Get Experienced

The king is gone but he’s not forgotten. No, this isn’t the story of Johnny Rotten, but of Jimi Hendrix – one of the most recognizable names in rock ‘n’ roll, an original guitar god, a bona fide musical legend, a hazy cloud of smoke and one of the ones that died too young.

Hendrix was an American original embraced by both sides of the pond. And with Hendrix’s drug-related death in September of 1970, it may as well have marked the death of the blues as it had been known. Goodbye Mississippi and hello London, where British musicians like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Paige tweaked and tittered with three chords or 12 bars or pentatonic scales to reach new sonic heights. Yes, some amazing music was made, but the guttural grit that so naturally came from bluesmen like Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker was lost, probably forever.

And now we have the Experience Hendrix tour, a simple play on words that capitalizes on a legend’s name and music, where a dozen or so amazing musicians get together and jam the night away with Jimi on the mind. Classic rock tribute concerts seem to be all the rage these days – we have Zappa Plays Zappa, Australian Pink Floyd and even Roger Waters paying homage to himself, along with revised dinosaur acts of the past – the Who, Cream and even Led Zeppelin recently reuniting.

But the fact remains that Hendrix has been dead for 38 years. His records are still readily available, there’s plenty of live footage of him playing, so why orchestrate a bunch of guitar geeks in a wank-fest tribute to their hero at theaters across the country?

Because it’s awesome.

One of the performers, Mato Nanji, of the Lakota Sioux Indian Nation in South Dakota and the brains behind blues rockers Indigenous, has been tearing up renditions of “Little Wing” and “Hear My Train A Comin’” on the tour. “Everybody kind of has two or three songs they play every night,” he said. “It’s awesome to get up and play with all these other great musicians … that have probably been hit by Hendrix the same way I have growing up.”

Nanji’s love for Hendrix is a typical story, for a guitarist of note at least. His father listened to Hendrix records as Nanji grew up in the ’80s and ’90s and he eventually found himself learning the riffs, solos and idiosyncrasies from the album “Axis: Bold as Love.”

“I’ve always learnt as much as I could from Jimi and (I’m) still learning to this day. I’ve always tried to incorporate his style of music, you know, what he did with the guitar into what I do when I write my music and write my songs.” He added that the Experience Hendrix tour is another way of keeping Hendrix’s legacy alive for the next generation.

The roster of musicians runs deep on the tour: guitarists Buddy Guy, Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Eric Johnson, David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas, along with Nanji, Hubert Sumlin and Eric Gales. Chris Layton of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Double Trouble is also on board, not to mention Hendrix’s old rhythm section, Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox.

You’d think with so many stars along for the tour that egos would clash. Not so, according to Nanji: “I’m pretty surprised at how smoothly it flows, but I think it has to do with the artists a lot of times because everybody is pretty laid back and easy going … it’s a good environment to travel together and play together. I can only see it getting better and better down the road and taking it around the world.”

The lines might blur at times as to whether it’s a Hendrix tribute or a giant jam session, but perhaps this particular tour should be referred to as simply a “tribute jam.”

“I guess all of us,” Nanji said of himself and his tour mates, “we kind of do what we do, just incorporate what we do into what Hendrix did … I try not to step too far away from what he did, you know, ‘cause it’s already great music the way it is.”

There will only ever be one Jimi Hendrix, and the Experience Hendrix tour doesn’t attempt revive the king – that would be sacrilege. True to life blues won’t resound through the halls of the Orpheum as they would if Hendrix was actually playing live and in the flesh, but guitar playing to near virtuosic levels will satisfy any crowd that, from as soon as they enter the building, are already under a purple haze of their own.