The Mitch Mitchell Experience

The 1967 album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced?, featured a virtuoso musician who changed the way we played rock music. His name was Mitch Mitchell. Yes, Jimi was pretty hot. But he never burned as brightly as he did when Mitch Mitchell was by his side, and in particular on that genuinely iconoclastic recording.

Whatever Hendrix could do on the guitar, Mitchell could match on the drums. And like Ginger Baker, Mitchell brought the skills, the attack and the bravado of jazz music to the rock arena.

Mitchell, the longest-surving member of the Experience, died at the end of a Hendrix tribute tour of America. And why mention him now? Because increasingly I feel his ghost present whenever we go out to play.

An Image Problem?

My good friend and chronicler of the Swinging Eighties David Johnson (shapersofthe80s.com) has suggested that I might consider this picture as a more appropriate image for my blog. I'm certainly an Animal-lover and would put the percussive Muppet up there with Ginger Baker, Mitch Mitchell, Keith Moon, Jon Hiseman, Elvin Jones, Art Blakey and Tony Williams.

But it was another world-class drummer, the great John Marshall (drummerworld.com/drummers/John_Marshall.html), who told me that Animal's drumming was actually performed by Ronnie Verrell, a formidable jazz musician who played with the orchestras of Ted Heath, Syd Lawrence and Jack Parnell.

Almost every drummer worth their sticks has a bit of Animal inside them. But they also want to be taken seriously, you know. So I may not be changing the picture just yet...