DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-146

Affonso Celso de Miranda Neto

timerocker@gmail.com

Celebrated today as the main character in the world of “guitar heroes”, Jimi Hendrix holds a sacred place in the social imaginary as an icon of the electric guitar and rock. As a key part of our thesis about the mythology of guitar heroes, this study aims to understand his personal journey as a classical hero narrative. The adaptation of the real facts to the fictional saga will be prepared based on three biographies available in the publishing market. Our first task is to accomplish this by implementing the method of narrative analysis proposed by Propp in conjunction with the stages of the hero's journey designed by Campbell. Our second objective is to undertake a new synthesis to extract and reveal the logical production of signification in Greimas’s semiotic perspective. At this level, the actantial scheme aims to show the primary functional relationships of the narrative subject to expand the understanding of the structure plot content.

Keywords: Jimi Hendrix - narrative - semiotic – mythology - aesthetics

Introduction

Jimi Hendrix is often mentioned as the greatest electric guitar player of all time by several surveys carried out in specialized publications about music and guitar. Born in Seattle, northwest United States, the African American Hendrix emerged from humble beginnings to become a rock and hippie fashion’s icon. At dawn on the London scene in the late 1960s, all his instrumental virtuosity and his bold and libidinous way to take the stage conquered the music critics and the public, which led him to become a popular music’s myth of an overnight.

His commercial success in the music industry was a result of various accumulated experiences in his life story. Although some authors have already studied the guitar hero’s universe - a term used to refer to the main representatives of this rock guitar virtuoso lineage - a more detailed and focused vision for the mythological foundations of this special condition is a gap in the rock literature. The question here is: Why do many media professionals treat these musicians as gods, heroes or extra-terrestrial beings? It is pertinent to the use of fantastic language to describe the trajectory of these guitarists?

Our goal in this article is (re)construct a hero narrative resting on books and articles about Jimi Hendrix in order to confirm if this approach is justified by his lifetime events and facts. This task will be employed under the guidance of Propp’s, and Greimas’s narrative methods in conjunction with Joseph Campbell's hero's journey in order to confront theories and reflect on the best way to make the transition from reality to fiction. Others interpretations of mythological and esthetic symbols applied in the analysis are based in the theories of Carl Gustav Jung and Ariano Suassuna.

In publishing market can be found more than twenty books between biographies and works about his musical career. Each of them, in its own way, brings relevant aspects to the understanding of his short journey abbreviated at 27 years old. From a personal point of view, the journalist Sharon Lawrence (2005) and his brother Leon Hendrix (2012) construct their narratives based largely on the memory of the dialogues and privileged observers who lived closely with the guitarist. The third chosen book by Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber (2010) reveals through an extensive research the formative years of Hendrix on American soil, before his success in the London’s music industry.

Several authors have engaged in researches on various topics related to Hendrix's work. Friedlander (2004) in "guitar kings" reflects on the genesis of this idolatry, and talks about his musical career, highlighting his unusual style of playing guitar. Waksman (1999) in turn focus on the discussion of the phallic nature of their body performance shedding light on issues relating to the blackness’s fetish in a mostly white universe as rock. The symbolic condition of Hendrix was also studied by Millard and McSwain (2004) in order to understand the essence of guitar hero practice, to clarify some myths and rites enacted and present in the trajectory of the guitarist.

1.     Characters of the narrative

In "Morphology of the folktale" (2001), Propp analyze a body of over a hundred tales of the folk genre and pulls out a narrative structure of thirty-one levels based on temporal action functions performed by each character of the story. In this format, seven characters are charged for undertaking the actions that build the semantic meaning of the plot. The hero is the protagonist, the narrative’s driver, always looking for something, i.e., an object, a person or an ideal. Roby and Schreiber report an interview with Hendrix for the British newspaper New Musical Express in which Hendrix summed up his mission in life: "Personal ambition: to have my own musical style. Find my mother again " (2002, p. 5).

