Grandes Flaming Lips (por Arthur Dapieve para NoMínimo)

Sem querer comparar, mas já comparando, cada disco dos Flaming Lips é uma espécie de “Se um viajante numa noite de inverno”. No livro de 1979, o escritor italiano Italo Calvino demonstrou toda a sua mestria iniciando uma dezena de histórias fascinantes e largando-as no meio, em prol de uma trama maior, tão logo o leitor se encontrasse incondicionalmente rendido. Pois a banda de Wayne Coyne faz o mesmo. Cada faixa de cada um de seus 11 trabalhos – como as 12 do recém-lançado “At war with the mystics”, que sai no Brasil pela Warner – traz idéias o bastante para grupos menos talentosos fazerem um álbum inteiro.

De maneira geral, contudo, os Flaming Lips hoje soam como se Neil Young estivesse cantando com uma banda de rock progressivo italiano, tipo Le Orme. Escute “My cosmic autumn rebellion”. Como? Se isso é possível? Só sendo os maluquetes que garantem ter começado, em 1983, tocando instrumentos roubados de uma igreja num clube de travestis em Oklahoma City. Daquele tempo, permanecem na banda o vocalista e guitarrista Coyne e o baixista Michael Ivins. Entre álbuns e mudanças de formação, eles sempre se mantiveram como uma banda alternativa – apesar de desde 1992 gravarem por uma grande gravadora.

Os Flaming Lips permaneceram nesta condição não porque seu som, a um tempo pop e experimental, seja difícil de ouvir e sim porque a sua criatividade é inapreensível: não há rótulo capaz de dar conta da cabeça hoje grisalha de Coyne. Num determinado ponto da vida, ele praticamente teve de reinventar a banda. Foi em 1996, quando o então guitarrista Ronald Jones saiu ou numa viagem mística ou por não agüentar mais o vício em heroína do baterista e faz-tudo Steven Drozd (os autores divergem). Três anos antes, o quarteto havia chegado o mais próximo do mainstream em toda a sua história, com o CD “Transmissions from the satellite heart”, puxado na MTV pelo clip de “She don’t use jelly”.

Não bastasse a partida de Jones, no mesmo ano Ivins se envolveu num acidente de carro (o seu foi abalroado por uma roda que se soltara de outro) e Drozd quase perdeu a mão (depois de ser picado por uma aranha). Nada tão bizarro quanto o projeto de Coyne de gravar 40 automóveis com seus toca-fitas sincronizados tocando uma mesma música. O chamado “Parking lot experiment” nunca foi adiante, mas o primeiro álbum dos Flaming Lips após a inhaca geral refletiu, digamos, um décimo desta idéia mirabolante: os quatro CDs que compunham “Zaireeka” (1997) eram para serem tocados todos ao mesmo tempo.

Como um trio, Coyne, Ivins e Drozd lançaram, depois de “Zaireeka” e antes deste “At war with the mystics”, dois discos delicados e solenes, “The soft bulletin” (1999, o melhor de todos, na minha opinião) e “Yoshimi battles the pink robots” (2002), ambos só lançados no Brasil no ano passado, pela Warner. Os três formam uma espécie de trilogia. Sob capas que remetem a gibis de ficção-científica da década de 50, eles imaginam histórias surreais – nas quais, porém, a concretude da morte é principal tema de meditação, como na faixa “Mr. ambulance driver”, do novo CD – e as contam de maneira suave e serena.

No caso de “At war with the mystics”, o mote é (ou seria) um mágico que parte para o espaço sideral em busca de um agrupamento de estrelas supernovas que assumiu a forma perfeita de uma mulher... Com as pernas abertas. Adiciona estranheza ao já estranho saber que Coyne, este Frank Zappa hodierno, dá um jeito de associar tal trama à Era Bush.

