Dead Dad Dictum

  What dark arts are invoked in the creation of a song that makes you wistful for the person you never were, for a past that never happened? A song able to instantly transport you back to a place you’ve never been and one capable of effortlessly summoning feelings of loss, desire and longing, seemingly out of the ether?    Almost every pop song ever written is either about love, or the loss of that love. Loss is powerful, maybe even more powerful than love, because loss walks in lockstep with hate. But longing is even stronger still, as it leads us to make irrational justifications for situations that are, perhaps, not, as Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham sing in the classic Fleetwood Mac breakup song  Go Your Own Way , “the right thing to do.”   Watch contemporary Fleetwood Mac performances of this song and you can see the loathing Nicks developed for Buckingham in every small gesture she makes, every intonation in the lyrics she’s singing. It was visceral a...

  Jimi Hendrix had a problem. He’d broken through with his 1967 Monterey Pop performance, where he closed his set with a raw, confronting version of The Troggs’ proto-punk track  Wild Thing  and, as the song came to an end, he smashed his Fender Strat against the stage, set it on fire and then threw the pieces into the crowd as his rhythm section, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, kept up a syncopated backbeat.    The performance was a statement of intent, and Hendrix’ fame only grew over the next few years before his untimely death on 18 September 1970. The problem Hendrix had is that he wanted to grow as an artist and musician, but the audience wasn’t having a bar of it. They wanted more of the same:  Purple Haze , Hendrix playing his instrument behind his back and with his teeth and, yeah, the guitar smashing. What most of the audience didn’t want were extended jazz-blues fusion jams or collabs with Miles Davis.   And so Hendrix was t...