THE GREAT GADFLY:

Experienced

Hendrix Bassist Noel Redding Dead At 57

In my family, this news is up there with losing a Beatle. But then again, in my family, the news of losing a Beatle calls for veils and ululation. What can I say, I grew up with a hippie mom.

Arguably, the Jimi Hendrix Experience was the first concert I've ever attended...if you count attendance as having a front row seat via your mother's womb, anyway. Hey, tickets aren't cheap, you do what you can to have a little fun, you know how it is. I don't remember a thing about it, but then again, I'm sure very few of the people who were there can remember much about it either, heh.

I grew up listening to "Are You Experienced?", liking it but not really being aware that I liked it, simply because it was always playing and it was just part of being at home. When my mom decided to buy a crazy rawk-star full-sized drum set and plop it in the dining room (some families had a pool table, others a trampoline - we had a 12-piece, three-cymbal Pearl monstrosity in our rec room), the records I played when I taught myself how to play drums were "Are You Experienced?" and "Axis: Bold As Love".

I'd venture to say that around the time I was 14 or 15, I was a pretty kick-ass little drummer. I am not anymore, but hey - drumming got me out from behind the Atari 2600 (oops, I mean ColecoVision) and after a few months, I wasn't such a little fattie and I even had some rhythm. Drumming makes you sexy.

Anyway, I always thought the bass on those Hendrix Experience songs was so deliciously skanky, like strip club music in a Russ Meyer flick. Jimi's heart and soul might have come through in his guitar and lyrics, but there was no denying the hot, smelly crotch in Noel Redding's bass. It was the constant rambling id of those albums, regardless of what Jimi was going on about in any particular tune.

Compared to his bandleader, the guy lived a long life. Compared to most rock stars, he was Methuselah. I know he'll be politely swept to the "In Memoriam" sidelines with a gentle paragraph or two in Rolling Stone and a quick purse of the lips from Mary Hart...but DAMN. This was the guy who played bass on "Purple Haze", on "Foxey Lady", on "Little Wing". Pardon my geeked-out reverence, but those are pretty fucking incredible things in which to say you took part.

I think anyone whose work is captured on recordings as beautiful and legendary as those albums is incapable of ever truly going away. That's what I think, anyway.

Go dig out a Jimi Hendrix Experience album and give it a spin sometime. And dig that bass.