According to most of his biographers, his interest in music was manifested very early. For his young brother Leon Hendrix, the practice of sound experimentation was the key feature that defined “Buster’s”[1] personality. In his childhood, the habit of stretching elastic in the foot of the bed or tying wire strands to simulate a guitar string was very common. As a teenager, Buster was always seen playing air guitar[2] at school corridor or even wielding a broom like a guitar. In fact, as we shall see ahead, music played an important role in his life as a psychological sublimation to the absence of the mother.

This lack of affection began with incompatibility of temper demonstrated by his parents in the family environment. After Al Hendrix, his father, seek for divorce in court and apply for custody, the situation has worsened. The difficulty in maintaining a steady job for not control alcoholism and addiction to gambling, made him the first antagonist of the story. The role of harming the hero in achieving his goal is the task of the villain or anti-hero. In the plot, both the conjunction of his incompetence to manage a home and inability to recognize Hendrix's musical talent resulted in a negative image reflected in a conflictual coexistence.

In offsetting, the few moments Hendrix shared with her mother, Lucille Hendrix, represented the transition to a special and magical sphere, which strengthened her status as the princess. His brother Leon recalls: "The mom’s apartment on the other hand was a reward. All we did together was exciting. Not to mention she made breakfast, lunch and dinner. None of us could ask for anything better than that " (2012, p. 20). By dying young, Lucille Hendrix, became an idealized image in his life and work[3]. The journalist Sharon Lawrence (2005) reports more than one occasion in which Hendrix mentioned the importance of his mother and showed her pictures in the dressing room before performing.

Representing the villain’s condition, two other characters emerge within the narrative. The first one is Ed Chalpin, music producer from New York, whom was characterized by appropriating the Hendrix’s inexperience and neglect with respect to legal and financial issues. The other was Michael Jeffery whom benefit the pressures on justice for Chalpin processes to further damage his accounts. In a way, Jeffery can be defined as the great villain, to be revealed at the end of Hendrix's career, a selfish professional. The biographies confirm his unscrupulous conduct from the beginning of his activity, which gives undoubtedly the villain status.

The figure of the donor - individual responsible for advising the hero and give him a magical object, not necessarily a thing - is shared between the English model Linda Keith and the music producer Chas Chandler, former bassist for The Animals. The latter came on the scene indicated by Linda, first to glimpse the possibility of a musical career for the guitarist. At the time, Chandler raised every effort to invest in the dissemination of Hendrix's talent. In a way, the English man is also characterized by the dispatcher figure to convince Hendrix to go to London, and the helper, by being present in all the crucial moments of his musical adventure, whether in recording studios or in major concerts at the beginning of his career.

There are several helpers in his life story, role characterized by helping the hero at the time of the greatest challenges imposed on it. Billy Cox, his friend and bassist, shared with Hendrix both musical experiences in chitlins circuit in the early 1960s, and in his final career stage, integrating the The Jimi Hendrix Experience. The drummer Mitch Michel was another key partner in his music career to perfectly fit the musical style created by guitarist. The existing fine-tuning between the drums and the guitar is a notable feature in their work. In our view, the main helper and a decisive character in Hendrix's career was the studio engineer Eddie Kramer.

His mastering both in recording techniques and in providing various sonic experimentations, inaugurated a new paradigm in popular music’s producing. All the technological tools available to the guitar were employed to give the ideal tone desired by Hendrix in each song. This partnership knowledge is fully recorded in the recording industry. Kramer is still the curator of his works until these days and responsible for almost all posthumous records released in the record market. Other important character in the story is Faye Pridgeon, his girlfriend at the time he was trying his luck in New York before fame.

3. The hero’s narrative

Fistly, we must emphasize that our conception of narrative resembles the Todorov’s theory on the dichotomous relationship between change and regularity found in any humankind stories:

The narrative is the tension of two forces. One is the change, the inexorable course of events, the endless narrative of "life" (the story), where every moment is presented for the first and last time. It is the chaos that the second force tries to organize; it seeks to give you a sense, enter an order. This order is translated by repetition (or the like) of events: the present moment is not original, but repeated or announces past and future moments (Todorov, 2004, p. 21).

