The first time I saw Jimi Hendrix, I was eight years old and he scared me. Really scared me. I wanted to leave, go home, and watch The Monkees or The Archies just to dilute the scary substance that was now inside me. I saw Hendrix in a dive theater where my dad had taken me to see the film American Graffiti—it had just come out, and it was his scene, right down to the film’s location. I think Hendrix scared my dad, too. But being a good father, he didn’t show it. Thank god it was a matinee…

That day I learned many new and frightening things, like the word “Bijou,” the name of the broken-bulbed, ratty-screened cinema where, prior to the main flick, they played a trailer for a Jimi Hendrix documentary. I’m still not fond of the word because I always associate it with that dive, which seemed to almost exclusively feature ’70s soft-core porn—even that could not redeem the place. More importantly, I learned that music sometimes didn’t just appear—friendly-like, and with a warm smile. Music sometimes showed up furiously, angrily launching itself from speaker to ear with a bruising velocity. Sometimes music thumped my entire torso with a single beat. And the beats that came after made me wonder what would happen if it never stopped. This is what the music of Jimi Hendrix, cut up into pieces and shoved through a broken sound system, did to me as I sat in a threadbare, squeaky cinema chair that I weighed just enough to hold down. I honestly thought I was going to vomit—of course, the popcorn was pretty bad.

To accompany this assault, I saw smoky images of a black man with an electric guitar wearing stitched-together circus costumes—and it didn’t look silly in the least, it looked like it fit the soundtrack. He pumped his guitar like he wanted to break it with his crotch. In the end, he didn’t break it; he burned it alive and worshipped the fire. And the band kept playing. What kind of band keeps playing when there’s a fire and an arsonist together on stage? Talk about being overshadowed by a fire demon Strat-fucker. When the trailer was over, there was only the sound of the projector, and a couple whispers of righteousness somewhere behind me in the dark. Though I wished all the lights would come on, I found the quiet roll of the projector soothing. Like the smoky silence after a dentist’s drilling, or the whipped quietude after a harsh breakup, there was a measured relief. At least I’ll never have to go through that again. Still, the music was now in me, maybe worse—maybe some rock-fire parasite was now implanted in my viscera, and when I wake up in the morning, I may look like that kid that could barely hold a cinema seat down, but on the inside I am towering in shiny metallic purple armor.

American Graffiti has always been a melancholy movie for me—I’m pretty sure this has nothing to do with Hendrix opening for it when I first saw it, there with my dad and about 12 other people in a dingy Bijou. It is, for me, one of the absolute best movies about the end of innocence, and what happens when you try and hold onto it. Set in 1962, the movie is also one long night full of a great but dying kind of rock ‘n’ roll (talk about allegory). A rock ‘n’ roll that, through this end of the telescope, seemed heady in its innocence (though in its time, the music was branded as youth corrupting). Looking from the stage of Woodstock or the grave of Jimi Hendrix, the music of American Graffiti seems hopelessly happy. Even the sad love songs are quietly optimistic. There is no ache anywhere, except for the characters that are coming of age whether they want to or not.

When the sun rises at the end of the movie all bets on the future have been laid down; after much jockeying for position at the table of destiny, nearly everyone ends up feeling trapped and wanting out of the game, preferring the immortality of youth. Maybe just one more night. Us kids, we didn’t really believe adolescence would end. We couldn’t kill it when we tried. And those with the memorial picture in the yearbook, like my cousin Eddie, just flukes, or maybe worse, sacrifices to the gods of adolescent immortality. Then the sun comes up, which is a huge misnomer—for we are bound to turn and face it, walking right into the sun and disappearing like Tom Joad. And that’s what the music and the characters did in George Lucas’ ode to his days of innocence and immortality. All but one—the one who tried to keep the page from turning, or the movie from ending, so to speak—he survived, which is saying something since these kids were being fattened up for the slaughter of Vietnam. He tried not to face the sun, which of course is impossible, so he ended up hanging from the edge of the film, with his girl in his arms, choosing the safety of the love you know over the love you won’t. He became an insurance salesman. He survived, and I’m not putting him down, because even insurance salesmen get the blues.

I haven’t decided if he is victorious in the film or not. But I think, choosing to grow old in one place, in a family, shows a type of courage. Lord knows I couldn’t do it. Maybe the rest of us are just running away. The life-giving waters taken for granted, they quietly understand—but wonder why the fight is still on.

The next time I heard Hendrix was on my bicycle, and a few years had passed. My neighbor was playing it in his garage. He played it on a Stratocaster through a Crybaby wah wah and an amp (I don’t remember—I probably didn’t notice—the model). I stopped my bike on the sidewalk at the end of his driveway and watched and listened to him play. I felt the driveway was a sufficient buffer. I think this was the first time I stopped my bike for something besides candy, dinner, or friends. The guitar playing neighbor, his name was Donnie, and he was older and in high school. And he was great, not just from a kid’s point of view but truly an excellent guitar player—they are not as rare as the labels would have us believe. With that guitar, and those Hendrix riffs, he fed me. He stood up my innocence for the bittersweet fall from birth to death and I learned then how my innocence would die. Orange is young, full of daring, but very unsteady for the first go round.

I rode my bike home from Donnie’s knowing I had to get an electric guitar as soon as possible. I was ready to place my bet—turning away from the safe stillness of a simple life to walk into the sun wearing an electric guitar. I knew the bet was risky, fraught with the fears discovered in a Bijou—a loud, aggressive, and soulful unknown, a seedy abyss where people burned music alive to get the art out; where, chained to a rock ‘n’ roll muse, they were swung about until something broke, and in the breaking all the right sounds and moments were unleashed, maybe even recorded so later they could scare some kid in a dying theater.

Like a true rock ‘n’ roller, like Jimi Hendrix, a man who helped shape his destiny, Donnie died young. He died in a car crash on his way home from a gig. It was right around the time I got my first electric guitar. Years went by before his mother would look at me again. I’ll stop now because that bet—that bet I laid down at the foot of Donnie’s driveway—it scares me sometimes, just like Jimi Hendrix. 

And all these emotions of mine keep holding me
from giving my life
to a rainbow like you.

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