So looked down upon by the black community back in the late 60's...I was watching this interview that he did back in the 60's on you-tube...and I scrolled down to the comments...and everyone was saying that he didnt get enough respect back in the day when it came to the black community...?

Heres the interview:

http://www.youtube.com/wa...YlWyBm7sXY

The answer is simple and this not only falls apon Jimi many blacks that r fame

they beileve if it aint gospel is devils music ...not to mention he dealings with drugs

BluHaze said:

But Motown was out back then...and that wasnt considered to be devils music, not to mention Little Richard, and Chuck Berry.

In the 60s, the accepted/expected look for a Black male artist...



...was the above.



Not this...



...And as i've heard it said, "Looking like some circus clown" (check the Are You Experienced cover)


And they certainly didn't expect to hear...

Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things they don't seem the same
Actin' funny and I don't know why
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky

...lyrically


Nor the sounds emanating from his guitar...



...sonically.


Now I had some Black friends that were down, but most weren't.
The way they saw it (the ones that weren't), he was playing "that white boy music"


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

Thanks T.A !

theAudience said:

That's interesting that already, in the mid 60s... rock and roll was being considered white music. Didn't Clapton, the stones etc... give credit to the black artists that started it all?

coolcat said:

they did.
they gave credit to black blues by whitening it into rock and roll.
basically.

i always thought the question of Jimi not being the black community's hero was that he mingled with the white establishment more than, say, Sly Stone, George Clinton, or indeed James Brown.
Jimi never had a song like "Say It Loud (I'm Black And I'm Proud)".
he finally formed Band Of Gypsys hoping to change it, but it was generally considered too late, too un-spontaneuous.
he wasn't 4 Real.

coolcat said:

But just like most Black folks didn't initially listen to Hendrix, they definitely didn't listen to Clapton or The Stones during that time period either.


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

riffraff said:

How was Band of Gypsys "unspontaneous"? Some of Jimi's best freeform playing came from this outfit. And how can it be said that he wasn't "4 real"? In what way was he less than real?

theAudience said:

Reminds me of Fayne Pidgeon's reaction when Jimi played her some Bob Dylan...She definitely wasn't feelin' that...

theAudience said:

I've never understood why hard rock/prominent guitar driven rock is considered "white". Most of the early white guitar heroes were biting heavily off of electric blues players, and as far back as the fifties blues and R&B guitarists were the first to use distortion and heavy riffing. Wasn't Buddy Guy pushing the envelope in terms of loudness, wildness and amplification before Cream OR Hendrix? granted Leonard Chess didn't want that stuff to be recorded and asked Buddy to kick him in the ass when Cream and Hendrix sold millions off it, but still, I've never heard anyone impugn Buddy's "blackness".

Besides there've been plenty of other black musicians since Hendrix who haven't been afraid to rock out. Funkadelic rocked about as hard as any of their white contemporaries (when they wanted to). Hell a non-soul fan coming from a hard rock background would probably be surprised at how hard Sly, the Isleys, even Otis Redding could rock. Then of course there's The Bad Brains one of the hardest rocking bands EVER who were the exact opposite of the stereotype of the genre they helped found (black rasta virtuosos in contrast to white atheist amateurs)....bah, I'm done ranting.
[Edited 4/11/07 23:04pm]
[Edited 4/11/07 23:04pm]
[Edited 4/11/07 23:05pm]

jacktheimprovident said:

That's because most Blacks had already dumped the Blues.
The Black Rock & Rollers (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc.) were the next to get dumped.

Keep in mind that i'm speaking in general terms and don't mean all Blacks.

I don't get it either. The Blues/Gospel/Jazz/Jump/R&R/R&B historic lineage should be obvious.


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431
[Edited 4/11/07 23:13pm]

Aud is right. The "Band Of Gypsys" documentary explains it the best. Black radio wouldn't play Jimi because it didn't fit their format style. And a lot of black folks at that time considered him a sellout and too wild.

I used to catch hell as a kid (from other black folks in the 80's) for listening to Jimi and wearing Jimi shirts. These were the same folks who loved Parliament but hated Funkadelic.. But once I started running into other brothers that were musicians that loved Jimi, all that went out the window.

