America Drunk On Itself

Outside it's all happening. I keep hearing the loud bursts of sound, random, like gunfire, with the accompanying lights flashing across the sky. Hell, I kind of wanna go out there and blend in with the commotion. Go crazy with noise and color and pig intestines and beer. Why the hell not? We're Americans, we can do whatever we damn well please.

What I’m doing instead is obsessively watching and re-watching a short clip of Dick Cavett interviewing Jimi Hendrix in 1969. It's just after Woodstock, where Hendrix played a searing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. In his version the bombs bursting in air seemed to be exploding in torturous slow motion. Probably in Vietnam. 

Cavett wants to talk about the animosity engendered by any “unorthodox” interpretation of the national anthem. Hendrix is having none of it, he interrupts Cavett mid-sentence, speaking pointedly, assuredly: “Hey listen, that’s not unorthodox. I thought it was beautiful.”

Those words work like music. Watching the bit over and over, it’s easy to become entranced. Those words, and the way Hendrix says them, take on the air of simple, ineffable truth. They have the same kind of impact, maybe more, as his guitar playing at its most expressive. Bob Dylan, speaking through Jeff Bridges, nailed the subtext of the Hendrix Anthem performance - though he may as well have been talking about the Cavett appearance - in 2003's Masked and Anonymous: "I'm not a traitor - I'm a native son." 

On the Cavett show you can hear in Hendrix's words a vision of (for) the country that he must have felt was just within grasp. One where every window is open and every rule is subject to change. But that's what it's like here anyway, isn't it? Isn't it?

Around this time Hendrix was workshopping a song called “Freedom”. It's a mean, funky song, with Hendrix zig-zagging between exultation and desperation, stretching and repeating the title word again and again, demanding "Give it to me, so I can live." That could be an echo reverberating from two years earlier, when in one of his most powerful songs he had cried "I don't live today".

It’s a slippery concept, freedom. We bandy the word about wantonly, not only in politics but in everyday life. I hear it applied to music all the time. “Rock and Roll is really about freedom.” “Jazz represents freedom.” “Punk means freedom.” You can find variations on this idea just about everywhere. This is freedom. There are a lot of different kinds of freedom.

For a country, and a people, who have freedom inherent in our very identity, it's a little odd that we spend so much time trying to define its parameters. And then trying to burst through them. Like a vicious circle, we're free to be free to be free to be free.

And then we're free to wallow in it. Like right now.

America - drunk on ideas, possibilities, freedom's ever-shifting meaning, and alcohol (mostly alcohol) for two-hundred thirty-plus years. 

Woo-hoo!