A coin dealer in Houston offers one dollar in credit for every “A” a kid gets on his report card. Grades in hand, my 7-year-old and I visited the shop on Thursday. Between his handsome report card and the three dollars left the previous night by the Tooth Fairy, Michael had eight dollars burning a hole in his pocket. While he prospected, I sat on a stool by the counter and talked with the owner, like a tavern patron consulting the bartender.
On a previous visit I had admired a framed photograph of Jimi Hendrix hanging on the wall above the Indian-Head Penny Table. Jeff, the owner -- a bearded man about my age with a deep drawl -- said years before he had swapped some coins for the black-and-white picture of a subdued Hendrix, looking young and vulnerable and without his customary swagger. Jeff was born in Miami, and he told stories about seeing Hendrix, and Jim Morrison and The Doors, in the months preceding their premature deaths. I can’t vouch for their authenticity, but it was pleasant to recall a time when the way a guitarist bent a note seemed like a weighty matter. On the CD player at the back of his shop, Jeff was playing early Traffic. He went on toextol Led Zeppelin, a band which, like The Doors, I always abhorred, but we circled back to Hendrix and agreed Electric Ladyland remains his finest album.
The last thing about the guitarist I had read was “Improvisations for Jimi Hendrix,” a poem by Geoffrey Hill from Without Title. Its epigraph comes from the lyrics to “The Wind Cries Mary,” a cut from Are You Experienced?:
“Somewhere a Queen is weeping
Somewhere a King has no wife”
The poem feels improvisatory, without the heft of Hill’s best work, and I‘m unable to make much of it, though these lines, recalling Hendrix’s guitar-burning stunt, are pleasing:
“The show guitar melts like sealing wax.
It mutes and scalds. Your fingers
burning secrets.
“Your legerdemain.
Extraordinary progressions chart
No standard progress.”
Jeff said he believes Hendrix probably would have given up the show-biz pyrotechnics, literal and otherwise, matured into a pioneering jazz guitarist, and probably gone on to collaborate with Miles Davis. Had he lived, Hendrix would have turned 65 last month. Here’s the conclusion to Hill’s poem:
“Somewhere the slave is master of his desires
And lords it in great music
And the children dance.”
Michael went home with a book of Jefferson nickels and a five-dollar piece from Liberia.
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Stuart Nicholson's Jazz-Rock: A History has some good chapters about Jimi's dabblings in fusion. In one sense, it's a relief that he never got washed up in the 70s like so many other 60s figures. One can imagine, barely, Hendrix playing heavy metal. One can imagine him debauching his muse to play Parliament-style funk, too. But Jimi playing disco? Jimi playing punk? Feh! Once he made it to the mid-80s and the first wave of 60s revivals, though, he'd have been home free.
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