Jimi Hendrix vs. Stevie Ray Vaughan

sunwaiter

New member
i don't understand this "underrated / overrated" thing as well as is hould, i guess. i was not born at the time, but i believe and it seems obvious that jimi was not the only one who could do new, beautiful and interesting things. he wasn't the greatest technician on the instrument either, but as i was trying to say, this has nothing to do with music, as long as it is appreciated. i've always been impressed by jimi's tricks, but what i really love about his playing is the intense involvement, the concentration he gave to obtain magnificent sounds, out of simple blues composition.

stevie ray vaughan was of course a big jimi hendrix fan and had his own guitarist identity, though tainted with a very americna culture (stetson included!)

jimi hendrix - born under a bad sign
 

John Watt

Member
Jimi was not a blues musician. He, The Jimi Hendrix Experience while he was alive, never released a 12 bar blues. Most posthumous albums like that were fakes. He was a great technician. He just sounded "slow" because he could play six strings all the time faster than most others could single notes. Jimi said the blues were behind everything he played. If it didn't have that blues feel, he wasn't interested. All the recent global tributes for Mitch Mitchell, his Experienced drummer, and his accolades as a top three British drummer, comparing him to Elvin Jones, should steer you correctly. Jimi as blues is "The Band of Gypsys", the only live album he put out to get out of a record contract. Playing single note riffs as original songs, singing with Buddy Miles, riffing over "repetitious" bass lines, is as blues as Jimi got, and most reviews thought he played like a long sax or jazz line. This did define a new, laid back "funk" style. Jimi already invested heavily in Electric Ladyland. He said he was looking for Electric Church. Someone from England was smart enough to take Leo Fender's other invention, the electric violin, and start The Electric Light Orchestra. I'm going to have to visit the Hendrix estate and municipal sponsored Jimi Hendrix park, next to the museum, the house he lived in and the family cemetery and put my feet on new Jimi Hendrix ground. Jimi Hendrix "The night I was born the moon turned a fiery red, I'm a voodoo chile, lord knows, I'm a voodoo chile". Belly Button Window "I was up there inda womb, anda lookin' all around" with all those gurgling, chuckling wah-wah guitar sounds. Hendrix was a master musician, technician and showman. The recording studio he build in 60's New York is still successful. And those three albums are still out there, waiting... for you to come around... not to take you higher, but to make your wider. Live in Toronto: "There's a whole lot of people here that need to come on down".
 

sunwaiter

New member
John Watt*

To me Jimi symbolizes the blues, or maybe just the idea i have of the blues, and he does it in the same way John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Mcgriff, Jimmy Smith, Freddie King or Howlin' Wolf do ( i know... they did, and don't anymore since they're buried six feet deep. uhh, is Jimmy Smith dead?). It is a cliché anyway, because i really don't care about étiquettes.

It is true that Jimi, even before pairing with Buddy, had this extremely funky approach to what he played. Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding did a wonderful job on building superfunky grooves. Here i'm thinking about one tune in particular: "little miss lover", from "axis...". The intro break is awesome, and i wonder if anyone has ever used it for a hip-hop song. Jimi's use of wah-wah is nice, you can feel how much he gets his kick out of this.

Man, i wish i had it in my walkman right at the moment i get out of my working place.
 

John Watt

Member
The Jimmy McGriff and Jimmy Smith I think of were hard-core B3 players. Swingy and bluesy. Playing with The Isley Brothers, The Ike Turner Review and Little Richard, to name a few, might have been Hendrix's last "funk" style bands. He went beyond that. I don't think Noel Redding had a funk bone in his fingers. If you're referring to Little Miss Strange, that was a Noel Redding song. It's the band singing vocal parts instead of lead lines that makes il strange, pour moi. If you want to hear the most purely revealing Hendrix wah-wah, please try "Belly Button Window", a post-humous release. Jimi imagines being in the womb, looking out and wondering if he has to come out into this world. It's an unfinished song with a lazy and simple three chord rhythm pattern, probably a bed track or added by posthumous producers. I might have forgotten this song if I wasn't reminded of it by a link after looking at bass-cellos on Ned Steinberger dot com, where he uses this example as the epitome of wah use, citing Hendrix as a master. Instead of this bassist's vanity piece, can I recommend for your headphone pleasure, "House Burning Down" off Electric Ladyland.

