🔒George Logan’s Purple Haze

To say that George Logan is a man of many contradictions is something of an understatement.

By day, the 50-year-old Ansonia resident is director of environmental compliance for the Aquarion Water Co. in Bridgeport, where he first went to work in 1992 as a newly minted Trinity College engineering grad pursuing master’s degree work in mechanical engineering while he worked full-time.

Also by day (and not infrequently by night, too) he represents Ansonia, Hamden, Woodbridge, Bethany, Beacon Falls and Naugatuck in the state Senate. He earned that second job in 2016 when he upset 82-year-old Democrat Joe Crisco, who had represented the 17th District in Hartford since the earth was flat. As a Republican in Connecticut, Logan is already a rare species. As an African-American GOP-er in a bluer-than-blue state, we’re talking hen’s teeth.

Then there’s by night, when Dr. Jekyll becomes a musical Mr. Hyde, channelling his musical hero, Jimi Hendrix, in a tribute rock ‘n’ roll group called the Electric Lady Band. The band — which includes his brother Hector, a state probation officer, and drummer Chris Donlon, a high-school English teacher — most recently played a show Dec. 6 at Toad’s Place in New Haven with a Doors tribute band called Riders on the Storm.

Logan discovered Hendrix before he started playing guitar as a senior at Notre Dame High School in West Haven. “It never even entered my mind to play an instrument,” he recalls. He loved listening to ‘60s and ‘70s music, especially blues and blues rock. “I was always attracted to music that had guitars prominent in the songs,” he says.

“I remember the first Hendrix song I ever heard — ’Purple Haze,’” Logan recalls. “I heard that guitar, and I was like — whoa.”

Whoa indeed. “I had never heard an African-American play rock ‘n’ roll guitar like that — it was so far out there I was blown away. It helped me to think that I could do whatever I wanted to as long as I put in the work to do it.” So he picked up the guitar at age 17 — ”and I haven’t put it down since.”

“Tribute” groups have become a force in the live-entertainment industry. Ensembles performing note-for-note live versions of hits by groups like the Rolling Stones, Doors, Tom Petty, the Eagles and especially the Beatles have helped baby-boomers relive the days when they still had hair and spent precious discretionary dollars on vinyl discs known as LPs.

One ‘60s music icon that never really spawned many “tributes” is Jimi Hendrix, perhaps the greatest guitar player in rock history. Hendrix’s playing was so wild, so unpredictable and so virtuosic that mere mortals find it practically impossible to replicate Jimi’s bat-out-of-hell guitar solos — which Hendrix himself likely never played the same way twice before his meteoric career crashed when he died in 1970 of a drug overdose at age 27.

Countless long-haired teenage boys strained to learn guitar solos by Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page note-for-note, but trying to reduce Hendrix’s aural assaults to notes on a music staff was always a fool’s errand. Logan doesn’t try to play Hendrix solos note-for-note. But he channels the spirit and intensity of the guitarist’s one-of-a-kind fretwork. This Republican can really play.

In addition to playing and singing, Logan is a recording engineer whose Ansonia basement houses a state-of-the-art recording studio with a 32-track mixing console. He’s also a songwriter who’s putting the finishing touches on a double album of 25 original songs that he hopes will be finished early this year. Logan plays all the instruments — guitars, bass, keyboards — and performs all the vocal parts. He also plays solo acoustic gigs at coffeehouses and open-mics. “I just want to get my music out there to as many ears as possible,” he says.

How does he do it all?

“For me, it’s part of the balance of life,” Logan explains. “I’m running around all day for my job at the water company,” plus his responsibilities as a state lawmaker could occupy literally limitless hours. Nevertheless, “I play music every night without fail. Even if it’s just 15 minutes of scales or exercises.”

And Logan is a fervent believer in the power of music to channel and challenge young people intellectually — and ultimately to shape lives.

“When it comes to music and STEM [aptitude], I think they go hand-in-hand,” Logan allows. “I find that music is helpful in getting kids interested in science, and the discipline required to learn an instrument and achieve a goal.

“I would encourage kids to take up playing a musical instrument as early as possible,” Logan says. “The benefits are long-term and life-beneficial.”