs, hard touring, alcohol, groupies, invention, and innovation – notwithstanding the management, money and alleged mafia troubles that followed in his infinitely surfed wake.

If you are baffled by the countless re-iterations and compilations floating endlessly around; the remixes and terrible bastardisations such as the “Midnight Lightning” album (Alan Douglas hiring modern musicians), or “Loose Ends” (which clearly showcases shallow greed in using out-takes from the cutting room floor), add to this the blatant mis-branding of Hendrix’ work with Curtis Knight and the many more myriad compilations on offer – take heed herein…

To help you navigate the shark infested waters of the Hendrix legacy here are 6 Essential Hendrix albums that distill the the soaring, expressive talent and vision of Hendrix’ legacy both live and in the studio…

1.Are you Experienced – 1st album – : FIRE & BRIMSTONE

The Jimi Hendrix Experience first album fuses gritty rock, psychedelia and feedback in a blistering rocket fuelled journey to the centre of the cosmos. This is as close to ‘classic’ rock as Hendrix gets with pumping riffs, weird chromatic guitar solo’s (”Purple Haze”) and a lyrical disposition (especially in “The Wind Cries Mary”) that combines Dylanesque surrealism with the hip acid talk of the American Summer of Psychedelic Love. This album is filled with triumphant feelings of revolution, victory and optimism, which burn like bright flags amongst a speudo-existentialist spacescape that flirts with ideas of depression and death beyond time. It’s a fervent and heady mix of grass roots psychedelia and Jimi’s earthy hands on approach to tonal exploration, distortion, feedback and elemental urgency on the guitar ensures it burns white hot, like magnesium at midnight.

2.Axis Bold As Love – 2nd album – : WATER

Despite leaving the original mastertapes of side one in a London Taxicab The Experience Second album is another triumph.

The second Experience album leans more heavily towards a more complex lyrical mysticism and lucid poetics with songwriting of a more deliberate meaning and intent in opposition to the hard rock rattle and hum combustion or interstellar immediacy of its feedback soaked predecessor. Hendrix also blends the fervant science fiction, metaphysics and exploratory lyricism of his psychedelic ideology and imagination with a more refined approach to instrumentation and a more nuanced style. The tentative, fragile lyrical tragedy of “Castles Made of Sand” hones more Dylanesque metaphor through the collapsing time of backwards guitar, whilst “If 6 was Nine” screams the experimental battle cry of the counter culture, like the dissembling miles of a bullet from a revolutionaries’ musket in slow motion.

Hendrix of course still manages to coax never before heard techniques and sounds from his guitar, more melodic jazz funk influences (from his R&B chitlin’ circuit days) whilst channeling his mysticism and revelatory existentialism across a range of genres. There are unmissable ballads that exemplify the duality of the time; the hopes and fears, the real and the unreal as much as showcase his unique melody / chord phrasing: the birdsong love poem Little Wing and the homesick art-rock of Spanish Castle Magic. The final track Bold as Love is arguably one of the greatest arrangements of synaesthetic lyrical metaphor, melodic rhythm guitar and majestic lead ever written and recorded.

3. Electric Ladyland – 3rd album – : TRANSCENDENTAL

Take the previous two Jimi Hendrix Experience albums and throw in some voodoo blues, low down groove, funk, rock and roll, orchestration and then blend into a transcendental, love apocalypse masterpiece of songwriting, guitar playing prowess, musical exploration, ufology, time travel and the foreboding sense that the world is coming to an end. The sheer emotional intent of the guitar playing alone on this double album  absolutely shines through as Hendrix delivers masterpiece after expressive masterpiece.
The stellar guitar piece “Come On” hermetically seals Hendrix’ Rock and Roll prowess, expression and technique beyond time and space as he launches through a blistering high octane guitar marathon whereas “Voodoo Chile”, featuring Steve Winwood, pushes the blues guitar envelope to the end of the universe and back again with such archetypal and quintessentially natural phrasing wrapped within a live studio performance that literally kicks out the jams and destroys them.  “The Burning of the Midnight Lamp” features more sonic experimentation recorded in a vacuum of depression, until it breaks into a vivid and wildly oscillating wah wah solo while “Gypsy Eyes” conjures up the rattling bones of African witchcraft with Hendrix’ dead blues spirit traversing the ghostplane in search of his lost love.

On “Long Hot Summer Night” Jimi fuses colourful story telling with more achingly soulful and fluid guitar then amplifies Bob Dylan’s skeletal masterpiece “All Along the Watchtower” with the sonic emotional import and smouldering sound and fury of God and some of the most memorable guitar playing ever.

