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Jimi Hendrix


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21 hours ago, HeartbreakerWoman said:

Finally getting into his stuff, probably the best guitarist who ever lived. What are some of you guys' favorite songs of his?

Indeed. 

Favorite songs? Aww man...I'll just choose ten songs off the cuff.

Gypsy Eyes has always been a traditional "go to" for me, it's not his "best" song or anything though.

Hey Baby (live in Hawaii 1970), 1983 (A Merman I should turn to be)

The Wind Cries Mary, Castles Made Of Sand

Manic Depression, You Got Me Floating

Spanish Castle Magic, Voodoo Child (Slight Return)

Machine Gun

 

 

 

 

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11 hours ago, J Dog said:

I'm not even saying it's a southern thing, it's a life thing. I can see an argument against Clapton or Zep, even though they played it great, really they just heard the blues and were like, oh shit that sounds good let's play that. Allmans, Skynyrd, SRV, they just didn't hear the blues one day and like it and decide to play it. The blues were a part of their upbringing, it was a part of their life. Them boys didn't even think like, let's put some blues in here. The blues were just in them from the start. It was a part of them. Just because they didn't crank out Muddy Waters rip offs every song don't mean shit either, Jimi didn't do that either. And I love Jimi and not trying to knock him, just saying that I believe it's possible for some of these cats to feel the blues too.

Do you consider Eminem hip hop, or just a white boy that can rap?

Eminem is different because hip hop came to be in a lot more of a (relatively) multi-cultural envoirnment than the blues, Hip Hop had whiteboys and Puerto Ricans involved from almost day one, which you could say to a point was the case with blues, not in anything like the same manner though, all it was with the blues was you had black guys in a white mans country so it stands to reason in terms of format there'd be some kind of footing in American folk but this shit weren't no white mans thing, i think we can all agree on that.  Also, hip hop is a lot more musically diverse than the blues, being from a different era and incorporating a lot of different styles.

But look, i'll give you a for instance, I grew up here in England in the South East, reggae music, the culture of the west indies is entrenched over here.  and i LOVE reggae music.  I mean i love it in my bones.  same way i do with the blues and with hip hop but the examples reggae here, for a moment.  Now i grew up with reggae.  I mean i really didn't even know there was this cultural differentiation, i been to the parties, i had black friends.  Is it my experience though?  It kinda is in the sense that when it evolved and you had these second generation Jamaicans over here making reggae music it makes that strain of it, to a point, kinda English...but is it REAL reggae music?  No it's not.  Is it MY story, despite my entrenchedness in it?  No, it's not.  Same with hip hop, i probably know more about hip hop, a lot of the slang, the names of the places, the people, where the music came from, i could talk your fuckin' ears off about it...is it my experience though?  No, it's not...and no matter how much i love it and how much i want it to be mine and i might even know more about it and the music and what it's about than even some black Americans, especially the younger generation.  but that still don't mean it's mine, I'm not from those people, when push comes to shove what does it all mean?  I listened to more records and read more books about it.  Is that really it though?  You're married right?  I mean i know you are, presumably you love your missus.  Well i don't love nobody like that and I'm single.  Do you think i can really grasp that feeling by reading Baudeliere or Romeo and Julliette, more than you, a man who lives with a wife he's loved for years now, has a kid with her and has this shared experience?  No i don't. 

And anyway, why WOULD you wannabe someone elses thing?  Like we were talking about The Chilli Peppers doing rap the other day right?  See i love that shit but the reason i love it, the reason it's great is cuz its not trying to be anything but the Chilli Peppers doing rap and in doing so it makes itself its own kinda raw.

Multi-culturalism has made this interesting kinda thing out of music though, going back to reggae you have bands like The Clash, who have immense reggae influences in their music, got there by way of living in a culture where they were kinda surrounded by it...but is it real Reggae?  Revolution Rock, Crooked Beat, their version of Police and Thieves, is that real reggae?  It don't mean to say they can't do it and can't sound great doing it but essentially what it is is real reggae filtered through the eyes of 4 West London whiteboys.  And there's nothing wrong with that, God knows as an avowed Clash fan i adore those songs...but i don't think (and neither did The Clash!) that you could take those songs to those people who created reggae and go 'here, this is reggae'...i mean it is in a sense but it isn't. 

