Floatin' in Liquid Gardens
In Honour of Jimi Hendrix
They said the grass was greener so we snuck and hopped the fence (Uh)
Landed in a meadow (Uh)
Glimpsed and saw a shadow (Okay)
Of brothers with guitars, common sense and puffy afros (Yeah)
Lucks was getting brazed (What?)
Paps was getting blazed
Feds was cracking domes, but these cats, they wasn't phasedDigable Planets
And just like a merman, I washed up on the shoreline just off the coast of cold, hard reality after having been submerged in the sonic waves of Jimi and some company. And as I brushed off the sand, another wave blasted my head in half, a wave of despondency as I lamented how much more Jimi could have done with this newfound sound but alas, shallow consumerism had the final laugh… a few inches from the face of artistic merit/endeavour. But maybe more is… more or less… well… less.
I think of this convoluted paradox as I dwell on days of chance encounters whose geometry was outlined by the Experience itself. I think of that one sports bar where I met a Jimi fan three generations removed from me, meditating on Fillmore East (1979)1 we spoke about all his Hendrix records and all the lovely records Jimi went and murdered as he pivoted the trajectory of electric addled fervency. The scene, was the scene, was the scene in an age where he snatched lightning from the clouds and turned our circuits round.
Jimi!
Jimi!
Jimi fuckin’ Hendrix!
It was a night where a drink or three was raised in his name and in the end, we debated which rendition of Machine Gun pierced the heart the fiercest (I know which trench to die on, the one that brought me right to tears and hooked me head to toe and lifted whole my soul like the angel of death on the kitchen stove). The song even has traces of The Power Of Soul, which Jimi, Billy and Buddy played earlier in the set (a testament to the source of Jimi’s prowess).
I think back to just a week back, jamming to the oft-unsung father (Voodoo Chile) of Voodoo Child on a hot summer day whilst my buddy had a smoke preparing bolognese and my lovely lady typed away just working for some pay. Jimi cooked a storm of his own in my apartment and when Jimi snatched that lightning cable, the whole ceiling collapsed, a thunderstorm trance and he funnelled every gigawatt into our limp limbs’ nodes and circuit boards igniting puppetry that had me ricocheting off the walls and through my skull making everyone in close range seek a bomb shelter and trade their nine to five for a Nine to the Universe a neon sign to the uterus where collisions birth volitions of utter surrender to a chaos sweet and trust me, you’ll shout to the mountaintops of the clouds saying, “You shall not neuter us you sly old slitherin’, ditherin’, slobberin’ corporate devils!” The capitalist pigs beg for reprieve but this Sanded Castle shall not give.
I take a page from Posterity and even dwell on the inversion of the Electric Lady Land album cover back at the ‘Time is the Medium’ Exhibition held on campus. It was a painting and a triumph, a version vergin’ on a tribute band all at the hands of my good friend; glad… was all I could be.
And that’s the thing, Jimi latches on like Coke and McDonald’s on tongues and bowels in distant, foreign lands. An inheritance of temporal-spatial cradles that inhere in the staple trades of the game; in the stadiums and halls of psychedelia. It’s not just that you can hear his work anywhere and at any point in time with the same reverence and relevance as 50 years ago —say, a record shop at the tail end of the 90s, an iPod touch or a cassette tape before 2008, or a Substack post in two thousand and twenty-three— it’s that you can also hear him anywhere else but his own music. The affluence of influence. I ain’t talking about Stevie Ray just for today, but it’s this tug that pulls from someplace else; I swear I feel the raindrops of Jimi’s liquid garden splash and float around Kikagaku Moyo’s Stone Garden2 EP; be it backward guitars blowing down the boulevards of a track like In a Coil and then giving Jimi’s 1983… (A Merman I Should Turn To Be) a friendly handshake at the corner just before the claustrophobic fuzz and rising thunder clouds of a track like Backlash wave a salute all the way to Jimi on the Third Stone from the Sun, who waves back so much slower but keeps abreast when the song hits the crest (and I Don’t Live Today gives a lil nod stored all the way from yesterday). I swear I hear the rain drip along the weathered veins of that Stone Cold Garden, I hear Jimi’s 1983… in Causa Sui’s Eternal Flow, and plenty more, off their 2013 Euporie Tide3 album, where both tracks give the gesture of peace and stream tranquil and charismatic guitars backwards in measured bursts and forward too in hurried breaths, with flutes and chimes tiptoeing about whilst a passage melts all along the ground en route to somewhere devout and your feet leave afterimages in the shadow of the now like a millipede charting the liquid dream that is the sea and the arid skin of a desert scene, a droplet of cinema that scrambles your viscera, gently though, so that all that’s left is a form that gloats beyond gravity’s tow.
“[insert here] inspired a generation!” a lot of us claim, afraid to be wrong.
I know such proclamations can sound brash and two notes from harsh like a grand piano crashing down the staircase, pounding every step’s face and claiming that it’s fair play. But in the other room, some dude just plugged his keyboard and clicked and clacked away, notes on notes on notes that seemed to make the claim that,
“Jimi inspired some generations; you can hear it on the stations— across the globe, he’s played!”
It’s a tired old tune but the string pulls true, although it’s always important to acknowledge that one may be speaking in alliance with cognitive bias, a partnership where your brain punches a hole the size of a potato chip in the fabric of reality to funnel the vast sea of all there is and for fellas like me, mermaids from acid pools nesting in Neptune’s sulphur mines tend to roll in with the tides spurred in threes by the methane seas every time Jimi fills the gap between each synapse left in this basket case. A ring at the door and a baby is born, peeling youth like some tired, worn glue, a live montage on a conveyor belt from the birth canal to the river Nile, with the blue and white of the Promised Land just in sight beyond the reddened sands— Silver lining on the horizon’s mountain and—
Or:
The song ignites a new and serious, euphoric experience that scorches a slot in your brain that can only be soothed by more of the same.
You know, he sang about skirting the outskirts of infinity on an eagle’s wing, flying strong and flying on and that’s the thing about Jimi, he never knew when to quit, prodigy turned self-fulfilling prophecy filling up a vacancy at the club just off twenty-one and three and three, what a deadly spree but his pedigree was of an older kind— primordial lightning strikes. Maybe more would really be less. Hendrix left us Gypsys with the Experience, and it only happened because it happened; although my heart has hardened and trembled all the same, what happened really happened, so more would not be bliss; the experience is this, nothing more and nothing missed. Had a hair been lost or split, or his heart declared but fit, then, “All of this would seize,” the flattering wings insist. ‘What more’ not mine to implore. “Rest easy, Jimi,” I say as I seek for the door. Gotta finish this off cuz I Hear my Train a Comin’4, yes, I Hear my Train a Comin’5.
Right from the start; Disc 1 will always have my heart.
I can speak only for myself, but there is this weird humility that falls upon one when one is in the presence of genius and knows it. It's tough when you AREN'T a genius; you are just some fool who likes Art.
The Jimis die early. The rest of us slug along picking up the pieces. Maybe that's God's point; take what you're given and do what you can with it.