My Tuesday: Impending Snowpocalypse, Loud Fire Alarms and More Hendrix

It's looking increasingly like there will be a "snowpocalypse" starting on December 23 and extending at least until December 24, and this throws older son's travel plans into doubt and uncertainty. I guess we'll just have to see what happens. I hope it's not as bad as predicted, but I'm definitely worried he will fly into Dulles and be stuck there for who knows how long.

Today, we had a fire alarm at work. We have fire alarms at least once a month, or so it seems. It's usually caused by a library patron lighting up in the restroom. Our fire alarm is so loud that it could wake the dead. It's so loud that one of these days, one of us will keel over from a heart attack, and then immediately come back to life because the damned fire alarm....you guessed it...wakes the dead. 

We all grabbed our coats, phones, keys, and whatever else we wanted to take and snaked our way down the stairwell and outside. There, we waited for the fire department to arrive, poke inside the library for 15 minutes, and then give us the "all clear." Now we wait for the inevitable fire alarm in about a month or so and jump out of our skins when the 100+ decibel shriek of the alarm goes off.     

That was the extent of the excitement at work.

Drive time music was provided by Jimi Hendrix's Radio One collection. Yes, the Hendrix jag continues (yesterday it was Electric Ladyland). It was the first Hendrix compact disc I ever bought (I already had a few cassettes). If I remember correctly, I got it from Columbia House in 1988. It's just comprised of recordings Hendrix made for BBC's Radio One, and I hadn't listened to it in a ridiculously long time. I honestly can't remember the last time. I'm happy to say it holds up. Of particular interest are some of the covers on the album, like a fairly faithful attempt at "Day Tripper" and a goofy take on "Hound Dog." Nothing on the album is essential, but it's an enjoyable listen.

Listening to all this Jimi Hendrix makes me consider how tough he had it as a Black virtuoso musician in the 1960s. He wasn't fully embraced by either white or black audiences. White fans certainly appreciated his amazing guitar playing and showmanship, and maybe to a certain extent his songwriting, but many still saw him as a Black stereotype of the overly sexual "super spade." Meanwhile, Black audiences largely viewed him as an Uncle Tom playing "white music" for predominantly white audiences. 

I read a story of Hendrix returning to Harlem to play in front of a Black audience and facing a jeering crowd that threw things at him as he took the stage. Even when Hendrix played in front of appreciative Black audiences on the "chitlin' circuit" before he became famous, he had to deal with racist bullshit from whites in the South. This was an America that was only a few years removed from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and in which Bull Connor's firehoses and the Birmingham church bombing (to name just a few of the 1960s civil rights era powder kegs) were still fresh on everyone's minds. More than ever--as I have already mentioned in a previous post--I think about what a shame it is that Hendrix died before he could truly grow into a mature artist and do exactly the kind of music he wanted to do--not feeling as if he had to satisfy the expectations of other people. He was aiming in that direction with the Band of Gypsys album (along with other music recorded in 1969/1970)...and then he died. We'll never know what more Hendrix might have accomplished if he had the opportunity.