Now The Sex Pistols, THATS my experience.  I mean to a point you could say it's not because i weren't born in the 70s, i ain't a whiteboy (although you dont really need to be) but there's enough in that and it's broad enough in terms of it's scope in regards to English youth that i get that.  I truly get that.  I get the silliness, I get the snotty attitude, i get the class struggle, i get how that effects people, i get John Lydon as a second generation Irish immigrant who was in a sense a second class citizen in this country because i share a version of that experience, I understand them, i understand the way they speak, I understand the cadence of their language, i understand their obstinance and their form of aggression, its enough relative to me to where i can kinda speak on what they are talking about.  Even then to some i might warrant exclusion from that but i can get in there on that.

In the same way like i love country music, i mean i really love it, as I'm sure you know from our talks, a great many artists and maybe even more than some people from where you're from...but can i REALLY tell you shit about that place?  I can ask and listen and learn but I'd have to be a dick to sit there and go 'nah J, it's like this and this and this' because it's not REALLY in me, i listen to it and certain aspects that i can associate to my life speak to me and i go from there but the entire experience, the whole kit and kaboodle is not me.  And I'd be lying to myself and would look foolish in the proper situations pretending that it was.

It's not an insult to anyone, it's not anything to get down about, going back to The Clash for a second, those guys played ALLLLL kinds of music, Jazz, Funk, Reggae, Hip Hop...and i love it all and it's THEIR version of those things and it's brilliant and it's as valid a contribution as any...but it is what it is, their jazz isn't Ornette Coleman, their hip hop isn't LL Cool J, their funk isn't James Brown...and it's OK that it's not but it's still not. 

Now as times change and new shit comes about it's all getting melded together and these concepts are becoming less and less applicable, as with hip hop, you got Em', you got Macklemore you x, y and z but you can't really look at those other things and re-shape the reality of history.

And y'know what?  Black Americans DESERVE the blues.  They deserve the right to have that called their own.  No one can deny they made it, no one can deny they played it the best, no one can deny that, despite their being parrallels there for whiteboys, i.e. the dirt roads the poverty etc etc, the real deep core meaning behind the blues, related to slavery etc etc is a thing that no other group can rightly and explicitly and accurately lay claim to, they just can't.  And it's worth noting hardly no fuckin' black bluesman made shit off their music and a bunch of whiteboys (and they were entitled to, God bless em, i love a lot of their music) made a fuckin' mint off the back of it, some of em whilst espousing some pretty awful views about 'coons' (i.e. Eric Clapton). 

And thats just how i feel, the true bluesman are black guys, the true exponents of Jazz are black guys, the true exponents of reggae are black guys.  That doesn't mean it isn't there for any and EVERY fucking body to join in cuz end of the day music is culture and culture is inclusive, not exclusive...but it still is what it is and it came from where it came from and no amount of thinking you have an affinity with something will change that.  You can't tell you listen to Peter Tosh or Big Youth and you can't hear the difference between that and whiteboys doing reggae like UB40 or The Police.  You can't tell me you hear the same mark of history in the voice and playing of Son House, Robert Johnson, Bukka White in Stevie Ray Vaughn and Eric Clapton.  You can make a hundred thousand inch perfect copies of the Mona Lisa...but it won't be THE Mona Lisa. 

And apart from that, in terms of the blues, I'm not sure I wanna pay the price it took to be authentic and I'm not sure anybody ever did by choice.

Edited by Len B'stard
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I'm with you on everything you said. That's some good shit right there.

I do look at hip hop a little bit different. I know over here, shit was real black and white in America in the 80s. Hip hop really was the black man blues 50 years later. It did come from all the things you said, a mix of styles musically, but culturally, here it was 100% strictly from the black community for the black community. It was greatness from the street. White people didn't understand rap for a long time, and they shouldn't have. Chili Peppers did like we said, but not everybody is the Chili Peppers either.

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Sorry, took the conversation a bit off Jimi there, didn't I? :lol:

Y'know what i wanna hear?  there's this documentary where this guys talking about the day after MLK died and Jimi played his balls off in a tribute that night and it was like the most beautiful haunting shit ever, wish there was a recording of it somewhere.

 

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Just now, Len B'stard said:

Sorry, took the conversation a bit off Jimi there, didn't I? :lol:

Y'know what i wanna hear?  there's this documentary where this guys talking about the day after MLK died and Jimi played his balls off in a tribute that night and it was like the most beautiful haunting shit ever, wish there was a recording of it somewhere.

 

That would be cool. Bet it is haunting.

I've been hearing about a movie for a few years now. I think Andre 3000 was playing him? I'm not really feeling that but I haven't heard anything about in awhile.

