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Why Amy Winehouse likened playing guitar to “having a dick”
Amy Winehouse didn’t often play the guitar on stage, but when she did, she found it to be a wildly liberating experience. As she once said, “I’m not Amy the star. I’m Amy the girl with the guitar.” When she got to show this to the world, it made her strut her stuff with extra swagger, like when Bez’s dancing was bestowed with maracas to shake.
As Winehouse explained, “I never really liked a lot of guitar bands.” Her influence was always more soul-inflected. However, there was one star whose playing was more in-line with extolling what was within, like Ella Fitzgerald’s singing transcribed onto a six-string, nevertheless. As Winehouse added, “I always loved [Jimi] Hendrix, always. There’s room in everyone’s life for Hendrix.”
His bravura on stage was legendary, and while Winehouse’s chops may have paled in comparison (whose don’t?) she identified with the liberation that the otherwise shy Hendrix exhibited. “When you have a guitar, it’s not so much like ‘I know I look good’ when you walk out. It’s more that you feel power. I guess it must be akin to having a dick. I’ve never had a dick, obviously, but it must be like that. When I go on stage and I’ve got a guitar, I feel like no one can touch me. Not in an ‘I’m so good’ way, it’s just that I feel that’s all my strength.”
Aside from the slightly troublesome reflection of the patriarchy that such a comment reveals, the truth that Winehouse was comically touching upon was that an axe is like an appendage of the soul, it’s just that it’s a genuine wooden one as opposed to… As Winehouse explained: “To me, the guitar represents my music that’s inside me but in an external way. So, I guess that’s why it’s like having a dick—because it’s like myself but out.”
As it happens, Winehouse and Hendrix have a kinship on this front. Hendrix went from a retiring and reserved, quirky guy to a God on stage because he felt the same engorging effect. The same can be said of his songwriting. As John Frusciante once put it: “His life, and his lifestyle, and the women in his life, affected his music more so than other musicians did because that’s how free his playing sounds. When you hear Jimi Hendrix play, it’s a pure expression of him as a person.” You could quite easily blank out the name and apply that quote to Winehouse’s songwriting and performative ways.
Frusciante added: “You see him on stage and there’s absolutely no separation between him and his guitar—they’re completely one because he’s just putting every single bit of energy, everything in his whole psyche, and every single part of his body into his guitar playing,” Once more, that is essentially a less comical way of expressing exactly what Winehouse put her finger on.
Thus, if Winehouse had swapped places with Cynthia Plaster Caster, the self-described groupie who took a plaster mould of Hendrix’s dong (among other rockers), and taken a more abstract approach, she may well have moulded his throbbing fender rather than his floppy spam javelin, so to speak. After all, in a figurative sense, they are just the inside laid bare in an emboldening fashion.