Nem o mago nem o bruxo tem lá tanta importância. “At war with the mystics” é, como seus dois predecessores imediatos, encantador já a partir da faixa de abertura, “The yeah yeah yeah song”, um chiclete-de-ouvido que propõe algumas perguntas incômodas ao ouvinte (“Se você pudesse tomar todo amor sem retribuir/ Você o faria?/ E assim nós não podemos conhecer a nós mesmos ou ao que realmente faríamos...”). Melodioso e inteligente, este rock seria um estrondoso sucesso radiofônico caso vivêssemos noutra dimensão.

Segue-se “Free radicals”, um funk esperto e espacial que parece, sim, dirigido tanto ao presidente americano George W. Bush quanto ao homem-bomba muçulmano que surge no seu enorme subtítulo (“A hallucination of the Christmas skeleton pleading with a suicide bomber”): “Você pensa que é um radical/ Mas você não é tão radical/ Na verdade, você é apenas fanático! Fanático!” Satisfeito? Não. Na faixa seguinte, “The sound of failure”, sobra para Britney Spears e para Gwen Stefani... E, mais adiante, na bela “Pompeii am Götterdämmerung”, as referências sonoras são, exato, Pink Floyd e Richard Wagner.

“At war with the mystics” não acaba sem que surja uma segunda candidata a sucesso radiofônico, claro, no planeta de onde vêm os Flaming Lips, planeta que evidentemente não é o nosso: “The W.A.N.D.”. Título que se explica por “The Will Always Negate Defeat” e se traduz por algo como “O que sempre negará a derrota”. Sobre um riff poderoso de guitarra, Coyne desafia: “Vez após vez aquelas mentes fanáticas/ Tentam dominar o mundo/ Dizendo-nos a todos que mandam em tudo/ Eu tenho um truque, uma varinha mágica que vai fazer todos caírem”. Na cabeça dele, a arte pode derrubar preconceitos e virar o jogo. Ao menos durante a audição de “At war with the mystics”, na nossa também.

Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint hold a rambunctious fete (by Laura Emerick for the Chicago Sun-Times)

New Orleans always has embraced the spirit of "laissez les bons temps rouler," and even after Hurricane Katrina laid the city to near ruins, the good times have continued to roll, at least musically, in the Big Easy.

That was the message conveyed by Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint in a rambunctiously joyful, emotionally fulfilling, nearly three-hour concert Sunday night at the Ravinia Festival. Accompanied by Costello's regular band the Imposters and Toussaint's signature Crescent City Horns, the two celebrated New Orleans' inherent bonhomie but also aimed barbs at the governmental incompetence that almost allowed the Pearl of the South to float away.

Their just-released disc, "The River in Reverse," pairs the seemingly mismatched Odd Couple in lesser-known songs from Toussaint's huge catalog and new tunes written jointly for the project. While indignation wells up on songs such as the accusatory "Broken Promise Land," the tide turns to hopeful resilience on bluesy party anthems such as "Wonder Woman." Though Costello has been called a serial collaborator, "The River in Reverse" actually cements a bond established in the '80s when Toussaint joined forces with him on "Punch the Clock" (1983) and "Spike" (1989).

So their performance Sunday displayed the easy camaraderie of longtime brothers-in-arms. Costello's free-wheelin' music hall vibe, typified by "Get Happy" (1980), finds a happy partner in Toussaint's born-on-the bayou boogie. When Toussaint strolled onstage and sat down at the piano on "Monkey to Man," the moment had the feeling of a long-delayed reunion. The good times continued to roll on Toussaint standards such as "There's a Certain Girl," with the pianist adding delicately shaded Professor Longhair-style filigree, and on Costello favorites such as "Clown Strike," which benefitted from Toussaint's funkified arrangements.

As producer, composer, arranger and performer, the 68-year-old Toussaint of course has come to embody New Orleans R&B and soul. Known best for hits such as "Working in a Coalmine" and "Yes, We Can" (which he offered Sunday), he also has displayed a strong sense of social consciousness that sometimes has gone unacknowledged. One of Sunday's many highlights was his impassioned version of "Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further?," which asks: "What happened to the Liberty Bell .../Did it really ding-dong?/It must dinged wrong."

This doggerel, which crystallizes the genius of Allen Toussaint, sums up the plight of a post-Katrina South, and takes on added resonance given the current national debate on immigration.

