08. Axis of Love / Abraxas of Evil

On cancel culture and psychedelic cover art

Left: Jimi Hendrix, Axis: Bold as Love 🔻 Right: Carlos Santana, Abraxas

ISSUE EIGHT

Axis: Bold as Love

My son has a poster on the wall of his college dorm room. It’s the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s second album, Axis: Bold as Love, released in 1967.¹

A few student friends were over visiting my son at his dorm several nights ago, when one of them, a young woman of East Indian descent, announced that she was so triggered and offended by the Hindu-themed imagery of the album cover art, its cultural disrespect and racist appropriation of religious iconography, that she was tempted to just tear it off the wall! She demanded its removal and an apology from my son.

I won’t impinge any further on his privacy, or theirs, but my own initial reaction was frankly WTF is this young woman’s problem? Is she really accusing Jimi Hendrix of racism?

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Yes, the imagery does invoke Lord Vishnu, but it’s rooted in what looks to me like pure intentions, an homage in the same aesthetic and spiritual vein as Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released six months earlier, or Donovan’s contemporaneous musical imagery, or George Harrison’s for that matter.

Anyway, no sooner had I tied these sentiments and rationalizations into a neat liberal bow, than I dipped into Google, hoping for a bit of backstory to back myself up. Instead what I found was an article by the conspiracy enthusiast and, apparently, music journalist David Metzger, writing in 2018 in his online zine, Dangerous Minds. Under the headline Jimi Hendrix REALLY HATED his album covers Metzger encapsulates the true story of the controversial Axis cover art thusly:

“And then there was the cover for Axis: Bold As Love.

“Roger Law made a painting of the band based on a photo-portrait from Karl Ferris and that image was superimposed over a mass-produced religious poster. Hendrix and the Experience were depicted as incarnations of Vishnu, something many Hindus found insulting.

“Hendrix hated it, feeling that its appropriation of Hindu symbolism was disrespectful and questioning why his own Native American heritage did not supply the motif.

“An exasperated Jimi told the press that ‘the three of us have nothing to do with what’s on the Axis cover.’” (It’s worth noting that this cover art is still banned in Malaysia.)

And to that I say… Oops… Never mind…

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But then there’s this…

Annunciation (1961) by Mati Klarwein

Carlos Santana recorded Abraxas, his own legendary second album, in 1970 at the tender age of 23, younger even than Hendrix, who had just turned 25 when Axis: Bold as Love was released three years previously.

[And let’s just stipulate up front that Santana and Hendrix are two of the six-string titans standing astride the Mount Olympus of rock and roll.]²

Santana chose the title “Abraxas” from the Herman Hesse novel Demian, a story about Jungian individuation and the concept of duality. In the novel Hesse writes:

“We stood before it and began to freeze inside from the exertion. We questioned the painting, berated it, made love to it, prayed to it: We called it mother, called it whore and slut, called it our beloved, called it Abraxas…”

Santana also personally selected the cover art: Annunication, a 1961 canvas by the psychedelic surrealist Mati Klarwein, a French-German artist who created the piece shortly after immigrating to New York. The painting is Klarwein’s interpretation of the New Testament story of the Annunciation, in which the Archangel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary to tell her she’s going to give birth to Jesus.

In Klarwein’s Annunciation, however, the Virgin Mary is proud, black and naked, lounging languidly on a divan in an enchanted forest. The Archangel Gabriel, meanwhile, is awfully androgynous (and equally nude). S/he is indeed coming down from the heavens to deliver the Good News, but perched provocatively athwart a giant conga drum that seems headed for trouble!

As journalist Jacob Shelton tells it, CBS Records executives initially refused to distribute the album with a naked woman on the cover, regardless of artistic intent. If they were also concerned by the (historically accurate) prospect of a Black Virgin Mary, they kept that fact to themselves.

A large sticker featuring Time magazine’s glowing album review was affixed over Mary’s nakedness for the original release. But by the time Abraxas rocketed to #1 on the Billboard charts, cooler heads had apparently prevailed and Mother Mary was once again in all her glory.

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So What’s the Difference?

Objectively speaking, the Abraxas cover art is way more brazen an appropriation of Christian imagery and iconography than whatever offense Axis’s cover might cause some devout Hindus. (And that’s not even considering the use of naked female flesh to move merchandise.)

Why, then, did my kid’s friends side with the objecting Hindu student, and suggest that my son apologize and remove the offending artwork? Would the reaction have been the same if a White Christian student had expressed concern over the appropriation of Christian imagery in Abraxas?

I think not, and that opens up a whole can of worms about cancel culture and cultural appropriation that I’ll leave for another time.

But speaking for myself, I side with the album covers, both of them. The Abraxas cover is obviously the superior work aesthetically, and I do appreciate Jimi Hendrix’s anger at how his record label dealt with him as an artist.

But there is an awful lot of territory between “disrespectful” and “heretical.” And historically, when fundamentalists of any stripe start speaking of heresy, be they Hindu, Christian, Muslim or Jew, Magapublican or Massively Woke, it too often ends up in depressingly similar fashion, to wit:

John Lennon was murdered on 8 December 1980 by Mark David Chapman, a devout Christian who said he still nursed a grudge over Lennon declaring that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" in 1966, exacerbated by two of his post-Beatles songs, "God" and "Imagine.”³

Charlie Hebdo anyone?

- Art

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Santana previews Black Magic Woman at Tanglewood just before the release of Abraxas

Jimi Hendrix’s electrifying rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock

1. It’s hard to believe but Jimi Hendrix recorded just three studio albums — Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland — during his tragically short life, all produced when he was 24 and 25 years of age. Barely two years later he was dead.

In 2005, Are You Experienced was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress in recognition of its cultural significance to be added to the National Recording Registry. Smithsonian archivist Reuben Jackson, explaining its inclusion, called the album a landmark not just of rock music, but also R&B and the blues.

"It altered the syntax of the music in a way I compare to, say, James Joyce's Ulysses. You read a page of Ulysses and then you listen to just "Purple Haze," and you think, my goodness, what is this?"

2. Carlos Santana remembering Jimi: "To me, Jimi Hendrix is like John Coltrane or Bob Marley or Miles Davis. He belongs to a group, the Beethovens, the Stravinskys, the Picassos, people who transcend trends or fashions or anything like that - they are all like Da Vincis to me."

If Hendrix ever spoke publicly of Santana in the brief year between their one meeting (at Woodstock) and Jimi’s shocking death, I can’t find it. But no less a musician than Prince himself gave some love to Santana thusly in a 2015 Rolling Stone interview:

Asked about the influence of Hendrix on his own work, Prince said: “It’s only because he’s Black. That’s really the only thing we have in common.” Prince went on to say that Carlos Santana was a more befitting stylistic comparison. “If they really listened to my stuff, they’d hear more of a Santana influence than Jimi Hendrix,” he commented.“Hendrix played more blues; Santana played prettier.”

Abraxas, incidentally, was also added to the National Recording Registry, in 2015.

3. Outraged Christian religionists, whipped into a frenzy by fire-and-brimstone preachers and right-wing politicians, lit hundreds of bonfires of Beatles albums all across the Bible Belt in the summer of 1966, after John Lennon sardonically observed at a press conference how a rock group could be “more popular than Jesus” among American young people.