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9 hours ago, J Dog said:

That would be cool. Bet it is haunting.

I've been hearing about a movie for a few years now. I think Andre 3000 was playing him? I'm not really feeling that but I haven't heard anything about in awhile.

That movie came out a couple of years ago and died a death.

The estate and friends of the man himself were against it and it didn't feature any of Hendrix's music.

9 hours ago, Len B'stard said:

I hate those fuckin' bullshit movies, just gimme the real person, release all the fuckin' hours of footage they have of the actual person in some kinda documentary.

Right on.

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10 hours ago, classicrawker said:

Loved the Band of Gypsy's live album...probably my favorite Hendrix album as I love the laid back vibe to it.............wish that band could have done more...........

Although have to say the New Rising Sun material was very promising as well....

This is your bible,

http://www.guitars101.com/forums/f145/jimi-hendrix-box-of-gypsys-sbd-aud-flac-147527.html

9 hours ago, Len B'stard said:

I hate those fuckin' bullshit movies, just gimme the real person, release all the fuckin' hours of footage they have of the actual person in some kinda documentary.

Or the Royal Albert film (which has been stuck in litigation for forty years!).

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10 minutes ago, PappyTron said:

I think that Hendrix is massively overrated.

I had a metaller friend named Darryl who said the same thing, that it was just a bunch of fiddley noodling by an acidhead used to mask distinctly average songs.  He was the man who introduced me to The Dropkick Murphys.  Suffice to say i disagree in the strongest possible way.

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26 minutes ago, Len B'stard said:

I had a metaller friend named Darryl who said the same thing, that it was just a bunch of fiddley noodling by an acidhead used to mask distinctly average songs.  He was the man who introduced me to The Dropkick Murphys.  Suffice to say i disagree in the strongest possible way.

Hendrix was good. Very good. Awesome, even, but he was not at a level that other guitarists haven't matched and exceeded. That is what I mean when I say that he's overrated, because people put him in a category of one as if nobody else can play faster or more complex songs etc.

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7 minutes ago, PappyTron said:

Hendrix was good. Very good. Awesome, even, but he was not at a level that other guitarists haven't matched and exceeded. That is what I mean when I say that he's overrated, because people put him in a category of one as if nobody else can play faster or more complex songs etc.

Nobody has ever played guitar as good as Hendrix.

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Just now, PappyTron said:

Shawn Lane was a better guitarist than Hendrix was, for one.

There are chaps at that LA academy - I forgot its name - who I could imagine play 'x' number of notes 'in a shorter time frame' than Jimi could. The Bumblefoots and Bucketheads are of that tradition. It is the guitar equivalent of Ivan Drago. yet none of these people understand what the guitar means and its relation to music like Hendrix did.

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12 minutes ago, DieselDaisy said:

There are chaps at that LA academy - I forgot its name - who I could imagine play 'x' number of notes 'in a shorter time frame' than Jimi could. The Bumblefoots and Bucketheads are of that tradition. It is the guitar equivalent of Ivan Drago. yet none of these people understand what the guitar means and its relation to music like Hendrix did.

But that is not the question at hand. If person A can play notes faster and more accurately along with more difficult technique than person B then they are a better guitarist. You might prefer the style of Hendrix over Lane, but that doesn't make him a better guitarist, in the same way that you might prefer your warblings in the shower, but that doesn't make you a better singer than Fischer-Dieskau.

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5 minutes ago, PappyTron said:

But that is not the question at hand. If person A can play notes faster and more accurately along with more difficult technique than person B then they are a better guitarist. You might prefer the style of Hendrix over Lane, but that doesn't make him a better guitarist, in the same way that you might prefer your warblings in the shower, but that doesn't make you a better singer than Fischer-Dieskau.

Then you judge guitarists differently from me. See, I keep have this running argument on the gnr board - ''Richard Fortus, old manboobs, is technically superior, more versatile etc etc than Izzy blah blah blah'' - Stradlin to me has more knowledge of the guitar than Fortus could dream of.

Hendrix

Hendrix was the perfect guitarist. I actually think we do him a disservice, concentrating on his guitar skills in the sense that 'skills' merely consists of 'how many runs per second one can achieve' (or, 'how many scales one knows?'); it is not so much that Jimi was a godly guitarist capable of technical versatility, more that he harnessed the guitar to deliver some of the most sophisticated recordings in rock n' roll history. It is what he did with the guitar that counts.