Costello also kept the focus on the political, with between-song swipes at the Bush administration, and more significantly, with the vocal conviction he brought to anthemic pleas such as "Freedom for the Stallion" and "Ascension Day" (a minor-key reworking of "Tipitina"). Accompanied by Toussaint's solo piano, Costello transformed the latter into a soulful cry of redemption.

Before digging in for an hour of encores, they closed out with deliriously giddy takes on "High Fidelity" and "Pump It Up." And when Toussaint tipped his hat to his old mate Dave Bartholomew, on the encore "That's How You Got Killed," you really knew what it means to miss New Orleans.

So Paul McCartney Is 64. Now What? (by Sam Roberts for The New York TImes)

In 1942, when James Paul McCartney was born in Liverpool, the average life expectancy of a British infant boy was 63 years. Notwithstanding those expectations and the greatly exaggerated rumors of his death decades ago, Mr. McCartney turns 64 on Sunday, Father's Day.

He was a teenager when he wrote the tune for "When I'm Sixty-Four," and only 24 when the Beatles recorded it in 1967 for "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." But just as George Orwell's "1984" proved to be an abiding prophecy of a dystopic future for so many impressionable readers, Mr. McCartney's lyrics delivered to a self-consciously youthful generation an enduring if satirical definition of what their golden age might be like "many years from now."

Today, many of those who embraced that quaint vision of enduring love, caring, knitting and puttering in retirement — "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?" — couldn't have been more wrong.

And judging by his personal life, Mr. McCartney missed the mark, too. The song's promise of retirement with a longtime partner has proved, at best, bittersweet for him. Last month, he announced his separation from his second wife, Heather Mills, who is 38. "Will you still need me?" indeed. Since 1967, American divorce rates per capita have more than doubled (three-quarters of men married in the late 1950's celebrated their 20th wedding anniversaries with their first wife, compared with about half who married in the early 1970's).

A smaller proportion of Americans older than 65 are poor today, but more delay retirement because they want to, or have to. More of the better-off own their vacation homes outright (never mind renting "a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear"), while the less well-off who own homes have the newly popular option of reverse mortgages.

Americans live longer today (technically, no one has died of old age since 1951, when the government dropped that official cause). They also age more slowly, or so they say. Half the over-65 population define themselves as middle-aged or even young, though a greater proportion today are likely to be perilously overweight.

Yet the song still resonates. Julian Lennon, John's son, sang it in an Allstate Insurance commercial in 2002. When Paul Simon turned 64 last year, Mr. McCartney called and serenaded him with it.

According to most accounts, Mr. McCartney wrote the lyrics for his father (his mother had died of breast cancer when he was 13) and the song was recorded not long after the elder McCartney turned 64.

"While it may have been done tongue in cheek," said Bruce Spizer, a Beatles biographer, "life began to imitate art."

Mr. McCartney's first wife, Linda, died in 1998 at 56, of breast cancer; they had been married 29 years. "The bliss of being with a lifelong partner, as expressed in 'When I'm Sixty-Four,' was shattered by Linda's tragic death," Mr. Spizer said. "The little things expressed in the song, such as working the garden and going for a Sunday morning drive, were part of his life with Linda."

The writer Gail Sheehy, who, at 68, is still guiding readers through life's passages, said today's 64-year-olds have a "360-degree view of life." They may believe in yesterday, but they also can't stop thinking about tomorrow. Thanks to seasoning (and Viagra), males are not necessarily half the men they used to be.

Mr. McCartney, who recently appeared on the cover of AARP magazine, does not appear to be losing his hair yet, despite the song's augury. He has three grandchildren (not the song's "Vera, Chuck and Dave"). He is also the father of a 2-year-old daughter. And while he may not be living his own lyrical vision, Mr. McCartney seems closer to fulfilling Bob Dylan's "Forever Young" than Pete Townshend's "Hope I die before I get old."

Now a billionaire, he has said he has no plans to retire, either as a rock star or as an animal-rights advocate (although, at 65, he will be entitled to a basic pension from the British government, at least $156 a week, and a free transit pass).

