Out of Left Field

SOUTHPAW BLEND

Out of Left Field

Seattle, Washington. A place of the far Left Coast. The country began on the other side of the continent. However, Americans have always had itchy feet, and have been in low with the idea of frontiers, virgin lands, and a divinely-inspired push to move Over There.

All this innate rambling led pioneers across the belly of the land until they reached a place with mountains and water. Why go further? The cusp of the country attracted the eccentrics and artists, people who saw the rest of the nation as being a step removed. The residents of the Pacific Northwest were the ones who had wanted to always go further. Two left-handed guitarists picked up their six strings and changed the way that people had listened to music. Jimi Hendrix was a jumpy kid who grew up in cheap hotels and apartments around Seattle. One day he was helping his dad clean trash at an old lady’s house. He found a mostly-broken ukulele in the garbage. The old lady let him keep it. Kid Hendrix pinked out Elvis songs one note at a time.

He bought his first guitar at age fifteen for five bucks. He found that playing the blues was a good outlet for his nerves. In his teens, he could be found at any given time noodling out pentatonic scales and melodies, creating unending streams of music. He wanted to create a musical experience. He played the guitar upside-down on the left so that he could solo on the smaller top strings.

Kurt Cobain was a kid who crawled out of the woods of Aberdeen – a logging town. The type of place where a creative artist would be shunned at best. The boy had a voracious ear. He listened to everything that came down the rock and roll pipeline before him: Sabbath, AC/DC, GNR, The Beatles, Led Zepplin, Aerosmith. He gobbled these up and synthesized them into something new. Something raw, ragged, and infused with his own brand of howling backwoods angst and punk rock ethos. He picked up a guitar and played it left-handed. It was what felt right. It is one hundred percent not hyperbole to say that these two Seattle-based guitarists rewrote their genre.