According to Campbell, the hero’s birth is immersed in exceptional circumstances from pregnancy to the period of childhood. Johnny Allen Hendrix came into the world on November 27, 1942 in Seattle, after an unexpected pregnancy of his mother, Lucille Jeter Hendrix. His early years were spent in a foster home in California, because Lucille had no financial conditions, nor maturity to raise him. Drafted into World War II, his father, Al Hendrix, could not be present at birth. However, at the end of the conflict, Al resumed child’s custody, and changed his name to James Marshall Hendrix.

The name change is just one of the dramatic events that occurred in his childhood. All this period was marked by great family’s financial instability, and also emotional insecurity and numerous household transfers. Parental separation, which occurred when Hendrix was ten years old, led to a double affective absence. On the one hand, deprivation of contact with the mother, on the other hand, the daily contact with his father was not beneficial due to his hard work routine. The absence of the parental figures led to emergence of a shy and elusive boy, as Roy and Schreiber (2010, p. 7) point out.

The Propp’s method until the functional sphere IX can be applied to the family dynamics before his departure from Seattle. The first Propp’s functional sphere corresponds to the phase of the hero’s preparation when occurs a family member removal. In the specific Hendrix’s case, namely, it is configured in a double movement. The first forbiddance can be seen in the restrictions that have been charged to him taking care of his younger brother Leon daily. The second interdict had already been established with the prohibition of meeting his mother, a fact that only expanded the mother’s image as muse and object of desire. This restriction gained tragic dimension at the time Lucille Hendrix's death in 1958. The decision to prevent Hendrix's attendance at the funeral was an attitude that never would be forgotten by the musician.

In the perspective of Greimas’s actantial scheme of desire, the disjunction caused by the father with the opposition between the subject (Hendrix) and his mother as well between him and the object guitar. In this second case, paternal was directed to Hendrix's aptitude with sound experimentation, namely music. The initiative to take a five dollar debt on Hendrix's instrument purchase came from his aunt Ernestine Benson who persuaded Al Hendrix to accept a friend's offer.

At level III, defined by Propp as “transgression”, when the role of antagonist stands clear in the story, begins after Hendrix immediately engaged intensely with music by several bands in high school and in the city of Seattle. Even in such adverse emotional conditions, he formed The Velvetones and The Rocking Kings in high school. The latter one won a battle of bands and reached the highest point of the city venues, the Birdland house. Hendrix’s decision to abandon his studies became subject of discussions and interviews at home, especially with the pragmatic mentality of his father toward the exaltation of labor ideology. Disregarding his interest in music, his father tried to convince him to do manual works like cleaning the yard.

According to Campbell, this is the starting time of the hero's journey that is characterized by withdrawal from the paternal bond: “The unfortunate father is the first radical intrusion of another order of reality into the beatitude of this earthly restatement of the excellence of the situation within the womb; he, therefore, is experienced primarily as an enemy (2004, p. 6). The beginning of the hero’s journey was probably driven by his troubled family life, which aroused his desire to seek new environments. In this sense, the call to adventure “signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown” (Campbell, 2004, p. 53). At the military service, Hendrix met bassist Billy Cox who would become one of his great musical partners. After just nine months, Jimi Hendrix was discharged from the army, and began his musical adventure in chitlins circuit, American bars and nightclubs allowed to black people, one of the cradles of rock'n'roll.

According to Hendrix, these places were decisive for his musical development, where he could experiment with various sounds to create a unique style. This is the functional sphere of Propp representing the beginning of the protagonist's reaction when he is subjected to many challenges and tests for the future. The actantial axis of power proposed by Greimas begins to set here with the entrance of several helpers who will assist him on his journey as well as opponents, aimed to interfere negatively in the story. This is the time where hero faces his fears and insecurities entitled by Campbell as "refusal of call", a hesitation phase to be overcome with the participation of fellow partners.