By the time we reach side three Hendrix extends his themes into the soulfull jazz grooves of a “Rainy Day” before embarking on the ambitious philosophical, revelatory opus of “1983’s” melodic escape from the apocalypse into the sea. Through an undulating series of musical meditations, phrases and undeniable hook sequences that range from delicate washing tremelo descents beneath the tides to swinging grooves, the war chaos noise of the machines above, and heraldic anthemics of emotional release and salvation; Hendrix single handedly invents ambient and closes the chapter on the decade with an ambitious contemporary guitar symphony. The musicianship from all throughout is unparalleled and this record doesn’t date because of its scope, resounding energy and ambition. If you were to own one Hendrix disc, this is it.

4. Nine to the Universe – studio jams – rare jazz-blues improvisations – awesome and tight

This is what happens when Jimi Hendrix rocks into the studio to have a jam and the sonic results are absolutely off the hook. With more of a leaning towards  a modal approach to the guitar Jimi proves that literally everything is in his hands as he manipulates his stratocaster and amp to deliver a huge tonal range within the context of a progressive jazz-blues fusion jam session. If you are new to Hendrix this might be a little too like abstract expressionism for you but if you’re looking to expand your musical expression on the guitar without resorting to gratuitous effects and cheap tricks this is a great place to start taking lessons from the master.

5. Band of Gypsys – live – the once in a lifetime guitar mastery of epic sonic genius that is machine gun

After disbanding the original experience Hendrix returns to New York with Buddy Miles and Billy Cox to deliver a more loosely organised series of extended songs and groove laden hooks centred around the opposing themes of war and peace. Never to be underestimated, Hendrix is at the peak of his sonic creativity and effortlessly recreates the sonic palette and experience of the Vietnam war on Machine Gun, producing some of the most mesmerising guitar tones in the history of rock in an astonishingly complete performance. Hendrix flaunts acres of infinite sustain and tonal feedback control, combined with tremelo induced ufology and science fiction sounds in an engaging live performance that proves EXACTLY why he is history’s most mind blowing rock instrumentalist.  Hendrix’ intent though is not only to transport you into a world of complete sonic guitar mastery but also to inspire spiritually through the kyuss of great hooks, timing and melody (Power to Love).

6. The Jimi Hendrix Concerts – a great compilation of live recordings

This collection of recordings showcases the original experience at their best and includes the absolutely monumentous tonal mastery and feedback genius of Are You Experienced performed live – possibly another one of the greatest moments in guitar history. You can hear the feedback soaked guitar bouncing off the back of the auditorium and feel the hairs stand up on the back of your neck too as Jimi manipulates his signal in ways that the original studio recording could never achieve. This has to be heard to be believed. This is what the Experience sound like live on a great night and they’re absolutely burning it up. If you cant get this disc then get the LIVE AT WINTERLAND album instead.

7. Beautiful People  – If 60`s were 90`s

Some old friends of mine throw the War Heroes offcuts into the remix liquidiser to repackage Hendrix for the early 90`s chillaxation-house groove scene. If you like the idea of Hendrix with “modern” beats then this might be right up your street. The stand out cuts are “Get Your Mind Together” and “Sea Eventually”. Remixes with PM Dawn sounded absolutely incredible at the time but never officially materialised. If you want your Hendrix licks, melodies and riffs  served up in a dreamy, groovy back-beat sauce with a focus upon the nouvelle cuisine sampling of a chillaxed club mix then this is the gelato h’ors d’oeuvre you’re after. Rilly Groovy. Rilly, Rilly Groovy.

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

Rudyard’s IF represents more than adequately the struggle and difficulties of being an outsider, a traveller with no real destination, a tree broken off from its roots, driftwood amongst a million lonely stones, dispossessed, lacking in direction. Encapsulating a moment ‘beyond’ time and space in the mind of the lone individual, fraught with the vicissitudes, slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; in the eye of the storm & the heat of the battle silent volumes speak.

A friend writes of songwriting, and I`m presuming he means  quality songwriting of prescient import like Townes Van Zandt or Bob Dylan…and in quality writing I prefer to mean writers like Faulkner,  Steinbeck, TS Eliot, Shakespeare and the like? Certain genres create different spheres of discipline though it is true – but if we consider Like A Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan to be the hyperion of writing achievement then I don`t think just anyone can do it and I don`t think everyone has something to say. Certainly not of value.

Alot of people substitute melody, production  or style for lyrical content and allow marketing in all its myriad guises to persuade them of qualities that are simply nonexistant. We live in a world in which people are increasingly ignorant of history, sacrifice, emotion, trauma and the hurt of others. We live in a world divided into those who think and feel with their hearts and minds and those who think they can feel.

