When I'm sad, she comes to me with a thousand smiles that she gives to me free.
"It's alright," she said. "It's alright to take anything you want from me."
"Anything."
Those are lyrics from this song, typed spontaneously from memory. I hate memorizing lyrics. Either the song is good enough to make the lyrics unforgettable or too bad.
I know those lyrics.
I was a fan of Jimi Hendrix, but not very knowledgeable until I was 18 years old. At that time, my brother and I struck out on the road together to visit our dad and sisters in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
On the first day, he and I drove - our only road trip alone together - from North Dakota, down through the Black Hills of South Dakota, stopping to rest in Spearfish, then heading out of the mountains, onto the imposing national grasslands of eastern Wyoming. After accidentally going to Nebraska via Torrington, we righted ourselves and entered the scrubby rangelands of Colorado and finally stopped for the night in Denver. Laying in our hotel room, we marveled at the police sirens in the night.
In the morning, I let my 16-year-old brother drive us out of Denver in the middle or morning rush hour, and he got us outside the city limits before his nerves were spent. I took over for the rest of the way, seeing my first and only Chinook military helicopter along the way headed towards the Rockies, climbing through Raton Pass into New Mexico, then persevering through the black rocks of the northern desert plateau before finally rolling into Albuquerque that second evening.
I typed that sequence spontaneously from memory, too.
At that time, my brother was also my bandmate. Even off of band time, we wiled away days jamming together in our basement, guitar and drums. We dug so much of the same music. The day we left on our New Mexico trip, he produced a handful of cassettes with a smile. It was an audio documentary on the life and career of Jimi Hendrix, full of interviews, songs, demos, home recordings, and so, so much else. Something like four or five cassettes' worth! It was the motherlode of Jimi Hendrix.
Out of that experience, hearing those tapes as the miles flew by, I grew to love Jimi Hendrix as one of my top artists, and I especially came to love his second album with the Experience, Axis: Bold As Love. Less sprawling than what came after but far more colorful and ambitious than their first album, it is just soaked with spirituality and inspiration, this sense that a great Axis of love is in charge of everything, with a number of songs taking on this theme that benevolent, selfless spiritual beings are watching over us. We heard Hendrix speak so sweetly and affectionately about those ideas. They are in "Little Wing" for sure. And if you're not super interested in that, there are about a thousand Jimi Hendrix hammer-ons to ogle over in the song. It's remarkable music.
I never heard that cassette series again after our trip, and yet so many aspects of Jimi's biography and creative process are still at the fore of my mind.
It was all good enough.