“Braver musicians”: The summer Pamela Des Barres saw Jimi Hendrix change music forever
The shimmer of the ‘Summer of Love‘ gleaned with a fervour that suited Pamela Des Barres well. With flowers in her hair and a heart full of wonder, Des Barres was a true child of the movement and embraced it with the force of a soul that burned with flames as brightly as the barefoot dance of peace and love. The misty haze swam like it would never end until she was asked to be involved in a short film with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and then it shifted into something far more electric.
Until that point, Des Barres’ heart thumped to the tentative cadences of the free-spirited as she wandered among the rest like she was a part of an exclusive musical community. In many ways, that’s exactly what it was: a tight-knit tribe bound together by a shared ethos with a devotion to the power of change, even if it was merely a myth or fabrication dreamt up by one person but shared by all.
Still, Des Barres played the willing fool among her people while taking doses of peace in waves—the only transaction that most could give during a time when the privileges of such personal resources ran thin. It didn’t really matter, though, not to someone like Des Barres, who felt the virtue of the movement trickle into her heart like the soft and tender tides of the ocean at sunset.
Before she even learned of Jimi Hendrix’s existence, she had come to know the art of the carefree well, with photographers capturing the candid nature of her movements like they were attached to her soul on a camera dolly. As frequenting love-ins became her play, she would move to the snaps of the camera while handing out home-baked goods to “cute, long-haired boys” before breathing in the sounds of Doors and looping around to do it all over again.
If it looked intoxicating, it’s only because it was, even if her heart matched the same hollowness as others but with a sheen of joyous intent, the awareness of the temporary nature of such a feeling inferior to the fact that this was the here and now. Her involvement in the Jimi Hendrix Experience didn’t just set a change of pace; it allowed her to enter a fierce realm long before she knew she was even ready to, suddenly prepared in the face of something so obviously enthralling.
Pushing the doors open to her new world like someone arriving on their first day at a new job—intrigued but somewhat unsettled—Des Barres noticed the “soaring sounds” first. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of noticing as it was a force irresistible energy that pushed her into the vibrant pulse of this new reality, its charged eccentricity standing in stark contrast to the earlier touch of counterculture’s uncertain caress.
But she soon took Hendrix in as he stood there, “thundering from a shimmering guitar held by a vividly decked out gentleman with hair that stood out all over his head like electricity.” More evident than the fact that Hendrix’s entire entourage screamed “BRITISH” was how hearing ‘Foxy Lady’ made her want to dance, as she once wrote in her reflective liner notes for Tidal, though likely not in the way she had before, calculated and pirouette-like, as though capturing a fleeting moment in slow motion.
“What was he doing with that guitar? TO that guitar? Yes, I was certainly hearing sounds I’d never heard before,” she recalled, remembering how, suddenly, this shiny new musical plaything infiltrated her bones like something ecstatic, letting go of the withheld gasps she never realised she was holding in. “My head, heart, body and mind had been scorched, shaken and stirred,” she wrote, “and by the end of the day, I knew I was hearing sounds that had never even been made before.”
Although she notes her exposure to “some pretty spectacular situations” before this awakening, being a part of ‘Foxy Lady’ at such a pivotal moment, not only for music but for her personally, felt like rekindling a flame she never knew she had lost. However, rather than something divine, perhaps this mainly arose from the way he played his instrument to life like some form of avant-garde musical resuscitation, exhuming a moment and movement that had long reached out for some much-needed defibrillation.
As she put it: “Jimi’s guitar was born and came alive in his hands. A couple of times, I swear I could hear its heart beating.”