Some people have a god given talent with a pen and it clearly shows they have been around and experienced what life has to offer -  without this experience there is nothing to offer the song writing pantheon but secondhand echoes  and dull inarticulate reflections of life`s mirror.

More on songwriting here.

We separate ourselves through a broken language from the surrounding milieu. Both bird and tree are the same. A guest here says god is an astronaut – if he is; then his ship must be in for repairs or he has abandoned us for a cleaner, less f*&^ked up planet and people elsewhere? Do the quantum notions of great astrophysical thinkers, the musings of Von Daniken or the ’superstition’ of pagan systems offer us any further respite?

How do you know but every Bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?

I first saw House when I was maybe twelve or thirteen years old, and,  it changed everything for me.

House`s sounds are characteristically steam driven rhythmic explorations of disturbingly apocryphal and intense gothic desolation, loss, isolation and spiritual retribution. His early experience as a baptist preacher
bleeds through and informs his vocals empowering them with an incantatory, mesmeric resonance that borders on Native American shamanism. House`s lexicon occupies a position of such emotional lucidity and trail blazing acuity that much of what followed after him could be viewed as incomplete, inchoate gestural cliches. It was House who, speaking to awe-struck young blues fans in the 1960s, spread the legend that Johnson had sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical powers…but he musta been talking about hisself.

I got a letter this mornin, how do you reckon it read?
It said, “Hurry, hurry, yeah, your love is dead”

So, I grabbed up my suitcase, and took off down the road
When I got there she was layin on a coolin’ board

Well, I walked up right close, looked down in her face
Said, the good ol’ gal got to lay here ’til the Judgment Day

Looked like there was 10,000 people standin’ round the buryin’ ground
I didn’t know I loved her ’til they began to let her down

You know I didn’t feel so bad, ’til the good ol’ sun went down
I didn’t have a soul to throw my arms around

You know, it’s hard to love someone that don’t love you
Ain’t no satisfaction, don’t care what in the world you do

You know, love’s a hard ol’ fall, make you do things you don’t wanna do
Love sometimes leaves you feeling sad and blue

The mighty Son House. The real deal; spent the first half of his life in the Steam Age and the later half working on the New York Central Rail line. If this man`s music doesn’t move you – nothing will. You must be dead. In my humble opinion Son House is the greatest blues player of all time…

House was born in 1886 (officially) 1902 in Clarksdale, Mississippi and in his mid twenties, inspired by Willie Wilson, he bought a guitar and played alongside Charley Patton and Robert Johnson. Son House even spent time on Parchman Farm for killing a man in self defence.

House`s sounds are characteristically steam driven rhythmic explorations of disturbingly apocryphal and intense gothic desolation, loss, isolation and spiritual retribution.  His early experience as a baptist preacher bleeds through and informs his vocals empowering them with an incantatory, mesmeric resonance that borders on Native American shamanism.

House`s lexicon occupies a position of such emotional lucidity and trail blazing acuity that much of what followed after him could be viewed as incomplete, inchoate gestural cliches.

This is the voice of the Wicked Messenger, when he rolls back into town.

Use what you’ve got – if you’ve got a hook use your telephone, if you can get to a computer just video your performance. Move damn fast, get your idea down and review. Last night I improvised a song & threw it together -  move fast `cause the world is moving quicker than you are – also that way, you can dodge the bullets. Get the right tools for you. If you wanna write a song, write it , SO don`t write a song about the equipment, the set up, don`t let that get in your way. You can`t feel a mixing desk, you can`t emote a machine or elaborate a microphone set up – leave that for  Ron, later on.

After four years with no acoustic guitar writing songs on borrowed planks and often times on my beloved stratocaster with a collection of maybe 6 guitars left to decay, rot, decline and gather dust, rust and cobweb somewhere in an empty cupboard on the other side of the earth I have finally found a plank for myself. Its a simple rather than a complex machine…An old hofner F-hole!  Fortunately the gods here have smiled upon me and hooked me up with Mojo Sound in Wellington for recording with some pricey pricey guitars…

With a mellow, aged, ochre, molasses and diesel sound this baby is just built for percussive, skiffle styles, slide lead lines. It`s great even if it rattles like tthe eeth in an old desert lost skull, and the actions higher than god…

Ive been using my phone for years now to record stuff ..modern technology makes me sick.

Ive just started working on a new song with this new blues guitar but I can`t.

