Hendrix, Community Newscenter memories, and author Tim Riley

I am easily led into unexpected directions by whatever podcast I happened to listen to or whatever book I'm reading. But lately, it's really been podcasts that have had the power to sway me in directions involving movies to watch or music to listen to. A few days ago, I listened to an episode of The Classic Rock Album-By-Album podcast that was all about the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced album. The guest host was Tim Riley, who is a music commentator who has been around for a long time and wrote two books about The Beatles and Bob Dylan that I have enjoyed for decades, Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary and Hard Rain: A Bob Dylan Commentary. 

I remember haunting the old Community Newscenter bookstore on Grand River Avenue across from the MSU campus when I was a college student and had little-to-no money. One of the books on the shelf was the hardcover edition of Tell Me Why. The book was published in 1988, so this would have likely been sometime that year. Having no means of buying the book, I think I read about half of it in a series of visits to Community Newscenter. Several years later, when I was working at Schuler Books, I saw the paperback edition, decided that the softcover price combined with my employee discount made it an acceptably low price, and I bought that.

Just to go on yet another tangent, the newsprint and paper smell of Community Newscenter was unforgettable and beautiful. It smelled like knowledge and sophistication.

Back to Hendrix: the podcast inspired me to listen to Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold As Love for the first time in several years. I still like those albums, but--gulp--find them a little dated and maybe a bit half-baked in spots. Is that heresy? Don't get me wrong, Hendrix was a genius, but I'm not sure he released an album that was a beginning-to-end masterpiece. His musical highs were stratospheric and transcendent, but every album has some filler on it. It is such a travesty that Hendrix died at age 27. Who knows what musical paths he would have taken had he lived.