YouSaid · the spoken record

Jimi Hendrix

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27
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2022-12-06
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2022-12-06
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  1. “And then this is 12 days before he dies. I'm so tired of everything. I lose myself. I can't play anymore. I've been working very hard for three years. I sacrifice part of my soul every time I play. Direction is the hardest thing for me to find now. I can't even try and think about how this life has affected me. Somehow I must have changed, but I can't know how. The moment I feel I don't have anything more to give musically, that's when I won't be found on this planet. I'm not sure I will live to be 28 years old. The world owes me nothing. I tell you, when I die, I'm going to have a jam session. It's funny the way people love the dead. You have to die before they think you are worth anything. When I die, just keep on playing the records. The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye.”

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  2. “Got too much going on taking a year off, six months off, not like just stop because that pressure has to be released somehow. And unfortunately, he chose to release it through, you know, drug and alcohol abuse. And so he talks about this. This is a year before he dies. And well, let me read it to you and then I'll read the note I left myself. I don't know what's happening. I'm so exhausted. I have no time for my music. I just want to relax and think about myself and my music for a while. I want to bring my guitar, walk on stage, play, and then vanish. I want to get away from questions and people. I am very tired, not physically. I'm mentally. I'm mentally tired. My head's in a position now where I have to take a rest or else I'll completely crack up pretty soon. Nervous breakdowns. I've had three of them since I've been in this business. I can't help but isolate myself from the world. Sometimes I just want to be left alone. This is what I mentioned earlier in both their biographies Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan talked about that, like the fame and the pressure and everything wearing so...”

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  3. “And then we see it goes back to having a good sense of gratitude, understanding that this is like you're, he's doing things for the right reason. And so at this point, essentially the apex of his career, and he's asked the question, like, how has success changed you? And he says, it depends on what you think is success. I don't consider myself even started yet. I'm always just trying to get better and better.”

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  4. “I really like this part because he's saying, you know, the way my music is described, the way other people talk about it's like, that's not how I feel about it all. They call it like pop music at the time. And so it says, he's asked the question, how do you see the future of pop music? I don't know. I'm not a critic. And I don't like the word pop. So the follow-ups like, okay, well, how do you like your music to be described then? And he says, we're trying to play real music. We call our music electric church music because it's like a religion to us.”

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  5. “Read this paragraph by Jimi Hendrix. We haven't burned any guitars lately. Those little things were just added on like frosting, but the crowd started to want them more than the music. The more the press would play it up, the more the audience would want it, the more we would shy away from it. Do you see where all of that fits? You can't prostitute your own thing. You can't do that.”

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  6. “You're exhausted, and so is the public, and then they move on to other things. I am so tired I could drop, but I find the relaxation comes from thinking about music. Nothing else moves me. I hear music in my head all the time. A few pages later he picks up that same idea. I get a little deep at times, and I don't talk, but that's because I'm thinking about my music. I've got notes in my mind, so I can't kill them, but I can't kill them by talking. I guess I could do without people. In fact, sometimes I'd rather be alone. I like to think. I can really get lost thinking about my music, but then I think so much I have to get out among people again. A few pages later, more soul in the game. I care so much about my work. I record stuff I believe is great. So on some of his shows he would just, he's really big in improvisation. And so he started having this idea. He's like, man, I want to sacrifice. He goes to this church religious thing. He's like, you have to sacrifice.”

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  7. “He's like, yeah, Seattle's beautiful, but the next time I see it, I'm going to be on Pine Box. No city I've ever seen is this pretty Seattle. All the water in the mountains, it's beautiful. But I couldn't live there. You get restless. His whole point is like, he didn't want to live anywhere. He just wanted to roam the earth. You get restless. And before you know it, you're too old and you haven't seen any of the world. You've got to get this great big, fat old world here. Or excuse me, you've got this great, big fat old world here. So who wants to live in the same place forever? The next time I go to Seattle, it will be in a pine box. Let me go to the next page and this is redlining life main theme here. It's just slow down. Consistency over intensity. Tomorrow we end our Italian tour. Then I fly to New York for a day to sign a contract. In four days, four days later, I'll be in Switzerland. Then I'll have a vacation in Spain. We really need one. We are simply overtired. We cannot continue at this pace for this long. And he talks about, again, the mentions just how difficult the business is. They squeeze something until it is complete.”

