Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child Page #4

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and there's no harm in that.

We have to eat like everyone else.

I'm looking forward

to going home to Seattle.

It's been seven years.

There's my father,

who's married again,

and my brother Leon, who's 19.

He's trying to form a band of his own now.

And I've got a six-year-old sister, Janie,

whom I've never seen.

That's how long

I've been gone from home.

The problem of succeeding

is a hard one for you,

if your bassist, say, is into the blues

or something like that,

and you suddenly make hundreds

of thousands of dollars a year.

Someone said it's hard

to sing the blues

when you're making

that kind of money.

This assumes that you can't be unhappy

and have a lot of money.

Sometimes it gets to be really easy

to sing the blues,

when you're supposed to be making

all this much money,

because, like, money is getting to be

out of hand now, you know.

And musicians, especially young cats,

they get a chance to make all this money,

and they say, "Wow, that's fantastic. "

And like I said before, they lose themselves

and forget about the music itself.

They forget about their talents,

they forget about the other half of them,

so therefore,

you can sing a whole lot of blues.

The more money you make,

the more blues sometimes you can sing.

There was a time I was worried

about the money.

I was worried about whether

I was getting all I was entitled to.

But money doesn't affect me right now.

These guys in the business

who go out and spend, spend, spend,

then end up flat busted broke.

Except maybe they have

some personal things they bought.

That's no good for me.

I get my biggest kicks out of music.

We've been together

for about two solid years

and we've been playing Purple Haze,

The Wind Cries Mary,

Hey Joe, Foxy Lady.

We've been playing all these songs,

which I really think are groovy songs,

but we've been playing

all these songs for two years.

So, quite naturally,

we started improvising here and there,

and there's other things

we wanted to turn on to the people.

We're cutting a new record

between our tours.

There may be two tracks

from the new Bob Dylan album on it.

In fact, we've done

All Along The Watchtower already.

It is now that I plan to start

making real music.

I wanna create a new sound.

Most of all, I'd like to forget

everything before 1968.

We call it The End Of The Beginning.

But see, LPs to us

are like personal diaries, you know.

That's why I like all the songs we did.

I'm not saying they're better

than anything else, but I just like them.

I have personal feelings for anything

that we recorded, we released.

That album, when it was released over here,

had a picture of me,

Noel and Mitch on the cover.

But people had been asking me

about the English cover

and I don't know anything about it.

All I can say is that I had no idea

that it had a picture

of dozens of nude girls on it.

When we recorded our last LP there,

Electric Ladyland,

we were touring at the same time

which is hard to do.

Because that means

you have to concentrate on two things.

You have to do a good show tonight

and plus tomorrow morning at six o'clock,

you have to go into the studio.

And so it was really hard.

So I got down half the things

that I really wanted

to get down during that period.

The negro riots in the States are crazy,

discrimination is crazy.

I think we can live together

without these problems.

But because of the violence

these problems aren't solved yet.

I don't look at things in terms of races.

I look at things in terms of people.

Quite naturally, I don't like

to see houses being burnt.

They asked us to give benefit concerts

for the Black Panthers.

I was iron in all this,

but I'm not for the aggression of violence

or whatever you wanna call it.

I just wanna do what I'm doing

without getting involved

in racial or political matters.

I can't express myself in a conversation,

I can't explain myself like this or that

sometimes 'cause, you know,

it just doesn't come out like that.

So, when we're on stage, it's our own

little world, that's your whole life.

Music is what matters.

When you hear somebody making music

they are baring a naked part

of their souls to you.

That was really nice.

Great.

Well, ladies and gentlemen,

in case you didn't know,

Jimi and the boys won

in a big American magazine called Billboard,

the Group of the Year

and they're gonna sing for you now

the song that absolutely made them

in this country,

and I love to hear them sing it,

Hey Joe.

I feel guilty when people say

I'm the greatest guitar player on the scene.

What's good or bad doesn't matter to me.

What does matter is feeling and not feeling,

technicality of notes.

You got to know the sound

and what goes between the notes.

I always try to get better,

but as long as I'm playing,

I don't think I'll ever reach the point

where I'm satisfied.

It was the same old thing

with people telling us what to do.

They wanted to make us play Hey Joe.

So I caught

Noel and Mitch's attention,

and we went into

Sunshine Of Your Love.

If you play live, nobody can stop you

or dictate what you play.

We'll stop playing this rubbish

and dedicate a song to the Cream,

regardless of what kind of group

they might be in.

I'd like to dedicate it to Eric Clapton,

Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.

We're being put off the air.

An experience for Jimi Hendrix retaining

his title as the world's top musician,

Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees

doing the honors.

What do you like to hear

if somebody comes up after a concert,

what kind of compliment do you like?

I don't know.

I don't really live on compliments,

matter of fact,

it has a way of distracting me

and a whole lot of other musicians

and artists that are out there today.

They hear these compliments, they say,

"I must have been really great. "

So they get fat and satisfied

and they get lost

and they forget about

the actual talent that they have,

and they start living

in another world, you know.

A couple of years ago,

all I wanted out of life was to be heard.

Now I'm trying to figure out

the wisest way to be heard.

I don't want to be a clown anymore.

I don't want to be a rock 'n' roll star.

We haven't had a rest

since we've been together,

and we're going to have

to take a rest sometime or another,

or else some of the music

is gonna come out really bad,

or it's not gonna come out

the way we want it to.

What I wanna do

is rest completely for one year.

It's the physical and emotional toll

I have to think of.

Maybe something will happen

and I'll break my own rules,

but I have to try.

It was always my plan

to change the bass player.

Noel is definitely out.

Billy Cox has more of a solid style

which suits me.

I first met Billy when we were

in the US Airborne.

I'm not saying any one

is better than the other.

We're gonna take some time off

and go out somewhere in the hills,

or whatever you call it,

until I get some new songs,

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