“Play this motherfucker!”: The classic psychedelic song ‘Fire’ Jimi Hendrix forced radio stations to play
While wearing a bandana and setting his guitar on fire, Jimi Hendrix defined an era of psychedelic rock in the 1960s. In a style that blended rhythm and lead guitar, incorporating every musical genre from funk to blues and jazz, Hendrix took guitar playing to new heights and spearheaded an artistic movement centred around freedom of thought.
Quickly hailed as a sort of guitar-playing saviour, fans watched with bated breath as the possibilities of how an instrument could be played inspired a broader push of imaginative creativity. While the emergence of hallucinogenic drugs and the more general disdain for a conservative political landscape platformed the colourful counterculture we have come to associate with the 1960s, the music propelled it further, and Jimi Hendrix was firmly at the wheel of that.
While tracks like ‘Voodoo Child’, ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Little Wing’ have seen fellow musicians and fans pin Hendrix with icon status, he rarely indulged in self-praise. For the most part, he let his music do the talking, and where he was forced to speak publicly in between that, he would heap praise on his contemporaries.
In the summer of 1968, Hendrix had Electric Ladyland in his armoury, an album that would go down as one of rock n roll’s most significant records. Pushing Hendrix’s already experimental boundaries for making music, it was a record that foregrounded intricate guitar playing as a means of catching attention rather than snappy vocal hooks. Ultimately, it changed the landscape of guitar playing forever.
That same summer, a young Arthur Brown had just released his single ‘Fire’. After opening with lyrics, “I am the god of hellfire! / And I bring you / fire”, it descends into a song that is a psychedelic rock track at heart but without a reverberated guitar standing at the forefront of it. Instead, most of the track’s melody is played by an organ and then tails off with an elaborate brass section, creating a wild sense of euphoric chaos. In that sense, it was genuinely unique within the genre while remaining a seamless contemporary for other psychedelic tracks that it was played on the radio all over and danced to amongst the psychedelic haze of those heady free-love parties.
During a 2022 interview with NME, Arthur Brown spoke about the song, saying: “Everything opened up when ‘Fire’ became a hit and I went from being an underground figure who was regarded as strange to singing and playing with people that were my influences and heroes, like John Lee Hooker and Frank Zappa,” he explained.
While the song’s artistic value shot Brown to ’60s psychedelia stardom for its unique sonic palette, he attributes some of its success to Hendrix, saying: “At the same time, Jimi Hendrix helped break ‘Fire’, because he was on the same US label as me, and took the record around the stations demanding: ‘Play this motherfucker!’” he said.
In the true spirit of ’60s free love, Hendrix was less occupied with preserving his own radio real estate and more interested in promoting good music. While Hendrix was widely regarded as the chief of music innovation in the ’60s, a song whose melody was driven by an organ with religious imagery for lyricism would have been a new step change for the world of psychedelic rock.
In the years that followed, Brown and Hendrix almost joined forces and started a band together. Speaking to Classic Rock, Brown said he and Hendrix “proposed that we put a band together, with me, my keyboard player Vincent Crane and the Experience”.
He added: “In the background, he wanted tapes of Wagner and a number of big visual screens. It would be a mixture of classical, rock, jazz and R&B. But there were two things that prevented that. One was that, shortly after we came up with the idea, Vincent went into a mental home. And although I loved Jimi, I wanted to go in my own direction. So I missed out on it.”
Like most psychedelic music in the ’60s, its greatness was largely influenced by how closely the artists could fly to the sun. Both Brown and Hendrix did that, respectively, and ultimately, that played a part in the untimely death of Jimi Hendrix. In the mythologising of our favourite artists, we often scramble around scattered memories of their work and try to piece together an image of what could have been, and while the prospect of what Hendrix could have achieved with Brown is exciting, the iconic albeit smaller reality of Hendrix is worth cherishing.
