I think that for me, growing up when I did, Hendrix was a significant influence, not only musically but culturally. For me, at the time, he took the guitar to places no one else had. And culturally, it being the sixties, and me having grown up in North Carolina, in the South, in the sixties, and everything that meant, the fear, the mistrust, the segregation, the riots, the overcoming, the coming together, .. I loved that he was who he was, and where he was; that he was a cultural symbol, a face of the cultural transformation that so informed who I was and who I would become.
While the first two albums were amazing, with music that was so far beyond anything that had come before, in my college years I really began to appreciate Electric Ladyland; as evidenced in Voodoo Child Slight Return, it was some place new again; it was the blues, rebirthed through the Experience of psychedelia, and heard fresh and anew deep from within a soul that had a new Experience from which they could be reborn. Then Band of Gypsies showed just where he could take that sound. And then he was gone.
In the nineties, while playing with a blues group, I delved deeper into Hendrix, exploring South Saturn Delta and First Rays of the New Rising Sun. During that time I was increasing my knowledge of and appreciation for blues, and my appreciation for where Hendrix had taken the blues grew extensively. It was also when I began to realize just how important Mitch Mitchell had been to the whole story. I read John McDermott's Hendrix bio, watched videos, and listened.
First Rays of the New Rising Sun was were the music was going. For the most part, it is Hendrix, Cox, and Mitchell.
Freedom While I also appreciate Buddy Miles' contribution to the story, Mitchell's contribution to the music, and thus to my own story, is significant. The power of Hendrix, Cox and Miles on Band of Gypsies is wonderful, but First Rays shows the beauty of Hendrix, Cox and Mitchell.
So, my Mitchell story is just the fact that he was so much a part of Hendrix's music, which has significantly informed my own music, and that the Experience was so much a part of the cultural transformation in this country in the sixties, which is still a part of who I am today.
