The image that Hendrix had constructed for himself--quasi hippie and dreamy eyed hard rocking bohemian--was a radical one at a moment when black popular music was heavily characterized by the slick, well groomed, smoothly choreographed groups from Motown. Acts that signed on to Motown were put through a rigorous "finshing school," complete with fashion and diction makeovers, and eye stopping choreography created by the legendary Charlie (Cholly) Adkins. The fashions themselves--alpaca sweaters, crisp sharkskin suits, alligator shoes, and conked hair--were standard urban black male fashion. Jimi Hendrix clearly posed a different proposition, a different notion of blackness. If you want to talk about post-black, well here it was right here!

      I was a product of the move to integrate America's schools in the post Brown v. Board of Education years. This integration of America's public schools was achieved by bussing black kids from their neighborhood schools to schools in predominantly (or exclusively) white neighborhoods and school districts. So from the third grade on I was bussed to schools outside of my community, and spent my days in the company of my white fellow classmates. I'll save my stories about what happened when I showed up at these classmates homes for another time (!), but suffice it to say that this radical socioeducational engineering had something to do with shaping my growing taste in music as well. More attuned to New York's WMCA and WABC--home of "top 40" pop music--than WWRL, the "big 16" (so named because it was at the end of the tuning dial at 1600), the home of black popular music, and the home of soul music, I grew up with my little transistor radio listening to a steady diet of Beach Boys, Beatles, various "British Invasion" groups, and later the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, the Byrds, Mommas and Poppas, and others who emerged (mostly from San Francisco) in the mid-late 1960s and early 70s. I listened to WWRL occasionally, and bought the latest black music hits as well (Dells, Chilites, Parliaments, and Aretha among others) but it was pop music and rock and roll of that era that seemed to be truly inspired and breaking new ground to my ears. I was fortunate enough (or adventurous enough) to see the original Allman Brothers band (with Gregg and Duane) along with Blood Sweat and Tears and other acts at the Fillmore East in New York in the late 60s and early 70s. You get the picture.

                        

Jimi Hendrix was the first black popular musician who I located within that mostly lily-white milieu who didn't echo the Motown aesthetic, or the harder edged black vocal style of Percy Sledge, Jackie Wilson, Wilson Pickett, and others, and as such he was a liberating and reassuring figure. Haven taken a lot of heat from my black friends and classmates for my immersion in "white" musical culture, Jimi Hendrix was just the kind of black man this young black teenager was looking for: someone whose identity was unmistakably reinvented in his own image, and whose style was totally unlike the alpaca sweaters, Playboy shoes, and beaver hats that were the staples of urban black male fashion at that time. Any black man walking down the streets in the black community at that time looking like Jimi Hendrix looked on the cover of Are You Experienced would surely have been derided as "a stone cold fagg*t" for sure, strange at the least, and a Uncle Tom at worse. Yet Hendrix's masculinity was--as exemplified by songs like "Hey Joe" and "Fire"--typically macho, even if his appearance spoke of a new kind of hybridity, and other songs wavered between explosive and boisterous guitar driven rock and roll anthems and dreamy poetic musings. His physical persona and his music posed, for me, a new paradigm of blackness that suggested that one could indeed construct ones identity in a host of new ways. It was reassuring to know that--like me--not all black folks were characterized by the music at the end of the dial at the "Big 16."

      Though Hendrix's roots were firmly within the black musical traditions of blues and soul (he had played the "chitlin' circuit" as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, as well as having played with James Brown's backup band, the Furious Flames), his audience remained largely white; it seemed there weren't a whole lot of black folks willing to make this trip down a radically different musical path with him. Sly and the Family Stone (also from San Francisco...did San Francisco single handedly reinvent American rock and roll in 1967 during the "Summer of Love" or what?) were momentary partners in black cultural and musical hybridity, what with its integrated band and exhortations of racial unity in its music (and I was a regular habitué at any and all all of their concerts), but Hendrix stood alone for both the level of sheer electric guitar playing musical virtuosity and invention. He clearly extended the use and playing of the electric guitar far beyond what any musician had, both before and since. In spite of this, his lack of considerable black audience began to wear on him after awhile, and was one of the reasons he disbanded the Experience and formed the Band of Gypsies, with his old army buddy Billy Cox on bass and Buddy Miles on drums. 

      But even this change to an all black lineup and a more rudimentary approach to his music--with a bit more emphasis on the back beat--didn't bring him the larger black audience he had hoped it would. While one could certainly argue persuasively that neither Cox or the flat footed funk drummer Buddy Miles came close to approaching the level of musicianship of Hendrix's Experience band mates Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, his decision to seek a larger black audience through a more pronounced form of black musical "authenticity" is a telling one. Throughout his career Hendrix was often besieged by various groups and individuals trying to shake him down to contribute to "the cause." Members of the Black Panther Party were indeed notorious for showing up at his dressing room looking for "contributions." It seemed that Henrix could never do enough or be black enough for "the black community." Frustrated, and with a large black following still out of reach, Hendrix broke up the Band of Gypsies, replacing the leaden Miles with his original Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, and added multiple percussionists, including Juma Sultan (my across the hall neighbor from Brooklyn with whom I traded numerous Hendrix stories, and played with recently at a memorial service for a mutual friend). But a black following remained elusive until the very end. 

      This, of course, is the dilemma for many black artists who find a measure of success within the mainstream, only to find themselves largely isolated from the larger black community and at the center of a system of promotion, support, and acquisition that contains few people who look like them. How one can remain aesthetically and conceptually forward looking as an ambitious black artist, and still bring a sizable black audience along for the ride, is something that remains a question, since there seems to be few organized systems of support within the larger black community to enact and encourage this level of risk taking on the part of black artists. As such I suspect that black artists of a certain adventurous and ambitious stripe will continue to be celebrated, collected, and shown largely by an audience that looks very much like Jimi Hendrix's audiences did when he looked out at them from on stage forty years ago.