I`m surrounded by more technology right now than used to launch the hubble telescope, video cameras, sound interfaces, computers – windows and mac, photo cameras, mixing desks, amplifiers, electronic drums, p.a.`s and I cant record a single damn riff into any of it…so I`m using my mobile phone and I wish I had a cassette recorder…complexity is the enemy of creativity…

“Blood like cold needles that slide in my veins
You fell from heaven in the yellow rain
Stealing the crimson flowers of day
Black embers shone of a time now gone
crosses & candlesticks, conquests, cathedrals now forgotten”

Robert Johnson; there`s a lot of hoodoo wrapped up around the man, in particular that he sold his soul to the devil down at the crossroads in Clarksdale. Originally, Son House suggested, Johnson was not regarded as a good musician at all but after the trade with Satan he returned with the blazing skills and blues mastery of a demi-god. Much of the early blues protagonists framed their content within the context of african american hoodoo/religious belief wrapped up in the historical context of migratory diaspora and most of the cliches of the blues narrative are more culturally rich in meaning than they might at first appear. The simple cliche alone of “the highway” is extrapolated and interpolated by numerous artists over the last 90 years by Bob Dylan alone many times across his recorded work. A great bridging work for the blues to the present date is Michael Gray’s ‘Song and Dance Man III’, which illustrated Dylan`s reappropriation of the blues through other song forms.

The narrative and folk tales, the telling of lies or competitive tales, the healthily obscene “putting in the dozens”, the long and witty toasts and the epigrammatic rhyming couplets which enliven the conversation of folk negro and harlem hipster alike, have their reflections in the blues.

Paul Oliver`s book “Conversation with the Blues” (1965)

There`s a great thesis here about the concept of the Trickster, which leads me onto what I`ve talked about previously with regards to Radioheads re-appropriation of the blues through a series of post modern metaphors and the Sublime. Eric Clapton himself has suggested that Johnson`s cross tempo work is unparalleled and Johnny Winter makes use of this technique also.

In the following video Eric Clapton, another “guitar hero” whose early songwriting capabilities and exploration of new genres (e.g. Cale & Marley) seems to be wholly forgotten now, talks about Robert Johnson and plays “Stones in the Passway”.

It`s a great place to start exploring what Robert Johnson has to offer and why he is who he is. It also illuminates the sheer technique, the impact of the unusual, that is often confused with something arcane, mythical, metaphysical, divine and otherworldly or more specifically in the blues with superstition, an encounter with the Devil or other dark force and the conceit of a conspirational universe.  It’s also interesting to note that the cross tempo section Eric Clapton discusses is a technique that many artists have plagiarised or emulated: Johnny Winter and Rory Gallagher have used it in varying degrees throughout their careers.

At any rate as much as Johnson’s technique was formidable and undeniably unique recordings have always sounded odd: his voice always seemed pitched too high and anyone who owns a gramophone knows that speed is ultimately the choice of the listener. Anyway, it seems that we may been listening to Robert Johnson at too many revolutions.
Touched.co.uk are offering Steady Rollin’ Man – 24 tracks of Robert Johnson slowed down – click here. I.M.H.O. this is the way Robert Johnson should sound and you can read all about it here.

What is it about old guitars, old planks, old timber, old gold even? Who knows? Analogue or digital? I`d definitely rather listen to an L.P. or even better still a 78 on my gramophone.

If you write from experience you will develop a sense of place, character, a message, tone, symbolism, imagery, and figurative language, metaphor and simile. Ignore everybody and never even consider any filthy dirty money. Remember though the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Today I picked up the awesome Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee – Midnight Special album and the Muddy Waters` album I`m ready (produced by the mercurial Johnny Winter). Waters` style is particularly inspired in it`s use of Microtones. I also managed to find the 80`s Hendrix compilation Crash Landing which I hadn`t seen for twenty years or so. My old friends in the band the Beautiful People sampled alot of it on their release If 60`s were 90`s.

Well, it`s a very simple and easy methodology I use when it comes to songwriting. After 20 years of blistering licks, absorbing the music and magic of feedback, of tonal exploration, of distortion, of brainwashing with as many records as I could get my head around I found that alot of this “learning” would get in the way, that alot of equipment, amplifiers, effects, preconceived notions, riffs, hooks, rhythms and ideas just don`t even help with writing a song. It`s like writing, you can pin it down to a set of motifs, a set of ideas, devices and techniques…but these alone do not a great piece of work create. You need genuine experience. Remove from view all the pillars in your sight. I find the hardest guitars to play, and don`t mess about with any kind of notions of playing finesse as you can see in the video on my other posts. Writing a song aint about playing the guitar.

the river became central to my experience…at the end of my time, the mother of pearl crucifix I wore around my neck for a decade had cracked and broken – on my last journey through the gorge cast my crucifix into the waters …When I came back into the countryside the following year,  the river welcomed me in high flood, submerging islands, wreaking havoc. I was inspired by true tales – real lives. sometimes anger and the devil will blind and trick you; choose the way of the gun and a vengeful Miltonic god or cast yourself asunder, through the tides.

