Hendrix was my first hero.
I bought “Are You Experienced” as a 13 year old and would stare at the cover, mesmerized, wondering how someone could get their fro to leap like that. To the dismay of my parents, I would blast Manic Depression and Hey Joe and Voodoo Chile for hours in our small bungalow, I am certain driving them near mad.
And I tried to get the same look. For several years, I fought back my parents attempts to get me to a barber shop. My hair, though a bit kinkier than Jimi’s, bloomed and flowed and I turned heads everywhere, as people literally stopped and stared at the big, caramel-colored kid with the fro blowin in the wind.
True story:
After refusing to cut my fro for any reason, for about 3 years, I finally relented because I wanted to play football and my coach demanded that I cut my hair in order to suit up. After weeks of back and forth, I relented.
I went to the other extreme and walked out of the barber shop with a clean quo vadis cut. Heading home, I hopped on the bus, and at the stop at 7 Mile and Wyoming, as I sat on the bus’ back bench, next to an open window, someone was blasting a radio. The news report drifted in through the an Iron Pimp’s open window: Jimi Hendrix had died that day.
Now, even as a kid, I had no belief that Hendrix’s death had anything to do with my hair cut…at least that is what I said. But Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Almost Cut My Hair” had become an anthem, a song I’d play from my bedroom turntable whenever my parents raised the unpleasant and taboo subject of getting a hair cut. My hair, that fro, was my signature. It was the first thing anyone ever mentioned as they tried to identify me…”Yea, that kid with the fro…” I would ultimately let it grow back and was named Mr. Afro in high school a couple years straight. The fact that I was willing to cut it in order to play football was testament to how important football was to me, at that time.
It was a coincidence, no doubt, but it was a set of events that was burned into my memory for decades. The compromise…the dramatic change in looks from a long-haired hippie child to a smooth jock with waves in my hair that anyone would envy…Jimi’s death.
Hendrix’s image and music was a huge part of my life in some very important years.
What is remarkable is how important and durable his music is and how it still resonates. Every day, I hear some commercial selling something that uses “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” to convey a sense of wild, unbridled abandon. Even a half-century later no one or nothing comes close to bringing a listener that incredibly visceral message. There is music that comes somewhere near the mark, and it may hit you with almost as gut-wrenching an impact, but even after all these years, after half a century, nothing comes close to that wild, electric, unrestrained feeling Hendrix generates with that song.
“…If I don’t meet you no more in this world, then I’ll meet you in the next one, and don’t be late…don’t be late!”