ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?

1) I named my first company after the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Yes. I was going to name it after myself, which is to say I was going to call it Samuel Pepys (with an exclamation point, and lower-case, like fucking ee cummings, man; “samuel pepys!”), but I was stymied by the bureaucracy in Alberta, where I was registering it.

“You can’t name a business the same name as an individual,” said the bureaucrat on the phone. She had reviewed my case and rejected my registration on those flimsy grounds.

“But it’s not just my name,” I pleaded. “It’s got an exclamation point, which is a distinct feature of the brand and not at all a feature of my actual name.”

“No.”

“It’s in all lower-case!”

“No.”

She recommended Samuel Pepys Holdings or Samuel Pepys Company, which, she said, is what everyone else calls their companies. She seemed bureaucratically unwilling to understand that I didn’t want to be like everybody else.

2) In addition to The Samuel Pepys Experience, I briefly considered The Samuel Pepys Blues Explosion. One might conclude, from that and from the title of this blog, that we here at Mango Pudding Blues are some kind of blues freaks, but no, that’s not true. We’re just attracted mostly to the verbal surface of the blues. We’re not down diggin’ deep in the delta.

Anyway, The Samuel Pepys Experience had better legs than the Samuel Pepys Blues Explosion. Perhaps even more so now. I mean, everybody’s heard of Jimi, but where’s Jon Spencer these days? So The Samuel Pepys Experience it was.

3) This was all a long time ago. Eventually, I sold the company to a Southeast Asian electronics and entertainment conglomerate and the brand was slowly subsumed into their corporate marketing. But I thought about the mix of business and Jimi Hendrix today when I read in British music magazine Mojo that Third Stone from the Sun is being used in a UK television ad for Audi’s lovely TT Roadster. The advertisers claim that the song influenced the design of the car, but in the article, Romulus Rost, the head of Audi’s Munich design studio, is quoted as saying, “It is not easy to describe its precise influence on the final outcome, but music like Jimi Hendrix’s is very clean, which helps to create purity in design.”

Now, that’s a pretty mush-mouthed statement, which I’m sure was prepared for Mr. Rost by the ad agency. Music like Hendrix’s? Maybe, but we’re actually talkin’ about a specific song. And I don’t know about you, but ‘clean’ is not a word I would use to describe Third Stone from the Sun, or any other Hendrix song. Has this person ever heard Jimi Hendrix?

4) And so we here at Mango Pudding Blues do not believe that the TT Roadster was really designed under the influence of Jimi Hendrix. However, we can assure you that we have been listening to a scritchy old cassette of Kiss The Sky, a Jimi compilation released domestically in 1984, which includes Third Stone from the Sun, while writing this. We do not, however, claim that this has helped create purity in blogging.

5) We have decided, based solely on this train of thought, to hunt down some Jimi Hendrix CDs in the library. Like our recent sudden acceptance of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew after years of not really getting it, we think it might be time at last for us to close the circle we opened those years ago when we named our company the way we did. It might be time, at last, to fall fully into the bosom of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

5a) And we will also read ’Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky while we’re at it.

6) But we will not run out and buy all of these things, as is our wont, because we are still very shaky about our future. We are busy, yes, with contracts. But we are uncertain. And we expect our current state of chaos and ambiguity to continue to interfere with our blogging. So sit tight for a while. But keep those cards and letters coming, folks. We appreciate your good wishes. We appreciate letters from home. We appreciate brief homilies about the ultimate benefits of periods of chaos and ambiguity. Our silence should be interpreted only as a desperate cry for your attention. And as always, we simply promise that your loyalty will be remembered and rewarded.

Sydney or the bush!

* * *