By: K(en(neth Louis) G(rant)
The morning’s dead, and the day is too,
I’ve got nothing left to greet me, but the velvet moon,
All my loneliness, I have felt today,
It’s a little, more than enough, to make a man, blow himself away,
But I continue, to burn the midnight lamp… …alone
— Jimi Hendrix
Fifty years ago, this Wednesday, Jimi played an impromptu set with Eric Burdon and the fabulous L.A. band WAR at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho, London. Twenty-four hours later (+/-), he left us.
But in a very real sense, he’s still here. Millions of people (including your faithful scribbling wannabe shredder) listen to him, think about him, channel him, every day. Untold numbers of guitar hackers try – and fail – to replicate his sound. I suspect they always will. Try and fail that is.
Occasionally, my sister-in-law (who I love but sometimes loves to push my buttons) tries – and fails — to raise my hackles, by randomly (and out of context) blurting out: “Jimi Hendrix is a dead drug addict”.
If you say so, Cass, but on the other hand, whom among us isn’t? A dead drug addict that is.
Dirt-napping junkie or otherwise, his story is a compelling one. To begin with, he was part African/part Native American. His given first name at birth was Johnny; his dad renamed him Jimmy when he was about four. He came up with the Jimi thing on his own, and no one since has dared to use this handle. He trained Army paratrooper. They bounced him. He carried the burden of being a left-handed guitarist, forced by poverty to play his Stratocaster upside down. He was a side man to Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, others. He emerged in London and took the place over, leaving other guitarists in tears.
Came to New York and took this town over too. Built Electric Ladyland Studios in the West 50s, where he recorded our title track. Word is that he injudiciously financed this dream through some hard guys, which may be the reason he checked out early (more about this below). By the time of his death, he was a huge star. Was the headliner (and the highest paid artist) at friggin’ Woodstock.
He became a bigger star after he died.
But during his brief, magnificent run, he was an outsider: a black man playing to mostly Caucasian audiences. African American listeners didn’t know what to make of him. Their radio stations shunned him. He is known to have felt a form of obsequious patronization by all those white hippies that idolized him. For these reasons and others, as is the case with virtually all of the great ones, he carried crippling doubts about his own artistic validity. But hey, even Shakespeare must’ve felt this way sometimes.
And my rebuttal comes from another one-of-a-kind achiever of galactic proportions. “When your good at something, you tell people about it. When you’re great, people tell you”.
This statement comes from the late Walter Payton. And it certainly applies to Hendrix.
I’m wondering how we have endured 50 years without Jimi. But like I stated above, he’s in many ways still with us. His existence wasn’t an easy one, and even his death is shrouded in pathetic mystery. Choked on his own vomit, but was alive when he arrived at the hospital? How does this happen? How did it happen? Maybe it was the mob, but I like to think that Nixon got him. And I’m not alone.
Meanwhile, our own trip, on what Hendrix called the Third Stone from the Sun, continues. Been a little weird lately, no? Well, I suspect it may get even weirder as the year winds down.
The summer season is over, and it passed like a rainy day/dream (away). The ADHD public’s attention now naturally turns to preparations for what promises to be a passing-strange Halloween. New York City has cancelled most of the cool events, but somehow, the Bronx Haunted House show escaped the meat axe. However, in the interest of Public Health, this year, the zombies will not be spitting (faux) blood.
I thought y’all would want to know this.
But the late Oct axe did fall on the L.A. Unified School District, which announced on Friday that schools will not re-open until after Election Day. Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer was very clear on this. The next check point comes after we vote. Pardon me for wondering how she fixed upon this date. And for crying a few tears for those poor kids in Englewood, turned political footballs, who will be required to fend for themselves until the partisan hacks of the region decide which elections to steal, and which, alternatively, to sanctimoniously claim were stolen from them.
Know this: I am going to be relentless in sharing my fears that the election/vote counting cycle is setting up to be an historic disaster. And I fear for what happens in the markets if (when) this happens.
