Crossroads

By 1968 I had learned some folk guitar from friends. After hearing the Butterfield Blues Band I angled off towards learning to play blues guitar. I found I was more attracted to the more modern styles of Clapton, Mick Taylor and Michael Bloomfield rather than the root of blues guitar like Hooker, Albert King and Freddie King. I think it was the combination of the traditional funk combined with the modern power of new young players.
I was solid into this area when a friend urged me to go see Jimi Hendrix. I brushed him off saying with disdain that Hendrix was interesting but I was a bluesman. He persisted enough so that we finally went.
It was a huge auditorium and all I expected was to be amused and entertained. Jimi opened with Foxy Lady and Purple Haze if my memory serves me well. It was more interesting than I thought but I was still skeptical.
Then, after a slight pause, Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding Jimi’s extraordinary sidemen, broke into a moderate blues shuffle, smooth and sexy. My attention picked up a bit. I knew this music. From out of the sky came the first twelve notes of Red House. I will never forget those notes. I felt as if the hand of the great blues god, Johnson, had reached out of the sky and through the roof of the arena and slapped me across the face. In those first few notes my whole understanding of the blues in particular and music in general had changed forever. It was as if I was blind and then I could see.
Jimi played on. His patterns slowly grew more complex, more sinuous. Those notes slid around you like a zoot-suited hustler sneaking around you neighborhood at night, like a midnight rambler, like a back door man. Somehow the power built even higher, farther already than anybody I had ever heard. Pentatonic arpeggios rushed forwards. It was thrilling. It was frightening. Like standing and facing the 409 hurtling full speed down the tracks in the middle of the night four feet away from your face. You wanted to pull away and run but you were mesmerized, fascinated. You legs wouldn’t move.
“There’s a red house over yonder, that’s where my baby lives”.
He did things, technically, that I couldn’t believe I had heard. He slid a note up and then sustained it as an undulating tone so loud that you thought you would lose your mind. Then, at the same time, he picked other notes to accompany it as if there were two players. At another point he sang along with his own notes. A terrific effect that many guitar players can do but then he played the same line and sang harmony to the notes on his guitar. Unbelievable. I was stunned.
He took it higher: Beethoven meets B. B. King meets Timothy Leary. Standing in the background was Robert Johnson and Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis and John Lee Hooker. He took me leagues beyond where I had been before. Somewhere between a New Orleans back alley and the methane seas of Jupiter. Slinky little runs and five hundred pound notes falling like bombs. I couldn’t move. I had been slammed into the back of my seat like I was in one of those test rocket slides from the sixties, smashed by G-force and wind pressure.
When it was over, as we filed out, my friend asked me what I thought. I couldn’t speak. I was trying to process this new epiphany and it was going to take awhile. For days afterward I stared at my guitar standing in the corner sneering at me, but could not play. Finally I began to practice. I had to join this brotherhood even if, like a humbled monk, I spend the rest of my life at the foot of the mountain.