Starting At Zero (24 page)

America is inclined to bring out the rebel in me, and I’m not really like that at all. I still love America, naturally, it has so much good in it. But it has so much evil too. The way this
country’s being run you can see the badness, you can see the evil, right in front of your face.

On the one side the people are like pelicans who all think the same. They are striving for dead, useless things. Then we have the American Revolution, fake love for the LIE people who sold their
faith. Quite naturally you say,
“Make love, not war,”
but then you come back to reality. There are some evil folks around and they want you to be passive and
weak and peaceful so they can overtake you like jelly on bread. It’s good to be passive and all this, but you have to have something to back it up. You have to fight fire with fire.

Forget about the mass-love scene. It’s not building understanding. And I wish I could say this so strongly they’d sit up in their chairs, because there’s no such thing as love
until truth and understanding come about. In order to change the world you have to get your own head together first.

{IN MAY 1970, AFTER A YEAR OF STRUGGLING TO BUILD ELECTRIC LADY STUDIOS, JIMI WAS FINALLY ABLE TO BEGIN RECORDING THERE.}

I have done great things with this place. It has the best equipment in the world. It is capable of recording on 32 tracks, which takes care of most things. There is one thing that I hate about
studios usually, and that is the impersonality of them. They are cold and blank, and within a few minutes I lose all drive and inspiration.

Electric Lady is different. It has been built with great atmosphere. There are lots of cushions and pillows and thick carpets and soft lights. It’s a very relaxed studio with every
comfort, so it makes people feel they are recording at home. And you can have any kind of light combination you feel like. I think this is very important. I want it to be an oasis for all the rock
and roll musicians in New York. Chuck Berry and Sly have been down there doing a few things, and I am working on a symphony production to be done there in the near future.

I
’M ALSO WORKING ON MY OWN ALBUM, called
First Ray Of The New Rising Sun. The First Ray Of The New Rising Sun
is my new life. It will
be about what we have seen, and will simplify it all to bridge the gap between teenagers and parents. It’s going to be a double set again and have about twenty tracks on it. Some tracks are
getting very long, but you see, our music doesn’t pertain to one thing. You don’t have to be singing about love all the time in order to give love.

I wrote a song called
Trashman
, which I’ll explain. There’s a physical change coming soon, and the world’s going to go topsy-turvy. It’s neither bad nor good
– it’s just true. Because humans forget that they’re part of earth-matter too, they have bad vibrations floating around right now. For instance, you sometimes go into smoke dens
and find that nobody is contributing to nothing. It’s nothing but a big negative.

So there’s going to be this big physical change where you can draw all negative energies that might be around out of people. And from that energy you will be able to talk for about thirty
hours straight, talk about something right and true. I mean talk about something that has some kind of foundation. Everybody should play their own parts. Everybody should be actors in their own
scripts. All of the script is coming from God in the first place. It’s up to them to play out their parts.

Then we have
Valleys Of Neptune Arising
, and we have one called
Astro Man
. Talk about living in peace of mind, well,
Astro Man
will leave you in pieces! We have the theme
from
The New Rising Sun
, this little bolero type of thing. It’s kind of nice, but then it breaks down into a very simple pattern, asking this one question,
“Where are you coming from and where are you going to?”

I think we’re going to have this thing called
Horizon or Between Here And Horizon
, and that goes into certain things like
A Letter To The Room Full Of Mirrors
. That’s
more of a mental disarrangement. It’s a song about when you get real high and all you can see is you, reflections of you here and there. Some of you have undoubtedly been through this at one
time or another, in some kind of way or another. Oh boy! I guess I’ll try and get rid of that hang-up. Like they say, on a clear day you can see forever.

T
HERE ARE BASICALLY TWO KINDS OF MUSIC. The blues is a reflection of life, and then there is sunshine music, which may not have so much to say
lyrically but has more meaning musically. It’s more an easier type of thing with less worries and more meaning to it. I really don’t want to get too heavy. I want to play sunshine music
now. I have this saying that when things get too heavy, “Just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man!”

