Jimi Hendrix’s Final Interview Animated (1970)

We’ve previously featured Jimi Hendrix’s final interview, preserved as an audio recording by NME’s Keith Altham, who sat down to talk with him on September 11, 1970, one week before Hendrix’s death. Now, we bring you multimedia org Blank on Blank’s animation of that interview—breezy, surreal, funny, and profound. As I wrote in our previous post, Hendrix’s “offhand lyricism and fractal imagination” are on full display here. It’s rare that a musician is as interesting to hear speaking as playing, but Hendrix was one of them. Take, for example, Hendrix’s response when Altham suggests that he invented psychedelic music:

Jimi Hendrix: [chuckles] A mad scientist approach. The way I write things, I just write them with a clash between reality and fantasy mostly. You have to use fantasy to show different sides of reality; it’s how it can bend. As a word reality is nothing, but each individual’s own way of thinking. Then the establishment grabs a big piece of that.

Then there’s Hendrix on destroying guitars onstage:

Jimi Hendrix: One time I said: maybe I should burn a guitar tonight. You know [laughs] smash a guitar or something like that. And they said: yeah, yeah! I said: you really think I should? They said: yeah, that’d be cool. I said: well, ok. So like I just worked up enough anger where I could do it, you know. But like I didn’t know it was anger until they told me that it was, like with destruction and all that. But I believe everybody should have like a room where they can get rid of all their releases, where they can do their releases at. So my room is a stage. [laughs]

There are many more of these gems in the full interview that didn’t make the cut above, but the abridged Blank on Blank version appropriately captures the whimsy and good humor of the late lamented genius.

Related Content:

Jimi Hendrix’s Final Interview on September 11, 1970: Listen to the Complete Audio

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Previously Unreleased Jimi Hendrix Recording, “Somewhere,” with Buddy Miles and Stephen Stills

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness