Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience

the land (sort of but not really), eat (mostly) macrobiotic vegetarian food, take mescaline and LSD, and, of course, smoke buckets of marijuana. The Eden Express’s biggest differ- ence from the rest of the madhouse memoirs is that the author’s father is a counterculture giant, one whose best novels are animated by dark absurdity. Father and son share affini- ties and contradictions, but this book leaves them untouched. It seems only to say, “Look what happens when you have a dad who’s a hippie icon in an era when anything goes—you go crazy! But not so fast. Hippiedom was harmless. Look, I got better and wrote a book about it. We were right all along!” The confessional and harrowing particularity of the current memoir craze would have helped Eden Express. This book about intense feel- ings lacks feeling. Vonnegut never comes to life. He advances a cocka- mamie theory that multivitamins Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock in 1969. cured him of schizophrenia, though he disavows it in an afterword written for this tuoso guitarist and consummate showman edition—he did, after all, go on to Harvard but a musical visionary and writer of endur- Medical School and become a pediatri- ing songs. His career as a headliner was cian—and admits that he wasn’t really schiz- meteoric, from the release of his jaw-drop- ophrenic, but manic depressive. ping debut album Are You Experienced? in In the end, there is a pervasive sense of 1967 to his drug-related death in 1970 at age falseness here, a maddening skimming of 27. The Hendrix industry has thrived in the surfaces while purporting to get to the deep- years since, cranking out countless records, est interiors. Not very brave, not completely movies, books, tributes, and imitators, as honest, Mark Vonnegut never paid much of well as endless speculation about what a price for the 1960s. For brave honesty, read might have been. “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” not this Midnight Lightning is the latest and, in pseudopsychiatric memoir full of wimpy, many respects, the strangest of the books. whiny flower children. Greg Tate, a staff writer at The Village —Lorraine Adams Voice, provides a remarkably astute exami- nation of Hendrix’s protean talents. The effortless precision with which he positions MIDNIGHT LIGHTNING: Hendrix in the context of subsequent gui- Jimi Hendrix and the Black tarists is music criticism at its best. But Tate Experience. has loftier goals than mere biography or By Greg Tate. Lawrence Hill Books. technical appreciation. He seeks to place 157 pp. $18.95 Hendrix—a black man who was largely In few fields has the label genius been ignored by the black community—in a applied more recklessly than in rock ’n’ roll. racial context. One of the few rock stars truly deserving the Himself African-American, Tate an- label is Jimi Hendrix, who was not only a vir- nounces up front that “this is a Jimi Hen- Summer 2003 125 Current Books drix book with A Racial Agenda.” Readers political and social activities were tied.” She who can get past the rhetoric will be bore witness to the censorious climate rewarded with provocative insights into that subsumed everything—culture, dress, black America and white America and and social interaction—beneath ideology. Hendrix’s singular position at the intersec- “There were only two forces in the world, tion of the two. But there’s also a bunch of the army of God and that of Satan. Thus oddball material, including a fabricated every event, every social gesture, also review of a movie Hendrix never made and embodied a symbolic allegiance.” She quit her a bizarre synopsis of a novel Hendrix never job in 1981 after refusing to don the veil, and wrote. Through it all, Tate writes with an went on to teach at two other Iranian uni- engaging, highly stylized voice, which on versities, where she repeatedly crossed occasion even manages to evoke Hendrix’s lances with those who would politicize lit- own loopy lyricism. erature. Finally, she left academia. Despite all the pyrotechnics, though, the “After resigning from my last academic book seems not so much searing Hendrix post, I decided to indulge myself and fulfill solo as Eddie Van Halen guitar extravaganza, a dream,” Nafisi writes. From 1995 to 1997, full of impressive licks and memorable riffs she hosted a seminar at her home in Tehran. but leading nowhere. Tate thoroughly docu- On Thursdays, seven of her former female ments Hendrix’s African-American roots, students, chosen for their literary acumen, both social and musical, but this knowledge would discuss the intersection of reality and does nothing to explain his incomprehensi- literature. (The husband of one student ble leap from sideman on the black “Chitlin would meet with Nafisi in private, for teach- Circuit” to white rock ’n’ roll icon. Then ing “a mixed class...was too risky.”) Their again, geniuses by definition are beyond the discussions ranged across such topics as a understanding of mere mortals. woman’s right to choose her destiny (Pride —Preston Lerner and Prejudice), the sustaining power of the imagination in the presence of death (A Thousand and One Nights), and what it means to be the object of a megalomaniac’s READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN: obsession (Lolita). A Memoir in Books. These books, Nafisi convincingly argues, By Azar Nafisi. Random House. pose an even greater threat to a despotic 347 pp. $23.95 orthodoxy than any open display of political In 1979, having spent 17 years abroad as a rebellion. They’re especially dangerous student, Azar Nafisi returned to Iran and because they are not overtly political. By found her homeland transformed. Gone was addressing the private rather than the pub- the café where she and her brother, as chil- lic sphere, they do not speak in the hang- dren during the Shah’s reign, had watched man’s language, which depends upon what incoming planes through French windows. can be observed, and thus regulated. With signs proclaiming “Death to America!” Though the narrative’s path toward mag- and posters of Ayatollah Khomeini, the new nanimity is never really in doubt—Nafisi is reality was hell-bent on asserting its domin- too detached, too much the aesthete, to be ion over the imagination of the Iranian peo- unhinged by deprivations, and she knows ple. Yet beneath this totalitarian blanket, that during times of unrest, the servants of Nafisi resisted and flourished. She sets out beauty are most needed—the content of the here to “thank the Islamic Republic for all book overcomes the conventionality of its the things it had taught me—to love Austen form. What could have devolved into a and James and ice cream and freedom.” misty-eyed hymn to literature is saved by its As the youngest faculty member in the singular locale. In a nation afflicted with English department at the University of “intense sensory deprivation,” where even Tehran, Nafisi was well situated to chart the open displays of affection are proscribed, lit- Islamic Revolution: The university “was the erature becomes a matter of urgency. By navel, the immovable center to which all thinking through books rather than about 126 Wilson Quarterly.

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