From The Ridiculous To The Sublime

Two more takes on Hey Joe. I posted an amazing "I'm not your trained monkey" version that Hendrix did for the BBC awhile ago, but here's more. First, a bunch of stupid looking white guys from 1967 nearly destroy a perfectly good song. David Crosby should have realized it wasn't his day when that thing crawled on top of his head to shit on his lip. Then, Marc Ribot sits in with uber-geeks Medeski, Martin & Wood and gets so far inside the same song that, somewhere in there, time ceases to exist.

Wild, Wild, Wild Thing

I found this while obsessing over all the versions of Hey Joe on YouTube. It's Hendrix at Monterey Pops covering Wild Thing while fucking his guitar. Then he lights it on fire, smashes it to bits, and throws it into the audience. Not recommended from a risk management point of view. I can never quite get over the extent to which Hendrix and his instrument merged into one. It's almost supernatural.

The Insanely Talented Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix saw music in color. Sadly, there isn't a ton of stuff on YouTube that does him justice. Most of it's badly filmed, has poor sound, or just isn't that great of a performance. This video from the BBC's Lulu Show in 1969 is the clear exception. Jimi and his band mates Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding begin with a stratospheric Voodoo Child, and when the nice British announcer asks for their big hit, Hey Joe, he obliges her by totally screwing with the intro and rocking it for sixty seconds or so before he abruptly quits and does a quick little Cream tribute instead. Amazing. A talent too big to be contained by TV.

Redding's face kind of reminds me of the post-reconstruction Michael Jackson. My four-year-old doesn't believe me when I say he's a boy, And watch for the moment when Jimi smiles over at Mitchell as he drops the tuning on his lowest string for a little extra growl. Magic.