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[av_heading heading=’JUST ANOTHER DAY | ‘Excuse me while I kiss the sky’’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY LUIS BUENAFLOR JR.
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Friday, May 5, 2017
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“Purple haze, all in my brain
lately things they don’t seem the same
Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why
Excuse me while I kiss the sky”…
– Jimi Hendrix
THESE are lines from Purple Haze, a song written by Jimi Hendrix and released as the second record single by the Jimi Hendrix Experience on March 17, 1967.
To the uninitiated it was perhaps their first exposure to Hendrix’s psychedelic rock sound.
“The song features his inventive guitar playing, which uses the signature Hendrix chord and a mix of blues and Eastern modalities, shaped by novel sound processing techniques. Because of ambiguities in the lyrics, listeners often interpret the song as referring to a psychedelic experience, although Hendrix described it as a love song.”
But who is Jimi Hendrix in the first place and what is a “Purple Haze”?
From www.rollingstone.com: “Hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as the greatest guitarist of all time, Jimi Hendrix was also one of the biggest cultural figures of the Sixties, a psychedelic voodoo child who spewed clouds of distortion and pot smoke.
“A left-hander who took a right-handed Fender Stratocaster and played it upside down, Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before Hendrix had experimented with feedback and distortion, but he turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began.”
And from Wikipedia: “James Marshall ‘Jimi’ Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; November 27, 1942 – Sept. 18, 1970) was an American rock guitarist, singer, and songwriter. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as ‘arguably the greatest instrumentalist’ in the history of rock music.
“The world’s highest-paid performer then, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death from barbiturate-related asphyxia on Sept. 18, 1970, at the age of 27.”
On the other hand, Purple Haze is a very strong sativa strain of marijuana that affects mind more than body.
Yes, the song is indeed about mind-altering substances, in this case marijuana, particularly a strong strain that makes you “kiss the sky.” It’s all about getting “high” and kissing the sky – the perfect metaphor for it. Is there anything higher than the sky and if you can kiss it, it simply means you are really up there or “high.”
Nowadays most aging hippies like moi just use the phrase “excuse me while I kiss the sky” as a reference to the “dazed and confused” days of the ‘60s and the ‘70s. Although some still use it to literally describe getting high or drunk, whatever your preference is for getting off the world.
As a teenager in the “summer of love” or the “Age of Aquarius”, Purple Haze “was also my introduction to the psychedelic music of Jimi Hendrix. There were a lot of songs in that musical genre but Purple Haze seems to be the de facto anthem of that generation. The moment you hear it you know it’s time to turn on. There are three songs from Woodstock that immediately takes you back to that 3 Days of Peace, Love and Music — Soul Sacrifice by Carlos Santana, The Star Spangled Banner the Jimi Hendrix version, and Purple Haze, of course by Jimi Hendrix.
Here’s the rest of the lyrics of Purple Haze and you can see it’s all about getting high and not really a love song:
Purple haze, all around
don’t know if I’m comin’ up or down
Am I happy or in misery?
What ever it is, that girl put a spell on me
Purple haze all in my eyes
don’t know if it’s day or night
you got me blowin’, blowin’ my mind
Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?
Let me end with a quote from Jimi Hendrix which is more than appropriate for the situation our country and the rest of the world is in now:
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” (brotherlouie16@gmail.com /PN)
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