“It’s a bit embarrassing, but I came into Hendrix a little bit late in my guitar playing life,” Hocking admits. “I know that’s ironic because I call myself Jimi Hocking, with the same spelling!” Hocking grew up in a musical family, and was exposed to lots of different styles throughout the ‘70s, when he was cutting his teeth. He started playing electric guitar around the mid ‘70s and began forming his own ideas based on his musical experiences at that time – Countdown, AC/DC and things like that. Then in the early days of video, a mate brought around a tape of a Hendrix concert. Hocking was hooked.
“He was jamming off, doing his own thing, and I remember me and my friend sat there watching with our jaws open thinking, ‘What’s he doing?’ Because we were so used to the idea of rock music being kinda tidy. I know that sounds a bit weird, but if you take an AC/DC song or even a Thin Lizzy song, it was very structured. And we saw this guy with his eyes shut and his mouth open playing what we thought was kind of this jazzy, free-form thing, with no real care for song structure. We were a mixture of blown away and confused that somebody would do this!”
When it comes to song selection, a gig like Experience Jimi Hendrix can be a bit of a tense one. It goes without saying that there are some Hendrix classics that everyone wants to get their shot at. This year, Hocking has scored a huge coup: he’s the lucky bugger who managed to call dibs on Voodoo Child.
“I actually figured that would be the first one to go,” Hocking reasons. “I knew KB (Kevin Borich) was playing, and he often plays that in his set. So I figured he’d do it, and I’m the reverse: I’d always like to but someone else is always doing it. So I threw it out there and they came back like, ‘Yeah, sure!’ So that was a surprise!”
So what is it about Hendrix that made him so revolutionary, and that keeps him at the top of guitarists’ list of favourites some 43 years after his death? “I guess at the end of the day, the common thing is, there are certain larger-than-life characters who have dotted the guitar players’ manual. When you pick up a guitar, from that day you are gonna discover certain people, and even if you don’t like them you’re going to have to discover their work and form some kind of opinion about it. And Hendrix is one of those guys. So even if you don’t end up being a Hendrix devotee, you’ll take away from it some thing that you just have to know. A little blueprint on how to do certain things.”
Both being guitar nerds, the conversation dwells on guitar matters – just like last time we chatted with Hocking about an Experience Jimi Hendrix show, come to think of it. “Wouldn’t it have been amazing to have been there,” he ponders, “to have seen that transition into what became ‘the thing’? There’s a story – it’s either Mick Jagger or somebody like that – tells this story about driving along and hearing Purple Haze on the radio, and they literally had to pull the car over to listen to it and basically say, ‘What the fuck was that? What was that?’
“To have that kind of impact on a musical landscape would have been just phenomenal. And I’ve got a couple of young students who have been coming to see me, and when people get into their first extended chordal harmony, they learn what we call ‘The Jimi Hendrix chord,’ which is an E7#9. That’s the chord where people go from just playing major and minor chords to playing something …else!”
BY PETER HODGSON
