Hendrix thought (for bearded cat)

Had a series of dreams ending over week ago. Been playing and watching lots of R&R movies lately and that probably drove them. Camera-like, in my dreams, I was really paying attention to how guys played. How they boxed. Vibrato. Bending. Etc. Robertson from Last Waltz, Clapton in Bangladesh, Neil Young in Rust Never Sleeps etc.

This is true mind you, i.e. I had this series of dreams.

Then I dreamed about Hendrix and I had this revelation, in-dream, "You can't learn anything from Hendrix." (Not that this is necessarily true; it was a dream.) I think the upshot being not his handedness but his up and down the neck fluidity. And bending and feedback. Too organic to break into digestible chuncks, for my brain to process, at least.

Then days after I began to think. Aside from the easy answer that Hendix may have sounded unique cuz he was left handed, I got to thinking that maybe it has to do w/ left/right brain. If you play standard, yr left hand is fretting, i.e. controlled by right brain which is logical, mathmatical, even, I think musical (in western sense). But yr handedness does not swap the role of the brain halves around, correct? So Hendrix was articulating notes with the hand connected to the emotional side of his brain, right?

Hey I didn't say it was Hawkings or Watson and Crick.

That's all.

Interesting and very cool idea...

wonder if that could be taken out to the left handed golfers and other areas where handedness makes a difference.

and nobody has more creativity than Neil!!!!!!


He got the best years before Bruce S. did. On his porch.

Nothing better than After the....(fill in the blank)

edit: but right footed - ya can't figure out the lefties. Don't even try!!!!!

one of my oldtime favorites. :D

10 years later.

Alvin is something special. You know the words - great.

in a nightclub listening to a band, drinking and screaming YOU SUCK! So they challenged him to "see if he could do better". And he blew the roof off! Oh how I would have loved to see that.

Right hand dominance is associated with left brain dominance, which is allegedly linguistic and logical. The left hand, conversely, is a right brain tool, the right brain being artistic and image-centric.

When playing guitar, the picking hand is usually running the show. But like any two-handed creative process, both hands are collaborating to make music. It really doesn't matter, as far as I can tell, that Hendrix was a lefty. His fluidity and passion have a lot more to do with the intense chemical stimuli he applied to his brain. Look at the history of great rock and bebop musicians, and you'll find a lot of drug use that spans the range of instruments and handedness of players. They did this for a reason.

Your problem is not that you are right handed or left brained, but that you are too sobre. I knew one guitarist back in college who, freshman year, decided he would simply take psychedelic drugs and jam every day. Well, of course he dropped out eventually, but by the end of the frosh year he had mastered a whole boatload of Hendrix and Dead songs.

And I don't mean he learned how to play them, I mean you could listen to him and say, "Damn, that sounds just like how Jimi would pull it off." Not because he was playing note-for-note, but he had this resonance thing, like he was a shaman channeling the spirit of Hendrix. He didn't just know how to wiggle his hands like Jimi Hendrix, he knew, or seemed to know, the underlying causes for why Jimi played things a certain way. The difference is crucial.

I've had similar experiences, not to that dedicated extent, but where I knew I was transcending the personally musical and touching something much bigger. It's like setting up a telephone connection with the cultural tradition itself, and having a conversation. It isn't a technical thing, it's spiritual, and that's a huge roadblock for a lot of people because sobre or not, we're socially conditioned to supress our own spirits.

Somehow, Jimi Hendrix never did learn to do that, maybe because he was left handed and lefties often have a harder time in school. If you want to play Hendrix songs and not sound artificial, you need to be a free spirit. And that may be the hardest, most important lesson of all.