Entertainment
Strathcona Gets Experienced
By John Burns published Jul 1, 2008
A couple dozen of us are belting out the chorus to “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Denise McCann is on rhythm guitar. Her husband, Randy Bachman, is on lead. “He’s got you and me, brother,” sings veteran bluesman Jim Byrnes. We all sing. For this one-day-only house concert, we—musicians, neighbours, CBC technicians recording the afternoon—are the Jimi Hendrix Choir, and we’re experiencing the kind of communal euphoria I remember from childhood TV shows like The Partridge Family. This is old-school ecstasy.
Jimi would have loved it. The shooting star of rock ’n’ roll, dead at 27 from sleeping pills and red wine—or, some would say, from an excessof fame and insouciance—remains perhaps the greatest electric guitarist of all time. We are all made of stars, Joni sang after Woodstock. Jimi, who was there, was made of something better: music.
He would have loved this moment for another reason, too: we’re here to celebrate not just Hendrix but his grandmother Nora, who lived in this East Georgia house for 16 years. Gospel was her old-timey tidings, and if our version today is all squeaky-clean and proper, well, so is the house. Owner Marcia Jacobs has refinished it beautifully, restoring the elegant wooden staircase and lifting the ceiling in the airy living room. The Hendrix clan wouldn’t recognize it. Jimi used to come up from Seattle to visit Nora when times got tough, and he lived in this house for stints—he attended Grade 1 at Sir William Dawson Annex on Burrard; at 20, he played rhythm guitar at Dante’s Inferno with Tommy Chong’s old outfit, Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers.
In the here and now, it’s getting stuffy. We open the doors onto the back patio, and Bachman and McCann fill the neighbourhood with “All Along the Watchtower” (that’s Randy Bachman burning up the frets like that?) and “The Wind Cries Mary.” “I feel like I’m getting a free guitar lesson,” says Byrnes, host of the concert and the broadcast (airing July 10 at 8 p.m. on CBC Radio 2 105.7 FM). It’s true—it’s not the Hendrix pyrotechnics (though he bumper-cars the whole neck, just like Jimi) but the unerring economy; this is what decades of practice look like.
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Diligent Googling reveals that the concert is archived at CBC Radio 2's Concerts on Demand microsite.
The whole afternoon was electrifying, but have a listen especially to the remarkable Steve Dawson's lap steel playing underneath the Sojourners' "Little Wing" (an often maligned Jimi song in honour of his mother), Ndidi Onukwulu scatting a ram-funktious cover of "Crosstown Traffic," and the raw power of Mother Mother's "Manic Depression." Mother Mother is especially one to watch, though fireball vocalist Debra-Jean Creelman's departure leaves a big question mark in the future of the alt-pop group...
