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The world’s most famous guitarist. The girlfriend who wanted to be his wife. The famous rock singer. The rock singer’s wife who wanted to be the guitarist’s girlfriend. The guitarist’s manager, who mysteriously “misplaced” a fair amount of money. The manager’s associates, both of them angling to take over as manager. And Colonel Mustard, with the rope, in the library. Okay, even if we ignore that last one, this has all the makings of a murder mystery (or at least, a diverting game of Clue), but it is, in fact, the tale of the death of Jimi Hendrix. We’ve always been told, since that fateful day in 1970, that he overdosed on drugs and choked to death on his own vomit. But there have always been rumors that perhaps this wasn’t the real story…

Eric Burdon sang “House of the Rising Sun,” “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place,” and “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” – all huge international hits for his band The Animals. Then he scored a big hit again with the band War and the song “Spill the Wine.” But… did he also (cue dramatic music) kill Jimi Hendrix???

Author David Henderson, in the newly-revised edition of his Hendrix biography ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky, doesn’t claim anything so preposterous. But he does point out that Burdon was on the scene, helping Hendrix’s girlfriend “clean up” (ie, get rid of the drugs) the scene before the ambulance came for the guitarist’s body. And that Burdon was one of several men (the manager would be another) who lost his woman to Hendrix. So add Eric Burdon to what quickly becomes a very long list of people pissed off at Hendrix: jealous girlfriends, jealous and now lonely husbands and boyfriends, various hangers-on and would-be managers, even the FBI and the Mafia. Henderson has a plausible explanation why each of these various groups might have had cause to want Hendrix dead (the FBI saw him as a black power icon, like Malcolm X; the Mafia controlled the territory where Hendrix built his Electric Lady Studio in NY), but of course there’s not enough evidence to name any one person or entity as the possible culprit.

On the one hand, Henderson comes off sounding like yet another conspiracy theorist; on the other, he does actually identify some of these things as conspiracy theories, so he’s aware of the fine line he’s walking. One thing seems clear from the statements, finally, of the ambulance and hospital staff who dealt with Hendrix’s body – the widespread media story of the drug overdose and resulting choking seems almost as implausible as any of the other theories out there.

So what happened? And 38 years later, does it matter? Does it matter to you? Would proof of Hendrix’s death – either as a result of accidental overdose, suicide, or foul play - change the way you think about his work?

Daniel Levitin’s best-seller, This Is Your Brain On Music, contained some provocative stuff. The musician-turned-neuroscientist also displayed a philosophical streak, with answers to questions like “if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” His answer – an unequivocal NO. Sound, he wrote, is not the vibration of air molecules, but the perception of those vibrations by a human or animal ear. In other words, there is no sound (or music) unless there’s an observer to hear it.

Now, Dan has a second book, The World In Six Songs, which posits that human brains evolved to make and hear and understand 6 basic types of song: songs of friendship, comfort, joy, knowledge, religion, and love. Also a provocative thought. Where are the songs of war or hatred? Work songs? The cries of alarm that would’ve been one of our earliest evolutions from the cries that other primates use when predators are near?

This reminds me of a psychology professor who once told our class that there are no bad behaviors. The scandalized students immediately responded with war, child abuse, and host of other bad behaviors. No, the professor said; those are bad actions, but the underlying behaviors (which usually involved either killing or sex or both) are evolutionary necessary. Humans needed to be able to kill because the alternative was usually being killed. The sexual urge kept the species alive. Cheating on your spouse might be a poor choice of action – and in some societies, a crime – but the underlying behavior is the propagate the species and diversity the gene pool, both good behaviors. So Daniel Levitin’s proposal of 6 fundamental types of song has a similarly counterintuitive cast to it. But there’s science to back it up – love songs release dopamine, a “feel good” hormone in the brain. What do you think?

I believe that’s the same hormone that’s released when you support your public radio station’s capital campaign during its One-Day Challenge Grant Fundraiser…

So Giacomo Puccini is the biggest opera composer in the States. That’s no surprise. Fred Plotkin reports from Italy, though, that in Puccini’s home country it is Giuseppe Verdi who is considered to be the superior composer, and apparently by quite a large margin. In a sense, that’s not too surprising either – Verdi, after all, was considered a key player in the formation of the modern republic of Italy at a time when much of northern Italy was under Austro-Hungarian control. Like Sibelius in Finland, or much later and in a very different musical style, Thomas Mapfumo in Zimbabwe, Verdi was seen as the voice of an emergent nation. Still, Puccini wrote an incredible number of “hit tunes.” (Hearing the late Luciano Pavarotti ‘s great mid-70s recording of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma,” from Turandot, was a formative experience for me.) You’d think the competition between the two (or between their respective fans) would be a little stiffer.

Are you an opera fan? If so, where does Puccini rank on your list of favorite composers? And if not, are you a Puccini fan anyway? (You’re probably still familiar with famous songs from Madame Butterfly and Tosca, from movies and TV commercials if nothing else.)

