cktimes.ca Archives for Classic Vinyl


Classic Vinyl

With John Gardiner

What classic vinyl is all about

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

I was doing a lot of driving during the 911 crisis of last fall. I was working quite a ways from home and doing a lot of driving, so I ended up listening to a lot of car radio. I'm a usual CBC listener, but ended up tuning into a classic rock station out of Detroit on several occasions because I was curious about how our American friends were dealing with the terrorism attack.
One day as I was driving along, radio tuned to WCSX, something came on that I'd not heard for many years – something that couldn't have been in the usual radio programming cycle – the one that usually turns me right off commercial radio. It was Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner – the Woodstock performance – over 30 years in the past.
As I listened to the screaming guitar, the enormous feedback and the amazing sounds created by Hendrix's guitar, I felt emotion rising in me. As the song played, the words to the American anthem ran through my mind and tears started to flow – it was like nothing had changed – it was like we were back in 1969 and fighting the War of Communism, instead of the War on Terror. The more things change, the more they really stay the same.
Thought I'd like to write a piece about James Marshall Hendrix this week – the ex GI who went on to be one of the planet's great guitar gods, still thought of today as something just a little bit special. Died prematurely several decades ago and would never have tolerated what the world has become.
When I found out that Jimi Hendrix had been a soldier before becoming a rock legend, I was somewhat surprised – surprised that the guy who epitomized the free and untameable spirit of the 1960' was at one time a part of the U.S. military.
I wasn't a huge Hendrix fan back in the '60's. I found his music was too weird even for me. Sitting and listening to an album side of feedback just didn't seem to make sense to me. I liked great playing and it took me a few years and a couple of lifetimes to really appreciate the greatness of the guy.
I liked some of his stuff, like Manic Depression, Foxey Lady, Fire and some others, but I just couldn't get into his LP stuff, which I found very unmelodic. Even at the time of Woodstock, I didn't appreciate it when he did the American anthem. It sounded like nothing more than a bunch of noise to me.
But, over the years, and as my musical tastes have grown and matured, I have come to truly appreciate Jimi Hendrix as perhaps the greatest symbol of what the decade of love was really all about – and that would be spontaneous creativity – the ability to reach beyond yourself to create something that has never, ever been there before. It is simply an amazing thing to bring something out of nothing and to have it mean something deep and profound.
Hendrix was an amazing technical guitar player and a terrific showman, but those were not his true gift – his real gift was his ability to challenge his listeners to reach beyond themselves and to try to make more of themselves. When he played the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock, it was something that needed to be said – and he said it the best way he knew, and a generation understood what he was on about.
The 1960's saw an amazing flowering of creativity, a torrent of unbelieveably raw creativity that the arts world is still trying to come to grips with today. If you go back and listen to the albums that were being recorded back pre-1980, and not just the homogenized greatest hits packages, but the real thing, you'll see what I mean.



John Gardiner is a 25-year-veteran of the community newspaper business, but he is also a prolific writer of moralistic short fiction he refers to as "emotional thoughtscapes" or "adult fables". Samples of his fiction can be found at:

He has also produced a noteworthy piece of humanist philosophy which can be found at: http://www.xs4all.nl/~aboiten/ad502.htm He welcomes comments on his work.