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  8. “Above all, our records will become better purely from the point of view of our recording technique. We have not been happy with a single one. Keep in mind, he's selling tons of them. Everybody loves them. And Jimmy's like, they're not good enough. We're now cutting a new record between our tours. There'll be maybe two tracks from the new Bob Dylan album on it. Dylan goes his own way. He is just getting more and more of a songwriter. He mentions Bob Dylan, like I've said a lot. He's really admired Bob Dylan. And there's also these weird, like almost like premonitions of his death at the very end of the book. He talks about like, I don't think I'm going to make it to 28. And this is the first example where.”

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  9. “With. I have complete autonomy and control. You know how rare that is in life? And in Jimmy's case, it's just like, I just wanted to get paid to play the guitar. And now I've overshot that goal so much that I'm building, making millions and millions of dollars. He says later in the book, he's like, I could just buy if I really wanted to, I'd just buy a house in Beverly Hills and chill and do nothing. But he's like, I don't want to do that. I want to continue. What did I start out as? I started just wanting to be able to play the guitar and get paid for it. So I'm just going to keep doing that. And I think key of him like centering himself on that a few pages later. He talks to me like, what am I doing? Like, what am I making? And this is going to relate to another thing that Paul Graham said, that you need to build a product that you would use. It made me think of also what Stephen King when I read his autobiography, what he said. He's like, I'm the first reader, right? Which means that, yeah, I'm the writer, but I'm the first reader. If I wrote something and I'm reading and I don't like it, that means I shouldn't publish that book. Steve Jobs uses the same exact...”

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  10. “Enough for me. I consider ourselves to be some of the luckiest cats alive because we're playing just what we want to play and people seem to like that. You know how hard it is to, and you know, this is still like maybe a year into, two years into massive success, that sense of gratitude has got to be unbelievably difficult and counter to human nature to maintain that sense of gratitude as your success increases. And you see this as like people get richer and richer. And it's like, okay, yeah, maybe I have $100 million now or whatever it is, but I got to get to a billion. Or now I got to a billion, I got to get to $2 billion. And I think like Bill Walsh's perspective on this was like the score takes care of itself as long as you make that much money, that's fantastic, but you've lost the thread somewhere in life if you start out just wanting to start a business, get successful, build a business people love, you get wealthy as a result of that, which is, you know, as it should be, but then you're somehow discontent or unhappy because there's not some kind of number. It's just like, no, the center is like, I get to choose, I get to build my own business, build my own world. I get to choose who I spend my time.”

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  11. “Because that's the way I live my life. So he gets to England, writes his dad. I'm in England, dad. I met some people. They're going to make me a big star. This is where his career goes parabolic. I think that's the right word. Just completely a straight line all the way up. So he says, we don't want to be classed in any category. My music isn't pop. It's me. We're trying to create our own personal sound. So then he talks about, again, I wrote this on this page as well. Bob Dylan, Peter Teal, unique product. The English people hear Jimmy. They're like, what the hell is this? And so he says the first time we played there, they sat open mouth and didn't know how to accept us, but they still listened. The club managers think that we were in a bobbin. This is so important too, man. Why you can't listen? How many times have you and I talked about critics don't know shit, right? And the reason I use terminology like that so it sticks in your brain, it's like, it doesn't matter whether you're good or you're bad. That's irrelevant.”

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  12. “Like you were getting paid, you may have to deal with this jerk or whatever. And he says, I just got tired, man. I can't stand it anymore. I can't tell you the number of times that hurt me to play the same notes, the same song. It was just kind of a shadowy, I was just kind of a shadowy figure up there, out of sight of the real meaning. I wanted my own scene, making my own music. I had these ideas and sounds in my brain. So I just went down to the village, this is in Manhattan, and started playing like I wanted. That's exactly where Bob Dylan went. And we see that here because this is the first mention of Bob Dylan, first of many times. He's going to talk about Bob Dylan throughout the entire book. When I was down in the village, Bob Dylan was also starving down there. I saw him one time. Both of us were stoned out of our minds. We were both stoned and just hung around laughing. Yeah, we just laughed. And then he knew, like everybody else knew, it was like, oh, this cat is different. Like, Bob Dylan is on his, what did Bob Dylan say? He's like, listen, there's a lot of other musicians. They may have been better than me, but no one was doing what I was.”