Then by the late 80's and early 90's, Living Colour, Fishbone, Spyz, Bad Brains,
etc were out in the front and Jimi was getting his major props..and black folks (some older and some younger) were tuned into him.

theAudience said:

I think we need to view Hendrix in the context of his times, and those he grew up in. Maybe the music and image of people like Hendrix and George Clinton was part of what more 'traditional' blacks were trying to get away from. Remember, when Hendrix first exploded in Britain, he was often (offensively) nick-named 'The Wild Man of Borneo' and the like. His wild hair and music, though 'futuristic' to some whites (and blacks) may well have been considered 'regressive' from a traditional black viewpoint, reasserting ignorant white sterotypes of blacks as wild and untamed.

As the Audience showed, all the 'respectable' black performers of the '60s were clean and wore suits and kept the drugs out of the public eye - they were more 'tasteful' and 'wholesome'. They were all about integration in the MLK mould - well, excepting Malcolm X and up to King's murder anyway, which then radicalised a lot more blacks (and racist whites in opposition to them).

And a lot of the old black electric and acoustic blues players didn't like Hendrix because they didn't understand him (he was no Southerner for a start), he was too coarse and unkempt, his guitar was too loud with no clean, pure tone and he hung with far too many white boys to be 'real'. And he was too unsubtly sexual, with all his guitar thrusts and so on.

What these folks didn't get imo is that the likes of Jimi, Sly, Clinton and co were also about integration, but a more far-reaching kind of musical integration that the traditionalists on all sides just weren't ready for - including the possibility of sexual integration, one of the real taboos of society in the '50s at least, which was also the implicit 'threat' coming from Elvis being white and sounding black in the mid-'50s. Both Jimi and Elvis personified unbridled integration, beyond anyone's control, which scared ig'nant folks everywhere.

In short, Jimi had the wrong kind of 'blackness' at the wrong time. He was too 'black' for some and too 'white' for others.

Double post
[Edited 4/12/07 3:08am]

Very nice post, Miles!

theAudience said:

That sums it up NICELY.

Miles said:

Which blues players didn't like or get Hendrix? From what I understood B.b., Buddy and Albert King (I think) and perhaps some others all liked him and saw him as a peer.

theAudience said:

I don't need to add anything as it's been said already, I just love this shot of the ripped Marshall cabinets with jimi's shadow

God damn that was one cool ass cat!

jacktheimprovident said:

Of, course, there were a lot more blues players around in those days than just the Three Kings and Buddy. If you read around, there were certainly a few of the electric blues cats who had no time for Hendrix when he was on this earth, didn't think he was playing 'real blues' etc, but as soon as he stepped off, they said they were tight with him, jammed with him and taught him everything he knew (and of course, only Little Richard could say that with authority ). That's human nature. Happens everytime someone dies young and unexpectedly.

And as for the old time acoustic survivors like Bukka White, Son House and Junior Lockwood, Jimi might as well have come from the moons of Saturn as far as they were concerned.

If only Jimi had lived a little longer, to see the full blooming of Clinton's funk revolution. I was playing some good ole' Funkadelic today, and I'd bet Eddie Hazel's guitar pick that Jimi would have gotten up onstage and jammed with those guys had he lived. They were (part of) his vision given reality.

Miles said:

I'm just curious which bluesmen specifically expressed dislike for him or were dismissive of him. Buddy himself was pretty radical and probably got a lot of flack from blues purists, so obviously he wouldn't represent what the majority of blues players thought, and I'm not positive what other ones have spoken his praises or were friendly with him.

theAudience said:

lonelygurl, if Aud's post doesn't answer your question, then NOTHING will.

Tell that to the shit hoppers. They only like weak beats and fake bass (if any). I've heard harder drums and bass in country music.

Miles said:

The Isley Bros. could also claim to have worked with him... though I've heard he ended up getting booted from their camp because his style was too wild even for them.

According to Frankie "Kash" (P-Funk drummer), he and some of the other P-Funk members knew Jimi and did jam with him. No word if any of it was recorded. I could have defintely seen Jimi and Eddie trading off on "Hardcore Jollies". That would have been cool.

SPYZFAN1 said:

Can you imagine Jimi doing Maggotbrain!!?!?

because he wasn't singing R&B or what some considered to be "black" music at the time. they thought that he had sold out by playing "white" music.... which is but....

from the different documentaries that I have viewed, SOME african american music lovers weren't "musically" open. If it wasn't motown, or a sho-wop bee-bop type tune, it was like "what the hell is this"...???

do you really think if prince had come out before Jimi did, that his music would had been appreciated back then like it is now??? i don't think so.

BluHaze said:

-----
Jimi used drugs. I have never read anything about Jimi selling drugs. Black people did not get a chance to hear Jim's music since black stations played RnB music only. I think you guys need to remember this was the 1960's.