If you are interested in a shortcut to money, fame and glory hook up with American Idol and then hook yourself up to the mains. Down here we listen to Roland Kirk, Handel, Miles and Mississippi John Hurt.

I`m currently working in the studio as a composer; this blog – which by the way is not meant to be a “How to make it in the music industry” deal , or a “How to make a record” or “album” or become a “popstar” effort.

It`s more aligned with a why it took me four years and a lifetime`s worth of preparation to get some great songs written and recorded. I managed quite royally to fail, fail and fail repeatedly. This time Im hoping Im in a position to get things a little more right but in a metafictional, metaphysical and intertextual way everything I`ve ever done is everything Im doing now and vice versa. UNderstand that and maybe it`s a step towards understanding the universe. One thing is for sure  it isn`t about money, fame, glory, free rides , or whatever. I never spent years and years jamming in dirty studios, living in smelly windowless rehearsal rooms in filthy industrial areas, working manual jobs for money or glory. I only ever did it because I owed it to my guitar

… there is nothing more dangerous than a book.

A book is a bomb. A book is a time machine.
A book is a recruitment device. A book is mantra. A book is terror.
A book is enlightenment. A book is life. A book is death.
&cetera

read – change your life, open your head up like psilocybin and travel across the universe. If you aren`t forever changed, go back and find books that work.  If you think books aren`t one of the secrets to understanding the universe then you are wrong…. the work of the cosmos, that’s secret number one.

Genius is a word that`s bandied around these days as though it`s something that`s free, something to be found in the bottom of a packet of cornflakes. Not that rare gleaming like the flashing of a comet in the surface of a calderan lake. Unfortunately we live in an age of arch-mediocrity masquerading as noesis…….mostly through the perceived synonymity of marketing and meritocracy.
Achieving genius is often paraphrased as being “99 percent perspiration and 100 percent inspiration”.

A genius is a person who successfully applies a previously unknown technique in the production of a work of art, science or calculation, or who masters and personalizes a known technique. A genius typically possesses great intelligence or remarkable abilities in a specific subject, or shows an exceptional natural capacity of intellect and/or ability, especially in the production of creative and original work, something that has never been seen or evaluated previously. Traits often associated with genius include strong individuality, imagination, uniqueness, and innovative drive.

Achieving genius is more like evaporation, like boiling water. It takes more energy for water temperature to lift from 99 degrees to 100 degrees than to reach 99 degress from ambient temperature.
There`s a vast difference between “almost” and “all”; that extra last percent is worth 100 times the 99 that went before.

I spent the weekend swimming with friends off the epic East coast ocean beneath the stars above the rivermouth and at hard to find Honey Bay. Extra thanks to Pete and aqualunged for half an hour to return with crayfish which we all cooked, fresh on the beach fire: an iconic day at the beach…Sleeping on the clifftop above the spit and exploring the startlingly varied coastline of geographical collapse and debris, collecting stunning Abalone shells, plus swimming and cooking al fresco is a great way to recover from the clinical confines of ten days in the studio. Sure there`s a correlation between the rhythmic waves of the ocean and differing states of consciousness. No television, no telephones, no problem – talking to god!

No man is an island and it`s always great to be involved in a scene, NOT a CLIQUE, a scene.
Cliques are unhealthy, stagnant, dead end waters, tired, old, lugubrious and baleful – they tend to kill off creativity in their own incestuous way. A scene is open. A clique is egotists high on their own smug bullshit.
Ego kills: inexperienced people have to learn the hard way – most have – that you cannot do it all on your own no matter how good you are. Problem is inexperienced people don`t have the objectivity to step aside from their own ego agenda and view the bigger picture. Some hide behind loquacious blaggardry, specious claims of achievement, almost sociopathic tendencies and cetera.

I just had the pleasure of watching Smoke only twelve years too late. If you fancy mixing the intertwining intertextuality of Paul Auster`s genius, the engaging idiosyncrasy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo`s Nest, the cinematography of Down By Law with Mercurial storytelling and superlative acting performance then this one`s for you;baby. If you dig mixing metafictional metaphor with True tales of American Life then, man you`ll dig it the most. Loose identities, shifting nomenclature, fantastic dialogue,  realism & character shine through this film made with stolen cameras and shot by the blind. Harold Perrineau (the awesome Mercutio in Luhrmann`s Romeo And Juliet), Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, Ashley Judd, Stockard Channing & Victor Argo are directed by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster (screenplay).

