by Ann Powers
As a performer and a personality, Hendrix practiced what’s now known as code-switching: alternating between black and white idioms in ways that both engaged with and confounded stereotypes. His early admiration for Bob Dylan, whose Semitic Afro inspired Hendrix’s “bush” hairstyle and whose path he followed to Greenwich Village at the urging of fellow code-switching black folksinger Richie Havens, makes utter sense in this context. (“We called him ‘Dylan Black’ because of his hair,” one New York friend told Hendrix biographer Charles R. Cross.)26 Dylan, too, grew up an ethnic outsider in a supposedly less-racist-than-most state, Minnesota; he didn’t hide his Jewishness, but neither did he dwell firmly within it. And like Hendrix, Dylan had a strangely delicate air. “Pallid and soft, he seemed childlike, almost feminine,” Dylan biographer David Hajdu described the former Robert Zimmerman in his early Village days, quoting his first manager, Terri Thal. “He looked like he could really use some help around the house.”27 Hendrix cultivated a similar, arguably passive-aggressive spaciness in rambling conversation and through a messily pretty sartorial style. Manager Chandler tried to get him to wear the mohair suits favored by macho bluesmen like Hendrix favorite Albert King; declaring himself done with that, he adopted a flouncy layered look that had other musicians calling him “that guy walking around looking like he walked into a girl’s closet and put everything on.”28
Upon his arrival in London in 1966, Hendrix quickly worked to blur the lines between the bluesman self he’d established when touring the South and the rocker persona that he’d begun developing in Greenwich Village. Forming the Experience with Chandler’s help, he chose Mitch Mitchell as a drummer because of his chops, but the inexperienced bassist Noel Redding got in because of his hair. What made Hendrix different from other masterful showmen was a technical gift that allowed him to roam among musical signifiers (and, in doing so, among identities) with seeming effortlessness. The guitarist John Perry, who saw one of the Experience’s first London shows, described it in athletic terms: “His technique was so assured he had time to play brilliantly and do all this other stuff with his arms. Sometimes he only had one hand on the guitar, and it still sounded great. It was similar to that quality seen in those rare sportsmen who come along once or twice in a decade: they seem to have fractionally more time than their peers, time in which they can choose their shot, or adjust it without ever looking hurried, time which makes their play seem effortless and their companions or opponents look clumsy.”29
Hendrix’s skill, according to Perry, made his technique transparent, causing his playing “to become a direct expression of personality rather than a brilliantly executed performance.” It’s a small word change, but really, Hendrix was translucent. Traces of Hendrix’s blues schooling were clear in his licks and chord changes, his tendency to brandish the guitar as if it were a large appendage, and to dance with it. Yet that illusion of naturalness was key. It caused observers not only to gape, but also to meet some looseness in themselves. Fitting a moment when the performance of sexuality, too, was being loosed from its primary signifiers, Hendrix’s musical mastery became a metaphor for polyvalent pleasures that broke down the barriers separating people racially and in other ways. An incident involving Hendrix’s rivals and admirers Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend illustrates this. Charles R. Cross writes, “The two developed a friendship that winter based almost solely on discussing Hendrix and what they might do in response to him. During [one] particular show, as they watched Jimi play an intense version of ‘Red House,’ their fingers accidentally brushed. Clapton grabbed Townshend’s hand, and they clasped them together the way two schoolgirls might while watching a particularly gripping film.”30
Heterosexual male fans were not embarrassed to become rapt within Hendrix’s sensual spell. His physically free playing could feel like a guide to the wide open sexuality the counterculture idealized. The influential German philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote in the 1966 edition of his Freudian critique Eros and Civilization that the era’s most relevant battle was “the body against the machine.” Sensually pleasuring his machine, the guitar, and becoming one with it, Hendrix seemed to de-mechanize rock. His comfortable oneness with the instrument signaled his ability to inhabit the state of full-body bliss that Marcuse puts forth as the only one adequate to the revolution the counterculture attempted. Marcuse thought that people could transcend mere genital stimulation while engaging consciously in sex, their awareness expanding beyond those hot spots to encompass the whole body and psyche and even recast the world around them as wholly erotic. In this experience, he saw the potential for a new kind of enlightenment. “This process almost naturally, by its inner logic, suggests the conceptual transformation of sexuality into Eros.”31
