Hendrix and Christmas

The past and the present are inexplicably interlinked, yet we often forget how closely.

I had been thinking of writing a particular musical for some time – oh, perhaps twenty years; like many things it seemed to fit nicely on the back-burner. I had a good idea of its shape, scope, cast of characters, and theme but couldn’t quite figure how to begin.

Then I got the call. Stewart Lerman, a producer friend, had left a package for me at Electric Lady Studios - could I pick it up?

Nothing like a bit of a stroll on a December day, particularly to the recording studio built by Jimi Hendrix!

It was always a magical place but never more so than when Pierce Turner and I recorded there one Christmas Eve in the 1970’s. The song was called “Neck and Neck (in the race of life)” and I hummed it as I set out on my journey up to 8^th Street.

I remembered little of the nuances of the session, but for the first time one of our songs sounded as good on tape as it did in our heads. 

I vividly recalled the psychedelic mural that Hendrix had painted on a corridor wall. Years ago I’d heard that a new owner had painted over Jimi’s vision.

Such is life in New York, and yet to many musicians this was considered sacrilege.

I have two favorite streets for my rambles north through Soho – Mercer or Greene. Back in the 19^th Century the former was known colloquially as Oyster Row due to the number of fish merchants peddling their wares on its pavements.

I’m sure Greene Street too had a suitably serviceable name, as it was known internationally for its brothels. Queen Victoria’s son, the future King Edward VII famously paid his amorous respects there in 1860.

Since I was on a rock & roll mission, I chose Mercer Street so as to pass the site of the old Bottom Line club, now unfortunately displaced by a dispassionate New York University office. 

I had seen Springsteen there three times on his legendary five-night stand, and had been ejected for gregariously toasting Peter Gabriel with my own half-pint bottle of Southern Comfort when he danced on my table.

As I approached Washington Square I could hear the drums. The Bottom Line may be history but the Square has always marched to its own different drummer - each decade to its own inimitable beat.

This percussionist was precise and totally on the beat, the product of a life listening to Hip-Hop – so unlike the drummers from the 70’s and 80’s who grooved around a much more spacious pocket.

He was young, dreadlocked, tatted to the hilt, and he shook the Square as he hammered an upturned plastic bucket – no kick drum, just a sheet of beaten aluminum for his high-hat.

The receptionist was expecting me in Electric Lady. She smiled and was so friendly I inquired what year Jimi’s mural had been painted over. 

“It’s still there.” She pointed downstairs. “Why don’t you take a look?”

And there it was, much as I remembered it – a bit faded, but then which of us isn’t?

I stared down that long corridor – each panel a different psychedelic vista. It was like traveling back in time - coming home in a way.

I remembered how full of hope and optimism Pierce and I had been that Christmas Eve. And how that song Neck and Neck had hurled us on to a career in music, and how in some small way Hendrix had been a part of it.

In my head I could still hear the beat of the dreadlocked drummer, and his precise beats deepened the vibe of the mural until the colors and forms seemed to pulse out at me. I was taking a furtive picture on my iPhone when I felt I was being observed.

I spun around certain it was a security guard about to complain– but no, it was Jimi, young and forceful, and glaring out of a frame as if to say “get on with it.” 

And then I heard the opening song from the new musical - the Hendrix magic had worked all over again. Some things never change.

Ewan MacColl

I was reminded of his influence recently when playing three covers of his songs on Celtic Crush/SiriusXM Radio. 

An avowed Marxist he was once considered too dangerous to be allowed into the US, yet he changed the way we listen to music. Born James Miller in 1915, you might know him better as Ewan MacColl.

He was such a towering cultural figure in my youth it never occurred to me that he didn’t hail from the Highlands. His parents were indeed Scottish, but Jimmy Miller was born in Salford, part of Greater Manchester.

You probably never heard of the joint but you’ve hummed along to Millar’s hymn to its industrial dourness - Dirty Old Town.  

Millar couldn’t wait to get out of there. He quit school at 14, was organizing on the streets at 15, began his own theatre company at 16, while the British Secret Service opened their first file on him at 17.

Eventually he would shed his given name too. Ewan MacColl had a better ring for a man intent on changing the world.

He had plenty to revolt against - of four children born to his blacklisted ironworker father and charwoman mother, he was the only survivor. He grew up in a house throbbing with political songs, radical dogma, and a desire for universal revolution.

A voracious reader and self-educated man, he greatly resented the fact that people of his class were rarely granted entry to the halls of academia, much less the corridors of political power. 

Through his travels with his theatre company he came to understand that Britain’s old rural way of life was fast disappearing; and so he set out to record the songs and stories of the poor and dispossessed.

He presented a series of programs on BBC Radio and for the first time many “common folk” heard their accents, vocal mannerisms, and traditions broadcast on a medium that had been the exclusive preserve of the upper classes.

This was to open the door for “regional” people like Brendan Behan, Michael Caine, and The Beatles, all of whom would have been considered figures of fun in earlier decades.

MacColl was a hard, flinty man whose extreme Left Wing views barely softened with time. 

He could be intolerant and though almost singlehandedly responsible for the British folk revival of the 1950’s/60’s, he drew up strict rules for what songs could be sung in his folk club and how the performers should dress and present themselves.

He cared little for public opinion, and caused grave scandal by leaving his second wife while in his ‘40’s to marry Peggy Seeger, Pete’s 21-year old half-sister. Still he wrote one of the great love songs for her, First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, and their union lasted until his death.

I hear his influence often especially in Celtic Music for he was a strict taskmaster to Luke Kelly of The Dubliners who apprenticed at his school for folksingers. 

MacColl’s credo was to dig deep and find the inner core of a song, then sing it from the soul without any kind of ornamentation. He took this to rather absurd lengths with women for he frowned on the use of make up during performance. 

The Pogues would have appalled him and yet Shane McGowan’s delivery is vintage MacColl courtesy of his adoption of Luke Kelly’s soulful, stringent technique.

I once saw MacColl at Folk City in Greenwich Village. Finally admitted into the US, he dominated the stage – and yet there was a sadness about him. It was during the age of Reagan and it was obvious that time had passed the old Marxist by – his revolution would never come.

Oddly enough, the sadness humanized him and as I shook his hand after the gig I was never less than aware that the man who had written Dirty Old Town, The Traveling People, School Day’s Over, and a hundred other great songs, had indeed changed the way we listen to music.

I told him that Turner & Kirwan of Wexford had recorded a heavily synthesized version of Traveling People. With a glint in his eye he said, “I’ve heard of it.”

Choosing discretion over valor, I did not tell him I’d worn mascara many times while performing it.