Already in New York, his first mentor, Faye Pridgean, presented him to several musician friends, including Ike And Tina Turner, Isley Brothers, Sam and Dave and King Curtis with who Hendrix would gain visibility on the music scene, recording and touring throughout the American Territory. This season as soul sideman of soul bands contributes decisively to the development of his style, both in rhythm section and scenic performance. In this sense, we can conclude that his musical pragmatism based on experience led him to adopt various aesthetic elements, not only musical aspects, of other artists to form his original style. The extremely challenging and competitive environment of black audiences in small clubs in the American interior was decisive for his formation.

However, without the necessary freedom to fully express, he becomes aware in order to accomplish his desire as guitar hero he has to follow his principles and restart in New York. There, Hendrix will take the nickname Jimi James, and with band The Blue Flames, will settle down in the Greenwich Village music scene, famous bohemian stronghold of the time. At Cafe Wha, bar located in this historical place where flourished the counterculture movement of Beatnick literature and folk music, Hendrix will be discovered for a second donor in his story, model Linda Keith. Her mediation was important to offer two magical objects to Hendrix; a guitar model Fender Stratocaster and a cassette tape with the song "Hey Joe", who became his first success in the music industry.

Throughout her intervention, Chas Chandler, former bassist of the band The Animals came on the scene. Starting his career as a record producer Chandler represents the tutelary figure which will guide the hero to face all challenges in an unknown realm. Key figure in Hendrix's career, as well as donor, he served as a dispatcher, element for Greimas integrates the transmission axis, charged for connecting the protagonist with its object. Here starts the phase of the transference of the hero to a special world that Campbell characterize by "Passage from the first threshold" (2004, p. 71).

Chas Chandler also invited the former manager of his band to command the financial part. Michael Jeffery became thenceforward, the great villain in the story. To him are attributed several embezzlement charges during the brief Hendrix's career. According to biographers, Jeffery founded a company called Yameta in a tax haven to where he diverted much of the show’s income. In fact, his role in the plot was to destabilize the hero - in the Greimas lack of freedom level or not-being-able-to-do - fixing  an intense touring schedule and ending the energy of the story’s protagonist. Greimas recognizes within the Propp’s narrative schema a controversial structure, i.e, a real "manipulation’s semiotic ", where the role of the villain is an essential part of the story’s semantic effectiveness:

For his reading of V. Propp scheme, Greimas realized that narratives invented by Russian folklorist were not just hero stories, but also, although less explicitly, story of a villain. This means the narrative constitutes a controversial structure, that is, two opposing narrative paths: the subject and anti-subject, which aim at the same value object (MENDES, 2013, p. 8).

Manipulation is defined by Greimas as "man acting on the other men in order to make them run a given program; in the first case, it is a having-to-be, in the second of a having-to-do." (2013, p. 300) We can say that Hendrix was pressed for three villains in his ephemeral career. The first was Ed Chalpin, a New York producer that convinced him to sign an exclusive contract without reading. At this time, there is the change of Hendrix’s modal competence, caused by the effect of communication, which propelled him, for his lack of experience in the business, to accept the conditions imposed by means of seduction and pragmatic dimension. Greimas defines as a passage from not being-able-to-do to the must-do. In proposing certain positive cultural values to the musician in order to boost his visibility, Chalpin benefited from a contractual clause that forced Hendrix to give him 5% of all his future productions rights.

In subsequent years, this manipulation - in the Greimas’s modality of power - has become even more negative, because it was exploited by his manager Michael Jeffery to extort absurd for amounts of money to pay the lawsuits filed by Chalpin. To these justifications of managing Hendrix's work, added many Jeffery manipulations marking an intense tour schedule. This intimidation was made only with financial reasons without worrying about the long distances and the little time between them, which led to Hendrix’s exhaustion at the end of 1968. In fact, Hendrix used to think only in his music leaving the financial part aside. However, the musician from one point found himself cornered by Jeffery, which is configured as a submission code by Greimas as the relationship between impotence and obedience. Another great source of frustration and manipulation was his father Al Hendrix. According to Lawrence, Al used to call Hendrix "money machine" (2009, p. 284) and had a blatant way to address the financial issues.

