He was good, but I don't get the deification. You talk about improvisation, imagination, songwriting, live performances, recording techniques yet fail to realize that in all these areas Frank Zappa and Eddie Van Halen (and many others) did all of this and pioneered more than Jimi ever did. Even now people talk about recording the Van Halen way, or trying to replicate Eddy's "Brown sound" (the Frankenstein guitar that put a humbucker in a strat, the Floyd Rose bridge, the modded Marshall JCM 500s and later the Peavy 5150, the EBMM guitar, the Peavey Wolfgang guitar, etc). Or in areas of improvisation think about Zappa's skills, he recorded 3 separate albums live, unedited, completely improvised and they were released and were hits (You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore 1, 2 and 3). Or from a songwriting standpoint, Zappa wrote rock, pop, rap, metal, classical, avante guard, he was quite possibly the most versatile musician ever ... but he like Eddie didn't die young.
Buzz Feiten, the man who came up with the Buzz Feiten Tuning System for guitar, because as we all know the tuning system for guitar based upon Pythagoras's theory works, but not completely across the range of a stringed/fretted instrument where the scale length diminishes as you go down. It works for piano when introduced for piano Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier to prove that a piano could be in tune across it's entire range. Buzz did the same for guitars, he's alive now, he's also one of the most in demand session players in the world playing literally on thousands of albums (if you've listened to the radio you have heard him). Yet I'm sure you and maybe most here have never heard of him, but if you want to talk about influence, him being the person who made guitars intonate across the whole fretboard is way more influential in itself than Jimi could ever be.
I get that people love Jimi, but it's as a result of his life and how he lived it mostly I think. As I said I can name scads of guitarists who are better, who made more of an impact on the industry but are not big names because they don't have that crazy life story.
sorry for the slight delay in replying, i started a reply yesterday and was getting really into it when i had a fuse box power cut when the washing machine ended and i lost the post, so here is another version of the same kind thing(slight return).
Ok, let's forget the pioneering aspect, you have the lowdown on inventions I do not have the ken on, I of course defer to your knowledge there, *but* on one aspect...I think Hendrix probably had just as much influence on every generation of guitarists as any, in as much as getting young kids excited by the possibilities of the instrument, picking one up in the first place and going nuts with it.
Eddie Van Halen would have been inspired by Jimi, no doubt, all those guys in their bedrooms would have watched Woodstock and Monteray(sic) and been blown away by his improv, showmanship and sheer vitality.
Now, as for his 'deification', man, it is not because he died young, he was a deity while he was alive, and that is down to the guy's power of imagination and the fact he played straight from the heart.
His songs are held in the same regard as the Beatles, Stones, Doors...all the heavy hitters of the mid to late 60s that blasted rock into the creative strastosphere that has enabled it to survive to this day.
See, Hendrix's 'deification' does not surprise me because the guy played straight from the heart and gut, every time, not in a self concious way like Zappa might, where every move he makes seems like a very clinical artistic approach. I don't know much of his stuff at all, but that is what it has always struck me as when i have heard it.
People respond to someone like that, their imagination and energy are infectious. And Hendrix had a very powerful imagination, he was very prolific, and gave it 100% every time onstage.
There was a reason that *one* live performance at the Monteray Pop Festival took him from being unknown in the states to being an overnight sensation, and why Pete Townsend of the who refused to go on stage after him(before he actaully played his set).
His life was not 'crazy', I have read that massive tome on his life 'Electric Gypsy', and for the most part it deals with him constantly touring, and when he is not touring he is trying to get it together with other musicians and recording, that's why there are craploads of posthumous albums, because he wrote and recorded stacks of stuff, all the time.
Other than that the craziest stuff it went into was with his over-controlling shady manger, Mike Jefferies, who was affiliated with the Mafia, the controversies surroiunding that and his death, with many vying for control of the estate.
Yeah, he took a lot of drugs, but his life was not crazy like Morrison's, Joplin's, Brian Jones' or Syd Barrett's, he was a worker, when he was stoned he was in the studio.
and to put it simply, when you watch that guy playing guitar onstage in all that old footage, man, no-one ever made playing the guitar look like so much fun, while twisting the most unexpected noises out of it, you can pick apart the technical aspects, and say, 'that tuning is not right' or whatever, but to us laymen, it just sounds damn good, a bit of discord? maybe he liked that, maybe didn't care because he was caught up in the energy and moment.
He's deified because he was cool as ! lol
i am listening to him right now actually, his 3 studio albums are superb, a helluva lot of creativity in there, the songs are all very different, and every single thing going on in the record serves the song, he was one of the great artists of the late 60s when rock exploded and cemented it's place in culture, and he helped that, it is no wonder he is deified, his songs are still like a breath of fresh air when they come on the radio, they don't sound dated, unlike most rock songs, they sound timeless.
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, meaning "martial" or "military" and 術 (shù), which translates into "discipline", "skill" or "method."