One night, invited by the club owner, a landlord of friends in my home town, I went to St. Catharines with my guitar and amp to help start Sunday night jams at The Hideaway. I was having a good time hanging out, but when it came time to be part of what could happen onstage I was confronted with a D.J. and friends who were half my age and a little hostile about my big brown box on wheels onstage. It was a Redmere Soloist, a barely legal custom creation from Scotland and England, costing $2,240 cash in '77, combining stage and studio electronics. It had three pre-amps, Marshall, Fender and Vox, with a Marshall transformer with interior effects synchronized, flanging, chorus, etc, with a three spring Hammond reverb, all in a thin nine-ply birch cabinet. I had my "home-made" Strat. Not only catching lip offstage, I was ignored by the sound crew spreading mikes. So I just turned it all on, set it all up, and before anyone else turned on, started playing the intro to "House Burning Down", an awefull searing and burning and soaring scream of ghetto pain honouring Martin Luther King and the cities in flames that summer in America. More than "The Star Spanged Banner" at Woodstock, during Hendrix's time, available only through a recording studio playing with identical tapes manually. Everyone around me stopped. I could tell, but I had to concentrate, because there are note grabs and bends that are almost superhuman, but a little easier for me with a real left-handed guitar.
Later that night, with the party crowd, invited to the home of Ralph the Cable Guy, one of the first self-produced show hosts in Ontario, no-one said how did you do that. I was given the Hendrix treatment. Timeless. The next Sunday, everyone was surprised at the professional musicians asking for stage time, having to limit guests who didn't want to jam to one or two songs. Over twenty years later, talking to my landlord friend, now renting to a pizzeria I made signs for, they said "John, if you're moving to Welland you can have one of our apartments free for a month or two".
Jimi! Jimi! I'm still trying to hear all of you!
 
Last edited:

sunwaiter

New member
the song i was refering to is entitled "little miss lover". i know "belly button window very well", this song makes me feel good, with a strange sensation of comfort. and whoever is on bass, the music moves me.

your bass-cellos thing makes me think of ramsey lewis ans the guy who recorded with him "sun godess" and "funky serenity", for example. the double-bass goes through a wah wah device and i love this sound. i will call this a "womby" sound.
 

John Watt

Member
into intet-at-tabe

Further up this thread, intet-at-tabe ends posting with The Carpenter's "Close to You", "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" and Paul Anka's "My Way". Firstly, Paul Anka didn't write "My Way". He just added English words to an old Italian folk song. The deal he got to make with Johnny Carson's talk show for that theme song, over $2,000 per show, is what musicians I know talk about, respectfully.
Secondly, I'm wondering about the inclusion of the other two songs, why intet-at-tabe associated them. They both start with what is an unusual treatment of a basic chord, AM, or for some here, A major. Imagine your AM triad, E, A and C#, on guitar, three notes in a row at the same fret. Take the A note up to B#, back to A and down to Ab, and return to A. That's AM to A9 to AM to AM7 back to AM. If you can remember the rhythm intro of either song, you basically have both.
I spent a lot of time sitting around gigs with other musicians, hitting notes and trying to guess, helping to get used to other sounds. But that's just pitching notes around for something to do. Being able to hear chord patterns to enable jamming tunes or carrying one song into another, spontaneously, is a special talent that only working with music develops. Of course, talent shines through, and I think intet-at-tabe has just shown hers, even if subconsciously.
"Why do birds, suddenly appear, every time, you are near, just like me, they long to be, close to you". I wasn't a Carpenter's fan, but our female singer Tracy Hoare (real name) wanted to do a Bette Midler song, "Superstar", that turned out to be written by The Carpenters. Learning the exact piano Bette used, only on guitar, helped keep Tracy happy and showed off my new acoustic tones from my first pre-amp volume and main volume Marshall 100 watt head, ordered fresh from the factory as soon as I heard about the new pre-amp volume and mains. $775 up front in '72?
Recently, being outside all day on a long distance bike-hike, when finches swarmed beside me in a shrub, one landing on my shoulders, flitting around, is a far happier and stronger memory. They were quiet when I first entered their domain, a quiet pond I happened upon. I gave them a few cheeps like my brother's finches, and that set them off. Beautiful! Almost as wonderful as that huge old gull beside Lake Erie, way out on the shore, that let me handle it to remove a lure caught in it's bill and foot webbing. Sometimes singing in a foreign tongue can create real fusion. Allahu Akbar. God is Great.
 