Marcuse’s heady language trickled into countercultural rhetoric through manifestos like Kupferberg’s or another by poet and Digger Chester Anderson, addressing the sensory overload of the San Francisco ballroom scene in the Oracle newspaper in 1967: “The things a really imaginative [lighting and sound] engineer could accomplish by working on our many senses, singly and in orchestrated combinations, are staggering. Imagine: sensory counterpoint—the senses registering contradictory stimuli and the brain having fun trying to integrate them. Imagine tasting G-Minor! The incredible synaesthesia!”32 For many, psychedelic drugs allowed for such beneficial sensory confusion, pulling the lines of desire and sensuality off track and making fingers, ears, or toes as enjoyable to touch and explore as were genitals. Anderson identified rock music as the ideal conduit for this experience, as an “essentially synthesizing art, an art of amazing relationships.” The extreme amplification and distortion electric instruments made possible also contributed to rock’s decentering power, allowing, for example, bass to be “experienced in the abdomen as localized vibrations, an amazingly private sensation impossible to resist.”
Hendrix did more than provide this experience for concertgoers; he enacted it. “His body language was impossible to separate from his technique,” notes Perry. The feedback Hendrix created by playing at top volume and moving his guitar over his head, around his back, or, yes, between his legs was the product of his embodiment of Marcuse’s theory of Eros. Using the whole stage as an instrument and every part of his body to play it, Hendrix cultivated a wide field of pleasure, penetrating it and being penetrated by it. The field included the audience: “People make sounds when they clap. So we make sounds back. I like electric sounds, feedback and so forth, static,” he once told a journalist.33
Insistently nonchalant, Hendrix gained a remarkable amount of mobility for a black popular musician within a pop world that, even in its most progressive corners, remained mostly segregated. But he kept running into roadblocks that prevented him from inhabiting a truly blended identity. He encountered legal problems, as when Linda Keith’s father, horrified by their relationship, made her a ward of the court and shipped her back to England. He accepted minstrelsy-level nicknames like Wild Man of Borneo and Mau Mau from insensitive friends and supporters. His recorded attempts to forge a new musical form akin to John Coltrane’s jazz suites were severely edited to accommodate the requirements set forth for pop songs. And Hendrix rarely if ever received airplay on black radio, though he had African American fans and, after disbanding the Experience, played with black musicians.
In his personal life, he dealt with the unspoken taboo the white Austrian artist Alfreda Benge expressed in a lustful recollection of the guitarist in 1991: “He was the first black performer of whom you can say, ‘PWOOORRRRRGH, I FANCY you.’ I don’t know what it was about him, but he was incredibly important for that . . . I had shared houses with black people, I wasn’t distant from black people, but it had never occurred to me to fancy someone black.” Pete Townshend exhibited similar shock at Hendrix’s interracial appeal when he puzzled aloud about his wife’s interest in Hendrix: “‘What was it like? Was it sexual?’ She said, ‘What a fucking stupid question.’”34
To be the only black man white women co
uld desire was to become a new kind of invisible man, accepted as a cipher, not a real person born into a black community. As the historian Lauren Onkey notes in her analysis of Hendrix and 1960s race relations, by the time the guitarist disbanded the Experience in 1969, “he had come to realize that the hybridity of his act wasn’t communicating what he wanted it to either to counterculture or mainstream audiences.” Hendrix, whose instrument was the stage, never found acceptance among African American live audiences—he was greeted by thrown eggs and an admonition by a black activist to “come home” when he played a street festival in Harlem three weeks after his triumphant sunrise set at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. Yet among the hippies and hipsters who became his fan base in both