Setlist:
Killing Floor
Spanish Castle Magic
Fire
Hey Joe
Voodoo Child (slight return)
Red House
Sunshine Of Your Love
First off, some of the material on here has seen an official release: Sunshine Of Your Love and Red House were featured as part of: Experience: Jimi Hendrix (AKA "See My Music Talking" by Peter Neal)- a 2001 DVD/VHS release which I have not seen and believe is out of print.
This show was pro shot in a TV studio. The very first thing that strikes you is the vivid quality of the image. The analog videotape signal really had an electric looking contrast and has some strange overexposure effects. There's some compression noise in the blacks, unfortunately. I had a projector at one point and threw this up on the wall for a party. It was very striking, one of the best looking bootlegs that I own.
As for the performance itself, I've searched around a bit and all the reviews I've encountered say pretty much the same thing: Hendrix was not really feeling it for this occasion. He starts the show explaining that the band hadn't played together for six weeks and that they are going to play "oldies but baddies," suggesting his enthusiasm for his older material was on the wane. Mitchell and Redding often extend the verses by a few bars or just lay out to let Hendrix try to take the solos somewhere. But it never really comes.
As far as the greatest moments of Hendrix unreleased in his lifetime, both in terms of recording and performance, I have to say, sadly, I haven't had the time to really dig into it. Top 10 recommendations would be appreciated. I know a few things here and there. I was listening, for example, to "Spanish Castle Magic" at the Atlanta Pop Festival the other day. Its ride-the-feedback solo never fails to mesmerize. Overall, there are 1000s of hours of Hendrix audio recordings. I just had a online look inside of Black Gold and the second part's list of films and videos is a Hendrix Studies 101. Some guy at In from the Storm.com has done some meticulous years of research and gives you some idea of how big the continent really is. The estate, controlled now by his sister, I believe, is attempting to slowly present the material in a curated, well packaged way that keeps pace with casual demand. In contrast, other parties, some affiliated with Hendrix' deceased manager, persist in cranking out cds like hotcakes. I remember feeling overwhelmed just thinking about a recently released 22 cd set! I'm no slouch when it comes to obsessive compulsive disorder, but for Hendrix, at least, I'd really prefer to depart with someone else's reader's digest roadmap.
My intuition is that, of all of the recording artists of the twentieth century, Hendrix is one of the dozen most deserving for someone coming along and fashioning a high tech navigation database for every single recorded moment that remains. With dead authors, publishers eventually put out a collected works: with all of the ephemera, like mail correspondence and such, all of it annotated by the dates at which they were written. A certain nerdy, scholastic margin of society, whiling away their hours in the shadows of such monuments, attributes to them an almost supremely stunning beauty (guilty.) Now, the official Hendrix website has a history tab, with a daily diary of the last three years of his life in which there are links to the resulting recordings. It's nice, but it could certain use a little infusion of Web 2.0. A complete terabyte of the digital simulacrum of the Jimi Hendrix Experience may await us one day.
If you've been reading this blog for more than a page or so, you've gathered that I've been using these DVD acquisitions to comment on the achievements of Rock and Rollers on the whole, above whichever bootleg I happen to be talking about. It is very hard to find something about Jimi Hendrix that goes beyond what others have tried to say. I've discarded a number of drafts of this, finally deciding that I may have to wait to review one of my other Hendrix bootlegs before I can articulate something that approaches the subject.
The one thing that I always think of, in the context of Hendrix, has to do with the character of music itself: with music, talent consists of something more than ability. When the music of one celebrity creates more of a response in you than the music of another, why does that happen? It's more than mere technical know how. Music is more subtle than the Olympics- where a stopwatch or a number of pounds lifted can declare the world's greatest.
At the bottom of the day, I find myself thinking that it might merely be whoever is there to make the imprint at a critical time. Like Dr. Lorenz and the geese that followed his boots. Most people worship their childhood celebrities in some fixed image of a never changing ideal.
And of course, from thoughts of Hendrix, follow thoughts of "the summer of love", whatever that was, is, could have been, or never could have been. Of course if the task of meaningfully describing Hendrix seems to challenge our abilities, discussing revolutions..................capturing them in dead words on a page................I feel convinced that it would require an altogether total effort to get anywhere close to what is required. Although it is unlikely, perhaps some further images will force the occasion.
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