Logman

New member
Lest we forget the great Frank Marino is also a very great guitar player and Hendrix influenced. A side note. JH was in the Army, not the Air Force. He was a paratrooper and injured his knee during a night jump. Honorable Discharge and at first supported the war in Vietnam. Check out Frank Marino and his early band Mahogony Rush.
 

John Watt

Member
Logman! You're saying check out Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush from the late 60's. And you're from California? How'd you hear of him? Frank made a splash touring back then, but I haven't heard anything new.
He was originally from Quebec and I saw Mahogany Rush at the Welland Fair as a concert act. Playing with a Marshall stack and effects, he used a Gibson S.G. and wore faded jeans and a t-shirt. He was okay in a raunchy hard rock kind of way, I liked him, but then I heard his album. He wrote a song about Jimi, now passed away, saying he would sing and play for him, amongst other less than Hendrixian sentiments. This spooked me a bit, not as a Hendrix wannabe, but as a musician who saw Jimi everywhere on the musical horizon and heard his albums as innovative and deeply mastered. Even scanners today, taking beat per minute and notes per frame counts can administer a new appreciation of Jimi Hendrix by cataloging, if you can, the amount of stereo juxtapositions he used, still surpassing anything since.
All Jimi asked of you was the price of stereo headphones and your listening attention.
 
Last edited:

John Watt

Member
This thread hurts. I guess no-one read my Hendrix postings here, when I saw him in Toronto, quitting high school to get a steel factory job, buying a '64 Strat (in '69) and ordering a Marshall from England, with all the effects I could find. Later, I was a music columnist and reporter, so it's well edited and as concise as music lets me be. Yeah, it hurts.

I'll say it again. Hendrix was not about drugs. A Canadian judge agreed. He had an incredible amount of musical, studio and broadcast components onstage to duplicate album sounds, with roadies watching him, moving big home-made knobs for the double miked everything, so that the sound was stereo side to side, front to back, over your head, gently swirling around, or like a mild hurricane. You can only get the musical insinuations, trailings, the background chatter, the bass tones with chords and lead, by using your fingers and all six strings. Sure, the artificial fret boost and enhanced harmonics are electronic, making softer transitional sounds possible, what critics described as "Jimi having a conversation with himself" or "Jimi's guitar talking back to him", only 'cause no-one could flow with him, or erupt as magnificently. His example has inspired me to be a musician and even invent a patentable new semi-solid-body redefinition of Strats. Pictures as proof, with the love of Mr. Magle's domain making me reveal them here first as an international debut, are still in the gallery. A real Hendrix fan would be looking and commenting on the new and untried. I haven't had one response yet. Free for the world like my ancestors inventions. It hurts again.

Jimi was a well established and feared presence onstage as a chitlin beginner. You can only admire his resolve for maintaining his incredible musical ear while learning the business. The fact he went from "obscurity" to be an international pop star overnight only proves how prepared and methodical he was. Have you ever listened to Electric Ladyland on headphones in the dark? That's Jimi there for you. Please see my concert review in concert reviews.