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  13. “He has to fall back on is a wish sandwich. This is what he says. I had nothing but a wish sandwich two priests of bread wishing I had some meat between. Moving a few pages ahead. We see the theme. How bad do you want? It continues on and on and on. And it comes from this idea. It's like, I don't want to play backup on somebody else's team. I have my own ideas that I have to bring to life and I'm willing to sacrifice my comfort to do so. So he's writing a letter home. I just want you to let you know that I'm still here in New York trying to make it. Although I though I don't eat every day, everything's going all right for me. I still have my guitar, and as long as I have that no fool can keep me from living. And he's trying to put things into perspective. He says, it could be worse than this, but I'm going to keep hustling and scuffling until I get things to happening like they're supposed to be. There's that relentless self-belief, right? Belief comes before ability. He's homeless. He's not eating every day. And he's like, that's fine. It could be worse. I'm going to keep hustling and things will be how they're supposed to be. And so he talks about, now he's telling us, like, why'd you quit? You had a game.”

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  14. “Know this, but if you Google Jimi Hendrix and you look at pictures of him, you're going to see him dressed as only Jimi Hendrix would dress. So that was really important to him. Goes back to that memory he has from childhood. His grandmother giving him, you know, this some Native American clothes or some clothes made in Mexico and he's wearing in Seattle, Washington. People are like, what the hell's wrong with you kid? You just love to stay out or stand out. He says, little Richard said, brothers, we've got to have a meeting. I am Little Richard and I'm the king of rock and rhythm and I'm the only one who's going to look pretty on stage. So he's like, Jimmy, you cannot look pretty on stage. He had another meeting over my hairstyle. Imagine working for somebody like this. Come on, man. He had another meeting over my hairstyle. I said I wasn't going to cut my hair for nobody. That'll be a $5 fine for you, little Richard said. If our shoelaces were two different types, we'd get fine $5. Everybody on that tour was brainwashed. And so then he quits the band, but he doesn't have anything to fall back on.”

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  15. “Circumstances, sleeping among the garbage cans between all the tenements was hell. Rats would run across your chest at night. I ate orange peel and tomato paste. People would say If you don't get a job you're just going to starve to death, but I didn't want to take a job outside of music. Then one of the Isley brothers, this is one first big break, Isley Brothers are obviously well-known musicians, heard me playing at a club and said he had a job open. And so the very beginning for he's got a few years before he makes it on his own where he's got to play backup to more famous people. And in that case, he's told what to do and what to place. No part of my personality eventually just like I can't do this anymore. I have to. I have something inside of me that the world has to, that has to get out. I want the world to see. And so he gets to play. He's making a little bit of money, but he's still homeless. I had to sleep in the clubs where we were playing. And there were a lot of cockroaches and rats. Those bastard animals were all over you during the night. But as a result of going”

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  16. “I don't even understand how that's possible. But he learned that idea a decade before playing these gigs. He says the idea of playing guitar with my teeth came to me in a town in Tennessee. Down there, you have to play with your teeth or else you get shot. There's a trail of broken teeth all over the stage. I traveled all over the states playing in different groups. Oh, God, I can't even remember all their names. Bad pay, lousy living, and getting burned. That was those days. And so what he means by getting burned is that a lot of the promoters would fail to pay you or they'd say, hey, we're going to pay you $15 for this gig and he'd get like two bucks or no money at all. And so I spent a lot of time in this book or in this part of his life, in this part of the book as well, because there's no after note after note on these next few pages. It's like, how bad do you want it? You can say that you want X to happen in your life. Jimmy did everything he possibly could to allow to prepare himself to have a lucky break. I lived in very million.”

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  17. “The restaurants, unfortunately. One group would stand on one side of the street and the rest on the other. They'd shout names and talk about each other's mothers and every once in a while they would stab each other. That would go on for a couple hours and then we'd go to the same club and we would get stoned. And so people were like, why aren't you involved in all this? And he says, I had more important things to do, like playing guitar. So we see this singular focus. He doesn't like, obviously, agree what's going on, but he's like, I'm only focused on what I can actually control. And it's going to be playing the guitar. I want to make money playing the guitar. And he felt it was beneficial to be where he was at this time because so many guitar players were in Nashville. He says, in Nashville, everybody knows how to play guitar. This is where I really learned how to play. And so he's going to list a bunch of people that when he's not playing, he's studying the people that came before him that created great work that he admired to see if there's ideas. He names them Elmore James Hall and Wolf, Muddy Waters again, Robert Johnson, Albert King, Albert Collins. You see this with Bob.”