This year, the first baby boomers turned 60. About 2.7 million other Americans observe their 64th birthdays in 2006, including Muhammad Ali, Erica Jong, Larry Flynt, Garrison Keillor, Michael Bloomberg, Harrison Ford, Ted Kaczynski and Barbra Streisand. (Ringo Starr, the only other surviving member of the Fab Four, will be 66 next month; John Lennon was murdered at 40 in 1980; George Harrison died of cancer at 58 in 2001.)

"The slogan back then was 'Never trust anyone over 30,' " recalled Jeff Greenfield, the CNN commentator, who is 63. "We thought people would be dead or in a home by their 60's."

Today, on average, 64-year-olds can expect to live more than 16 years, about 4 years longer than 64-year-olds could expect in 1967, according to government statisticians (and, hey, an editor of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Jude Rutledge, was named for another of Mr. McCartney's songs).

"The new 64," Ms. Sheehy said, "is more like 84."

Arlo Guthrie and his tribe carry forward a tradition woven from luck, loss and a legendary arrest (by Paul Lieberman for the Los Angeles Times)

AN hour before Arlo Guthrie is to go on stage, a reminder of life's serendipity walks into the old church here.

A volunteer doesn't recognize the man at the door, and she can't find his name on the "comp" list of invited guests, either, so she calls over Guthrie's longtime right hand, George Laye, and tells him, "There's a Mr. Wilcox…."

Laye confers briefly with Richard B. Wilcox, laughs and says, "Oh, of course. I'm sorry. Go right in." Then as soon as the new arrival has stepped into the onetime sanctuary to await the concert, Laye announces, "That's the chief of police of Stockbridge!"

Everybody has a good laugh at that, for this church in the Berkshires would not be the Guthrie Center today had it not been for Stockbridge police. And Arlo himself … well, had not those cops arrested him four decades ago for the crime that began right on this spot, he might have gone on to be a forest ranger, as he'd intended as a kid, and not followed his doomed father, Woody, into musical storytelling.

The tale of that absurd life-changing encounter became the entire A-side of his debut album, "Alice's Restaurant," the 18-minute, 20-second song relating how, as a teenager in 1965, he had Thanksgiving dinner in the church — then a commune of sorts presided over by Ray and Alice Brock — and thought he'd do a good deed by carting away the truckload of trash that had accumulated at the place … except the dump was closed on the holiday, so he tossed the stuff down a hillside, where the cops found it and took their "27 8-by-10 color glossy photographs" of the scene and threw his young butt in the slammer.

The catch was, all those glossies were of little use as evidence when his case came before the local judge — the blind judge — and then came the real twist, in Arlo's song's version of history, when the misdemeanor arrest prompted a New York draft board to toss him aside with the other rejects, the mother stabbers and father rapists, thus sparing him a trip to the front lines of the Vietnam War or, more likely, flight to Canada.

"Garbage has been very good to me," sums up Arlo Guthrie, who was resting up, that hour before his "Spring Revival" concert, in the old bell tower of the church, now the green room lounge of his nonprofit Guthrie Center.FOR years he owned a farmhouse a half-hour away, in a hill town with no traffic light, but he did not get the church until 1991, when he was brought here by a TV crew filming what he calls a "whatever-happened-to-him?" feature. The deconsecrated church, which dates to 1829, had been through a number of owners since the Brocks had it and was not in the best shape. But the owners at the time must have seen him coming, for that story has them peering out the window exulting, "Oh, there's Arlo Guthrie, he'll buy it," and he did, with the help of donors, whose names now adorn a wall of the Guthrie Center.

Today, there's still no heat or air conditioning in most of the structure, but that doesn't stop the crews of volunteers and one paid staffer, the 64-year-old Laye, from offering free community lunches every Wednesday, with health food (lentil soup, rice dishes) provided by a nearby yoga center. Thursdays there's "Hootenanny Nite!" with an open mike for local musicians in the 100-seat performing space that has tables set up nightclub style where the pews once were. Summer weekends, the professional acts take over in a "Troubadour Series." And on two or three weekends a year it's all Arlo, in fundraising concerts that help keep the operation afloat.

