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On November 1st, 2010 I went to the National Arts Centre to see the Widdly Widdly Pentatonic Minor Legacy Cash-In Guitar Wankfest Extravaganza Experience. I guess that was too much to put on the poster so they shortened it to the much more succinct (and butts-in-seats): Experience Hendrix.
I went with my good friend and former guitar teacher Wayne, who knows his way around a scale or two. We were up in the balcony where we looked down on the whole affair like Statler and Waldorf in the old Muppet Theatre, critiquing each act harshly with jokes that we both found hilarious and giving only the most grudging of nods to an occasional act that passed muster.
Kenny Wayne Sheppard and Johnny Lang both tore through their twelfth-fret boxes with equal parts fluidity and predictability, Living Colour blazed through a pair of tunes with sheets of sound that all but blanketed the Hendrix-ness of both numbers, Brad Whatsisname (the other guitar player from Aerosmith) was the other guitar player from Aerosmith, that is: unnoticeable, and while Steve Vai amped up the tonic-ometer with a phrygian mode or two he always bends over pitch, which can get so very tedious.
Can’t you just hear us now, up there blathering away like a pair of empty-headed bits of foam with arms up our butts?
Robert Randolf was bequeathed a grudging nod because let’s face it, the guy just brings it and he does so with that most plaintive of stringed instruments, the pedal steel. Eric Johnson also got a nod; really his playing is just perfect, if almost wholly uninteresting. I would have Waldorf-ed all over Johnson’s clichéd overuse of chorus effect on his guitar but I was sitting right next to Wayne – who has been known to enjoy an occasional modulating envelope filter or two – so I kept my mouth shut and nodded along, albeit grudgingly.
There was of course the inevitable cascading wankfest closer, wherein everyone who could find a quarter-inch took a quarter-mile and each player struggled to find a voice among and above the dozen other axe-slingers shredding away right beside them. Imagine watching fifteen guitar players together onstage simultaneously signalling for the sound guy to turn them up in the monitors. “Could you turn everyone a little louder than everyone else please?”
Statler and Waldorf were last seen having a field day up there in the second row of the balcony.
(I’m leaving Billy Cox out of this. I think we can all agree that the inclusion of Jimi’s last and certainly least bass player was strictly an attempt to add an air of legitimacy to the tour, but dude was hand-picked by the man himself to be in the Band of Gypsies so I’ll bow out graciously.)
Todd Man Out 