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  18. “Had to steal it. I started a group called the King Casuals with a fellow named Billy Cox who played Funky Funky Bass Billy's that guy I quoted earlier that said Jimmy put in twenty five years of guitar practice into five years. And so now he's traveling all over the South. Again, he is homeless. That is not an exaggeration. He goes, I went to Nashville. I lived in a big housing estate that they were building. So you travel in the neighborhood you live in or whatever. There's a house that's under construction. No one's supposed to be in there. You're going to find Jimi Hendrix sleeping in there in the 1960s. They hadn't put in the floor yet and there was no roof. So we had to sleep under the stars. This was wild. We used to go down town to watch the race riots. He talks about in the background of this book obviously is all this is the 1960s America. It's crazy even though he blows up. He gets really famous in England first actually. We would take a picnic basket because they wouldn't service in the restaurants. So obviously being African American in the south couldn't even go into a lot of...”

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  19. “I'd started to play guitar very seriously, so I thought all I can do is try to earn money playing guitar. That is his, he has one goal. It's like, I just want to earn enough money so I can play guitar. There's no way he could have predicted when he was at this point in his life that he's going to be one of the most famous. You know, some people say he's the greatest guitar player of all time, whatever the case is, but he's no doubt one of the most famous guitar players to ever live. So he winds up breaking his ankle. And I think he either hurt his back or he faked a back injury to get out of the army. And so now he's completely broke. He's homeless. This is Bob Dylan all over again, right? Same story here. Completely broke. Homeless, just doing any kind of gig that he could possibly do. And so we're going to see another giant exhalation point on this paragraph. I went down south. I played in cafes, clubs, and on the streets. It was pretty tough at first. I lived in very miserable circumstances. I slept where I could and when I needed to eat.”

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  20. “Told the judge that Jimmy was going to enlist in the armed forces. This is 1961. He says, I was 18 and I didn't have a cent in my pocket. So then this part of the book is a lot of the letters that Jimmy is writing home to his dad while he's serving the armed forces. And he talks about the intense training, how difficult it was, how a lot of people are quitting. And I'm just going to skip over a bunch of that. I want to just pull out one line here because it gives you an insight what he just sold us. It's like, man, this is the point of people quit. I'm telling you, don't quit. Keep going. It's part of learning process. You're going to be rewarded if you don't quit. You and I talk about this over and over again. Time carries most of the weight. What did Jamie say here? He's talking about all these people dropping out, all these people crying next to him during all the training he's doing in the military. He says, I made up my mind that whatever happens, I'm not quitting. And what was he doing when he had any downtime in the army, right? He says in the army.”

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  21. “They think you're able to do something, and then you have, now you believe you can do it because you just proved you could do it. It's like, no, no, there is no reason on earth that Jimmy believed what he's about to tell us he believed when he's playing gigs for 35 cents and three hamburgers. I had very strange feelings that I was here for something and I was going to get a chance to be heard. I got the guitar together because that was all I had. Oh daddy, one of these days I'm going to be big and famous. I'm going to make it, man. I think at that point he's a 17-year-old. Heist broke high school dropout. Think about that. That's incredible. And now as the future, what's going to take place in the future of your life and my life is unpredictable. He's like, I'm going to make it. But first, he's going to get arrested and then he's going to have to go serve in the army. So it says Jimmy was arrested for writing a stolen car. He was given a two-year suspended sentence after the public defense.”

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  22. “But it's best not to. Just keep on, just keep on. Sometimes you're going to be so frustrated you hate the guitar, but all of this is just part of learning. If you stick with it, you are going to be rewarded. If you're very stubborn, you can make it. And imagine the self-confidence. This is not a cocky person. In fact, later in the book, which you find most interesting, is he's got a quote on how he deals with everybody suddenly telling him, hey, you're the best guitarist in the world, you're the best, you're the best. And he says, I don't consider myself to be the best, and I don't like compliments. They distract me. His whole thing is like, I just want to play a guitar. I want to get paid. Obviously, I want to make money, but if I can just play the guitar as a living for the rest of my life, I will be happy. But we see an insight into his mindset when he's playing gigs for 35 cents and three hamburgers, belief comes before ability. When you talk to normal people, right, not people, non-founder mentalities, people that maybe have a hard time understanding how entrepreneurs think, they think it's reverse.”

