Hendrix as Shaman! Townshend on Jimi Hendrix (for Dell)

🔴 PETE TOWNSHEND EXPLAINS HOW JIMI HENDRIX "DIDN'T KNOW WHAT HE WAS DOING"

Hendrix as Shaman by P Townshend 

Pete Townshend has always had a keen eye for anything spiritual. Thus, music, to him, holds a hefty weight. As he once poetically declared: “Rock ‘n’ roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.” 

In fact, recently Townshend claimed to be the first person in popular music to truly realise the weight of what they were doing.  “I was the child of the guy who played saxophone in a post-war dance band. He knew what his music was for – it was for post-war and it was for dancing with a woman that you might end up marrying. It was about romance, dreams, fantasy,” he told Apple Music. 

Continuing: “Music even today is about much more than that. It has a function which is to help us understand what is going on in the world and to help us understand what is going on inside us, so the purpose and the duty of somebody who makes music is very different to the way it used to be. […] And I think I was the first to articulate that and try to explain it.” 

Jimi Hendrix himself tapped into this exultant state to such an extent that he almost induced a trance upon the audience. His performative style is something that propelled his skills even further. It is this that Townshend most admires. “Well, that was a cosmic experience,” he told Rolling Stone about the first time he witnessed him live. “It was at Blazes, the nightclub in London. He was pretty amazing. Now I think you have to have seen Jimi Hendrix to understand what he was really about.”

He continues: “He was a wonderful player. He wasn’t a great singer but he had a beautiful voice. A smokey voice, a really sexy voice… When you saw him in the live arena he was like a shaman. It’s the only word I can use. I don’t know if it’s the right term. Light seemed to come out of him. He would walk onstage and suddenly he would explode into light. He was very graceful.” If a musical shaman delivering something cosmic isn’t what the pinnacle of live rock ‘n’ roll is all about then I don’t know what is?  

However, unlike Townshend who proclaimed that he was cognisant from the get-go that the engine of pop culture was going to change the world, Hendrix was seemingly unaware of the spiritual profundity of what he was actually doing in Townshend’s eyes. “What Jimi was doing was sublime. It was an epiphany in the actual dictionary definition of the word. You felt pained because in his presence and in the presence of that music, you felt small. And you realised how far you had to go,” he declared. 

However, he had to regretfully add: “What was also painful was to meet him afterwards and realise that he didn’t know what he was doing. I knew he was going to burn out very, very quickly because he was so insecure and shy, a sweet guy, a really nice guy.”