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I used to own a Hendrix biography, an interesting part of which was mention of Hendrix` fascination with Bob Dylan. Buying a copy of “John Wesley Harding” rather than food is a noble move as far as I can discern and wholly more palatable than a trip to Walmart. Helps to keep the fashionably thin look too. But Hendrix` is often eclipsed by his own guitar focused genius and I’d like to offer some feedback on why Jimi Hendrix is actually a man of ideas who, beginning with the simple ideas of other worldliness such as UFOLOGY,  extended his sonic, lyrical and experiental palette to encompass and map a far more complex journey, beyond playing the guitar, that is both personal and political.

That Hendrix was able at points in his career, such as the Machine Gun performance on the Band of Gypsies Live film and record, to encompass the entire journey into singular moments is testament to his greatness not only a a guitarist but also as an artist per se – at points like these Hendrix is able even to dispense with vocabulary itself and really paint with sound.

What is more interesting is the broad transition from Are You Experienced ( A.Y.E. ) to Axis:Bold as Love and beyond to Electric Ladyland especially in terms of Hendrix` lyrical expression, lexical development and what appears to be efforts to develop coherent meaning and make sense of “the experience” rather than simply to detail “the experience” itself.

To illuminate; the song “Are you Experienced” Hendrix` eponymous first album opener takes Dylan`s “Like A Rolling Stone” and makes it a call to action, a call to begin “the experience”.

I know, I know
you’ll probably scream and cry
That your little world won’t let you go
But who in your measly little world are trying to prove that
You’re made out of gold and -a can’t be sold.

So-er, Are You Experienced?
Ah! Have you ever been experienced?
Well, I have

The subject of Dylan`s Rolling Stone and the failure expressed therein upon so many levels, to understand, to see or gain awareness is offered here a solution directly through “experience”. The “er”`s and “-a”s have a distinctively Dylanesque time and feel no doubt.

More traditional blues lyric cliche content  (Highway Chile) or simple psychedelia (Purple Haze) all but disappears on the Axis disc. “If 6 was Nine” furthermore introduces politics and social commentary into the equation. I`d say the Axis album represents a move away from a perspective of psychedelia towards one of entheogenic purpose.

The song “Bold As Love” most especially marks a continuing departure from the fundamentally direct, acid soaked expressionism of A.Y.E. and a move towards defining a more positive, transcendental cosmology beyond simple psychedelia, time or space and extend earlier natural metaphor and imagery as found in “Wind Cries Mary” and “Third Stone from the Sun” towards a development of meaning or perhaps a system of belief.

This finds its logical conclusion in the third and final album “Electric Ladyland”; especially side three and the song “1983″. One might argue that “1983″ actually represents a defeat in the face of real world concerns, that the hope of defining such a meaning or system of belief had failed – war  still raged upon the land mass – and escape into the sea to avoid holocaust the only conclusion – OR,  that submersion into what is ostensibly another dimension beneath the waves represents a triumph of consciousness, belief and will over political and physical impossibilities.

Strangely enough certain parts of the piece 1983 bear melodic parallels with the Chilites chicago sound.

On the album “Electric Ladyland” we find a song such as “Voodoo Chile” formulating a pantheistic fusion and microcosmic omniscience in an attempt to reach enlightenment – lyrically it perhaps metafictionally encapsulates the journey from “Are you Experienced” through to “Electric Ladyland”.

In “Voodoo Chile” Hendrix takes the traditional blues structure and explodes it using the tonal and expressive palette later heard in Machine Gun. Lyrically beginning with traditional hoodoo, blues and gypsy superstition, fiery moons, night time birth, and resuscitation from strange instantaneous death Hendrix fuses and describes the intervention of messengers or gods in animal form, lions and eagles, from traditional AmerIndian and European paganism, a journey through infinity, science, and space (”Venus”, “Jupiter”), love, desire, union, transcribes the transcendent microcosmic omnipresence of his mind and finally the collapse of civilisation.

This post is in its infancy, this is as much as I can write before breakfast. I am going to expand this post to try and examine the movement across Hendrix` three studio albums from psychedelic rock to entheogenic purpose, the formulation of successful meaning and understanding with a few glances in Bob Dylan`s direction – can “the experience” form a remedy? If a visionary artist like Hendrix looks to the oeuvre of Dylan then maybe we all should….

Played a few numbers last night by Jimmy Buffet,  Jerry Jeff Walker & Bob. Quality song material. Interesting to consider the parallels and dissimilarities between the sentimental American iconography of Dylan`s cannon and that of Walkers lyrics – for instance Eastern Avenue River Railway Blues.

