http://www.box.com/s/b7qc7ac8fvbb1f55018o
For your funkier-than-usual listening pleasure, today's hit rekkid is a version of Jimi Hendrix' "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)" off the sprawling "Electric Ladyland" from 1968. It's precisely the kind of tune that I can't create or execute on my own--- the psychedelic appointments welded on top of the classic blues structure, the progressively speeding (in this version anyway) drum-conga-bass-organ groove, the dynamics.... and especially the presence of actual guitar playing,
Lemme tell you one thing that I am not: a guitar player. Yeah, you'd never know by the number of gitboxes that I own, and the amount of time I spend trying to play them. Sure, I can coax some passable noises out of them but doing so does not make me a player, the same way that being able to exchange some basic information doesn't make me a Spanish speaker or writing and playing a bunch of songs make me much of a musician. It's what my friend and pathology mentor Rich Jakowski refers to, in a slightly different context, as the "difference between a lightning bug and lightning".
Rich and I also discuss the world in terms of the difference between chimpanzee people and orangutan people. In the music world, us shrieking, easily distracted poop-hurling chimps are just grateful to have more measured primates to steer us right every now and again. Sometimes, I suppose, that orangutan is my buddy John Stackpole, with a guitar.
Voodoo Chile (Slight Return):
Wow...thanks for the compliment. But you know having somebody to play off who is a great player too helps and that my friend is you.
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