Voodoo Chile was the first Hendrix song I heard. From the first wah-wah I was hooked. No, you may mock but this was a life-changing moment. Hendrix underpinned everything heavy that followed. Through Hendrix, I discovered Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and the massive swathe of stateside bands that had adopted the heavy rock sound and developed it. So subsequently, heavy metal has become my first love. The electric guitar, previously the instrument of rebellion, in Hendrix’ hands had become the instrument of wonder and awe. The AXE was a weapon. It had a voice. It altered perception and connected to an amp and effects pedals, could generate tons of wonderful feedback, fuzz, sustain, attack, decay, echo. Looking back to my folks old Who and Floyd records I listened with fresh ears, tuning out Daltrey, focusing on Townshend and the same with Barrett and Waters, concentrating on Gilmour. Let me explain one more thing: I can’t play guitar, never could never will, but Jimi encouraged me to play air guitar on tons of rock records, RamJam’s Black Betty for one. Motorhead’s Ace Of Spades was another. Jimi was never “pop”. Jimi was blues, rock, soul and the godfather of heavy metal. Shame he died when I was 4 years old.

At school in 1970, the first thing we had to do in the morning was our “diary”, a paragraph in a small exercise book. Took all of five minutes. Naturally there was little variation day by day apart from on a Monday when we were required to account for the weekend. One boy in my class, who was considered (ahem!) “slow”, practically replicated the same entry every day, beginning with: “Yesterday I went to school and I did my diary…”, which our teacher Mr Turner let pass as the work of a halfwit. The nine year-old me, however, recognised it as the ironic offerings of a genius. The boy ended up as a BT engineer. Not even Waldo can be right all the fucking time.

Meanwhile, Jimi Hendrix choked to death on a tuna sarnie with all the fixings and “Voodoo Chile” was wrestled off “Electric Ladyland” and took its appointed spot at the top of the chart as a tribute. The more I think of it, the more I become convinced that this was the wrong choice. Perhaps the line about “I’ll meet you in the next world – don’t be late” clinched it. At school the Friday after the TOTP when this was number one, my diary ran something like: “After tea, I sat and watched Top of the Pops with Peter and Mummy and number one was the dead Jimmy. It’s funny to look at him looking alive when really he’s dead…”

The Waldo psyche was coming along nicely.

(My favourite Jimi Hendrix song, not unconnectedly, was “Storm Green”, which I thought was an extremely poetic and evocative title. I am given to understand that what Hendrix penned and is actually singing is “Stone Free”, alas.)

Not all the apparent tape dropouts which appear on this single are on the LP version; either because of sloppy transcription when cutting the 45 or, perhaps, intentionally.

hope you KER-POWWED ‘ EM to the far side of the gigiverse..

b

Meant only as the source of inspiration. No negativity implied by me.

Brian

There’s definite ‘doin it doin it’ songs I like but yes, most of my huge 10/10 favourites are page turners.

(And I totally get the distinction between Actual Singles and Frank Singles, except of course mine aren’t Frank Singles.)

It’s a 9.5, so it ties w/ “Rush” and “Get Ur Freak On,” slightly ahead of “London Bridge” and “It’s Goin’ Down,” slightly behind “Purple Haze” and “Since U Been Gone” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” To put it in context.

I have NO problem thinking of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” as a single and thinking of it as a hit and thinking of it as pop, but I might have trouble explaining why. There are Frank Singles and there are Actual Singles. If it’s a genre I get, then often enough Frank Singles are also Actual Singles. A Frank Single functions as a single in my psyche; basically it grabs me in a pop hit way. “Like A Rolling Stone” grabs me in a pop hit way, “Visions of Johanna” doesn’t, though if somehow the latter had gotten to number one I’d have endorsed it as a 10.0 on this board. (Well, 9.5, anyway.) It’s too settled and noncatchy to be a Frank Single. “Search and Destroy” and “Personality Crisis,” on the other hand, grabbed me in a pop hit way, even though neither was a hit. “Bodies” and “Takeover” and “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Gimme Shelter” and “Under My Thumb” were Frank Singles even though they weren’t Actual Singles. (And the latter three ended up on Stones’ hit compilations. So there.) Those examples hardly explain anything, but let’s just say that “Voodoo Child” has a hook, and 20 seconds into it, the first time, it was a Frank Single. (And I didn’t know until today that it had ever been an Actual Single.)

