Well, this is hardly a surprise, but still something you have to shake your head about. From AP, “Calabasas company to market Jimi Hendrix energy drink”
A new energy drink doesn’t promise you’ll have the juice to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix after taking a sip, but it does hope to give you a “Liquid Experience.”
Beverage Concepts, a new Calabasas-based company, recently announced it will launch a line of nonalcoholic drinks named for the title of Hendrix’s breakthrough album, “Are You Experienced?”
I was particularly amused by this quote from the story,
“To see his image and the beautiful feelings it has created during my lifetime cheapened by base advertising … is very disappointing to me,” said bassist Michael Balzary, better known as Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Of course, that’s the band that recently licensed its music to play on Disneyland roller coasters. Disneyland. On the other hand, those guys are still around to say yes or no, unlike Hendrix.
This isn’t even close to the first product licensing Hendrix’s ghost (e.g. witness that awful Pepsi commercial of recent years), but it seems a particularly loathsome idea considering his, ah, pharmaceutical choices in life, not to mention the manner of his death.
My wife Denyse and I were talking yesterday about the way generations are being sold and marketed — currently the 80s are the hot ticket, which is particularly surreal to me. Last it was the 70s, and before that the 60s. It won’t be long now until the 90s are the thing.
Can you imagine a Kurt Cobain energy drink?
Like Hendrix, or Cobain, or any musical ghosts being disturbed by marketing, none of the mountebanks involved can take away the beauty of the music — as long as you mute the incessant commercials playing bastardized versions of the songs. ;)
Nothing can take away the beauty of these words,
If you can just get your mind together
Then come on across to me
We’ll hold hands and then we’ll watch the sun rise
From the bottom of the sea
Can you hear the innovative guitars playing backward? I can, and I always will.
