NEW HENDRIX OUT! Oh, Wait ... I Don't Think I Care and I Don't Know Why ...

 March 12, 2010

It’s been awhile, maybe two years ago, but I was waiting in line at Jacque-Imo’s regretably short-lived food kiosk in Grand Central Station — and beheld a young man of high school age in a King Crimson t-shirt.
 
You don’t see that every day! I predict great things for him.
 
Similarly, whilst shopping for signed first-editions of Shelby Foote at the Waterford Target the other night, I pushed my cart around the corner and nearly smashed into three giggly teen girls, typically pierced and each jabbing at their respective space-phones.
 
And, lo, one of them was wearing a Jimi Hendrix shirt. It was very cool, too, a neon yellow item with the cover of Are You Experienced? on it.
 
I didn’t have the heart (or guts) to ask her if she actually paid any attention to Hendrix — could I scroll through her iPod and find, for example, the live version of "Hey Baby (Land of the New Rising Sun)"? If she admitted she had no clue and that the shirt was a fashion statement, I’d be disappointed. And if she mistook me for a middle aged creep hitting on her, well, that would be even worse. Particularly since my wife was three aisles away, looking for my Geritol.
 
I said nothing and moved on, wishing I had the Are You Experienced? shirt — albeit in a considerably bulkier size — when a sorta disturbing thought hit me.
 
There was a time when I had to be one of the five biggest Hendrix fans in this solar system.
 
And yet, much as I love him today, I realized Valleys of Neptune, the latest posthumous Hendrix album — and one reportedly of much higher sound and archival quality than the slew of watered-down stuff we’ve been getting for years — has been out several days now.
 
And it hasn’t remotely occurred to me to buy it.
 
I’m just … sorta not interested. How can this be?
 
I assure you it has nothing to do with my affection for Jimi Hendrix. Or does it?
 
What about you? Have you heard it? Do you care? Am I wrong? Have I lost my way?

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