The Experience Hendrix Tour returns to Santa Cruz with new guitar slingers and past favorites
‘I’ve been imitated so well I’ve heard other people play my mistakes,” Jimi Hendrix once said.
But you’re not likely to hear many when the Experience Hendrix tour wheels into the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium on Oct. 14. The guitar legend’s songs will be showcased by an all-super-star line-up backed by Band Of Gypsies bassist Billy Cox and Stevie Ray Vaughn’s drummer Chris Layton.
“I’ve been on the road with this show for 13 years. There’s no particular thing I’d call a ‘high point’—it all feels like a high point,” Layton told GT. “I enjoy the diversity of the players. Each is a distinct artist in their own right with a different take on how they hear the music of Jimi Hendrix. There is a different mood and vibe in every segment.”
Other heavyweight talents on the tour include Buddy Guy, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Eric Johnson, Jonny Lang, Doyle Bramhall II, Zakk Wylde, Ana Popovic, Henri Brown, Mato Nanji and Rich Robinson.
What draws them together is the left-handed stone free voodoo chile who remains the most oft-cited influence on rock guitarists five decades after his passing. Hendrix was an original who infused the groove into groovy and made explicit in the electric guitar what had been implicit and untapped up until the Jimi Hendrix Experience hit the scene.
Hendrix was equally an earthbound journeyman bluesman and an open channel to the psychedelic cosmos, as is unabashedly evident from the first bar of almost any Hendrix tune. He redefined the technical and tonal vocabulary of electric guitar, magically harnessing elements that were previously considered noise—distortion and feedback—plus whammy bar, wah-wah and massive Marshall wattage, trailblazing a quantum leap in the sonic dimensions of musicality “beyond the outskirts of infinity.”
Hendrix had the mojo and it showed. His inspired phrases struck like lightening, leaving greats Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck quaking in their Beatle boots, spooked by a smoother hand. Beck described his reaction: “It was like a bomb blowing up in the right place. I went away thinking I’d better think of something else to do.”
Live, Hendrix was bold as love, slithering in a frenzied passionate spectacle: sexual, sensitive, savage and supernatural. He humped, caressed, flipped and gnawed the Stratocaster—Isabella, his foxy lady—into musical ecstasy, contorting and distorting a wild thing of ferocious grace, ultimately sacrificing her to the muse at Monterey Pop Festival in a fiery release.
Jimi’s fire was fueled by a deeper vision of the instrument and the power of music. He divined an “Electric Church” to accelerate spiritual maturity.
“Everything is electrified nowadays,” he told Dick Cavett in 1969. “The belief comes through electricity to the people, that’s why we play so loud, because it doesn’t actually hit through the eardrums. We are playing for our sound to go inside the soul of a person actually and see if they can awaken in their minds because there are so many sleeping people.”
Clearly the transmission was received. You can hear it (and, yes, feel it, too) in the tone, texture and phrasing expressed by the tour’s featured performers now known for authentic Hendrixian stylings even in their own music. Hendrix’s influence can be seen as well in the left-handed swagger of Doyle Bramhall II, the sheer abandon of Kenny Wayne Shepherd or Jonny Lang, and the subtlety of overtone and feedback control masterfully demonstrated by Eric Johnson.
The legacy of supernatural mystery embedded in the blues goes back as far as Robert Johnson. It is the DNA from which Hendrix re-animated the formative influences of Muddy Waters, Albert King and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Buddy Guy.
“This tour has been on the road with different casts,” says event promoter Michael Horne of Pulse Productions. “This particular one with Buddy Guy has great reviews. It will be a real treat to hear Buddy Guy play the music of Jimi Hendrix. There are some master blaster jams at the end. The spirit of Jimi Hendrix looms large in Santa Cruz, and this will be a great night to celebrate his memory.”
Experience Hendrix will be presented at 8 p.m. Oct. 14 at the Santa Cruz Civic, 307 Church St., Santa Cruz, 420-5260, $45-$88.