The early 20th Century Hobo Folksinger Itinerant features but tonally Walkers perspective is different, perhaps more urbane, positing the protagonist trapped within the urban wasteland seeking escape through the boxcar. More later perhaps: I have to take a deeper look inside Walker`s catalogue. In (a lazy) comparison the Dylan protagonist would be moving or not moving from an opposite direction.

“Where another man`s life might begin is exactly where mine ends.”  I am a Lonesome Hobo, Bob Dylan.

Dylan positions the OUTSIDER within the traditional outsider contexts. Riding the rails.

Click here for some great articles on Dylan`s use of melody, lexicon, voice, blues tradition etcetera & are easier to consume than Michael Gray`s exhaustive Song and Dance Man III.

Radiohead by contrast position the outsider existentially within all of us and more occasionally it seems technology is at the root of this loss of self, disconnection, otherness. If not at the root technology serves, as in Iron Lung to highlight the futility and tragedy of the human condition. Technology that serves as a control mechanism through surveillance, technology that replaces metaphysics? Escaping an existential life of Orwellian nightmare seems only possible in the In Rainbows song Videotape through suicide perhaps? (”I can`t do it face to face”) or death with videotape judgement or a video record in (8-bit) red, blue and green.

syllogism.

Radiohead perhaps make their modernism plain through a vacuum where romantic ideals, icons, traditional themes and historicism would once have been evident but have been replaced by songs that metafictionally recreate a bleak, unwholesome, wasteland of soulless corporate control, governmental, terror, solipsism and lonely existentialism? There are echoes of the traditional sublime across the In Rainbows recordings but as usual concrete themes seem obscure.

“Radiohead’s lexicon is all about bureaucrats telling you you can’t succeed.” Stereogum.com

Radiohead modern antihero.

Briefly, it`s interesting to note the sense of the Sublime (Edmund Burke) in the Lyrics of Radiohead`s “In Rainbows”  – particularly  the use of gargantuan scale – there is “falling off” in three songs that I have noticed thus far.

This spatial exaggeration and use of outsized objects reminds me of  “Castle of Otranto” and “House of Leaves” (Mark Z. Danielewski / Horace Walpole respectively).

A house of cards, an organization, structure, consciousness even,  or plan that is weak, fragile and liable to collapse. Household objects suddenly take on vast proportions at a particular junction in the song:

“Fall off the table and get swept under” – House of Cards by Radiohead.

Similarly in “Weird Fishes”, which is highly spatial, the protagonist falls off the end of a (pre-copernican?) earth. There is also a parallel between Hendrix` “1983″ (Electric Ladyland side C) and “Weird Fishes” in overall schemata – escaping through immersion into the depths of the sea.

Listening to B-sides from several Radiohead singles – e.g. “Melatonin”, “Pearly”, “Lozenge of Love”, and  “A Reminder” the effect of the In rainbows record isn`t surprising at all.

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FAITH & RELIGION - not the same.

“And the bleak music of that old stone wall”

The title of this post is an extract from William Wordsworth`s two part prelude…

Having a pantheistic sense of the milieu in which we move is certainly not a scientifically approved way to discern reality…but in making sense of a world gone awry it is an audacious and beneficial angle. Permission to make connections that science simply, or as yet, disallows almost echoes the cosmogenies of earlier civilisations with incisive, natural consciousness. It is faith without religion – these are two VERY different things.

Questionable waffle.

“a musician, if he’s a messenger, is like a child who hasn’t been handled too many times by man, hasn’t had too many fingerprints across his brain.” Jimi Hendrix in Wordsworthian mode.

This Metaphysics of the cosmos is everywhere in 19th century literary art – Blake, Yeats, Keats, Burke, Beckford…It also lends itself toward a more supranatural engagement with the world (although at this point I cant detail the quantum effects of consciousness  /“matter“ha ha ), and, an ability to view phenomena in a micro/macro/metacosmic sense. Very simply expressed time and space are inversely proportional in an octave interval played on a one stringed machine and this is a useful metaphor for engaging with your guitar.

As in my previous post about inspiration, guitar playing is more about attitude, experience If you have any character, message or experience as a human being  that`s exactly how you will sound.

I do not carry a black cat bone or mojo hand in my guitar case but I do carry talismans of another nature. I also carry talismans in my car and on my person. More soon, hopefully Lay Down Your Weary Tune by Bob Dylan as it seems an unusually pantheistic & romanticist lyric in his catalogue.

It`s a beautiful day so I am going to leave this MACHINE where it belongs, in a room,  and head outside for some fun. Sitting in front of it can sometimes be stultifying, inspiration so often comes from elsewhere – NEVER directly from the machine or its environment. Its just a box. Machinery will never replace the emotional complexities and responses of people – not least until we start building “machines” from things like proteins or cellular material, utilising chemical reactions rather than the simplicity of binary. Imagine the speed and capabilities. ON or OFF is that as complex as we can make it?
Hopefully the dichotomy between man and machine will remain.

