I wrote earlier about how "Fire" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience was the song to make me become a drummer. Weirdly, it failed to make me much of an actual fan of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
That had to wait for another happenstance of 1990s Americana.
Like many families, my family got our first PC computer in the mid-90s, and it was full of many space-age features such as dial-up internet and Solitaire. But most important of all, to me, was the Encarta Encyclopedia. I am a fan of encyclopedias. As a kid, I read my youth encyclopedia set in a few nights when my new asthma medicine kept me awake. The wide-ranging non-fiction, non-dramatic, non-needy attitude of encyclopedias is something I zestily feast on. They will not beg you read them; they will not pay you off with attention-grabbing histrionics. They will simply be there, a range for your mind to ramble.
Many, many hours I spent touring through the Encarta Encyclopedia. One of the best features: Short (very short) digital videos, something positively sci-fi at that point in history. There weren't very many; they were reserved for some of the most consequential subjects. Great speeches. War footage. And a super-select group of musical performances.
One of those performances was about 2 minutes of a Jimi Hendrix Experience performance of "Hey Joe." Easily one of the longest clips available in the Encarta Encyclopedia, it spanned from the first verse to the end of the guitar solo. I have tried but can't seem to locate that exact clip anymore.
There was so much about Jimi that blew me away. Unlike many early live versions, the Encarta clip featured him playing the guitar solo with his hands, not his teeth. I prefer that, aware that he hated the gimmick of playing with his teeth. During the verse, he notices a string out of tune and fixes it in-song, in-beat, turning the tuning peg and making it sound like a whammy bar bend, then chuckles over to bassist Noel Redding about it. But like "Fire," what fascinated me most about the song was the drumming of Mitch Mitchell.
The agility and flair that he employed were hypnotic. His ability to flail his sticks in a blur around him as he whipped his head around wildly probably made 20,000 drummers overnight upon first seeing him. The drumming was ecstasy incarnate. It was freedom of movement.
It's such a slow blues song - how are hyper-agile drums even a feature? Thank Jimi Hendrix, probably. Many other band leaders maybe would've told their drummer to dial it back, not just to serve the somberness of the song, but also to avoid the cardinal sin of upstaging said band leaders.
Hendrix dealt with just this issue coming up as a backing guitarist in the Chitlin' Circuit before becoming famous on his own. For many years, he was the guitarist for Little Richard. Little Richard knew Jimi was a genius. But that genius was not for Little Richard's stage. Little Richard was the genius of his stage, and there was apparently a great amount of conflict between Jimi and Little Richard over even modest amounts of showiness peeking out in Jimi's performance.
There came a day when, in a scene I have embellished with likely too excessive mythic quality in my mind over the years, Jimi simply walked out on his touring gig, boarding a bus for New York City, where his fortunes of all different varieties awaited. I see the guitar case in his hand.
So Jimi's band encouraged all players. They flew together. "Hey Joe" is my favorite song on their first album, a blues standard elevated to singular greatness by Jimi's voice and musicianship, Mitchell's drums, Redding's excellent bass foundation, and the exhilarating chromatic blues runs they played at climactic moments.
After repeating the Encarta video for about as many times as I could stand, I began to seek out everything by this group. The music of Hendrix has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It all truly got underway with "Hey Joe." And an encyclopedia.