But music is always changing according to the attitude of the people. When the air is static, loud and aggressive, that’s how the music gets. When the air starts getting peaceful and
harmonic, that’s how the music will get. So it’s up to the people how it’s going to be.

M
USIC GOES BY THE RULES OF THE PRESENT AIR.

I’d like to get into more symphonic things, so the kids can respect the old musical traditions, the classics. I’d like to mix that in with so-called rock. But I have to get involved
in my own kind of way, because I always want to respect my own judgments.

I don’t plan to just go out there with a ninety-piece orchestra and play two and a half hours of classical music. I plan for both those things to be used without even knowing that
it’s rock and classical, with it being a whole other thing. It would be just like every step is, a mixture of the past and the future. When I finally get into it the whole world’s going
to know about it.

I
T WOULD BE INCREDIBLE IF YOU COULD PRODUCE MUSIC so perfect that it would filter through you like rays and ultimately cure. I’m into this
combination of music and color. It’s an extra area of awareness.

I have plans that are unbelievable, but then wanting to be a guitar player seemed unbelievable at one time. I only regret that I didn’t start singing and playing on my own much earlier. I
also regret that I’m lazy. I used to write thousands of tunes, but I don’t seem to get around to it now.

{ON JULY 30, 1970, JIMI APPEARED AT THE “RAINBOW BRIDGE VIBRATORY COLOR/SOUND EXPERIMENT” ON THE HAWAIIAN ISLAND OF MAUI.}

When I was in Hawaii I saw a beautiful thing, a miracle.
There were lots of rings around the moon, and the rings were all women’s faces. I wish I could tell someone
about it ...

BABY CHILD AS A MAN,

AS A LIVING GRAIN OF SAND,

SITTING ON THE EVER-CHANGING SHORE,

GREETING THE SUNRISE ...

PICKED UP UPON THE GYPSY WOMAN,

HAIR FLAMING NIGHT AS RAVENS

EVEN SLEEP ... RAINBOW CLOTH ...

TAMBOURINE COMPLEMENTING HER CHANT AND CHOICE OF GRACES,

AND LOVE HER GOD.

I ACTUALLY LOOKED UPON HER

ON MY RIGHT ... COMING FORTH,

AND BABY CHILD THEN SECONDLY LOOKED

HIS LEFT TO EYE,

AND 11 OR 12 WOMEN, MEN

AND LITTLE ONES APPROACHED,

THEY CLAD IN THEIR MASTER’S WISH;

WHITE ROBES SWAYING TO BE BAPTIZED.

THESE TWO WORLDS CROSSED EACH OTHER

IN FRONT OF ME, WHEN AFTERWARDS ...

BABY CHILD SIPPED A HEARTFUL OF OCEAN,

SPAT OUT THE WASTE AND WALKED

UPON THE NEW DAY.

I see miracles every day now. I used to be aware of them maybe once or twice a week, but some are so drastic that I couldn’t explain them to a person or I’d probably be locked up by
this time. One of these days I’ll finally release all that out, but I’m not going to say anything about it until a wide range of people see it. It’s a universal thought;
it’s not a black and white thing, or a green and gold thing ...

People are frightened to find out the full power of the mind. At the moment, people use only a minute part of their minds, and there’s so much more scope. At one time man could see right
around the world with his third eye. That was something that’s always been there. If we could only redevelop those old skills.

I think the way things are going right now, maturity, that’s going to take time. But spirituality and things in the head, they’re always there. I mean, it gets better and better all
the time. I’m always having visions, and I know it’s building up to something really major. It’s out of what’s directing me. What I was here in the first place to do.