After all if this machine even wanted to desire to find its own inspiration, it would leave the house too. And Paint. Perhaps what makes us human is that we are blessed with self awareness and from that springs the capability for evolutionary ideas. So, simply put, maybe you want your song to have inspirational and therefore human qualities and that requires an inspired writer, someone who lives on the edges. Someone with an idea. It doesn`t have to be the biggest idea, or the best idea but it ought to be your idea, one that you OWN.

The kernel of an idea will more likely come from an experience external to the writing medium itself; a book or a painting or a conversation or a place.
It may be melody, one word, a name, a sound, an event, a roadsign….it`s up to you to find it….

You have to remember that a guitar listens as well as talks too, so you have to feed it the best poetry you can.

If not just stay at home and listen to the microwave or type something into google and get the kind of dull, dry, paint by numbers songwriting advice, a sawdust that will just smother your flame and leave the taste of boredom in your mouth.

Do you think anyone who ever wrote a great book prepared in a sterile, environment – performed characterisation without meeting people, wrote dialogue without conversing, expresed emotion without feeling. No they fucking well didn’t. And when they weren’t living on the edge or thinking or experiencing something great, they were reading. Not plugged into some ghastly machine.

In the previous post Songwriting I
it was suggested that:

“…no matter how hard I try to ignore it I feel the real context within which a song operates, the luminescent, spectral halo of moonshine is the mind of the reader/listener.”

This of course is not to imply Roland Barthes `Dead Author` but it`s worth considering if it is actually possible to free a text from the socio-historical tyranny of its author or the Intentional Fallacy ?
What of the contexts from which the listener emerges ?

IF then the author`s meanings and intentions are wholly irrelevent then is it mere coincidence that texts which upon the face appear pared down and oblique e.g. “The Wicked Messenger” speak such vast volumes to so many ? The Wesley Harding album exudes an almost Burroughs-esque cut up reductionism as though Dylan had taken complex song-mythologies and fed them through some kind of shredder.

If the song [as narrative] is to be freed in this way then surely it would be a previously unheard song from an artist unknown to the reader? Bob Dylan has intimated that he is merely a cipher, that the songs came from the ether and in some way every song one writes does appear or concretise through some kind of osmosis – but he is talking specifically from within the realm of the rock cliche perhaps.

You still have to find inspiration, play an instrument, form a melody…have something different to say, especially if your material will be a verisimilar material of ideas, rather than some bland, insipid, secondhand, wallpaper.

Back to the brass tacks of songwriting for the next post perhaps, with a touch of ludology & narratology thrown in.

I briefly mentioned  an approach perhaps even a “method” of songwriting….A highly foolish notion indeed but one nonetheless of great interest – a songwriting method.

I`d like to extrapolate, in a highly subjective way, across the time and space that this humble blog is yet to occupy, my own  ideas and thoughts. Of course there is no one method, subject, genre, approach or way; no set of rules, no map or compass and that`s what makes songs so fantastical,  interesting, different, invaluable. One mans turgid, drone is another mans celestially illuminated supernova of clustered genius. ZEN.

Watching No Direction Home I was not surprised to learn that Dylan himself had methods or ways – visit the library, search and research, read the classics, look through old newspapers &cetera. I happened to be watching the film with someone of Dylans age, who was there in the early Sixties and I was highly surprised when he commented:

“I had no idea he worked so hard to produce that material. I thought he just did it.”

Well, it is true that in a way song will “just come together” but you have to have that kernel of an inspirational idea and Conrad quite succinctly elucidates this in his marvellous metaphor at the beginning of Heart of Darkness :

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical … and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty haloes that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”

So, the meaning is illuminated by context rather than the immediately internal and this works on many levels obviously. It is quite clear in listening to Dylan`s earlier material that the personal musical & lyrical context from within which he writes is one encompassing the earliest blues/folk forms both lyrically and sonically, but also that of popular Fifties music and movies.

If you want to make these connections yourself you can do no wrong in listening to Smithsonion Folkways collections and reading Michael Gray`s “Song and Dance Man III – the art of Bob Dylan”.

My personal feeling is that a great song should have at its core narrative elements, be borne of some sublime experience, a time and a place, historicism, meter and rhyme but these are only elementals.

But no matter how hard I try to ignore it I feel the real context within which a song operates, the luminescent, spectral halo of moonshine is the mind of the reader/listener.

More later {Roland Barthes of course plus formalism/estrangement and emotion recollected in tranquility etcetera etcetera…}