In the TV interview that opens Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child, the guitarist is modest, almost self-effacing about his talent. As the documentary continues, with more TV snippets but mostly through Bootsy Collins’ narration drawn from Hendrix’s own words, the guitarist comes across as wise and wary of the traps of celebrity, money and too much praise. It’s all about the music, which is all about peace and harmony despite its guitar-smashing catharsis and Dionysian frenzy. “I was always very quiet but I saw a lot of things,” Hendrix recalls from childhood. And in the center of the firestorm he conjured on stage was Hendrix the observer, contemplating the vastness of experience.
Filmmaker Bob Smeaton’s Voodoo Child is the fifth disc of the multi-media set West Coast Seattle Boy: The Jimi Hendri Anthology (released by Sony Legacy). Like the music of the other four discs, Voodoo Child manages to find artifacts from Hendrix’s life that have seldom and often never surfaced. Arranged as a chronological scrapbook of still photos and footage accompanying Collins’ voiceover, boyhood pictures move on to snapshots of Hendrix’s high school bans and his stint with the 101st Airborne Division. Supposing he was ripe for the draft, Hendrix volunteered to get military service behind him. A twisted ankle won him an honorable discharge just in time to avoid Vietnam.
Determined to make his living in music, he lived on the streets of Nashville before finding his way into the R&B circuit, performing behind the Isley Brothers, Little Richard and others. Most of his recordings from this era are gathered on disc one of the Anthology and reveal the roots of his sound within the confines of three-minute songs. By 1965 Hendrix shifted from Harlem to Greenwich Village, where he was discovered by the Animals’ Chas Chandler, who brought the guitarist back to England and surrounded him with the musicians known as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, bass Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell. Hendrix finally came into his own in this setting, drenched in the blues and exploring the untapped potential of the electric guitar through feedback, sustain and volume. He could play the instrument with his teeth more proficiently than many guitarists with their hands. According to Voodoo Child, Hendrix first performed this way in the early ‘60s on the “chitlin’ circuit” in small town Tennessee. He explained that it was a hard crowd to please.
Hendrix’s first and indelible musical influence was Muddy Waters, who “scared me to death” with the voodoo reverberations of his electric guitar. As seen and heard on the DVD and the three discs of previously unreleased material from 1967-1970, Hendrix possessed a jazzman’s freedom to improvise. He never played the same song the same way twice. The narration also touches on the inspiration of science fiction on his lyrics, his understanding of fantasy as a way to cast a revealing light on reality. Hendrix the aesthete and seeker stayed arm’s length from the racial and political turmoil of the ‘60s, refusing to be drawn into the darkness of violence. Voodoo Child sidesteps the darkness of drug abuse, a problem that stemmed in part from the psychedelic milieu Hendrix inhabited. He died in 1970 from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, cutting short his restless journey toward the horizon of new possibility.
