Black beads, Hendrix and why we forget what we loved

 I had black, multi-faceted beads I'd bought at Glebe markets around my neck. Cream coloured corduroy jeans from an op shop and a grey tee I'd home screen-printed with a Sonic Life logo, along with black Chuck Taylor All Stars, completed the look. It was January 28, 1993, and we were at Sydney Uni to see  Sonic Youth, who were touring their 1992 album Dirty. The place was packed, and me, Dudley, the Wonder and Eliminator jr huddled in a small group waiting for the doors to open.

Looking back, the sheer number of people there surprises me. I'd come to Sonic a few years earlier, reading about them in a magazine, buying some albums (EVOL, Sister, Bad Moon Rising) and having my mind blown about what was possible with guitar music. Their politics also opened my mind. I began to develop an understanding of inclusion, of difference, and why so many people fear the ‘other.’ Sonic Youth changed everything for me. And yet, here we were, two major label albums in, and it seemed like everyone was a fan.

 

Sometimes I think I'm naive. It's an accusation I've had levelled at me from time to time. The idea that music and art and poetry and literature, along with love, are the only things that really count in this existence. And I wonder: of all the folks at that Sonic gig that night, how many of them still listen? How many of them took something from Kim, Thurston, Lee and Steve, and made it part of their lives? Ideas of inclusion, of artistic freedom, of liberating ourselves from the quotidian and pursuing the things we really love? Am I naïve for still believing in those things? That my generation, GenX, could do things differently, could liberate ourselves from the strait-jacket ideas our parents clung to? That we could make a better world?

 

 

“I’m going to sacrifice something here tonight that I really love.” The squall of feedback swirled around Hendrix as he hit the whammy bar on his Fender Stratocaster before launching into the primitive power chords of ‘Wild Thing,’ the Troggs song he closed his set at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival with.

 

Hendrix had had to go to England to get any recognition. Playing Monterey was his passport into the US market, one that hadn’t appreciated his genius. The thing Hendrix sacrificed that night was his Strat, decorated with hand-painted swirls and whorls. Towards the end of the song, he swung it against the stage, smashing it, before squirting it with lighter fluid and setting it aflame, his band keeping up a syncopated back beat.

 

If you watch the film of the performance, the audience is just sitting there, perhaps unable to grok what they’re seeing. Hendrix presaged metal and punk with this performance. It would take The Stooges, a year or two later, to truly invent what punk was, and Black Sabbath around the same time for metal,  but Hendrix was there first.

 

 

Sonic Youth opened that Sydney Uni gig with the song Shoot, off Dirty, then ran through a set including more songs from the newest album, as well as older stuff. Then they came back for an encore, playing the epic Expressway (aka, Madonna, Sean and Me). 

It's weird to think now that in 1993, we were closer in time to that Hendrix Monterey gig than we are today to the Sonic Youth show. A lot of time has passed.  

When I think about the situation we’re currently in, where misinformation rules and where fear of the other is paramount, I think a lot about those folks I saw Sonic Youth with in ‘93, and also about those folks who saw Hendrix at Monterey in ’67.

 

The baby boomers had the opportunity to change the world. They had the ‘60s, and they fucked it up. Lots of those hippies became the yuppies of the ‘80s. They forgot the lessons of inclusion, of love of the other, of what the summer of love was supposed to represent. They fell in love with money, and now the baby boomers are mostly a dead hand on our society. 

 

And I wonder what this means for my generation. Will we make the same mistakes? Will we fuck it up? How many of those people who were at Sydney Uni that night to see Sonic actually took what the band represented to heart? How many of them live by those values today? Was it just a passing fad, something to be discarded when the realities of paying bills and raising families came to the fore? Or was it something real, something life changing, with ideas and values to pass on to our kids?

 

I’ve never forgotten.