{JIMI CONTINUED RECORDING AT ELECTRIC LADY STUDIOS THROUGHOUT AUGUST. THE STUDIO WAS OFFICIALLY OPENED ON AUGUST 26.}

New York is killing me at the moment. It’s positively claustrophobic! Things go so fast you might as well step on a roller coaster each time you move outside your door. One day I saw a
soldier in the street and said, “Hey, how are you?” He just stared at me and said, “Hey, man, are you for real?” He was bringing himself down because he was so full of
hate.

I
BELIEVE YOU HAVE TO LIVE AND LIVE AGAIN until you have got all the evil and hatred out of your soul. Your body is as unimportant as one fish in
the sea compared with your soul. But there are still some hardheads who don’t give themselves a chance to develop in the brain, or to let the soul develop or the emotions. You’ve got to
gentle these people along for a while until they are clued in on the scene. With enough love and faith, they can find themselves again.

There’s no bad people or good people; it’s actually all lost and found. That’s what it all boils down to. There’s a lot of lost people around, and there are a few chosen
people that are here to help get these people out of this certain sleepiness that they are in. There’s going to be sacrifices. You have to go down into a really bad scene before you can come
up with light again. It’s like death and rebirth. After you’ve gone through all of the hell of dying, you’ve got to find out and face the facts to start a nationwide rebirth.

The whole past is going towards a higher way of thinking. There’ll be a day when houses will be made of diamonds and emeralds. Bullets’ll be fairy tales. There’ll be a
renaissance from bad to completely clear and pure and good – from lost to found.

I attribute my success to God. It all comes from God. I go by message, and I’m really a messenger of God. My name is nothing but a distraction. Already this idea of living today is magic.
I’m working on music to be completely, utterly a magical science, where it’s all pure positive. The more doubts and negatives you knock out of anything, the heavier it gets and the
clearer it gets, and the deeper it gets into whoever’s around it. It’s contagious. Bach and all those cats, they went in there, and they caught a whole lot of hell.

The deeper you get into it, the more sacrifices you have to make. It means I’m going to have to strip myself of my identity, because this isn’t my only identity. Really I’m
just an actor. The only difference between me and those cats in Hollywood is that I write my own script. Someone is going to have to go back to his childhood and think about what they really felt,
really wanted before the fingerprints of their fathers and mothers got a hold of them, or before the smudges of school or progress ...

{ON AUGUST 30, 1970, JIMI RETURNED TO GREAT BRITAIN TO PLAY AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL, HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN ENGLAND IN ONE AND A HALF YEARS.}

It’s nice to be back. I’ve been away from this country and Europe for such a long time. But the band has been committed to so many tours and college gigs in the States that it was
utterly impossible for us to come over. Believe me, we wanted to! We’d mention that we’d like to come back to Britain to play, but our business people would tell us, “You’re
nothing over there in Britain at the moment. Besides, you’ve got this booking in Boston ...”

We received a lot of STATIC in New York, a lot of aggravation in New York. So I’ve been doing like Yogi Bear, I’ve been hibernating. I just tried to do the gigs and stay quiet for a
while. I’ve been going through certain changes. I guess it’s something else for people to talk about.

While I was doing my vanishing act in the States, I got this feeling that I was completely blown out of England. I thought maybe they didn’t want me anymore, because they had a nice set of
bands. Maybe they were saying, “Oh, we’ve had Hendrix, yeah, he was okay.” I really didn’t think we’d have any drawing power.

I’m so very nervous about the Isle of Wight, I can’t believe it. I really hate waiting around like this. I think it would be better if I’d come and mingled, took a sleeping bag
with me and mixed with the crowds to identify with it all. It would be so much better than all this, but there are the usual problems. If I do things like that the people keep coming up to me
saying, “Look, it’s him,” and, “C’mon, c’mon” and all that, prodding me.

I’m just a little bit worried now because I sound a teeny bit like a frog. Last night we were playing so loud that I was shouting on my tiptoes. I felt like my kneecaps were up in my chest
nearly. I get kind of tense before a show. I like to be left alone to think. I have to think myself into my act. I can’t just turn on.