Philip Norman - Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix

Also by Philip Norman

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Plumridge

Wild Thing (short stories)

The Skaters Waltz

Words of Love (a novella and stories)

Everyones Gone to the Moon

The Avocado Fool

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Shout! The True Story of the Beatles

The Stones

The Road Goes On For Ever

Tilt the Hourglass and Begin Again

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Elton (reissued as Sir Elton )

The Life and Good Times of the Rolling Stones

Days in the Life: John Lennon Remembered.

The Age of Parody

Buddy: The Biography

John Lennon: The Life

Mick Jagger

Paul McCartney: The Biography

Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton

autobiography

Babycham Night: A Boyhood at the End of the Pier.

plays and musicals

Words of Love

The Man That Got Away

This is Elvis: Viva Las Vegas

Laughter in the Rain: The Neil Sedaka Story

WILD THING

The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix

Philip Norman

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

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Copyright 2020 by Jessica Productions Ltd.

All rights reserved

First Edition

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Production manager: Julia Druskin

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Norman, Philip, 1943 author.

Title: Wild thing : the short, spellbinding life of Jimi Hendrix / Philip Norman.

Description: First edition. | New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020.| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020023464 | ISBN 9781631495892 (hardcover) |ISBN 9781631495908 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Hendrix, Jimi. | Rock musiciansUnited States
Biography. | GuitaristsUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC ML410.H476 N67 2020 | DDC 787.87/166092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023464

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Jimi worked with light. He used light to bring walls down.

Carlos Santana

All rock musics historic names began by doing cover versions of other peoples songs, usually little more than pale facsimiles, to be discarded once the impersonators had a soundof their own. The great exception was Jimi Hendrix, who throughout his brief time at the top went on performing covers that were never straight copies and often radical reimaginings.. The Beatles whimsical Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, for instance, he turned into a heavy metal broadside that Paul McCartney no stranger to accolades considered one of the greatest honours of his life.

Everybody whom Jimi covered felt the same: not pique at the deconstruction of their (often million-selling) handiwork but awe at the new dimensions to which he transported it. Indeed, the apogee of his genius, rather than original composition like Purple Haze or Voodoo Child, is widely thought to be his treatment of Bob Dylans All Along the Watchtower. The track had first appeared on Dylans John Wesley Harding album in 1966 and, as usual, was a reflection of his reading rather than his life. The title came from a passage in the Old Testaments Book of Isaiah one also containing the phrase Go set a watchman, which Harper Lee borrowed for an early draft of what became To Kill a Mockingbird. Dylan gave it a medieval setting filtered through the sensibility of some Victorian poet like Alfred Lord Tennyson, his great passion at the time.

The result seemed more a throwback to his folkie past than affirmation of his recent conversion to rock: a solitary voice, repetitive acoustic strumming, a harmonica pitched too high to pack its usual punch and no echo anywhere of his Victorian poetic muse, no Sad-eyed Lady of Shalott. Although generallygreeted as as further consolidation of the Dylan miracle, it caught some flak from fellow musoes for being all portentousness without a pay- off . His former folk mentor, Dave Van Ronk, even criticised the syntax, calling it a mistake from the title on down. A watchtower is not a road or a wall and you cant goalong it.

Jimis cover appeared on Electric Ladyland, his third album after being transplanted from New York to London and teamed with two white Britons, drummer Mitch Mitchell and bass-player Noel Redding as the Jimi Hendrix Experience. It is at once the quintessence of primal hard rock and a reminder that, whatever the medium, true genius demands not only matchless expertise and energy but discipline and understatement.

In Jimis hands the rather aimless canter of the Dylan version is slowed down by an introductory chord sequence, simple enough in form yet with a wet, seething quality suggestive of some wild seashore with angry waves pounding the shingle, gulls screaming, bladderwrack glistening and dark clouds piling overhead. All the Tennysonian bleakness and melodrama that Dylan left out are there in a moment.

The lyric starts as a duologue between the Joker i.e. the traditional playing-card figure in stripy three-pointed hat and the Thief, plotting escape from some unspecified confinement. Whereas Dylans every syllable was soaked in irony and ambiguity, Jimis mellow baritone plays it completely straight, with perhaps the slightest emphasis on Theres too much confusion and I cant get no relief, which happened to express what he was already feeling about his new life in Britain.

His voice carries the same utter conviction in the Thiefs incoherently moralising riposte. Yet his guitar still holds back; not even B. B. King was ever so sparing with a riff.

At last, as the hour is getting late, a terse Hey! announces a break which, for me, surpasses any other to have been recorded since guitars had electrical wires threaded through their bodies like keyhole surgery and metal pickups and volume knobs and tremolo levers dentist-drilled into their faces. Forget Eric Clapton in Creams Crossroads or Jimmy Page in Led Zeppelins Stairway to Heaven or James Burton in Ricky Nelsons My Babe or Mark Knopfler in Dire Straits Sultans of Swing or Scotty Moore in Elviss Heartbreak Hotel or even Chuck Berry in Johnny B. Goode; go, Jimi, go.

It comes in four distinct movements of which only the first is a conventional solo with notes selected as judiciously and bent as elegantly as B. B. at his best. The second is played with a metal slide along the fretboard, which from Elmore James or Howlin Wolf would be jagged and angry but with Jimi resembles a thrill-ride through some extraterrestrial cityscape, each gush of the slide like a glowing elevator, sibilantly ascending or descending. Down swoops one, then up goes another, and another still higher until it almost seems to be dancing in time.