The Day I Played Through Jimi Hendrix Guitar Amp
A tale of a tour in Montana, circa 1996
This one from the archives, never published.
September- Bozeman, Montana in a dark, dungeon-like maze of rooms called the Zebra Cocktail Lounge.
The smell of stale beer brings back a hello from every bar I ever played in. I wonder why I make part of my living in stinking dungeons where people come to forget their lives, where I can judge my performance on how much beer is spilled, that the more the place stinks by the end of the night, the better the chances we'll be hired back.
I've just finished a three hour conversation in the car with the drummer, who was an NCAA championship downhill ski racer. He described stupefying wipeouts going 90 mph down a mountain, disappearing into a pure rush of adrenaline, tales of fighting his fear, of transcendent ecstasy as he sailed 200 ft. through the air in 2 seconds over a bump that was no more than three feet high. He told me he could kick a soccer ball 70 yards, throw an 80 mph fastball, or plant a snowball in the middle of someone’s forehead at 100 paces. He was as mystified as everyone else why he’d been born into a near-perfect physical form.
As usual I can't wait to play, but the performance that night sucks all the love out of me. The promoter has projected a crowd of at least 200 people, and 20 show. Those there aren't there. Above us is a bar that is hosting a metal band, and in the quieter part of our set you can hear strains of Judas Priest and Black Sabbath slamming down from above. A pile of oversized University of Montana boys come in for last call, hollering, wrestling, holding drinks up like trophies, talking nasty to the few remaining girls in the place, which appears to please the girls.
The next day I wake up still smelling the cigarette smoke from the night before. I let the rest of the band head to Billings and I take the second car and drive out to see the headwaters of the Missouri River.
Long, rolling plains under a cerulean blue sky, the boundless land shining gold, soft green, crimson, and misty gray. I approach the headwaters, at the confluence of the Jefferson and Madison rivers, the place where Lewis and Clark had to pack up shop and search for horses, and pull my car up right beside the water. I walk along the bank, entranced by the sunlight playing the waves. The dark blue waters of the two rivers slide inside of each other, create a braid, like two beings merging as one, and I can feel that unity, that pure energy moving through me, as if I am the water. I've been told that warring Native American tribes used this spot as a place to make peace, where treaties were made, battle never allowed.
Spirit voices whispering in the cool September breeze. The Absaroka mountains frame the sky. The beauty of the earth is an inconceivable gift. No words of gratitude suffice. Perhaps this is why the mystics claim that tears are the only authentic response to the divine.
And then I'm laughing, thinking of where I was last night. The lattice of our lives is built upon contradiction and paradox. No truth attracts us if it appears too clear.
I am due to meet the rest of the band that evening for a recording session in Billings. As I drive off I search for that place inside that can be traveled to for peace, a breath away, yet often as inaccessible as the stars. I think about Clay, the drummer, more about what he told me on the long drive to Bozeman. He was brought up in an extremely wealthy East Coast family, with all the apparent opportunity and privilege in the world, yet his parents emotionally tortured him his whole life, berating him for wanting to be a musician and not a senator or a lawyer, isolating, punishing, teasing him. They eventually disowned him, despite his attempts at peacemaking over the years, refusing to visit or even acknowledge his sons, their own grand-children.
Peace- it's like the current in the water- you thrust your hand in, but you just catch drops, nothing whole.
I arrive in Billings at dinner time and the bassist fills me in on our recording session that night. More paradox. A black figure skater wants us to remake a Captain and Tenille song called Love Will Keep Us Together so she can perform her skating routine to it. She has a CD by a teenage white girl I've never heard of that serves as an example of how she wants it to sound. I laugh in disbelief. A black woman, who's a virtuoso in a white-dominated sport, wants us to redo the most dumb, Caucasian song imaginable, in a modern funk/rap/R&B style exemplified by a blonde vixen who looks as funky as Anita Bryant. It's amazing what some people will pay you to do.
When we get to the studio we're greeted by a curious looking fellow named Dave Weyer, who turns out to be the engineer. He looks like he's done more farming than engineering. He's thin as a cornstalk, moves and speaks slowly, and leaves the impression that he has no particular need to be here, or anywhere else. I mark him as an eccentric rube— but
I begin to notice the way his fingers jump around the recording console. He's good at what he does. His eyes are peculiarly wide, as if permanently propped open in surprise. He has a detached half-smile on his face that seems to say, "I've seen it and I could care less."
The session is as surreal as you might expect. We're trying to be professionals, but the goofiness of the Captain and Tenille song brings out the worst in us. The keyboardist keeps making faces as he plays, cracking me up, staring at his watch and sighing in between takes, and by about midnight we're making up new lyrics to the tune that are about as grown up as Mad Libs.
It comes time for me to add a guitar solo. I've been plugging directly into the board for the rhythm tracks, but I need different tone for the lead. I survey a cluster of amps Dave, the engineer, has in an adjoining room. One of them looks particularly unusual, as if it were homemade. I ask Dave about the amp, and he casually tells me that he built the thing for Jimi Hendrix in 1969, and that it had been used on Jimi's last recording Cry of Love. Describing this with utter nonchalance Dave barely has a pulse. I start busting out of my skin.
It turns out that this Montana "nobody" happens to have been Jimi's electronics tech, the guy who rewired wah-wahs, fuzz faces, guitars, and amps for the greatest electric guitarist who ever lived. All of a sudden I'm in the room with a genius, not a rube, and my estimation of my own powers of perception slip even more. I plug into the amp, and the tone that comes out practically makes me weep. For half my life I've wanted to be Jimi Hendrix, and by god, the sound from that amp is as close to Jimi's tone on Ezy Rider, or Freedom, or Drifting, as anyone could get. I play my solo in one take, the notes pouring from my fingers. To have that much fun on a Captain and Tenille song— it strains all sense of the limits of the physical universe.
I stand around afterwards talking with Dave, and he remains as casual as he can be. He tells me about helping to mold the now classic sounds of the late 60's for Neil Young, Pete Townsend, and Jimi. "Oh", he says, in a quiet, gentle drawl, "I guess I could have capitalized on it all, and made some real money, but I don't know why... I just never did." He pauses, and I pump him for more details. "Well, in the beginning it was pretty fun... But when the acid we were all taking turned to cocaine, everybody seemed to get a little greedy. I just didn't want to be part of it. I left LA in '73 and came back home to Billings..." There was no regret.
I walk away in a state of grace. In little more than 24 hours I've gone from pointless blues shuffles in a Bozeman beer dungeon, to the liquid heart of the earth, to a ridiculous musical triviality in a trailer park, to the guitar tone of the gods. I lay on the bed of my motel room with no need to sleep.
Joel Harrison 1996
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