His annual spring weekend has spawned another tradition, a "Historic Garbage Trail" walk to combat Huntington's disease, the hereditary neurological ailment that killed his father. Participants trek 6.3 miles from the church to Stockbridge, the scene of other "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" landmarks, the tiny restaurant once run by Alice and the Stockbridge police headquarters. The cops no longer have cells there ("liability issues," Chief Wilcox says), but the front of one has been preserved for posterity and was displayed on a platform for this year's Sunday hike, May 21, so the walkers could pose behind the same bars that once confined the littering Arlo. In the spirit of the '60s, they also were given pens embossed "This pen has been stolen From Stockbridge Police Department," courtesy of the chief.

As a child, the 57-year-old Wilcox was a model for a Boy Scout painting by the local chronicler of Americana, Norman Rockwell, and he later served two tours in Vietnam. But the chief long ago came to embrace Arlo and that contentious era as slices of Americana as well, even if a church volunteer did almost diss him and his wife at the door that evening. "They try to keep the riffraff out," Wilcox reasoned, "but we snuck in."

The Garbage Trail walk alone brought in $8,500, but the weekend was more than a fundraiser for Arlo, who took the revival theme seriously, for the time back home was his bridge between two long forays on the road: The one just finished was a 40th anniversary tour commemorating the Alice's Restaurant incident, an occasion to dust off the rambling story-song he normally eschews these days; the one upcoming is a "Guthrie Family Legacy Tour," which was to begin in Alaska, of all places, and which takes him to downtown Los Angeles on Saturday for a free 3 p.m. concert at California Plaza, part of the Grand Performances series there.

The "Legacy Tour" looks to the past too, obviously, embracing the work of Arlo's father, the voice of the Dust Bowl Okies and other underdogs, who penned "This Land Is Your Land" as a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." But it's also a showcase for new songs written from lyrics Woody Guthrie left behind — and for newer musical Guthries, who are in no short supply, thanks to Arlo. The bushy-haired hippie kid of the Woodstock Festival is now, at 58, a father of four and grandfather of five. THREE generations of Guthries are milling about the church bell tower on this Sunday night. As Arlo himself relaxes on one sofa, a harmonica ready around his neck, his youngest daughter, Sarah Lee, 27, plops in the sofa across from him, cradling her own little girl, Olivia, who is not quite 4. Between them, a small table supports three lighted candles, while another to the side displays a drawing of St. Francis, a small skull ("to point out that the body is fleeting but the soul is forever") and a bottle of sacred oil given to Arlo by his spiritual advisor Ma Jaya, a onetime Brooklyn housewife (Joyce Green Difiore Cho) who now heads an ashram in Florida.

Ma also provided the interfaith dedication that hangs over the entrance to Guthrie Center's main room: "One God, Many Forms/One River, Many Streams/One People, Many Faces/One Mother, Many Children," and above her words is a portrait of a somber Woody Guthrie with his guitar, pointing into space. Someone has made sure the message does not seem too heavy, however, by adding a cartoon-style balloon that has Woody saying, "He went that way…."

There's another portrait of Woody in the bell tower lounge, beside one of Jesus. All faiths get equal billing here, even as Arlo says, "I'm still a Jewish kid from Brooklyn."

Jimi Hendrix: An Experience (by Valerie Wilmer for Down Beat— 4/4/1968)

There's no experience that compares to the first time the blues get to you. The hairs on your neck stand up and an uncanny churning sets up between your heart and your stomach. It's the universal experience that unites the blues world.

Today that world is wide open. The fences are down. The boundaries have been extended to take in the music's lovechild, rock & roll, and through the disciples of Muddy Waters and B.B. King, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, the experience continues, though with the accent on a battering-ram intensity of sound, not nearly as convincingly as it might. But the important thing is that it keeps on happening.

Right now, across the Atlantic, a unique blues experience is taking place--the Jimi Hendrix Experience, a marriage between a couple of British rock merchants and an American Negro.

