How Jimi Hendrix’s Dreams Inspired His Music
In the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix was known for his guitar-playing abilities and his infectious music, as well as his electrifying stage performances. When coming up with his own music, the rock legend admitted that he sometimes had dreams that inspired the creation of some of his songs.
Jimi Hendrix was a talented guitarist
Jimi Hendrix started performing in the 1960s in Nashville, playing guitar in the backing band for icons like Little Richard and The Isley Brothers. He eventually moved to the UK in the mid-1960s and his success began to skyrocket.
In 1967, he and his band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, released their debut album Are You Experienced. One of the most recognizable songs from the album — and from Hendrix’s catalog in general — is the single “Purple Haze.”
Jimi Hendrix’s dreams inspired his music
Hendrix reflected on how songs like “Purple Haze” came to him in a 1967 interview with New Musical Express, according to the 2004 book Take a Walk on the Dark Side: Rock and Roll Myths, Legends, and Curses.
“I dreamt a lot and I put a lot of my dreams down as songs,” Hendrix said. “I wrote one called ‘First Look Around the Corner’ and another called ‘The Purple Haze,’ which was all about a dream I had that I was walking under the sea.” Hendrix was notably a fan of science fiction, and the idea for “Purple Haze” came to him from Philip José Farmer’s Night of Light. While “Purple Haze” became one of his calling cards, “First Look Around the Corner” never saw the light of day.
Hendrix also lamented the fact that he had to cut down much of “Purple Haze”‘s lyrics. “You know the song we had named ‘Purple Haze’? [It] had about a thousand, thousand words … I had it all written out,” he said. “It was about going through, through this land. This mythical … because that’s what I like to do is write a lot of mythical scenes. You know, like the history of the wars on Neptune.”
His interview with New Musical Express noted that the “Purple Haze” lyric “‘scuse me while I kiss the sky” referred to a drowning man that Hendrix saw in his dream. The lyric, however, has often been misheard as “‘scuse me while I kiss this guy.'” Hendrix played into this in his performances, often singing the incorrect lyrics and leaning in to the confusion.
His unique performance style
Hendrix’s music was truly innovative, especially at a time when rock music was in a state of transition. His live performances complemented his music well, as he was known for being just as inventive on stage. He would play the guitar with his teeth or behind his back, and sometimes without even touching the guitar strings at all.
Hendrix, like Paul McCartney and Kurt Cobain, was also notably left-handed. This resulted in him playing the guitar upside down. Philip Norman’s 2020 book Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix recounted how being left-handed was a problem for Hendrix’s father, who would punish his son for playing using his dominant hand. “[Hendrix’s father] set about correcting it in the only way he knew how. If ever [Jimi] were caught using the ‘wrong’ hand, he could expect an angry swipe around the head,” Norman wrote.
