We’ve previously featured Jimi Hendrix’s final interview, preserved as an audio recording by NME’s Keith Altham, who sat down to talk with him on September 11, 1970, one week before Hendrix’s death. Now, we bring you multimedia org Blank on Blank’s animation of that interview—breezy, surreal, funny, and profound. As I wrote in our previous post, Hendrix’s “offhand lyricism and fractal imagination” are on full display here. It’s rare that a musician is as interesting to hear speaking as playing, but Hendrix was one of them. Take, for example, Hendrix’s response when Altham suggests that he invented psychedelic music:

Jimi Hendrix: [chuckles] A mad scientist approach. The way I write things, I just write them with a clash between reality and fantasy mostly. You have to use fantasy to show different sides of reality; it’s how it can bend. As a word reality is nothing, but each individual’s own way of thinking. Then the establishment grabs a big piece of that.

Then there’s Hendrix on destroying guitars onstage:

Jimi Hendrix: One time I said: maybe I should burn a guitar tonight. You know [laughs] smash a guitar or something like that. And they said: yeah, yeah! I said: you really think I should? They said: yeah, that’d be cool. I said: well, ok. So like I just worked up enough anger where I could do it, you know. But like I didn’t know it was anger until they told me that it was, like with destruction and all that. But I believe everybody should have like a room where they can get rid of all their releases, where they can do their releases at. So my room is a stage. [laughs]

There are many more of these gems in the full interview that didn’t make the cut above, but the abridged Blank on Blank version appropriately captures the whimsy and good humor of the late lamented genius.

There’s not much left to say about Jimi Hendrix’s last days. The endless stream of commentary surrounding his life and death threatens to bury the man and his music in music-press fetishization, urban legend, and fawning mythology. When I’m able to totally tune out the hype, Hendrix’s polished work stands the time-test, and some of the more raw releases—the bootlegs and demos that appear every few years—at least document musical roads not taken and preserve moments of stunning genius, if not fully-realized compositions.

And Hendrix’s intriguing persona—revealed in casual interviews and conversations—still captivates, with his offhand lyricism and fractal imagination, qualities on full display in his final press interview, to NME’s Keith Altham, on September 11, 1970, just seven days before the artist’s death. (Listen to the YouTube audio above, or Soundcloud below.) Hendrix is breezy, contemplative, a little evasive, revealing his own sense of being between things, not sure where he’s headed next. As all those late-Hendrix bootlegs and demos testify, he could have done anything and made it work with the right band and a bit more time…

But enough what-ifs. Nobody’s better on Hendrix than Hendrix, so listen to the interview. You can find a full transcript and much more Hendrix-on-Hendrix and music-press chatter in a recent (and quite inexpensive) Kindle publication called Jimi Hendrix: Interviews and Reviews 1967-71.Ultimate Classic Rock calls the final interview the “most interesting thing about the book from a historical standpoint,” and this may be true.

Finally, if you don’t make it all the way to the end of the audio, Hendrix leaves on this vivid and quite funny note:

ALTHAM: Do you feel personally that you have enough money to live comfortably without necessarily making more as a sort of professional entertainer?

HENDRIX: Ah, I don’t think so, not the way I’d like to live, because like I want to get up in the morning and just roll over in my bed into an indoor swimming pool and then swim to the breakfast table, come up for air and get maybe a drink of orange juice or something like that. Then just flop over from the chair into the swimming pool, swim into the bathroom and go on and shave and whatever.

ALTHAM: You don’t want to live just comfortably, you wanna live luxuriously?

HENDRIX: No! Is that luxurious? I was thinking about a tent, maybe, [laughs] overhanging … overhanging this … a mountain stream! [laughter].