These and other market risks continue to present themselves, a number of which are beginning to enter the valuation calculus. As a result, the fearfully joyous rally of late August/early September appears to have run its course. Will it gather itself and re-emerge with renewed vigor in the coming weeks? My sense is probably. But: a) it may not transpire at all; and b) if it does, it will be difficult to capture.
We could capture a measure of clarity this coming week, as Wednesday (50 years less one day from Jimi’s passing) Fed Chair Powell takes to the FOMC podium to utter his next policy statement. It should be interesting. Even though these rituals can be dry as chalk, this one may be worth our attention. Because last round, Chair Pow issued some vague guidance suggesting that he and his crew were gonna allow the inflation dogs a longer leash than had been the longstanding official policy protocol (2%). And wouldn’t ya know it? This past week the PPI/CPI data suggested that they got the memo. Officially, inflation, being the first derivative of prices (with respect to time), appears to be on the rise.
So now Powell’s some ‘splainin’ to do. Not a lotm but some. I will be very interested in what he has to say. But then again, I have idiosyncratic obsessions about such matters. So, don’t worry if you blow it off. I’ll be taking notes and sharing them. After all, it’s what you pay me for (except that a lot of you don’t).
I suspect that he will be gentle as a lamb and cooing like mourning dove, but I could be wrong. After all, this has happened before. Me being wrong that is.
But my guess is that he knows, with enough out there to freak us out to fill a dozen or more blood-spitting zombie-infested haunted houses, he’s of no mind to add to our agita.
And, in general, as we focus on the serious business of trying to figure out how to monetize what is without question the strangest tape of our lifetimes, my key observations are as follows:
- We can anticipate a number of cycles of unpleasant and potentially crippling volatility the entire rest of the year.
- They will come without advance warning and may not, on face value, make sense.
- Because of this, risk models (including the impeccable ones that I run) may very well be understating forward-looking performance hazard (i.e. your book may have more risk than you think it does at the moment).
- For all of this, I think that there remains a robust bid for risk assets – particularly at points below prevailing valuation levels.
- Thus, while markets may not have huge upside potential, their visible downside is more constrained, and because of this, the always hazardous short side is particularly risky now.
- Stocks, corporate bonds and other risk assets, cannot, in my judgment, fall much without taking yields down with them, so long Treasuries remains an elegant hedge against these exposures.
And if I failed to mention this before, the election is going to be a hot mess. Almost doesn’t matter what the outcome is. Armies of vote harvesters and lawyers are teed up to disrupt and dispute the outcome. I don’t wish to travel deep down this rabbit hole, but when, I ask you, has a losing candidate in a previous presidential election publicly advised their successor not to concede the next election under any outcomes, as Hillary Clinton just did (and she’s not alone)?
It all brings to mind that debacle of 1876, when New York Governor Sam Tilden legitimately won the election, only to witness the army forcibly overturning the electoral vote in three southern states, and in the process, swinging the victory over to the forgettably unforgettable Rutheford B. Hayes. Of course, I was much younger when this sh!t went down, and don’t remember all that much about the episode. And what I do remember doesn’t pass the test for inclusion in this family publication.
I do think it sets up for a whale of market disruption this time ‘round, and may even eclipse the plagues of pandemic, spectral socialism and social unrest – with which we might have to contend, come what may.
And as for 2020 as a whole, its morning is indeed dead, and its day is fading fast. Soon enough, we’ll have nothing left to greet us but its velvet moon. But all the loneliness we have felt today is mere illusion — a little less than enough, in my judgment, to make us blow ourselves away.
Because we have each other, and that’s not gonna change. We may continue, like Hendrix, to burn the midnight lamp. But unlike him, we will not be doing so alone. We will do it together. Always and forever.
And Jimi will be with us, because he never really left. He’s Stone Free now, but let’s be glad that he came when he did, because the world would have been a decidedly poorer place without him.
Rest well, Jimi; we’ll continue to leave out midnight lamps on for you.
Here’s hoping and expecting that it will provide divine illumination, in the lonely, velvet moon nights that await us.
TIMSHEL