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  23. “My first gig was at an armory, which is a National Guard place, and we earned 35 cents apiece and three hamburgers. That's incredible. I think Bob Dylan, there was a similar story Bob Dylan where he was playing at an armory too. And I don't think he was making much money. So then this is Jimmy talking about this. It was so hard for me at first. I knew about three songs. And it was time for us to play on stage. I was all shaky. You get so very discouraged. You hear different bands playing around you in the garden. Guitar players always seem like he's so much better than you are. And this is so important. I put a gigantic exclamation point on this paragraph. Most people give up at this point, but it's best not to. Just keep on. Just keep on. Sometimes you're going to be so frustrated that you'll hate the guitar. But all of this is just part of learning. I'm going to read that again. Just keep on. Most people give up at this point.”

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  24. “Next, it was a violin. I always dug string instruments and I liked the piano, but I wanted something I could take home or anywhere, and I couldn't take home a piano, so think about that, something that he can always travel with him. He carries it all the time that's going to fuel his practice habits, you know, sitting there waiting for the plane to take off. I'm playing the guitar. I'm in bed, playing the guitar. I'm walking down the street to get coffee. I'm playing the guitar. And so he says, so then I started digging guitars so he could take it everywhere. One night my dad's friend was stoned and he told me, or excuse me, he sold me his guitar for $5. I was about 14 or 15 when I started playing. I learned all the riffs I could. He's completely self-taught. Completely self-taught how many entrepreneurs have you and I spoke talked about if you take an ambitious driven intelligent person, especially today, imagine how hard it was to get information. And we know this again. I'm going to tie down to the Bob Dylan.”

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  25. “Away a couple times because I was so miserable. I don't think my dad ever thought I was going to make it. I was the kid who didn't do the right thing. And so his life changes just like when Bob Dylan has that almost religious experience when he hears the words of Witty Guttry, just like Jeff Bezos ran around with Sam Walton's book and gave it and gave highlighted copies to all the people in Amazon at the very beginning, just like Steve Jobs talked about visiting Edwin Land was like a shrine we see that happening again. In this case, it's this guy named Muddy Waters who changes Jimmy's life forever. Listen to how he describes this. This is wild. The first guitarist I was aware of was Muddy Waters. I heard one of his records when I was a little boy and it scared me to death. That's a crazy response, right? Wow. What is this all about? And so he just starts playing a bunch of different instruments. My first instrument was a harmonica.”

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  26. “Wanted to be different. He did not want to fit in. Mostly, my dad took care of me. He was religious. He taught me that I must respect my elders and that I couldn't speak unless I was spoken to first by a grown-up. So I've always been very quiet. But I saw a lot of things. A fish, this is something a lesson from his dad, a fish wouldn't get into trouble if he kept his mouth shut. And so it does not sound like an environment that Jimmy wanted to be in. And you know that through his actions because later on once he leaves Seattle, he doesn't wind up. He winds up having a half-sister. He doesn't come back home for like seven years. And his half-sister is like six years old the first time he meets her. And I don't think he ever goes back to Seattle after that. So you can read through his actions what he thought of his home life. Jimmy, not that he didn't love his dad. There's a lot of letters. A lot of the book is letters he wrote to his dad, but he chose not to visit and stay in his hometown. Jimmy dropped out of high school at the age of 17. Lots of kids have it tough. Jesus, I couldn't stand it at home.”

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  27. “Remain with their father. Why is that? Jimmy saw his mother for the last time in January of nineteen fifty eight. She died the following month. This is Jimmy talking. There's a dream I had when I was real little about my mother being carried away on these camels. It was a big caravan, and you could see the shadows of the leaf patterns across our face. You know how the sun shines through a tree? Well, there were these green and yellow shadows. See what they were talking about? It's like, speaks very rhythmically, almost poetically. You're going to see the same thing if you've read the Bob Dylan autobiography as well. And she's saying to me, well, he's still talking about the dream. Think about this. Well, I won't be seeing you too much anymore, you know, so I'll see you. About two years after that, she died. I will always remember that one. I never did forget. There are some dreams that you never forget. And then he talks about how strict and he was raised in a strict and religious upbringing and he wanted to rebel from that.”

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