Struck by inspiration: How a frying pan to the head helped write a Jimi Hendrix classic
Most of the best Jimi Hendrix songs don’t feel like typical rock and roll tunes. He had the same tools to work with as The Rolling Stones and The Beatles did, but he seemed to channel some kind of spiritual energy whenever he wrote songs that felt like it was coming from the other side of the cosmos.
It normally takes some sort of genius to have that kind of track record in the studio, but when inspiration failed him, it turned out a frying pan could work just as well on ‘The Wind Cries Mary’.
Regardless of his ability to wail like no one else, Hendrix was just as interested in being a songwriter as a guitar hero, and by the time he got to work on Electric Ladyland, he seemed to become the common ground between Miles Davis’s experimentation and Bob Dylan’s lyricism.
On his debut, though, every song just seemed to be a tour de force of what he could do. After kicking down the door with ‘Purple Haze’, ‘Manic Depression’ was the kind of psychedelic rock that teetered on metal in a few places, and ‘Hey Joe’ is still one of the most electrified versions of a folk song that anyone would ever lay down.
That kind of brilliance doesn’t translate to a happy home life, and when he got back from the studio, Hendrix was known for fighting relentlessly with his girlfriend, Kathy Mary Etchingham. After making a remark about her cooking, Hendrix got the clubbing of a lifetime by meeting the business end of a frying pan before his girlfriend left in a huff.
While anyone would normally be in for an apology after someone insults their cooking, Hendrix wasn’t looking to forgive. That was an emotional moment, and any good artist knows that if you harness it right, it didn’t take long for that emotion to be channelled from the brain to the fingers.
According to Etchingham, she claimed that ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ stemmed directly from that argument, saying, “We smashed the kitchen up. It was a horrific argument. ‘All the jacks are in their boxes’ probably relates to during the argument when he said, ‘You play games, you’re always playing games.’”
Whereas the rest of Are You Experienced was about turning everything up to 11, ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ actually works as a fantastic comedown to everything else. Hendrix knew enough soul music to deliver this kind of ballad, but during the solo, there were bits and pieces of everyone from Muddy Waters to Curtis Mayfield, and even a bit of George Harrison-style licks in there as well.
Then again, it’s not like anyone would have noticed it on first listen. Hendrix was always his own unique animal when it came to music, and even if ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ stemmed from a couple on the verge of collapse, rarely can anyone translate that into such raw beauty as he could.
