Former Atlantan Susan Tedeschi isn’t claiming there was a transmigration of souls or anything, even though she was born in December 1970, shortly after Jimi Hendrix died.
In fact, as a youngster she was more interested in show tunes than the blues and didn’t take up the guitar until she was in her 20s.
But sometimes when she’s playing Hendrix tunes, strange things happen.
Last year, for example, she performed at a festival in Monterey, the same California town where Hendrix first exploded onto the American rock scene like a suitcase nuke.
As she launched into the Hendrix tune “Spanish Castle Magic,” a dove flew onto the stage and perched above her head, as if to say, “This is my daughter with whom I am well pleased.”
“The whole band was freaking out,” Tedeschi said with a laugh. “I’ve always thought he was sort of a guardian angel.”
Tedeschi is one of nine guitarists who will bring Hendrix’s music to life Saturday, March 27, during the “Experience Hendrix” show at the Fox Theatre. In conjunction with the Fox show is an exhibition of prints of Hendrix’s own paintings, which will be presented in the lobby of the Georgian Terrace Hotel, across Peachtree Street from the Fox.
Nearly 40 years after his death, Hendrix is still the reigning avatar of electric guitar. This spring his spirit will be omnipresent, with the “Experience Hendrix” tour visiting midsize theaters across the country, the re-release of his classic studio albums and the arrival this month of “Valleys of Neptune,” a compact disc of unreleased studio recordings. Rumors that Hendrix will be featured in a dedicated Rock Band video game continue to circulate.
The surge in attention could be attributed to 40th anniversary marketing, but it’s also appropriate, given Hendrix’s enduring influence, musicians say.
“Like Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis are to the trumpet, Jimi is to the electric guitar,” said Ernie Isley. America has George Washington, he said, and rock has Jimi Hendrix.
Isley is perhaps the only musician performing at the Fox who watched “Beany and Cecil” and “Super Chicken” with Hendrix on Saturday mornings.
During the mid-1960s, when Hendrix played guitar with Ernie’s big brothers in the Isley Brothers band, the couch-surfing Hendrix lived at their mom’s house in Englewood, N.J. Ernie, 11 at the time, was into baseball, not rock ’n’ roll, but he and Hendrix both loved cartoons.
Later, Hendrix left the Isleys to light his guitar on fire at Monterey and the younger Isley joined his big brothers’ band. Ernie’s splintery, wah-wah sound on “Who’s That Lady” echoes those summer evenings of listening to Hendrix play with the family band.
A few other members of the tour have had similar personal contact, including Hendrix’s Army buddy Billy Cox, who played rhythm and blues with Hendrix in the early 1960s and went on to play bass in the Hendrix group Band of Gypsys.
But most are like any electric guitarist, in that they all revolve in the Hendrix field of gravity. Eric Johnson, who was 14 when he first saw Hendrix perform in Austin, Texas, will be playing a pitch-perfect version of the backward guitar solo from “Are You Experienced” not because he studied and learned it, but because he knows it by heart, after 40 years of listening to it.
“I just grew up on those songs,” he said.
Born in Seattle to poverty, Hendrix dropped out of high school, got in trouble, served a year in the Army, then made a living playing music in Nashville and New York. His first studio recording was 1964’s “Testify” with the Isley Brothers, but he began to gain momentum after hiring Chas Chandler as his manager and moving to London in 1966.
There he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, recorded a series of singles and his first album, “Are You Experienced.” The impact of that album and tour were huge. He was not only a spellbinding showman (with his Afro, scarves and Carnaby Street threads) and a gifted songwriter, but he turned the guitar inside out, combining stunning musicianship with a willingness to mess with every aspect of the instrument, from feedback to the on-off switch.
“He opened up the electric guitar, he took it as far as it would go, and I don’t think anyone’s took it any further,” Eric Clapton told Larry King in a 1998 interview.
Johnson, 55, said he is still trying to figure out how Hendrix made some of the sounds he made. “He had some unique movement and magic in what he was playing,” Johnson said. “It surpassed the instrument.”
On July 4, 1970, Hendrix played his notorious version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” for several hundred thousand at the Atlanta Pop Festival in the town of Byron, which isn’t exactly Atlanta, but close. (At Woodstock the previous year, perhaps only 30,000 waited around in the rain to see Hendrix play on the last morning of the festival.)
On Sept. 18 of that year he died after taking pills and alcohol.
Tedeschi, a Jacksonville, Fla., resident, wanted to be part of the show when Hendrix’s music returned to Atlanta, because she has so many friends in Atlanta, including most of the members of her band and the members of the band led by her husband, Derek Trucks.
Hendrix, said Tedeschi, was “powerful, melodic, emotional, sensual and, because he was so handsome, sexual.
“Women would just go crazy. He was the whole package.”
The experience
"Experience Hendrix" is a tour of 20 dates in 19 cities bringing a changing ensemble of up to 10 guitarists and a rhythm section playing music written "and inspired" by Hendrix. Performing at the Fox Theatre will be guitarists Ernie Isley, Eric Johnson, Susan Tedeschi, Joe Satriani, Robert Randolph, Jonny Lang, Brad Whitford, Doyle Bramhall II, Vernon Reid (with Living Colour), bassist Billy Cox and drummer Chris Layton. 8 p.m. March 27. $36.50, $51.50, $66.50. Information: 404-881-2089, www.foxtheatre.org .
An exhibit of prints of original artwork by Jimi Hendrix, including the image "Valleys of Neptune," will take place March 26-28 at the Georgian Terrace Hotel, 659 Peachtree St. Information: 404-897-1991, www.thegeorgianterrace.com .
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Meet the players
Ernie Isley, 58, St. Louis
First saw Hendrix: When he moved into the Isley house in the mid-1960s.
What he thinks about when he’s playing with “Experience Hendrix”: He’d be standing on the side of the stage with a grin and tears in his eyes.
What Hendrix sounded like: He plays like you put an apple in somebody’s mouth and tie them up, put them over a slow fire, roll them over, that’s the way he plays: You feel yourself cooking.
Why he thinks Hendrix is “all that”: I’ve heard him play without an amplifier.
Eric Johnson, 55, Austin, Texas
When he first heard Hendrix: Age 14, in concert in Austin.
How he approaches playing “Are You Experienced”: A lot of people on this tour are doing real nice jobs with their own interpretations, but I tend to do a lot of it note for note — I guess because, for no other reason, than to me it’s neat to hear that stuff done the way he did it.
Why Hendrix will last: He had that extra thing of writing great songs. At the end of the day, people are going to respond to those great songs . . . Like ‘Castles Made of Sand’ will be a great song 80 years from now.
Susan Tedeschi, 39, Jacksonville
Where she was when Hendrix died: Her mother’s womb.
About being the only woman on the “Experience Hendrix” tour: I take it as an advantage being a woman: You can wear dresses and wear high heels and play ‘wah’ and people don’t ever do that. It’s important for women to see other women play guitar, it shows it’s not completely a male-dominated world, even though it’s mostly a male-dominated world.
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