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48 minutes ago, PappyTron said:

Hendrix was good. Very good. Awesome, even, but he was not at a level that other guitarists haven't matched and exceeded. That is what I mean when I say that he's overrated, because people put him in a category of one as if nobody else can play faster or more complex songs etc.

With Hendrix it's about passion and the ability to communicate feeling and emotion.  Of course half a century down the trough the technical aspect will be bested, thats only natural but the man played his bollocks off in a way that speaks to people, in an emotional sense, over many decades right to the present day.  I do see the point you're trying to make but I'm not sure music works that way.  

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Just now, Len B'stard said:

With Hendrix it's about passion and the ability to communicate feeling and emotion.  Of course half a century down the trough the technical aspect will be bested, thats only natural but the man played his bollocks off in a way that speaks to people, in an emotional sense, over many decades right to the present day.  I do see the point you're trying to make but I'm not sure music works that way.  

Right, so when people say "Hendrix is the best guitarist of all-time" what they really mean is "Hendrix is the guitarist whose playing speaks to me an emotive level the most".

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8 minutes ago, DieselDaisy said:

Hendrix was the perfect guitarist. I actually think we do him a disservice, concentrating on his guitar skills in the sense that 'skills' merely consists of 'how many runs per second one can achieve' (or, 'how many scales one knows?'); it is not so much that Jimi was a godly guitarist capable of technical versatility, more that he harnessed the guitar to deliver some of the most sophisticated recordings in rock n' roll history. It is what he did with the guitar that counts.

But there is nothing particularly complex about his guitar playing in and of itself. I think that people conflate their favourite guitarist with who is the best guitarist and when it comes to the first part there is no right or wrong, but the second part is something that absolutely can be measured, and Hendrix is way down the list in terms of technical ability.

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2 minutes ago, PappyTron said:

Right, so when people say "Hendrix is the best guitarist of all-time" what they really mean is "Hendrix is the guitarist whose playing speaks to me an emotive level the most".

Is your redundancy,

Best Guitarist=Fastest fingers and biggest knowledge of scales?

Then yes.

I would quite happily walk away with my copy of Axis and leave you with your speed freaks.

 

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3 minutes ago, PappyTron said:

Right, so when people say "Hendrix is the best guitarist of all-time" what they really mean is "Hendrix is the guitarist whose playing speaks to me an emotive level the most".

But then what is the key function of music but to get to people like that?  Otherwise any number of boxers were better than Ali on paper, he didn't have no one punch knockout, he didn't have no body shots, he didn't have anything but speed footwork chin jab and heart...it's what you do with what you got, not your ability to run the gamut.  I mean Buckethead has more range than BB King but can Bucket make your toes curl like BB can?  He don't for me.

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6 minutes ago, DieselDaisy said:

Is your redundancy,

Best Guitarist=Fastest fingers and biggest knowledge of scales?

Then yes.

I would quite happily walk away with my copy of Axis and leave you with your speed freaks.

 

Best guitarist is the person who has the greatest mastery of the instrument in terms of ability to play it. If Shawn Lane can play anything that Hendrix can play, note for note, with his eyes closed, then you cannot in good consciousness, say that Hendrix is better at playing the guitar. That you guitarists who can play rings around Hendrix as mere speed freaks is spurious.

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9 minutes ago, Len B'stard said:

But then what is the key function of music but to get to people like that?  Otherwise any number of boxers were better than Ali on paper, he didn't have no one punch knockout, he didn't have no body shots, he didn't have anything but speed footwork chin jab and heart...it's what you do with what you got, not your ability to run the gamut.  I mean Buckethead has more range than BB King but can Bucket make your toes curl like BB can?  He don't for me.

That's because boxing isn't based on mathematics and set notes, like music is. Ali IS a better boxer than Audley Harrison, in every quantifiable way, the same way that Shawn Lane IS a better guitarist in every quantifiable way than Hendrix; more accurate, better technique, faster, can play more complex arrangements. What else is there other than personal emotion, in which case Audley may well be the greatest boxer of all time.

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1 minute ago, PappyTron said:

Best guitarist is the person who has the greatest mastery of the instrument in terms of ability to play it. If Shawn Lane can play anything that Hendrix can play, note for note, with his eyes closed, then you cannot in good consciousness, say that Hendrix is better at playing the guitar. That you guitarists who can play rings around Hendrix as mere speed freaks is spurious.

But what is the purpose of that? You are reducing music to a mere technicality? You are (to utilise British scholarly usage) turning a humanity into a science!

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