after the dramatic band entrance and first verse it’s five minutes meander, and I can’t get much of an emotional toe-hold on it

I think that’s your crucial point, not that it’s a rock album track. If it’s a five-minutes meander, then it doesn’t work as a rock album track either, unless it’s either a really engaging meander or a really effective mood. But I don’t hear “Voodoo Child” as a meander, I hear it as more of the same, that consistent pile driver, doing what it’s doing what it’s doing what it’s doing. Enriched by other stuff going on, but not changing. So, to choose from my comparisons above, it’s not a page-turner like “Rush” or “Purple Haze” or “London Bridge” or “Since U Been Gone,” but rather a doin’ it doin’ it doin’ it song like “Get Ur Freak On” or “It’s Goin’ Down” or “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” I recall that you gave “The Last Time” a 6 and “Satisfaction” a 9, and maybe that’s a consistent choice. “The Last Time” is a doin’ it doin’ it riff song, “Satisfaction” is a page turner (it’s also a riff-based doin’ it doin it song, but has more development, variety). “The Last Time” is a 9.5 or 10.0 for me. (I don’t necessarily assume you wouldn’t be up there with 9s and 10s for “Get Ur Freak On,” but if you were I’d be curious as to your reasons for liking it more than “Voodoo Child.” E.g., better vocals, better rhythm. (In a straight up competition I prefer “Freak” to “Voodoo” for just those reasons.))

Firstly it was Floyd Hughes, not Brendan McCarthy, who illustrated CSM’s Hendrix strip in Revolver. Brendan was always pretty anti-hippie, in art and life – his ‘Electric Hoax’ strip in Sounds has a gd claim to being the first (uk) punk comix strip. Crosstown Traffic by CSM is still the only decent Hendrix bk I’ve ever read, but the Revolver strip is DIRE – a bit like Oliver Stone’s Doors movie but w/out any of the phun.

Heavy Metal magazine once did a whole ‘Rock’ issue that included a laughably literal-minded strip version of ‘Voodoo Chile’.

Vastly underrated English comic artist Paul Bignell once told me that in the 1980s, Chelsea School of Art never admitted any prospective student who had a drawing of Jimi Hendrix in their portfolio.

Lord Sukrat’s argt is obv. v. convincing – THE Marvel catchphrase is “with great power comes great responsibility”, and that has become perhaps the central bio-narrative of Jimi’s ‘real life’ on Earth (cosmic gunslinger neglects talent/abuses drugs and PAYS THE PRICE). Another possible source of Hendrix imagery – esp. all the swirly oceanic stuff on Electric Ladyland – might be Mati Klarwein’s seminal, garish painted cover for Bitches Brew (which I think predates EL by some months??)

first: the metaphor the “same well” bears no relationship to how ppl actually came on music, blues or any other kind, by the late 50s — it WASN’T this vast passive sea of mutual telepathic ethnic heritage which black folk could all magically access, and had to willy-nilly (one of the things you have to deal with, with hendrix, is how out of synch he was with his own notional community)

second: it should be obvious enough not to have to say, but black folk just like white folk also read books and comics — hendrix DEVOURED pulp sf — and watch movies and playfully adapt and adopt same; the “same well” theory assumes a weird pseudo-sociological colour-bar* in what the roots of black pop might be, which simply makes NO SENSE ANY MORE — certainly not after 25-odd years of rap, and how it
absorbs and reuses ALL available cultural input; let alone how g.clinton and cohorts whirl through pop-cultural material from outside the sociologically “proper” realm (that thread cites clinton on hippy conspiracy theory, but but his buddy bootsy was clicking directly into kids TV as HIS lyrical framework)

three: if we’re tryin to explore why hendrix is EXCITING and LIBERATING then FUN and IMAGINATION are our best maps — besides the song is FULL of blatant science-fiction images, language which is plainly NOT pro forma blues hand-me-down (tho i’d accept a counter-argument that the “essence” of “blues” means nothing if it doesn’t mean this formal and thematic adaptibility)**

