Willy DeVille on the radio. Sings “Hey Joe.” Mariachi-style. Sings with a growl. A talking blues. A run of questions. Where you going, Joe? Why? // The answer. To murder “his old lady.” To exact revenge. To free himself of her evil ways. //
It is the day after a mass shooting in Boulder. After a Georgia man wanted on stalking and intimidation charges was killed in Montana fleeing marshals. After a former Texas trooper is charged with sexually assaulting two women. A week after seven women were assassinated by a gunman in Atlanta. As the New York governor fights harassment charges. As more and more women tell their stories. //
I’ve heard this version dozens of times. Heard the Hendrix version hundreds of times. Heard it. Understood it. Continued to play it. // Like The Beatles’ “Run for Your Life.” Like Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Bring Me My Shotgun.” Like The Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.” Powerful songs. Each great in its own way. Each a part of the rock and blues canons. // But they also are a part of a soundtrack of violence and control. Of misogynistic attitudes that permeate our culture. That make women both an object of desire and one of loathing. A thing to be protected. To be possessed. Managed. Both a font of purity and contamination. // “Hey Joe,” says a blogger, and so many rock, blues, and rap songs, are “the background music of our lives.” Normalizing “male violence against women.” //
She writes this in 2014. After a California killing spree. Six dead. Two women. By a man who posted misogynist videos. Who wrote a manifesto. Who targeted a sorority. // Lone wolf, the media repeats. The lone shooter. Mentally ill. But “there is no such thing as a lone misogynist,” writes Jessica Valenti, “they are created by our culture, and by communities that tells them that their hatred is both commonplace and justified.” //
“I gave her the gun and I shot her!” Hendrix sings. Plays. Sublime fill. As tight a solo as he can muster. Shouts: “Shoot her one more time again, baby!” Buried deep in the mix almost imperceptible. Gleeful. // I cringe. This is what the song is about. This is why Marc Shapiro called it a “premeditated murder (set) to a rock and roll beat.” It is a song “literally extolling the virtues and rewards of murder.” A song repeatedly played. Covered. “The lyrics and their presentation would ultimately stake out the claim of ‘Hey Joe’ as being something special — as well as a bit sinister and unsettling.” //
Yes, “Hey Joe” is a classic. Deservedly so, thanks to Hendrix. It is a song covered hundreds of times. Has a tortured history. // Written in the early-‘60s. Or the ‘50s. Has been credited to Billy Roberts. Has been mis-designated a “traditional.” Is often assumed to be a Hendrix original. // It the kind of song that should be played at full volume. That drives people to pick up their guitars in the hopes of capturing some of the song’s fire. Roberts and the New York folk scene. The Leaves. Surfaris, Standells. The Byrds. Then Hendrix. // Noel Murray, on AV Club, calls the song a “set-list staple in rock clubs, coffeehouses, and garages.” A song “so identified with the music and the mood of the era that the cover versions in subsequent decades—and there have been many—have at times seemed like an effort either to co-opt or subvert the original’s 1960s cachet.” //
One can hear the co-optation in DeVille’s hands. A Spanish count-in. Then strings give way to light guitar strums. New York cool recast as Texas-border machismo. DeVille’s voice flat, gravelly. Questions and answers. Where you going with that money? The full lyric. The answer: To see “his woman.” To buy a “Blue Steel ’44.” To “catch up with that girl, she won't be messin' 'round on me no more.” // Questions. Answers. No shock. No push back. No remorse. Terrifying. Normalized. DeVille on the radio. No comment. Just another song. //
DeVille: “Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand / Hey Joe, I said where you going with that gun in your hand.” // Acoustic guitars. Horns. A ghost of Hendrix twisting in the arrangement. // The Mariachi swing foreshadows the denouement. The flight to Mexico, “way down south / Way down where I can be free.” // Call. Response. Question. Answer. Vengeance unquestioned. Violence accepted. //
DeVille shifts the tone. Lightens it. Darkens it. A trumpet slices the mood. Hendrix was all muscle. Foreboding. Intimidation. DeVille siphons the menace. Makes it something new. Forces you to listen. Closely. //
DeVille’s version is recorded in the early 1990s. In Los Angeles. With the mariachi band Nati Cano’s “Los Camperos.” Helmed by French producer Philippe Rault. // “Willy totally identified with the ‘bandido’ persona and slid into that character like a hand into a glove,” Rault told Dangerous Minds. // With the “bandido.” Not the woman. Not the other, unnamed speaker. The “bandido.” Fleeing south of the border. A longstanding literary trope of American masculinity. Mexican otherness. No rules. “A man can be free.” //
But Joe’s no “bandido.” He’s the cuckolded man. The object of literary derision. But imbued here with a fearsome anger. A false pride. A toxic sense of his own privilege that erases the woman from our concern. // She’s absent throughout, except as rumor. As plot device. The reason for the violence, but robbed of her victimhood. Erased. // Joe flees. South of the border. “where a man can be free / No there ain't no hangman gonna put no noose around me.”
“Hey Joe” was a toss off song. A minor hit for many. Until Hendrix made it growl. Constructed it into a near-perfect blues. // Later, Patti Smith would twist it into a paean to Patty Hearst. To rebellion. //
Charlotte Gainsbourg would bend the song’s gender. Remaking it as a kiss and a curse. // DeVille would deconstruct it. Soften the thunder, but not the violence. Not the visceral anger in the words. Not the glorification of the killer. Nor the male prerogative at the song’s center. //
“Hey Joe” is iconic, but does not stand by itself. The male-centric viewpoint. The framing of woman as subservient to the man. As man holding domain over her. // Think of the toss off line in “Fire” by Bruce Springsteen:
I'm pullin' you close
You just say no
You say you don't like it
But, girl, I know you're a liar.
Or Ray Charles singing, “She knows a woman's place / Is right there, now, in her home.” // Women there for men. With no agency. No right to say no. To choose for themselves. “I can't spend my whole life / Trying just to make you toe the line,” John Lennon sings.
You better run for your life if you can, little girl
Hide your head in the sand, little girl
Catch you with another man
That's the end, little girl
The end. Like Joe’s old lady. Life snuffed out. Shot dead and unremarked upon. // This is brutality built from power. From privilege. Ownership. Woman as property. Man’s pride as legitimate justification for violence. // Woman as Madonna or whore. As saintly mother figure or venal temptress. As docile and loyal, like a puppy, or deceitful and cheating, like Joe’s victim. //
“Hey Joe” is a great rock song, in many ways. It is a troubling song. It will remain a part of the canon, because it launched Hendrix into the public eye. Because its sound jumpstarted a harder approach to the blues. // Because it tells us so much about ourselves. Our culture. About how we view women. Classify them. Categorize them. How we still view them through these distorted lenses and treat them as something less than full participants in their own lives. //