England and the United States, he faced a kind of blinkered idealism, wrapped in unacknowledged prejudice. Though he occasionally spoke in positive terms about the militant nationalism of the Black Panthers, Hendrix did not actively join the black power movements that arose during his career, either literally, the way Muhammad Ali did when he refused to be drafted in 1967, or in song, as James Brown would with “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” in 1968. As an artist, he longed for the kind of erotic liquescence Herbert Marcuse had proposed as a harbinger of change, a way of becoming a new being—a merman, he said in one song. But these dreams of transcending the body he’d been given also contained Hendrix’s fear of losing himself; his songs acknowledged Ralph Ellison’s assertion that “to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.”35
Depression was the counterpart to Hendrix’s athletic ease. Evoking that mental state was central to his persona and his artistic process from the beginning of the Experience. He made it explicit in songs like “Manic Depression” and “I Don’t Live Today,” with its traditional blues lyric, “Feels like I’m livin’ at the bottom of a grave.” His love affair with the guitar was a tragic one; the poem he wrote on the back of one of the first instruments he smashed invoked “frustration, wracked feelings of not being able to make true physical love to the universal gypsy queen of true free expressed music.”36 Known for humor and gentility in most situations, Hendrix was occasionally prone to violent, hotel-wrecking outbursts that frightened his girlfriends and bandmates. He had grown up in a chaotic, extremely impoverished household, a past he hinted at to English journalist Jane de Mendelssohn (in an interview he gave, probably to disarm his interlocutor, in the nude). She had asked his opinion of the burning of warehouses by radical US activists. He thought more should burn: “If I wasn’t a guitar player I probably would [burn down buildings],” he said. “I’d probably be in jail, ’cos I get very stubborn, like with the police. I used to get into arguments with them millions of times, they used to tell me to be quiet and I just CAN’T be quiet, there’s no reason to be, especially if I have something to say. So I’d probably wind up getting killed.”37 In his performances, when others saw and felt sex, Hendrix experienced a catharsis meant to dissipate simmering rage. “It’s best to have violence on stage and watch it through TV than do it yourself,” he told de Mendelssohn. “So many people would dig it, would really be turned on by it, and they don’t bother their old ladies as much when they get home. They don’t beat their old ladies up as much, because there’s hardly anything left in them. We try to drain all the violence out of their system.”
Countercultural chroniclers echoed white hippie leaders in often dismissing racial discord within the new polymorphous utopia. In fact, black artists found themselves still trapped within stereotypes even as they tried to dissipate them. “I want to see you down there looking like a bunch of wild niggers!” an inner-city black radical named Chaser advises his fellow ambassadors to the white liberal elite in journalist Tom Wolfe’s 1970 account of interracial de-activism, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. (Wolfe’s widely read satires skewered people across racial lines, but should be read with an awareness of his own white Yalie background.) Looking wild was a safe bet for African Americans whose usurpations of authority went deeper than most whites could accept. In his fantasies, Hendrix imagined himself dissolving: in a 1967 interview, he described his professional ambition as “to be a movie and caress the screen with my shining light.” Yet he remained alive within cocoa skin, the audience’s inability to really see him eventually suffocating him.38
Near the end of his life, Hendrix’s performances became strangely lackluster. Realizing that his audience was having trouble identifying with his polymorphous vision of lust and satiation as an aspect of a larger spiritual evolution—a very science-fiction scenario, reflecting Hendrix’s immersion in that genre—he retreated more and more into his Electric Lady Studios, where he could, as the historian Steve Waksman has observed, “enact his wildest fantasies of sound, and . . . work to exert the greatest amount of control.”39 His death came during a European tour, when, exhausted and behaving erratically, he overdosed on sleeping pills while in the company of a woman he barely knew. The man who had so nimbly moved through sexual stereotypes in hopes of rendering them obsolete had found the counterculture’s unceasing craving for them too much to overcome.