*this possibly had a certain truth to it when yr discussin delta blues in the 30s — rural music from a VERY isolated and impoverished region — but is just NONSENSE when it comes to black urban life from the 20s onwards; and even then, the earliest blues-as-blues were URBAN and WRITTEN, and full of references to fashions and movies and stuff in the general air, inc. non-black stuff, before percolating back out INTO country areas. yet STILL there’s a habit of assuming that black pop folks are merely somehow passively unable to do anything except “tap into the available folk consciousness”

**anyway what i think is more likely the point is that the r&b he learnt on the backing-musician circuit was as much something he could dip into and adapt as the superhero comix he was readin while he was on that circuit — they weren’t in a “hierarchy of acceptable influence” for him, so they REALLY REALLY shouldnt be for us

i’ll have to check if charlie shaar murray talks much about this in his hendrix biog — he knows LOTS abt marvel etc and pulp sf AND abt hendrix and blues — but i don’t recall him expanding on this so much

(and i don’t know enough abt marvel to pinpoint any exact crossovers)

Excellent UK comix artist Brendan McCarthy, who illustrated the Hendrix bio for short-lived mag Revolver, had a kind of psychedelic Jack Kirby style going on (Ward F and Martin will know more of this I suspect) (and not to say Jack K couldn’t do psychedelia himself)

The opening lines of Voodoo Chile are very superhero, of course.

Of course in pop vs rock terms (the albums vs singles narrative a lot of the comments box massive have touched on) this is indeed a visitation from a parallel world, an intersection of several planes (if you want a comics image I’m reminded of the 90s Alan Moore Marvel pastiche where a character called the Hypernaut fights a 4-dimensional beast, and can only perceive 3-D slices of its inconceivable bodymass) (I can’t remember who the Hypernaut is meant to be a parody of!)

the last phrase of “(slight return)” (=”if i don’t meet you no more in this world, i’ll meet you on the next one, and DON’T BE LATE”) — which was a gift to the marketing department obv in ref this release (the hero’s farewell message to the living) isn’t at ALL about the “greatest adventure of all” ©p.pan)… he didn’t know he was going to die young and he didn’t plan to either — “world” means what it means to ANY SF/comics fan — viz planet, or parallel world, or neighbouring plane of the multiverse; and the song’s an apology for intrusion here on our world/in her life (from someone creeping sadly away while his lover sleeps)

“voodoo chile” is a VERY marvel topic, surely? viz: yes JH has these awesome superpowers (cf guitarplayin), but at the same time (cf delivery and manner) he is a shy and vulnerable soft-spoken man, cut off by circs (inc.talent) from all that surround him (not just his uk compadres but the place and people he came from also) — the song is abt the tension between this sudden vast scale of unleashed ability in ONE (technical) sphere vs still feelin all diffident child-like hurt within, far from home and very lonely

anyway the way his guitar paints always reminds me of the way marvel artists visually depict the clash of elemental powers — lines and pop-art swirls and pulsing clouds of pan-coloured energy as backdrop to battlin superheroes vs s’villains — this achieved, his drop into gentle half-whispered melancholy as the antagonist front central was at the time really startling: “i am the space-alien cut off from all like me — i can do things you only dream of BUT ME, I STILL MISS JUST BEING ORDINARY ME NOW AND THEN”

(also i never feel it as histrionic — even at force it feels gentle and relaxed to me — unlike many of his successor show-offs he doesn’t really seem to be testing the limits of his powers as the carnival spectacle; it’s more like something he doesn’t quite know how to turn off)

later on this kind of pop culture would flood into black music — spaghetti westerns and kung fu into reggae; comix and the godfather into rap — but as a direct and overt adopting of a pop-pulp vernacular it seems pretty original (that said, some of the earlier blues figures WERE fascinated by the uncanny and by electricity as a power, but i’d REALLY hesitate to build this similarity up into an “influence”) (and not just bcz there’s no such thing as influence hurrah)

I’d have given this 4 or 5, I think.