When Tom Petty died recently, the one thing that struck me as most interesting of all about the entire tragic experience was the manner in which folks on the Internet reacted to the death of this long beloved rock star. Twitter went into a mad uproar of people pouring out love for Petty, sharing memories, the New York Times printed a numer of articles (as did other publications), and then of course, on trusty YouTube, tons of folks that I am subscribed to -- musicians -- all began to publish their various videos dedicated to Tom Petty's wide and very beloved catalogue.
For about a week straight, and a bit even still, Tom Petty beacme more of a major presence than he had ever been in my life previously. And at some point, I'm not sure when, all of the focus on Petty and his rather unexpected passing got me to wondering about other famous celebrity deaths we all know about, but that did not have the "luck" of happening in the Internet era. Like Jimi Hendrix, for example, or Jim Morrison, or Brian Jones.
I began, I suppose, to wonder about what the reaction to those very famous deaths must have been like, all those many, many years ago. What, really, was it like, the night Jimi Hendrix died, in September of 1970? Who, exactly, discussed his death? Who was truly aggrieved by it? Was it really as mourned as the Petty death was this month in 2017? Something tells me no way. For how could it have been? In 1970, where could you have really thrown all of that grief? And I mean, really thtown it? Who could you have really talked about Jimi Hendrix with in 1970, especially if you lived in a small town? Who is to say that all of the other kids there would be automatically interested in discussing him with you? Who is to say anyone in your small town back then, with no Internet access, had ever even heard of him?
After all, we are living in the time of instant communication, and yet there are still many things that people are very confused about, and oblivious to. So what must this obliviousness have been like back in 1970? I cannot even imagine. Which leads me to think that , for the most part, when Hendrix the Legend died, I bet the refrain of lament was a bit soft, in comparison to what we hear today. It's hard for me to imagine, for example, that anyone back then would have really thought Jimi Hendrix would survive as such a formidable legend, even now, 20 years into the 21st century. It sounds ridiculous, really. The people of 1970 had no Internet, no Wikipedia, no cell phones, no Rock and Roll hall of fame, and Rolling Stone magazine had only just begun. For all they knew, rock and roll really was just some sort of freak trend that was going to come to a swift end at any point. I just do not think there was any way they could have imagined how "archived" all of this was going to become.
Again, don't forget: When those kids of 1970 looked into the past, even just their own recent past, they had no real archive to sift through. Oh, ya, they had libraries...(if they were in a good town)..but whens the last time you heard about somebody studying rock and roll at a library? Sounds unlikely to me. Plus they couldn't have studied it there if they had wanted. No books had been written on it! So, in truth, all of this was just one big mystery world to those people. No one knew what the hell was going on. In 1970, televisions existed, and so too did telephones and vinyl records, but in many ways, the World was still operating by word of mouth, just like it always had, for centuries prior. Instant facts that you search on Google were impossible to fathom.
No one average knew quite hwen anything had really happened, exactly. These kids didn't know, one imagines, that Hendrix was from Seattle, or that he had once been in the Army, or that he had traveled with Little Richard on the Chitlin Circuit, or lived in Harlem, etcetc. Details were, so I believe, scarce in the past, even for famous people! This is not at alll the case today, really. Wikipedia tells the condensed story of eveyones life and all the necessary details the moment they're famous. For instance, Jimi Hendix was born on November 27 in 1942. He had a paternal grandmother named Zenora Rose Moore. She was a quarter Cherokee. His grandfather was the result of an extramarital affair between a woman named Fanny and a grain merchant from Urbana Ohio, or maybe Illinois.
What in the hell was that, right? And how in the good hell could you have ever easily tracked down that information, in 1970? It's almost mind blowing. It's ridiculous. Every time I think about it my mind is just like ...I can't believe it! How is this all possible? This gigantic pool of information? All of these deep stories just unraveling everywhere you look. They are EVERYWHERE! And so too, of course, are the little stories connected to the big stories, like the ones people tell on Twitter and on message boards and on YouTube when famous folks die. Stories the little folks tell that, a lot of the time, I dont' think they realize just how long they'll last, just like the kids in 1970 never realized just how long their favorite music star of their short high school career would last.
Have you ever really thought about what it might feel like, 50 years from now, assuming you are younger and you make it 50 years, to look back on YouTube videos folks are publishing now? To me its a mind fuck. I can't imagine it. But it will certainly be the case. Which means that people in the year 2067 are going to have the option, when they read about Tom Petty and how he died on October 2, 2017, to look back and search the web and see exactly how we all felt the very moment we heard it. They will be able, in fact, to even see how we all thought, for about 4 hours, that Tom Petty was about to miraculously resurrect, because the news initally broke the wrong way.Smething that probably culd have never really happened in the 70s...and even if it had, it would be forgotten quickly, one imagines. It would become an unverifiable story, just like everything was back then. Now it's all verifiable all the time. You can't really just make things up anymore. If "Daddy" tells a story the wrong way now, you can catch him in his tracks. It's all written in stone now, kid. If I want to go around tricking people into thinking Hendrix was really from Texas for some reason -- easy thing to do in 1969 -- there's no way my trick will lats long. Probably wouldn't last 10 minutes. Is that not weird? I find it weird. Will people ever get tired of all this verification, one wonders? Will they ever yearn for a time when it was all just a fuckin mystery? Am I, in fact, doing that right now?
Maybe it's just me, but I have always been a little "weirded out" by the fact that people like Hendrix, who never used the Internet or even probably heard of it, are, in our own time, on the Internet, in such huge ways. It is almost as though the Internet is some other galaxy entirely and they just don't belogn on it and yet here they are, caught, for eternity, in the "Internet stone". It has always seemed odd to me, I feel, ever since I was a little boy and I first started using Wiki and stuff and reading of Hendrix. It has especially seemed odd to me as I have watched the first two decades of the 21st century pass (I've been rather conscious for all of it now, being 10 when the century commenced) and seen the way in which my old 60s stars just keep getting slightly re-invented, and brought up all over again, with each new little Internet neighborhood that gets created. First place I saw Hendrix was on a VHS cassette of Woodstock 1969, then it was mIRC, where we used to download things through weird dark chat channels, after that it was on Napster, from there his records were all on the BitTorrents, and finally,now, he has landed on YouTube and Twitter and everywhere in between. And each time I see him pop up agian, it just gets weirder and weirder. He is eternally in orbit. His music is, literally, always being performed somewhere. Right now, right now, right now, someone else in our World is just discovering their first Jimi Hendrix song. Just like I did all those many many years ago, watching that Woodstock 69 VHS cassette. And also right now, or soon, someone just found out that Hendrix died at only 27. They are beginning to mourn for an event that happened almost a half century ago, in a wildly different world. They will perhaps learn the exact details of his life that no one in his own time even knew the first thing about.
Weird, huh?
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