Hendrix: 40 Years Gone

Yesterday marked 40 years since Jimi Hendrix died at the age of only 28. (thx MMN)

When we were in Sweden, a tour operator pointed out a concert hall, Tivoli Gröna Lund, and mentioned that when Hendrix performed there the manager had to pull the plug since Jimi didn't wanted to stop playing (presumably at the concert in the video above).

I find it hard to believe that anyone would ever pull the plug on Jimi's brilliance, a brilliance that one researcher speculates had a lot to do with his "mix-handedness."

From Miller-McCune...

Writing in the journal Laterality, psychologist Stephen Christman notes that Hendrix was “mixed-handed:” He wrote and ate with his right hand, but combed his hair and played the guitar with his left. Several previous studies — including one we reported on last fall — have associated this trait with creativity, apparently because it indicates unusually strong interaction between the brain’s right and left hemispheres.

If Christman’s analysis is correct, Hendrix is a vivid example of this phenomenon. The groundbreaking musician’s ability to utilize both sides of his brain “enabled him to integrate the actions of his left and right hands while playing guitar, to integrate the lyrics and melodies of his songs, and perhaps even to integrate the older blues and R&B tradition with the emerging folk, rock and psychedelic sounds of the ’60s,” he writes.