BEING A MUSICOLOGIST
is like being a detective, especially when you’re tracking the artifacts of legendary performers who have passed. You research not in musty libraries but often in conversation with the survivors and cohorts of genius, following leads that take you down sonic wormholes and cultural tributaries. I’ve always compared digging up the truth about a legend like Jimi Hendrix to the journalist in Citizen Kane who searches for his quarry’s Rosebud. It’s like foraging for runes in the Great Pyramids, except instead of sarcophagi, you dig up priceless Stratocasters, rare minutiae of photographs and sagas of performances long since silenced.
That’s how it went when I interviewed the disc jockey who brought Jimi Hendrix and Leonard Nimoy together — and also when I spoke with Spock before he passed. I was working on a chapter of my forthcoming book, Hendrix Now! Backstory of a Legend, in 2015 and things were going well. I got my first chapter written about Jimi’s days in the Village in New York City, where I encountered him for the first time and we sat on a stoop on MacDougal Street comparing notes about blues records; I was set to begin the book’s second chapter. As I announced giddily in the final hours of a Kickstarter campaign for the book, Nimoy had been in touch and asked for some guidelines from me so that he could write something apropos for the book’s foreword. And then that February… Spock left the planet. I was distraught, not only for the loss of a hero and friend but because Leonard’s passion had left such a huge hole in my universe, a terrible disturbance in the Force.
We had a common interest in things spiritual and musical — the Kabbalah, Shlomo Carlebach and the origins of that Vulcan hand signal he devised from his memories of going to the synagogue in Nimoy, who was Jewish, wrote that he based it on the Priestly Blessing performed by Jewish Kohanim with both hands, thumb to thumb in this same position, representing the Hebrew letter Shin, which has three upward strokes similar to the position of the thumb and fingers in the gesture. The Vulcan sign became so well known that in June 2014 its emoji character was added to version 7 of the Unicode standard as U+1F596. We also had a common interest in Yiddish.
