Chords for Chris Layton: Manic Depression, Mitch Mitchell & Experience Hendrix | Reverb Interview

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_ _ _ [F] This is a 1970 Black Panther Ludwig drum kit.
Mitch Mitchell played one at Woodstock.
And when we got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
_ his wife, Dee, his widow,
loaned me this Mitch Mitchell's
superphonic Ludwig snare drum,
and then she gifted it to me.
So that's what I'm playing,
is Mitch Mitchell's drum here today.
You know, Mitch and I later became friends,
and he told me all these great stories,
[G] you know, and I asked him what he thought about [Eb] rock
and really thought it was vile rubbish.
He said, oh, you know, Elvin Jones and Philly Joe Jones
and Max Roach and all these people,
he's a jazz guy who met Jimi Hendrix,
and they created a whole thing
that was kind of in a strange way,
kind of out of context.
Being in Chicago, Ludwig drum company,
Mitch Mitchell's Ludwig snare drum,
you know, me playing this,
doing a show with Experience Hendrix tonight,
which John McDermott, the director of that,
had called me out of the blue years ago and said,
hey, you want to come do this thing,
which was just a show?
And I went, yeah, you know?
So I got to meet Mitch and Billy Cox and Buddy Miles
and all these people that many years ago,
and then I guess I've become the drummer for the tour,
one of them anyway,
because I spent, you know, a while
trying to get Mitch's vocabulary,
and then where he came from too,
which was a lot of great drum instruction,
you know, rudimental playing and whatnot.
But we do manic depression every night,
and so this is Mitch's deal,
as he described it, and me too,
is like his favorite waltz,
and it's one of my favorite [Em] waltzes too. _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ [F] Mitch Mitchell had a great way of just mixing stuff up
that sounded really confusing,
but it combines all those elements.
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Or when you turn it, when you add everything into [Eb] it,
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_ _ _ _ _ _ [Gb] he [F] actually showed me how to play that one time,
which was very little going on down here until the very end. _ _ _ _ _
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You know, I'd come from a father
that had played me all these great 78s
of, you know, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman,
Count Basie, Chick Webb Orchestra,
and when I heard that song come on the radio,
I was like, wow, this is really wild.
I go, the drummer sounds like one of those guys
that would be in that band,
but then there's all this other stuff going on
with, you know, feedback and reverb, you know, in the music,
and I was like, I gotta know what's going on here.
But this goes back to, you know,
back when I first met Stevie,
it was an accidental happening
that we ended up on stage together playing blues,
which I was a real novice,
and then he came over to the apartment the next day,
walked in and me playing along to a Donny Hathaway record,
Donny Hathaway Live, and he said,
man, he goes, what else do you like?
I said, well, I love Jimi Hendrix.
He goes, I do too.
And then a short time later,
he said, you wanna be in my band.
And then, so all this kind of carries forward to [Eb] today. _
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