PSYCHEDELIC UNCLE TOM

The fine guitarist and author John Perry has a book out titled Electric Ladyland, which is exactly what it is about; the Jimi Hendrix album of the same title. It’s part of a series of small format books from Continuum called 33 1/3, each dedicated to a single classic rock album, and, damn, but is it fine to read a really ace guitar player who also writes really well talking about music. He not only explains the true nature of feedback, but also provides some quite astonishing historical notes on US rock crits initial reaction to Jimi, especially that of Bob Christgau, with whom I worked with for years at the Village Voice etc., and whose word has become treated like holy writ. Today, Hendrix is totally canonized, but seemingly it was not always so...

When Jimi burst on them at Monterey, six months later, he was as unknown to most Americans as he’d been to English audiences. Yet it was as though they were reviewing a different performer. Critics wrote of an “undignified” “psychedelic Uncle Tom” whose “gimmick-laden” act was a “second-rate copy of The Who’s destruction”. Even his speech annoyed them with it’s “superspade jive”. The shrewd reader may feel a common theme underlies all those responses...

The liberal American press from Esquire to the Village Voice were perplexed by Hendrix in a way that the English never were. It seems extraordinary that the hippest American papers lined up with views found only in the English tabloids (“Wildman of Borneo” etc.). Nobody expected English papers like the Mirror to get anything right, least of all music, but one hoped for more from the American underground press. Filtering their reviews through a whole complex of self-consciously ‘radical’ Vietnam-era attitudes to race relations, they managed to miss the music almost entirely.

My purpose is not to flay the American press - they were quite busy enough flaying themselves. Behind a whole raft of complaints about Hendrix’s undignified performance and his irritating failure to fit existing critical categories for black performers, lay the essential point that his songs mysteriously failed to punish the audience for being white. Hendrix didn't play the wounded, angry black man, or the dignified bearer of oppression; he didn't provide white critics with a handy receptacle for their guilt. They didn't know quite what role he fulfilled. But they knew they didn’t like it.

Reviewing Monterey for Esquire, the 'Dean of American Rock Critics', R. Christgau, first distinguished himself by calling the Grateful Dead “the standout improvisers of the Festival” (actually the performance was so awful the Dead refused to allow even ten seconds to be used in the film or the soundtrack album). Garcia was very funny when he spoke about this, years later in London. He told me: “we blew Monterey and Woodstock. I dunno that big festivals ever really suited us. At Monterey we were sandwiched between The Who and Hendrix … first The Who - bang crash roar - smashed everything … then Hendrix - huge sound, set fire to everything … whooooosh … then we came out and played our little music…”

But as Christgau saw it:

"But [the Dead’s] performance was quickly obscured by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix is a Negro from Seattle who was brought from Greenwich Village to England by ex-Animal Chas Chandler in January. It was a smart move. England, like all of Europe, thirsts for the Real Thing, as performers from Howlin' Wolf to Muhammad Ali have discovered. Hendrix picked up two good English sidemen and crashed the scene. He came to Monterey recommended by the likes of Paul McCartney. He was terrible. Hendrix is a psychedelic Uncle Tom. Don't believe me, believe Sam Silver of The East Village Other: "Jimi did a beautiful Spade routine." ... He also played what everybody seems to call "heavy" guitar; in this case, that means he was loud. ... The destructiveness of The Who is consistent theater, deriving directly from the group's defiant, lower-class stance. I suppose Hendrix's act can be seen as a consistently vulgar parody of rock theatrics, but I don't feel I have to like it. Anyhow, he can't sing.”


It’s not my intention to single out Christgau. Clearly he represented one definite strain of US opinion (not necessarily restricted to white reviewers) and to his credit, he continues to stand by his original impression; a good polemicist should oppose the prevailing orthodoxy. But the disparity between UK and US opinion remains deeply puzzling. Hendrix's offences (apart from being, in Charlie Murray’s wonderful phrase, ‘unnecessarily black in an American context’) appear to be:

Coming on after the Grateful Dead. (A dirty job but someone’s got to do it)

Going to England. (Thereby reinforcing the deplorable European taste for Real Things).
Crashing the scene (!)
Being terrible (!!)
Seeming to be "heavy" (?)
Consistent vulgarity.
Inability to sing.

Phew. Add tone-deafness and poor microphone technique and you’ve got a pretty damning case.

SUBSERVIENT CHICKEN

And some girl sends us a real sicko-bizarre bit of corporate promo from – of all places – Burger King.

http://www.subservientchicken.com

CRYPTIQUE – Cluck, oh Mistress.