Experience Hendrix Concert Celebrates Jimi Hendrix’s Reinvention Of The Guitar Experience
Popology Lessons by Kris Fisher
We hear it all the time. They just don’t make ‘em like they used to. Perhaps nowhere is that phrase more valid than in the world of musicians. I don’t mean people who play music. I mean people who make music. People who become one with the music they make and gift that music to the world. People whose music touches your soul. Real musicians.
There are a select few people who embody that description. In almost all instances, the musician stepped away from the norm, choosing to blaze their own path. There’s certainly nothing wrong with doing a specific and established thing and following the expected path. But some people aren’t cut out for that. Those people sidestep the obvious, question the norm, and dare to be different. That was Jimi Hendrix.
In 1962, Private Jimi Hendrix was honorably discharged from the Army for “…having no interest whatsoever in the Army.” What would happen over the next eight years would be a lightning bolt of a music career. Before Jimi died in 1970, he completely changed the sound of not only rock music specifically, but the guitar as an instrument as well. Even within his already short career, the experience of Jimi Hendrix didn’t really begin until 1966, when his band the Jimi Hendrix Experience played its first gig.
Before that, Jimi bounced around R&B groups, performing as a backing musician for legends such as Wilson Pickett, Sam Cooke, Ike & Tina, the Isley Brothers and Little Richard. Knowing what we know now, it’s hard to imagine Jimi behind any other performer.
It didn’t take long for Hendrix to outgrow the R&B circuit, bored of playing the same thing every night and frustrated by having to follow the rules of the bandleader. History shows that Jimi’s brand of music wasn’t meant to follow rules.
Augusta guitarist Keith Jenkins said Hendrix was an innovator, and those innovations became the bedrock for his distinctive sound.
“He was the first guitarist to rely heavily on distortion and feedback,” Jenkins said. “Usually considered a nuisance, Jimi harnessed it, controlled it, and made it into beautiful music. He made it sound so sexy and powerful that guitarists quickly went from struggling to get rid of it, to trying everything they could to mimic it.”
This, accompanied with Jimi’s sheer talent with a guitar led Eric Clapton, a guitar legend himself, to proclaim that experiencing Jimi’s performance on a guitar changed his life.
Jason Sabo, lead guitar for Whiskey Run, said it’s important to remember Hendrix as not only an innovator, but a sensitive artist as well.
“His music is filled with tons of emotion, creative chord melodies, phrasing and feeling,” Sabo said.
That, Sabo explained, helped him create his own voice and the style heard in both his live performances and recordings.
In 1967, Paul McCartney all but demanded that Jimi be added to the lineup of the Monterey Pop Festival. Brian Jones, founder of the legendary Rolling Stones, introduced Jimi as the most exciting performer he’d ever heard. High praise from a man who regularly played with Mick Jagger. Jimi took the stage dressed in exotic clothes and redefined what the world expected from a Black musician. By the time he wrapped that historic set by lighting his axe on fire, the music world had changed forever.
Just imagine if he had stifled his urge to swerve. It would have been easy – perhaps – to have this vision, this calling, this dream but opt instead for steady gigs in backing bands.
We might have never gotten to experience Jimi.
Although he left this earth in 1970 to return to whichever planet he came from, we will get to experience Jimi tonight at the Columbia County Performing Arts Center. The Experience Hendrix Tour features a stacked bill through some exceptionally talented and accomplished musicians who are clearly acolytes of the Voodoo Child. They include rock-blues legend Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Zakk Wylde, Eric Johnson, Dweezil Zappa and more.
All the musicians set to take the stage are incredibly talented and accomplished in their own right and they’re all right here for us to honor the legend, prodigious talent, and the experience that is Jimi Hendrix.
Get Experienced
WHAT: Experience Hendrix
WHERE: Columbia County Performing Arts Center, 1000 Market Street, Evans, Georgia
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 16
COST: $65-$95. Tickets available at ticketmaster.com.