submissions
| The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Machine Gun Lyrics
| 18 years ago
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Hendrix indeed did claim he was gay to get out of the Army. He joined because he had no education, and other than guitar, no real talents (and also to stay out of jail as was previously mentioned). Another reason for his joining was he had a lifelong fascination with the military that didn't wane even when he became somewhat anti-war. He wanted to join the 101st Airborne and after becoming a supply clerk he constantly begged for Airborne training as he was desperate to belong to something, and the Airborne would give him something very macho to belong too. Vietnam hadn't escalated at the time he was in the service so he never left the States. The war didn't change him, music did. He started playing in a couple of small time bands with army buddy Billy Cox (who later played bass with Hendrix's Band of Gypsies) and decided that he didn't want to be in the Army because he wanted all of his time to himself to be a musician. So he visited the base psychiatrist daily with complaints of homosexual thoughts toward his bunkmates, compulsive masturbation, etc. He finally allowed himself to be caught masturbating in the squadbay and the psychiatrist finally marked him unfit and told him to go. And the lyric is "fight like a farmer" not bomber. |
submissions
| The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Red House Lyrics
| 18 years ago
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First off Texas Flood is not a derivation of Red House. Most blues songs have the same basic chord pattern and a rhythm that can be a shuffle, boogie woogie, etc. Red House and Texas Flood are both I-IV-V blues progressions which means you play the I IV and V chord which in the key of E would be E A and B. You can play a I-IV-V in any key you wish to. SRV played Texas Flood in G, which means the chords are G C D. In Red House the chords are B E G. These two songs are also 12 bar blues which means this: you typically play the first chord for for 4 bars, the second for 4 bars, and the third one 4 bars. Texas Flood is also 12 bar. That's why you get the same vibe out of both songs and they sound similar. Get in to blues real big and you will see most of them sound similar, differentiated mainly by the vocals and the individual player's licks. Anyway, the song is about Jimi's girlfriend Betty Jean and how when he came back from the Army she didn't live there anymore. The song strays from reality in the fact that he wasn't blue over her as he didn't want her anymore, and she didn't live in a red house, she lived in a brown house. Red House was one of the first songs Jimi wrote but even then he knew that a song about a red house would sound better and be more popular than brown. |
submissions
| The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Castles Made Of Sand Lyrics
| 18 years ago
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This song is actually Hendrix's most autobiographical work. Everybody who said that the basic meaning of the song is that even things we think are invincible will eventually crumble is right. That is what Hendrix was getting at because nothing he ever had lasted forever. His mother and father constantly split up over their excessive drinking, his mother died, and he never had a normal relationship. Several of his siblings were also made wards of the State of Washington because of birth defects that his father Al could not or would not pay to have corrected. The first verse centers around his mother and father's volatile alcoholic relationship. The second verse is about when Jimi would live with his paternal grandmother Nora, who was part Cherokee, and when she would regale him with stories of the Indian braves. He constantly pretended to be an Indian fighting cowboys, cavalry men, etc as a child. While nobody was actually killed when he played these games he took those childhood memories and made a story out of it for the second verse. The third verse is about the death of his mother Lucille, who towards the end of her life was so weak from alcoholism that she was confined to a wheelchair, and how she allowed herself to die. "She wished and prayed she could stop living, so she decided to die". The golden winged ship was a reference to the Heaven that Jimi was sure his mother had gone too. While not a traditionally religious man he constantly reminded himself he would see her and his other loved ones in a better place, even if he didn't know where that was. |
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