In his search for musical experiences, Hendrix played in all the bars and clubs of the London scene in 1966. According to Eric Clapton, Hendrix filled a gap in the movement of the British rock to mobilize the bands and artists. In a way, the musician met a predestined role "in that the act of hero coincides with that for which their own society is ready, it seems to run on the great rhythm of the historical process" (Campbell, 2004, p. 66). It was no accident that to the eyes of many, he represented a wild image having anticipated and translated the collective unconscious of a generation.

The Propp’s narrative sphere XVI of direct combat, came a week after his arrival, on the first of October 1966. In order to meet the guitarist Eric Clapton, Hendrix requested a participation in a concert of his band, held at the Polytechnic School in London. Surprised by the request - after all no one had done before such boldness request because of the "powertrio" reputation – the band accepted the claim for Chandler. Accordind to Lawrence (2009, p. 63),  after the interpretation of a blues, Hendrix turned into myth overnight, as the man who overcame the "guitar god" Eric Clapton.

His violent and sensual performance - in which he played the guitar with his teeth or behind the head, body movements that simulated a sex act with guitar - has become a key feature of his identification in the music business. His body has become an aesthetic object, a symbol of freedom and rebellion, by virtue of the physical attack on guitar. Another major factor in his stage performance was the flamboyant style in the composition of clothing that made him an psychedelic scene icon raised at Swinging London’s consumption. Stigma acquired by the hero was to create a wild image in rock, encouraged by Chandler in the press as "Black Elvis".

  The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first album, Are You Experienced, inaugurated a new paradigm in rock aesthetics. This production redirected the guitar history to create new techniques repertoire like feedback that definitely consolidated the "aesthetics of noise" raised by McSwain (1996). His close relationship with the engineer Eddie Kramer, another inseparable helper of the hero, allowed him carry out various sonic experimentations, designing effects and sounds never heard before. Eric Clapton reports the impression the album caused at the time:I will never forget the return to London after recording Disraeli Gears, with all of us excited for doing what we considered an innovative album, a magical combination of blues, rock and jazz. Unfortunately for us, Jimi had just released Are You Experienced, and it was just what people wanted to hear (2007, p. 105).

Early on, Hendrix reaches his first goal of designing an original musical style. The timing of the hero is translated by personal victory having overcome its internal insecurity and momentarily fixed his grace. However, the hero’s return, his recognition process can be extended in the narrative structure. For Propp, this sphere is characterized by the space domain or displacement turned to escape if the hero angered the opposing forces. In Hendrix path that period assumes the appearance of a new search, a metaphor for the conquest of his own territory, the United States.

His best-known image, kneeling with his guitar on fire, took place in Monterrey Pop Festival in 1967, the first major rock festival. In the song "Wild thing", Hendrix held a kind of "sacred fire cult" on stage. This practice of using fire in communion and spiritual elevation rituals is part of several cultures and religions from the man's beginnings. In this celebration, Hendrix has initiated the "Electric religion" metaphor, a term he used to define his music and the gregarious feeling shared by his followers. This concert represented the return of guitar hero to his homeland thereby configuring an important stage in the classic hero's journey. After going through many challenges and difficulties, his function is now sharing his wisdom’s elixir to contribute to the society’s improvement.

His personal tragedy began to emerge mainly caused by his personal dissatisfaction with the requirements of the music industry and the sabotage of his manager Michael Jeffery. His hedonistic conception of the "here and now" triggered in concerts created an insatiable expectation in public for more transcendence. This special condition awakened the evil greed of his entire administrative apparatus made up of businessmen, concert promoters, record labels owners, which was definitive for his downfall. On the other hand, the guitarist was carried away by wrong decisions in the professional field and weaknesses in the personal sphere related to drug use. Eric Clapton reported that Hendrix had a "Dionysian entourage" of parasites and opportunistic beside him every time they met.

