Author Archives: cleek

Album Reviews: Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton

Rolling Stone handled Are You Experienced and Fresh Cream in a dual review, Nov 1967.

Here’s a taste:

The earlier pop groups of the new wave, starting with the Beatles, the Animals, the Stones and the Beach Boys, were all four-instrument groups, and tended to influence others in that direction. But from the beginning some American groups have attempted to enlarge this concept.

…

Oddly, in England the trend has been in the other direction. The Who, the current Yardbirds, the Cream and Jimi Hendrix are all three-instrument groups. They represent attempts to tighten the music, to eliminate the superfluous and to get closer to the mythical nitty-gritty. In some cases they are going so far as to eliminate the distinction between background and foreground sounds.

In considering the work of two major new trios, the Cream and Jimi Hendrix, it must be remembered that there is no point in eliminating the rhythm instrument if it is a group’s intention to play the kind of rock in which it is important to have one. Any rock form in which there is a solo-accompaniment idea, such as the blues or hard rock, will require more than a bass and drums for rhythm. It is therefore self-defeating to start a three-man group to play those types of music. Hendrix has been more successful in realizing this and in using the three-instrument idea more meaningfully.

This concern about “are there enough instruments for this kind of music?” is the core of the review, and the reviewer is not at all pleased with the trios. No sir. And overdubs? Just proves how wrong the trio idea is. The idea that a record, a studio creation, can be a legitimate work on its own, as opposed to a raw document of what the musicians can do in real time, hadn’t sunk in yet, I guess.

On the Are You Experienced album Jimi has made a tremendous technical advance in the use of three instruments. The superfluous has been eliminated, the tightness of the arrangements is total, the ornament and the background-foreground concept have been limited, if not eliminated, and the level of individual virtuosity is extraordinarily high. But, in Jimi’s case, the sum total of all this is pure violence. Above all this record is unrelentingly violent, and lyrically, inartistically violent at that.

Inartistically violent!

It was a different time.

The Girl In The Rainbow Sweater, cont…

When we last saw rainbow sweater girl, she’d been expelled from her private school for being too much herself.

And then…

Then Rod Dreher, senior editor at the American Conservative, did some digging into the sexual-identity of a 15-year-old girl and decided to publish it in an article entitled “Rainbow Cake Girl: The True Story.” Which is in itself a statement about American conservatism in 2020.

My understanding is that [the child] had a long, specific list of repeated infractions — bullying, disrespecting teachers, vaping in school (as Alford acknowledges), and so forth. Part of what she has allegedly done is promoting LGBT consciousness in the school, including aggression on that front. I’m trying to be delicate here, but I can tell you that she has transgressed against other students on this front, to promote bisexuality. For example, she allegedly drew rainbows and wrote slogans like “bi pride” on other kids’ papers, and gave at least two different girls the impression that she was sexually harassing them.

He then posted several images from the child’s private Instagram account. Because Rod Dreher is a creep.

He is also a named defendant in the lawsuit filed by the child’s parents yesterday in Jefferson County Circuit Court. They allege breach of contract, since the school released the child’s personal records and failed to follow its own escalating disciplinary policy, which allows for “an opportunity for mercy and grace through contrition,” rather than summary expulsion because the some nosy assh*le screengrabs a photo which confirms the school’s suspicion that the child is gay.

The suit alleges defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and invasion of privacy by the school and American Conservative, as well as by Jacobson and Dreher personally. It further alleges that the child’s disciplinary record consists of cutting lunch once and getting caught with a Juul, after which she was referred to the school counselor who treated the child’s nicotine habit with a book entitled “Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, And Who God Has Always Been.” Which must have been very helpful.