Jimi Hendrix died 40 years ago last week at the age of 27. Do you even want to imagine a 67-year-old Hendrix, if he’d survived this long?

Three weeks ago, when I checked Electric Ladyland out of the public library, it was lost on me that this month was the anniversary of Hendrix’ death. The realization of his 40th death-day popped out of an inscrutable region of my brain that is constantly calculating how much time has gone by since whatever random event, and “All Along the Watchtower” set that engine in motion.

I got around to listening to the album during commutes to and from client sites over the last few days. Parts of it are just…trippy, I guess, and the wild experimentation with guitar licks is…enhanced (to use a common term of the 1960s) by the left-right-left-right bouncing of sound between the speakers. I can imagine the engineer in the control room having had a hair of the dog that bit Hendrix, and improvising accordingly.

When your kids know too much about rock ‘n’ roll

I was much taken by “Voodoo Child,” having forgotten what a good, strong rock song it is. There’s plenty to like in it, whether you’re fond of Hendrix in particular or the rock genre in general:

• nice guitar chirping and wa-wa work in the introduction
• good, solid crash (à la “Purple Haze”) at about bar 5
• eminently memorable – though not really hummable – theme
• AAB lyric structure
• example or two of picking out melody on the guitar that matches the notes he’s singing
• the Hendrix voice – if you want to call it that – that is short on melody and long on attitude

In short, a tune with lots of classic rock characteristics about which my generation is duty-bound to inform the next one.

So as I piled my 15-year-old son into the car this morning for the trip to school, I asked, “Are you awake enough for a Hendrix interlude?” He nodded his assent, and before I could even put my hand on the CD, he asked, “Is it ‘Voodoo Child’?”

“Damn!” I snapped. “How in the world do you know that song?”

“It’s on my iPod.”

So is everything else worth having, I guess. His brother had turned him on to “Foxy Lady,” and when he tried to buy it from the iTunes Store, he mistakenly bought an entire Hendrix anthology. Talk about stealing our generation’s thunder.

I played it anyway, and we bombed down the route to school playing air guitar. Jimi would have wanted it that way. I thought of an anecdote that, iPod or not, I was sure my son didn’t know.

“I heard once that Hendrix appeared on Dick Cavett’s talk show, and Cavett had a habit of pausing in the middle of a question to gather his thoughts before finishing the question. So he asked Hendrix, ‘Do you try to get up in the morning and…’ Pause. Hendrix jumped in: “Yeah, man, I try to get up in the morning.'”

That got the rise out of him that “Voodoo Child” hadn’t. Kicks just keep getting harder to find, but they’re still out there.