JANIS JOPLIN: TOO MUCH IS NOT ENOUGH
Like many countercultural sensualists, Hendrix found little need to separate the enjoyment of sex from the experience of taking drugs, blending references to the two in his lyrics and in interviews. Janis Joplin, in many ways his female counterpart, similarly mixed metaphors in a 1968 Time interview. “I’m on an audience trip,” she said. “When I go onstage to sing, it’s like the rush that people experience when they take heavy dope. I talk to the audience, look into their eyes. I need them and they need me. Sex is the closest I can come to explaining it, but it’s more than sex. I get stoned from happiness. I want to do it until it isn’t there anymore.”40 Joplin, naked and bead-strewn in a poster on her former tormenters’ walls, despite her acne and unfashionably soft flesh, was “the first major girl sex symbol in rock.”41 But like the classic blues queens she emulated, Joplin demanded that her audience recognize the costs of the libertine stance she took. “Women is losers,” she repeated over and over again in one song, exposing sexism but also centering her story on the experience of being sunk under its weight.
If Hendrix’s allure was fed by a perceived miraculous mobility—that flicking tongue on the guitar strings—Joplin’s was tied up in appetite. “She swoops around the stage like some kind of female bat about to get a kinky thrill from drinking your blood,” wrote one reporter in a profile titled “Lock Up Your Sons.”42 An image of her with a Southern Comfort bottle, ready to take more swigs, was central to her eroticism, which was as categorically transcendent as was Hendrix’s, but aggressive and enveloping where his was elusive and ego-dissolving. Famous for her keening, thick soprano, which she pushed so hard that her vocal cords produced multinote overtones, Joplin presented womanhood as a form of excess—a performance of the state of being “too much” that defies rules made by men, but which also presents feminine desires as dangerously, irresistibly insatiable. (Feminists, much later, would theorize such perceived excess as the product of society’s inability to process experience outside a male paradigm.) Deeply ambitious, Joplin chose this path to both fit in and stand out within a male scene. She played the bawd and she bawled her eyes out, though better known for her wild cackle. That laugh was her native tongue—a sound too loud to be ignored.
The critic Ellen Willis, whose crucial work brought explicit gender politics into the arena of rock criticism, once described Joplin’s performance as the quintessential “prefeminist” response to the false (for women) freedoms of the counterculture. “The male-dominated counterculture defined freedom for women almost exclusively in sexual terms,” Willis wrote in her essay on Joplin in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. “As a result, women endowed the idea of sexual liberation with immense symbolic importance; it became charged with all the secret energy of an as yet suppressed larger rebellion. Yet to express one’s rebellion in that limited way was a painfully literal form of sub
mission. Whether or not Janis understood that, her dual persona—lusty hedonist and suffering victim—suggested that she felt it.”43
Joplin was a messy person. Willis noted that seeing Joplin in concert, wild locks flying, inspired her to stop ironing her own curly hair. The star made herself an eyeful, consulting her hippie boutique–owning female intimates (some were lovers) to devise a layered look featuring bangle bracelets, feathers, scarves, and capes—none of which prevented slips revealing her nipples or dimpled backside. Scholar Lisa Rhodes has suggested that journalists’ focus on Joplin’s clothing signified a double standard in music writing; in truth, mentions of clothing almost always figured into accounts of Hendrix and Jim Morrison. But there was more to take in with Joplin. “Her wild brown hair, touched with gold, hung in untamed waves down her back and over her lavender silk shirt and blue velvet vest,” the journalist Michael Lydon wrote in a profile. “Gold sandals and bright blue stockings were on her feet, on her wrists dozens of bracelets in flaming acrylic colors; a blue and red kerchief was tied loosely into her immense fur hat; silver Indian bell rings were on every finger, and she was laughing, dancing, singing, her eyes, mouth, and body never still.” Lydon witnessed Joplin playing eight-ball pool with a barfly in San Francisco’s B & G club; the main personality trait he identified was what said barfly described as “pep.”44