Stirring Up the Devil

Song 252: This week Purple Haze by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, written by Jimi Hendrix, takes its place on the playlist. I knew Hendrix mainly for his amazing single of Dylan's All Along the Watchtower until just around the time of his death in September of 1970, when I started adding his albums to the collection, and his first LP just about knocked me over. I did have a friend who admired his guitar work but didn't care much for Jimi's voice, but I liked his singing just fine, even if it wasn't quite as stellar as his playing. From the first time through on the LP, this cut stood out as possibly the best one among a very good collection of tracks, but I also felt that the opening riff had an odd quality to it. I soon got used to that strangeness, and all but forgot it until a few years later when a friend mentioned Jimi's use of the devil tone. Until that discussion, I hadn't ever focused on exactly what 2 notes he played in that strange beginning, and the realization made me appreciate his mastery of music even more. The 12-tone musical system that Europeans developed during the Middle Ages primarily as a vehicle for sacred music had identified harmonious intervals between notes, particularly the perfect fourth and the perfect fifth that made up, for instance, the harmonies of Gregorian chants. The perfect fourth and the perfect fifth are essentially the same, but between them another possibility exists, sometimes called the flatted fifth or the augmented fourth, that has a jarring tone -- so much so that it has found use in modern society as a common emergency siren -- and church leaders believed that its use in music would disturb listeners, possibly even making them do bad things. Thus it became know as the devil's interval, and naturally jazz players in the '30s and '40s had to make room for it in their compositions, but until Jimi put it down on this track, it probably hadn't shown up in rock and roll. Of all the thousands of songs by hundreds of artists that I've heard in rock, blues, country and folk, I couldn't name another track that uses the devil tone. So far I haven't found a place for it in any of my records, though I have plenty of songs yet to record, and maybe someday I'll find a spot for that jarring tone in one of them.