While my lifelong love affair with horse racing is a poorly-kept secret, I am not in fact into gambling at all. (Thoroughbred racing is different. Don’t ask me how – it just is.) So while work has occasionally taken me to Las Vegas and being outvoted by a bunch of friends once landed me in Atlantic City, I am not the type that will be lured to a casino by a roll of free quarters or even a comped room in the hotel. And until recently, any musical act that I would want to see wouldn’t be caught dead playing a casino, so that wasn’t even a consideration.

But Prince changed all that when he went to Vegas – without, you know, “going Vegas.” Now, apparently, a far younger crowd goes to casinos to see musicians who still have their own hair and teeth performing songs that haven’t been out of fashion for decades. Yes, it’s easy for me here in New York City to say I still wouldn’t go see any of the newer acts in a casino, but if I lived in central Connecticut and someone I liked, let’s say Interpol because they have that kind of lounge lizardy dress thing going on anyway, was playing at Foxwoods… well, I don’t know. It still sounds wrong, somehow, but I imagine I’d be sorely tempted.

Tell us: What about you? Have you ever caught a concert at a casino? If so, how was it? And if not, what would it take to get you go to a casino concert?

I’ve followed the Billboard charts since I was in school, back in the late 70s (and that, kids, is what they mean by “old school”). But it wasn’t the Hot 100 that I was interested in; that was just pop pablum, nothing interesting there. I read the Top 200, the album chart, where you could reliably find Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” somewhere around #189 every single week and where you might occasionally find other albums that had been released a year or more before but which were already proving their staying power.

Well, the Hot 100 turned 50 last week and for a middle-aged coot, it’s looking pretty good. (I should be so lucky when my turn comes.) Don’t get me wrong, it’s still loaded with crap, but somehow it has managed to weather a half-century of often wrenching changes in the industry and our wider culture, and maintained a position of some relevance. One of today’s guest, Chris Mulanphy of Idolator.com, says the Hot 100 is the Dow Jones of pop music. And I think he might be right.

The Hot 100 may not be a barometer of musical greatness, but it does seem to be an accurate reflection of the changing culture of America. Look no further than the top of the first chart – Ricky Nelson leading a parade of white male singers back in 1958 – and compare that to the top of the chart today, 50 years later. Rihanna is at #1 and #4, four of the top are female (white, black, and South Asian), and the other is an African-American male. In a country where spending power is real power, that’s a pretty… uh, powerful statement.

Do you care about where songs are on the charts? Do they suggest artists you might like to follow up on? Or artists to avoid at all costs?

I think we can all applaud the idea of doing something well, becoming successful at it, and then deciding to try something a bit different instead of just repeating yourself. And if the results aren’t always what one might’ve hoped for, well, it’s like that old line from the Mary Tyler Moore show – when a donkey flies, you don’t blame it for not staying up. That seems to be the case with most “detour albums” – records by musicians who’ve become successful in one style and decide to try something that seems to be out of left field.

How you respond to these musical detours depends on what you expect from the people behind them. I personally thought that Devo’s “E-Z Listening Disc” was a hoot. Of course, Devo was so willfully weird that even this collection of electronic “easy listening” versions of their songs didn’t seem like such a left turn. But it makes it onto PopMatters.com’s list of 33 detour albums. So does Björk’s “Medulla,” I guess because of all the choral music, but for a similar reason, that doesn’t seem like such a detour to me either. And The Clash’s “Sandinista”? Anyone who’d been really listening to the band before that knew they loved reggae, so that wasn’t a huge surprise either. But man oh man, when Dylan went “Christian,” and Stevie Wonder went all photosynthetic, and Neil Young channeled his inner Mr. Roboto – those were shockers. So much so that most people (myself included) just didn’t know what to make of them all, and so we made nothing of them.

I think the benefit of a list like the one PopMatters has done is it offers a chance to look again at some of these musical detours to see if they’re as important as their creators initially hoped or as bad as most of us believed. So, how was Paul McCartney as a new waver, or an ambient/techno geek? (And why isn’t his classical music on this list? Talk about a detour…) What about when Kiss wiped off the makeup and tried to make an album of “serious” music?

Tell us about a detour album that surprised you – and tell us what you think of it now.

First of all, everybody calm down. We are not really suggesting that the electric bass is expendable. But sometimes you just gotta stir the pot a bit, you know? And it is true that what used to be a novelty (“hey look – the Doors don’t have a bass player”; 20 years later “hey look, Timbuk3 don’t have a bass player”) has become alarmingly common in rock today. The White Stripes, The Black Keys, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Kills – four great bands with a combined total of zero bassists. But wait a minute – The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ best-known song, “Maps,” has a very prominent bass part. And isn’t that a bass that launches The White Stripes’ hit “Seven Nation Army”?

