songwriting

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.

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.

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”

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.

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

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…}