Although he has been adopted by the British faction of the flower-power syndrome as a kind of high priest, guitarist Hendrix, through the screaming bravado of his music, belongs to the other side of the love generation coin. Violence is, for him, an integral part of the blues of today, and so he feels free to play the guitar with his teeth, set his instrument on fire, hurl it against an amplifier.

"Our music is getting uglier," he has said, and it rages like an angry torrent, almost overpowering at times because of the amplification. But unlike so many of the loudness-is-synonymous-with-excitement groups, Hendrix's sound is not only highly electrified, but electrifying too.

From out of the musical maelstrom, the howl of the leader's guitar comes leaping like a thing possessed, lashing with the anguish of a stricken giant. In contrast to a fair proportion of rock guitarists, whose lack of an individual conception is shown up by the aimlessness of their playing, Hendrix is in firm control of his direction. In his use of feedback, for example, he stretches the notes over several bars, occasionally accompanying the harmonics emanating from this device with a highly developed melodic line.

He claims to have soaked up influences from "everyone from Buddy Holly to Muddy Waters and through Chuck Berry way back to Eddie Cochrane," and one an hear just about everything from sitarlike riffs to crying delta blues from his screaming strings.

"Cats I like now are Albert King and Elmore James," he said, "but if you try to copy them, want to play something note for note--especially a solo or a certain run that lasts over three seconds--your mind starts wandering. Therefore, you dig them and then do your own thing."

When the thin, stooped, sad-eyed young guitarist came gangling into London in September 1966, he gave the floundering local scene a much-needed injection and with his unkempt mane of busy hair started a fashion unprecedented since the heyday of the Presley sideburn. His hair style had already made him an outcast in Harlem, and when Chas Chandler, former bass guitarist with the Animals, and the group's manager, Mike Jeffery, first heard of him, he had taken refuge from the Uptown jibes in Greenwich Village. As Jimmy James, he was playing with his own combo of two months' standing, the Blue Flame.

"We just didn't feel like trying to get into anything because we weren't ready," recalled Hendrix, (his real name, incidentally), but for the two Britishers, he was saying something.They foresaw a place for the shy young man with the despair-drenched voice and the reverberating electric guitar on the London scene and persuaded him to try his luck there.

"I said I might as well go because nothing much was happening," recalled the guitarist. "We were making something near $3 a night, and you know we were starving."

Hendrix was born 22 years ago on the wrong side of the tracks in Seattle, Wash. He brought with him to England an aura of mystery concerning his origins and musical experience and a tailor-made line of hard-times-and-poverty stories. His colonial version of how he traded the life of an itinerant guitarist for a place in the Isley Brothers' backing group was widely quoted in the British musical press: "Yeah, I'll gig. May as well, man, sleepin' outside between them tall tenements was hell. Rats runnin' all across your chest, cockroaches stealin' your last candy bar from your very pockets." (On his current U.S. tour, he was given a gala reception in his home town, and presented with the keys to the city by none other than the mayor himself.)

After a spell with the Isleys, the guitarist wandered to Nashville, Tenn., where he joined a package show starring B.B. King, Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke and Chuck Jackson and paid his gigging dues until one day he missed the band bus and found himself stranded in Kansas City, Mo.

"When you're running around starving on the road, you'll play almost anything," and Hendrix ruefully. "I was more or less forced into like a Top 40 bag. Playing the things that I'm doing now would have been very difficult in that area."

In Atlanta, he found a job with the Little Richard tour, and on the West Coast he played with Ike and Tina Turner. Then Richard's show took Hendrix to New York, where he played with people like King Curtis and Joey Dee's Starliters.

"Oh man!" Hendrix exclaimed. "I don't think I could have stood another year of playing behind people. I'm glad Chas rescued me."

The guitarist has the restless nature of the itinerant bluesman. "I get very bored on the road," he admitted, "and I get bored with myself and the music sometimes. I mean, I love blues, but I wouldn't want to play it all night. It's just like although I like Howling Wolf and Otis Rush, there are some blues that just make me sick. I feel nothing from it."