It’s true that the sixth string of the guitar can be used to play a bass line – but it really restricts the range, and after a while, if your band never goes below that only-moderately-low E, you’re missing out on the chance to really loosen the fillings in your fans’ teeth. The fact is, all of these allegedly bass-less bands do occasionally realize that they need to those nether regions – all of them either trot out a bass and play it themselves, or use a pre-recorded one, or – if they have a truly irrational fear of 4-stringed instruments – fake it with a keyboard. (So maybe their problem isn’t with the bass, but bassists? Wow, I don’t even want to go there…) You simply can’t rock if you don’t have a big bottom. In a manner of speaking.

What do you make of the recent trend towards rock bands without a bassist?

I am, and have always been, a big sports fan. And therefore, I have always hated the Olympics opening ceremonies. Huge spectacles, garish costumes and even more garish music, and not a single ball struck or gruesome injury or anything fun like that. Early (leaked and unofficial) word from Beijing suggested that last Friday’s opener would be more of the same, but I tuned in anyway because, well, there was always a chance of a dignitary falling down and suffering a gruesome injury I guess. And you know what? There was actually quite a lot to like. The 2008 drummers, the gu-zheng music (the traditional board zither of Chinese courts), the almost scary precision of the people recreating the effects of raindrops on a pond with their box-costumes – there were whole stretches which made very little attempt to accommodate Western musical or aesthetic tastes, which were clearly rooted in Chinese tradition, but which had been blown up to enormous proportion not just because they could, but because it fit the enormity of the occasion. Of course, there were moments of extreme lameness as well, most notably the closing duet (was Sarah Brightman actually singing in Mandarin?). But on the whole, I thought this might have been the best opening ceremony I’ve seen, and the music – especially the distinctly Chinese parts – were a huge part of it.

Tell us: What did you think of the opening ceremonies? Did the music seem too alien, or did it work in this context?

(Photo credit: beastandbean/Flickr)

Musicians generally hate being stuck into one stylistic box. Debussy and Ravel disliked the term “Impressionist.” Steve Reich and Philip Glass still rail against the use of the term “Minimalist” for their music. Miles Davis hated the term “jazz.” Well, you might think that someone like Lead Belly (and that is how HE spelled it, though you’ll commonly see Leadbelly) would have been so grateful to have been plucked out of the penitentiary and set on the road to a successful musical career that he wouldn’t have quibbled with those who called him a “bluesman.” But Lead Belly was, among many other things, a literate man and a guy with an extraordinary ear. He played blues, but that was a fraction of his repertoire, and in fact he actually precedes the blues. The folklorist John Lomax and other producers and presenters would tout Lead Belly as a blues singer – probably because that’s what you expected an African-American man with a guitar to be. But in fact he was a repository of folk styles – Appalachian, Southern, black, white – as well as cowboy songs, early Gospel, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and more.

Now, since the guy has been inducted into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame and immortalized in numerous CD collections and several books, it’s hard to say that Lead Belly’s reputation has suffered greatly because of this trend to categorize everything. But American culture is full of artists who colored outside the lines, and some of them have not gotten their due because of how they’ve been pigeonholed. Scott Joplin and Alec Wilder wanted to be known as composers, but America insisted on viewing them as pop tunesmiths, for example. What other American musicians have we overlooked because they didn’t fit what we were told to expect from them?

It’s the summer of the superhero. Batman returns in “The Dark Knight,” and we have eponymous films from Hancock, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man (wow – just had to type that three times because I kept writing “Iran Man” – what superhero was I thinking of?). It’s the Hans Zimmer/James Newton Howard score that intrigues me the most – first of all, because both Zimmer and Howard are among the most successful composers in Hollywood over the last decade or so and the idea of the two of them sharing a soundtrack is really quite unprecedented. Second, they have taken a page from the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass in terms of building huge orchestral structures around limited musical material. And third… no pop songs.

Think about it – it seems like every movie made these days licenses songs that often threaten to overwhelm the action of screen. I’m not just talking about “Juno,” where the music is virtually a character in the movie; I’m talking about the use of hip-hop, heavy metal, arena rock, or indie rock songs that reach out of the screen and grab your attention in a way that a conventional film score usually doesn’t. This is not a bad thing: when Jonathan Demme made “Silence of the Lambs” he made terrific use of some underground rock bands like Savage Republic, where the sound fit the mood of the film while still clamoring for a bit of your attention for itself. And Urge Overkill almost became an overnight sensation after their version of “Girl You’ll Be A Woman Soon” was plopped into the middle of a pivotal scene in “Pulp Fiction.” But now it seems you can’t make a movie without licensing songs – a venture now so expensive that once you’ve spent the money, you damn well better make sure people know those songs are there. It’s become a way of hedging your bets; “the film may tank but our soundtrack is killing.”

Tell us: What do you think about the use of pre-existing songs in movies? Any examples of songs that really worked? Or songs that didn’t?