The Jimi Hendrix Of Acting



I just finished watching Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A'Coming, from the PBS "American Masters" series.

I'm a big Hendrix fan, so it was fun to watch - It had footage I hadn't seen before, and it was especially interesting to hear Eddie Kramer (Hendrix's sound engineer) talk about his work in the studio - but my biggest takeaway was how many people said, "Jimi always had a guitar with him. He was always playing music".

Or as one of the "talking heads" on the program said (I forget who at the moment), "He was amazingly talented...and he worked like hell" (This might have been the same person who described him as "getting up in the morning, putting on his guitar, then going into the kitchen to make breakfast").

This wasn't "new information" for me, that Jimi Hendrix had an immense musical gift, that he was obsessed with playing the guitar and making music (As I said, I'm a big Hendrix fan), but in the position I'm in, the position that I have put myself in over the past decade-plus, it really "touched a nerve".

Jimi Hendrix was "Jimi Hendrix" because he had a huge talent, and he honed that talent every chance he got, and was never satisfied that he was "good enough".

While I used to consider myself a "very talented" actor, over the years, I've lost a sense of what that really means. I still have a somewhat-battered sense of having an ill-defined "something", but I can't really explain it, let alone "quantify" it in some way (And there's a part of me that thinks that's not really for me to do anyway; my job is to "do what I do", and leave judgments about its worth or my degree of "talent" or what-have-you to other people).

So I can't really say, like Hendrix, that I have some immense natural "gift". Probably not, cause most of us don't...but who knows, really?

But based on how I feel about myself, plus what other people have said about me over the years, it doesn't feel like I'm over-selling it to say I have "a certain something" - a "charisma", a "watchability", something that makes it not completely insane that I should hope to succeed as a professional actor.

But where I'm falling wildly, crazily short, is in the "working like hell" part of the equation.

I'm not only not "working like hell" - I'm not "working" at all.

And clearly, that's not the way to become the "Jimi Hendrix Of Acting" that I've always wanted to be...