The chance to improvise is, he said, of prime importance in his playing. "I love to listen to organized Top 40 R&B but I'd hate to play it," he said. "I'd hate to be in a limited bag; I'd rather starve."

When the Experience was formed on Oct. 12, 1966, three very different personalities were more or less thrown together. Hendrix was united with rock guitarist Noel Redding, who switched to bass guitar, and the explosive drummer Mitch Mitchell. Said the drummer, a devotee of Elvin Jones, "I wasn't at all interested in blues. I was more interested in a sort of pseudo-jazz thing. Noel was very interested in the rock 'n' roll scene of two or three years ago, and so it could have clashed like mad. Instead, we all threw in our ideas, and now we play individually to make one sound."

The first thing that struck Hendrix on his arrival in Britain was the high quality of many of the local musicians and their awareness of "soul."

"One of the first people I ever heard was Eric Clapton with the Cream," he recalled. "I had a couple of his records, but in person he really knocked me out. I didn't know quite what to think, but I guess that if they can dig a cat like Ray Charles, who's one of the all-time greats when you're talking of soul it isn't too surprising if they come up with that soulful feeling. It just shows that they're listening."

It is obvious from Hendrix's eclectic guitar style that he has not only been influenced by people like Waters, James, King and, in particular, Buddy Guy, but has done a complete turnaround in Britain, listening to the local synthesizers of blues guitar--people like Clapton, Peter Green and Jeff Beck.

"I really don't know about that!" he said, smiling. "I listen to everybody, you know, and a lot of the people now are British. But whatever you do, you have an open mind. You don't necessarily take things, you just listen and accept."

Declared Londoner Mitchell, "I don't think this country has anything to teach Jimi, because basically he hasn't changed since he came over. Maybe his outlook has changed a little bit and he's got more scope, but what he is doing is just an extension of his original ideas."

From his viewpoint, Hendrix said, "When you have people to work with who will work with you, quite naturally, you're going to start moving. If you're really interested and really involved in music, well, then you can be very hungry. The more you contribute, the more you want to make. It makes you hungrier and hungrier, regardless of how many times you eat a day."

Hendrix has slipped fairly easily into the British rock scene, and his attitudes are, at times, surprisingly un-American. Nevertheless, at such times he also seems to be rather uncomfortably straddling the fence between his own blues tradition and the Beatles heritage. It seems safe to assume that had he stayed in the United States, he might have been forced to cut his hair and dress less outrageously than he does in Europe.

As for smashing up instruments on stage, the group has been criticized for following in the path of The Who, the first pop group to introduce auto-destruction to the music. To this, Mitchell has a reply:

"Some nights we can be really bad. If we smash something up then, it's because that instrument, which is something you dearly love, just isn't working that night. It's not responding, and so you want to kill it."

Hendrix further likened the process to the love-hate relationship: "It's just like maybe you feel at times when your girl friend starts messing around. You might feel that you wanted to do that but you couldn't but with music you do, because an instrument can't fight back."

The Experience has an enviable reputation for the comparative ease with which it records, one of its singles having made the grade on the second take, something almost unheard of in contemporary rock. This stems largely from group rapport. Hendrix is such a magnetic figure that the two sidemen are stimulated by him, and they, in turn, free him from the restrictions that less intelligent musicians would impose.

"You've got to be musically one jump ahead to completely interpret what Jimi wants and put yourself into it," Mitchell said. "Certain times you might feel his equal, and then he comes out with something that stimulates your mind quite a bit.

"I don't know if the public realizes this, but we could make a damn sight more money by going out doing one-nighters than by recording. When we record, we pay for the studio ourselves and waste a lot of time finding out the different sounds and things. It's easy to go into a 12-bar nothing and put it on a record, but we spend so many hours trying to get new effects, it should be obvious that we're not trying to con the public."

At a recent rehearsal, where proceedings were held up for a couple of hours, the restless Hendrix sat down at the drum kit and tried his hand with the sticks.