You wanna get into it with someone who played, and sang, Hendrix, when Hendrix was alive? Someone who was able to grab the Star Spangled Banner in one afternoon, in 1970? Talking about him with everyone who ever saw or played or recorded or produced with him? Ask Sting, if you need a more intelligent reply.

And I don't care what anyone just says about Jimi, because we are hearing his hand-made phasing and flanging and echoing and shades of stereo mixing all around us as modern studio production values, now just digital samples. His sound lives on everywhere. If someone can post the Johnny Carson show Jimi was on, to hear the comments of Johnny and his Hollywood studio players, you might hear what interested Miles Davis.

I think Jimi would be getting into some tabla right now, after the joyful and exhuberant success of Slumdog Millionaire, and the American arrival of the influence of that happy culture, not all crack and coke and meth addled, pushing buttons to make beats and hammering rock drums. Why tabla? Because it would be a gift from musicians from India, coming to America, wanting to meet Jimi Hendrix. Belly Button Window could use a few tabla thrum slides. Ba-do-ba do-ba, ba-do-ba do-ba,
doimp-doimp!

Please, I am more than willing to be an earthly source of Hendix technique, not worship. Standardization is next to idolization. Cherishing is next to vanity. Hendrix worked up one universal musical sweat for all of us. He was The Axis: Bold as Love, and he knew it. His reputation is only going to grow as long as this wattage flows.
And I do say this as a descendant of Doctor James Watt, down from the Highlands, now living across overseaslowlands.
You let me get my plug in, I'll show you how to wire the wire.
 

John Watt

Member
Yeah, I wish I had a dollar for every hour I spent listening to Jimi at night in high school.
But let me clarify something.
I'm always going on about listening on headphones, and I see them all around now.
In 1968 I bought Koss Lightweight Studio Headphones, what a local recording studio recommended.
I had to order them and go to Hamilton to get them.
As recording headphones, they were made to block exterior noise as much as pumping it straight in,
so that made it easier to float away in one of Jimi's musical atmospheres.

I could never ride my bicycle and use headphones, ear buds, whatever,
and that's not just because I'd want to hear everything around me outside.
I just know I'd be riding along some day, getting into some guitar playing,
and I'd be jamming along in my mind... gripping the handlebars like I'm soloing,
and turn myself into the path of a school bus.

Probably a charter bus of inner city youth going to Jimi Hendrix Park.
 

methodistgirl

New member
Believe it or not, Jimi Hendrix was influenced by Churk Berry's
style of playing during the 50s. Stevie Ray Vaughn was influenced
by Jimi Hendrix's. There are not many left who are alive except
Eric Clapton, David Gilmore, Steve Vei, and Joe Satriani.
judy tooley
 

John Watt

Member
I ;gotta say, just today I was at Brock University,
and a young man was sitting playing acoustic in the courtyard,
and I got asked to do a song.
I played and sang "Little Wing", Jimi style, as best I could, cold,
and got a lot of nice reactions, even from female students.

I'm still alive.
 

John Watt

Member
Bein'alive! That's what keeps me happy as a Hendrix fan. If it was just me looking at lots of old stuff, what I gave away a long time ago,
I'd just be an old Hendrix freak.
But everyone in music seems to get off on Jimi, the constant artistic renewals of his artwork and image,
even when he was alive everyone who was putting out Hendrix stuff looked like they were having fun with it,
everything from t-shirts and books to "Jimi's Package" by Gibson Guitars.

So it's still nice and more than psychedelic now, being into Jimi.
As a matter of fact, Jimi's musical presence is still so strong,
his psychedelic is already supporting the online psychotic,
and for sure, Jimi would B-rate the haters, and sing about it too.
 

John Watt

Member
Thanks for the encouragement, white knight. At least we're here to get into it.
It's sad that this thread is about two guitarists who died too young.
When Jimi was alive I was in a long, long shadow of sound and sights.
Now there isn't anyone looming over me musically, and it's a quieter and emptier life.
 
Top