His journey is, in the aesthetic perspective, the essence of tragedy discussed by Aristotelis in the Poetics. According to Suassuna, the first characteristic of tragedy is a high character of action taken by the protagonist. But the key element of the tragedies reminds us of the exceptional and conflicting Hendrix’s personality. To Suassuna, the tragic character sees himself in a conflict that leads a dilemma: "There, contrary to popular belief, the tragedy is caused by will and not by fate" (2008, p. 129). Thus, his professional ambition left him in a dilemma between preserving his musical autonomy or conforming his public image in music industry. In this sense, Henderson states:

Over and over again one hears a tale describing a hero’s miraculous but humble birth, his early proofs of superhuman strength, his rapid rise to prominence or power, his triumphant struggle with the forces of evil, his fallibility to the sin of pride (hybris) and his fall through betrayal or a "heroic" sacrifice that ends in his death (Jung, 1964, p. 110).

A year before his death, Hendrix performed an iconic twentieth century image. At the end of Woodstock Festival, he interpreted an unorthodox version of the USA national anthem in alternating guitar sounds of bombs exploding, machine gun shots and planes falling. The clothing used by Hendrix had fringes under the arms, like bird wings, which increased his symbolism as a primitive archetype of transcendence (Jung, 1964, p. 151). Maybe he was preparing himself for the move to another dimension where he could finally reach his second wish: to find his mother.

4. Final Considerations

The narrative schemes proposed by Propp, Greimas and Campbell have perfectly suited to the biography of Jimi Hendrix. His personal and professional story can be seen as a repetition of classical tragedies, which points to the narrative definition as a balance of power between regularity and the inexorable time change. In fact, the dialogue between the structuralism and semiotic theory provided greater semantic understanding by allowing us to view the actions performed by Jimi Hendrix in his quest for recognition as a musician, and the manipulations performed by the villains that affected negatively his career. His electric guitar myth condition in popular music remains alive today because his life is a symbol of human being struggle by a higher ideal, which perfectly strengthens its social representation as a classic hero’s journey.

5. References

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CLAPTON, Eric. A autobiografia: Eric Clapton. São Paulo: Editora Planeta do Brasil, 2007.

FRIEDLANDER, Paul. Rock and Roll: Uma História Social. 7ª ed. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2012.

GREIMAS, A.J. & COURTÉS, J. Dicionário de Semiótica. São Paulo: Contexto, 2013.

HENDRIX, Leon. A Brother’s  Story. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012.

JUNG, Carl G. Man and his symbols. New York: Anchor Press, 1964.

LAWRENCE, Sharon. Jimi Hendrix: The man, the magic, the truth. New York: HarperCollins e- books Publisher, 2009.

MACSWAIN, Rebecca. The Social Reconstruction of Reverse Salient in Electric Guitar Technology. Noise, the Solid Body and Jimi Hendrix, p. 186-198, 1996.

MENDES, Conrado Moreira. A noção de narrativa em Greimas. Revista E-com. V.6, N.1 (2013). Disponível em: http://revistas.unibh.br/index.php/ecom/issue/view/79.

MILLARD, Andre (orgs).  The Eletric Guitar: a history of an American Icon. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004.

PROPP, Vladimir. The Morphology of the Folktale. Ed. with an introd. by Svatava Pirkov-Jakobson, tr. by Laurence Scott. Indiana University, 1968.

ROBY, Steven e SCHREIBER, Brad. Becoming Hendrix: From southern crossroads to psychodelyc London, The Untold Story of a musical genius. San Francisco: Da Capo Press, 2010.

SUASSUNA, Ariano. Iniciação à estética. 9ª ed. Rio de Janeiro: José Olimpo, 2008.

TODOROV, Tzvetan. As estruturas narrativas. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2006.

WAKSMAN, Steve. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. Cambridge, Massachusetts e London: Harvard University Press, 1999.