9/29/08
Review of "Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child"
by David Henderson
By David Blake
In many ways, Buddy Holly epitomizes the idealized 1950s. His geeky
yet winsome bespectacled face. His giddy, earnest, and charmingly
innocent music. Those lyrics telling of pure, proper, and
just-so-wild teenage love. These characteristics provide the grist to
untold reminisces of the decade, whether through Happy Days, American
Bandstand, or untold Time-Life collections. Forget the turmoil, the
social upheavals, and the disintegration of the so-called American
dream family through empowered, rebellious teenage leisure; the 1950s
is lily-pure, and Buddy Holly is its role model.
Of course, Buddy Holly is considered as such because, through tragic
fate, he did not outlive the 1950s. He is eternally young, eternally
a memory. Because he cannot defend himself, he becomes eternally an
ideological figure, a figure whose connotations have unavoidably
trumped his personality. Dead men tell no tales, so men with agendas
do so for them.
The same can be said for the subject of David Henderson's biography,
Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix, of course, died in 1970, likewise cast in
eternal youth. Unlike his contemporaries Eric Burdon and Eric
Clapton, he never shifted into 1970s styles or shifted his guitar
virtuosity towards mainstream lite-pop. He remains stuck with his
unkempt Afro and broad features, gazing with his lazily poignant eyes
and asking: Are You Experienced? He has become inextricably bound up
with the 1960s, the figure most representing, depending on who's
doing the associating, free love, peace, and a better world, or
drug-fueled, Dionysian amorality. Hendrix, like Holly, has shifted
from flesh and blood to spirit. His spirit, though, has been
converted to superficialities no deeper than the posters on countless
dorm room walls bearing his face and signifying nothing more than
thinking smoking pot is cool because the parents are no longer there.
The task becomes for a worthwhile biographer, then, how to
resuscitate Hendrix the person, and separate him from Hendrix the
concept. This question is thankfully undeniably on the mind of David
Henderson, acclaimed author and poet. Henderson had the benefit, as a
young rock critic, to meet and talk to Hendrix before his death, and
it would be an understatement to say he made an impression on the
author. The book jacket exhorts that the biography is a promise to
Jimi. Henderson clearly deeply appreciated Hendrix, not just his
music or image.
It is this desire towards understanding Hendrix, not just describing
his life, that drives Henderson, and that makes this biography an
enjoyable and insightful read. Both Henderson's obvious
perceptiveness, as well as his poet's sense of aesthetic and art,
help paint a picture of Hendrix that sees him not as a Rock Star, but
as a shy, awkward, idealistic young man who spoke better through
tones than language and sought nothing more than to express himself
and find inner peace in a forcedly nomadic and poverty-stricken
existence. Henderson teases flesh and psychology out of Hendrix, and
does so in a way that reins in the idealization that comes part and
parcel with such a task.
Nowhere is this desire to humanize Hendrix more apparent than in the
opening salvo that attacks whether Hendrix died of a drug overdose.
The morning of September 18, 1970 has remained a mystery, but the
public assumes that Hendrix's red-wine-and-vomit-stained end came
from a drug overdose. This is of course not a neutral claim; implicit
in such a judgment is that he died because he was a sinful,
hard-living hedonist whose death is a lesson for the dangers of
drugs. Henderson's response on page 6, italicized and set off from
the rest of his text, claims simply, but powerfully, "Jimi Hendrix
did not die of a drug overdose." During this section, Henderson
succeeds in providing facts that throw enough doubt into Hendrix's
last moments to question his final moments. Monika Dannemann and Eric
Burdon do particularly poorly under Henderson's gaze. Towards the end
of the book, Henderson's characterizations of the Mafia, the
anti-Black Panther movement, and Hendrix's undeniable depression and
exhaustion likewise call into question conflating his death with '60s
psychedelic haze. By taking on popular accounts of Hendrix's
unfortunately most famous moment, Henderson lays his ideological
cards on the table, saying in essence that Hendrix deserves better.
Henderson importantly never lets you forget that he was
African-American, and that the difficulties in his childhood and
during his days gigging and traveling as a sideman have racial
overtones. He also ensures that Hendrix's political stance is
resuscitated from "free love;" his anti-Vietnam stance and
relationship with the Black Panthers are emphasized. Henderson is
also not an apologetic for Hendrix's behavior; his drug use and
sexual promiscuity are described matter-of-factly, as an important
part of his personality and ethos.
Henderson is too poetic to write just prosaically, and his text is
enlivened by his extended quotation of interviews with Jimi. These
provide a way for Henderson to let Hendrix speak for himself.
Henderson is careful to describe at length the publicly shy and quiet
Hendrix as well as the at times excited, at other times exhausted
public Hendrix. These quotations both provide direct insight into
Hendrix's thoughts (Henderson is thankfully aware that he can't help
but be a filter) as well as help tell Henderson's story.
Unfortunately, one device that Henderson uses that is less successful
is his insistence on turning Hendrix's lyrics into stories when he
describes his songs. Hendrix, by the author's own insistence,
communicated more authentically through his music than his words,
both lyrics and speech. I feel that Hendrix's lyrics should not be
taken literally, but rather are sonically pleasant approximations and
intimations of states of mind that Hendrix understands
prelinguistically but fumbles at describing. Though Henderson, being
a poet, is naturally drawn towards the written word, I believe that
such lyrical focus does not capture the essence of Hendrix's message.
Moreover, his paraphrase of generally known material seems
uncharacteristically clumsy in the midst of his generally assured prose.
A metaphor for how I consider Hendrix's lyrics can be actually seen
in Henderson's description of his music. Henderson is not a trained
musician, and his use of musical terminology is best digested
figuratively, not literally. Painting music with words is a
difficult, if not ultimately futile task (if it wasn't, why would
music be so powerful and mysterious?). Henderson gets around this by
describing the music not through rigorous analysis and carefully
placed description, but through grasping gestures whose spirit seems
to mesh well with Hendrix's gestures. More care with accurate use of
musical terms would be appreciated, but Henderson understands well
that, when clarity isn't possible, the aesthetic of the word/prosodic
gesture can communicate just as effectively. Hendrix's lyrics are
likewise predicated on the aesthetic of his words, and it would have
been better for Henderson to deal with them on that level.
Despite these misgivings, I found Henderson's prose illuminating,
provocative, and edifying. While Hendrix will always be ideological,
Henderson's portrayal is as realistic and sensitive as can be
expected, and accurately challenges the myths that have grown in the
nearly four decades since his death. One has the sense of the man,
his charms and flaws, outside the psychedelic smoke clouds that
surround this decade. We need all the help we can get to keep from
superficial mythmaking of the 1960s, perhaps the most lionized decade
in recent memory, and Henderson does an admirable job towards this goal.
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