"Gotta keep it moving," he commented. "You don't care what people say so much--you just go on and do what you want to do. You never do it quite--I always try to get better and better--but as long as I'm playing, I don't think I'll ever reach the point where I'm satisfied."

In spite of the fact that Hendrix has no particular wish to be hailed as the new king of the blues, he is a unique contemporary interpreter of the genre and a musician whose impact on various areas of the scene has been considerable. The blues, in spite of the intrinsic resignation of much of its subject matter, has, as a musical form, an enduring optimism.

"The blues will never die," the bluesmen repeat with reassuring regularity, and it's probably true. In their own peculiar ways, people like Hendrix are carrying on the tradition.

Gram Parsons: The Short Life Of A Country-Rock Icon (by Mary Houlihan for the Chicago Sun-Times)

In a vast cemetery stretching along Airline Highway in New Orleans lies the unassuming grave of Gram Parsons. Fans make pilgrimages to the site looking for the spirit of the "cosmic cowboy" whose life and death make up a tragic chapter in the American songbook.

During the more than three decades since Parsons' death, the short life of the country-rock poet has developed a legendary status that refuses to die. Dead at 26 from drug and alcohol abuse, Parsons was an imaginative performer and songwriter who united the worlds of rock and country at a time when country music was considered only the domain of hillbillies.

And while this is a true American tale, it took a German punk rocker and country music fan to make the definitive documentary on Parsons' life. The magnetism of Parsons' story has not been lost on Gandulf Henning, who spent 15 years working on the new documentary "Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel."

"It was about 1990 when I first heard his music and couldn't stop listening," Henning recalled. "It was so heartfelt, so pure and highly emotional. I knew that existed in soul music, but I didn't have that connection in white music. It's an understatement to say it changed my life."

Henning, with help from writer Sid Griffin (Gram Parsons: A Music Biography), created a film filled with commentary from those close to Parsons -- people who have never before talked in public about their feelings and memories. Friends such as Emmylou Harris, Chris Hillman, Phil Kaufman and Keith Richards join in the conversation, as do fans Peter Buck, Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam.

"I was astonished a film didn't exist about him," Henning said.

Henning produced a music video for his own band as a means of moving from performing into film production. In the beginning, interest in his documentary was non-existent, until two German television stations and eventually the BBC came on board.

Parsons, whose discography consisted of just five recordings (one with the Byrds, two with the Flying Burrito Brothers, and two solo albums), commands a degree of respect and influence these days that's far greater than the modest success he enjoyed before dying.

And that point -- his premature death at the Joshua Tree National Monument in 1973 -- often is the introduction to his story for many people.

While at the Joshua Tree Inn for some R&R, Parsons succumbed to a lethal dose of morphine and tequila. Following the request of his stepfather, Parsons' body was to be flown to New Orleans for burial. But his road manager, Phil Kaufman, stole the coffin, drove to the Joshua Tree desert and cremated the body. Supposedly, this was Parsons' wish.

Henning feels this bizarre scenario continues to haunt those close to Parsons, including his wife Gretchen, daughter Polly and half-sister Diane. Initially, they all refused to take part in the film but eventually came around.

"Doing these interviews, I realized there is another side to the story," Henning said. "You can't deny the legend of Gram Parsons got ignited by that match, but it also started a growing pain in the family that they never really got over."

Decked out in flashy Nudie suits, Parsons, a big fan of Merle Haggard, Lefty Frizzel and Buck Owens, gave country music new meaning for a generation paying attention to it for the first time. His musical vision has influenced performers from Elvis Costello to Tom Petty to the Long Ryders, from the Mekons to the Jayhawks to Uncle Tupelo.

Uncovering all the strengths and destructive demons of Parsons' life has given Henning, who now lives in Nashville, a new perspective on his subject -- one that was not always pleasant to confront.

"You start as a fan, and then you find a Gram Parsons that is quite different than the Gram Parsons you were looking for. He was obviously flawed and troubled. But yet he didn't leave people untouched. Thirty years later there are so many tears and so much anger directed at him. He had a way of getting into people's hearts, and maybe he took advantage of them sometimes."

Artur Verissimo encontra Serguei