Friday, May 15, 2015

Jimi Hendrix, "Rock Me Baby"



B.B. King was not a metal musician by anyone's standard, even if he was badass enough to earn an obituary on MetalSucks. But his music is timeless and influential enough to help shape metal into what it is today, as heard in "Rock Me Baby", one of King's reworkings of several standard blues lyrics and progressions. As with many of King's songs, components of it can be heard in numerous other tunes, but it's King's genre-bridging version which reached the headbangers, as heard in covers by Blue Cheer, Deep Purple and best of all Jimi Hendrix, whose version at the Monterey Pop Festival was the first I ever heard. The blues had a baby, Muddy Waters noted, but the grandkid was metal.

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