Jimi Hendrix on American Masters

The PBS documentary, "Jimi Hendrix" part of "The American Masters" series, is cautious hagiography so wholly uninteresting as to induce a weird fascination in the viewer. There is no paucity of footage showing Hendrix mauling his guitar and the man was completely beautiful and uniquely photogenic. But the film is a collage of Hendrix' greatest hits fused together by talking heads who have almost nothing to say. I count a documentary as useful if it tells me one thing that I didn't know before watching the film. By this criterion, the film succeeds: the mythology about Hendrix is that he was a wild man whose inherent Dioynsian frenzy was fueled by his experience of the savagery of combat in Vietnam. Unable to cope with his furies, Hendrix, I always believed, became a heroin addict and overdosed. None of this is even remotely true. Hendrix served briefly in the military, enlisting in the Air Force for a paratrooper training when he was 17. But he was hurt during practice jumps and honorably discharged, probably around 1959 0r 1960 -- before the Vietnam war entered the picture. Second, Hendrix doesn't seem to have been anything more than a casual recreational drug user. He had trouble sleeping, probably due to the unusual hours that he kept, and customarily employed sleeping pills. Apparently, a British girlfriend let him use her pills, far stronger than their American counterparts with which Hendrix was acquainted and he overdosed. The overdose seems to have been a pure, freakish accident. Hendrix had been an unsung back-up musician in the US where his brand of gimmicky guitar virtuosity is a staple of half the kids playing in garage bands in the suburbs. But in England, Hendrix's antics astounded the public and he became famous very quickly. After conquering England in the scope of a year or so, Hendrix returned to the US as a hero. He alarmed and amazed everyone at the Monterrey Pop Festival and was a darling of documentary film makers from the very start -- his performances at Woodstock in the Michael Wadleigh film and at Monterrey in D. A. Pennebaker's picture contributed to his celebrity and made him famous world-wide. The witnesses testifying about Hendrix in this picture seem to be under some kind of a gag order. They have nothing scandalous to say about him and nothing even remotely interesting. His ex-girlfriends are reticient, as if signatories to confidentiality agreements, and don't reveal anything interesting. Hendrix seems to have been a person of austere tastes and a complete cipher. He didn't read anything, scarcely glanced at the newspapers, and carried a guitar with him everywhere. He was modest, articulate, but very quiet. We see him shrinking physically in an interview with that glittering mannequin, Dick Cavett -- he is polite, well-spoken, but doesn't have anything to say. Hendrix lived for his music, and improving his art, which became increasingly experimental with each month, was his only passion. He seems to have had thousands of encounters with groupies, and Keith Richards' ex-girlfriend, still attractive on the brink of her dotage, praises his "immaculate sexuality" but we don't really get much a sense for what this means -- he seems to have regarded women as a hygenic necessity, like recourse to the toilet. Hendrix's music remains, at least for me, a matter of taste. It's impressive to see him torturing his guitar; he paws the poor thing with his elbows, plays it with his tongue and teeth, turns the axe upside-down and plays it behind his head, and, in one spectacular scene, butts the guitar into his amplifiers creating howling feedback while ramming his pelvis against the instrument to scrape it across the speakers -- I presume that Hendrix's girlfriends were treated to interesting displays of phallus-playing as well since this is the inevitable direction that his art seemed to take. But was the man really so wholly uninteresting, apolitical, and opinion-less. We have to recall, I suppose, that he was very young, that he died before he was 30, and some of the talking head material -- discussing Hendrix's changes in style "as he became older" -- is simply ludicrous; he didn't become older and this is his Grecian urn appeal: Hendrix died young and beautiful, without an extra pound on his frame, without a grey hair on his head and so will be forever young in our imagination. In Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai", there is a swordsman who wishes only to perfect his art -- he scarcely speaks to the others and we see him practicing alone in a chilly looking forest. But there is a village in the picture and six other warriors to maintain our interest. We have no such luck in this film.