Song 443: The week the playlist comes around to Hey Joe by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, written by Billy Roberts, and you can find an interesting YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. I began adding Hendrix LPs to my collection shortly after he died, and his debut album soon became a major favorite. I quickly figured out how to play this tune, though I never even tried to deduce the lead solo, which, as on just about every Jimi recording, is the most compelling sequence of the track, and one that I've often heard in the back of my mind. At a social gathering in the early 1970s, I played and sang this piece, eliciting negative comments from a Jesus-freak chum who didn't like the violent message in the lyrics. Obviously, he hadn't heard the JH version, or any other model, but to me, the murder story in the words always sounded like an old Hollywood movie that you don't take seriously. I would not write a composition of this kind, or even perform one, but I didn't give it much thought when hanging out with friends - I was just playing a Hendrix classic that they would probably recognize, and maybe sing along on. Near the end of this cut, Jimi says Good-bye, everybody, and by the time I first came around to it, he had already left the stage for good, but he had also left behind some truly captivating music that can still spark up our lives 5 decades later.
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