Jimi Hendrix on the BBC
There was quite a good Jimi Hendrix on the BBC the other night that I recorded and got around to watching.
It did a good job of showing a little bit behind the image - the flamboyant showman on stage grinding his guitar into the Marshall stack or smashing it up after setting fire to it. The famous scene from Monterey where he did just that with his psychedelic painted Strat was shown again for the millionth time. But one good thing was showing the reaction of some in the crowd - he really shocked a lot of Americans that day. I suppose from England where The Who and others had made obliterating your gear a bit of a angry young man statement a few years before it wasn't so shocking, in mainstream America then I guess it was.
Like I say though a few glimpses of the shy quiet man behind the image. Also some great bits with Eddie Kramer talking about some of the recordings he did with the man. Of course the legend lives on due to his untimely death due to a mistake with some sleeping tablets - Hendrix was not killed by a drugs obsession like some others and as many I think mistakenly still think he did.
I dug out and dusted off my old VHS copy of "Hendrix live at The Isle of Wight" one of the last gigs he ever played, the last on UK soil anyway just 18 days before his death. On late in the middle of the night, sound and tuning issues but some of that stuff is sublime and you can see he was still an artist with a huge amount ahead of him, we should be grateful for what we've got. I can't find but somewhere on my old blog I had a photo of me holding the very black Flying Vee he played on Red House, Dolly Dagger and Freedom in that set - it is at the Hard Rock Cafe in London and I luckily got to hold it on a tour of their vault some years back.
That's made me look at the Vintage V60 as a very cheap flying Vee! My daughter just said "Dad you aren't Hendrix"... she is soooooo correct! haha
It did a good job of showing a little bit behind the image - the flamboyant showman on stage grinding his guitar into the Marshall stack or smashing it up after setting fire to it. The famous scene from Monterey where he did just that with his psychedelic painted Strat was shown again for the millionth time. But one good thing was showing the reaction of some in the crowd - he really shocked a lot of Americans that day. I suppose from England where The Who and others had made obliterating your gear a bit of a angry young man statement a few years before it wasn't so shocking, in mainstream America then I guess it was.
Like I say though a few glimpses of the shy quiet man behind the image. Also some great bits with Eddie Kramer talking about some of the recordings he did with the man. Of course the legend lives on due to his untimely death due to a mistake with some sleeping tablets - Hendrix was not killed by a drugs obsession like some others and as many I think mistakenly still think he did.
I dug out and dusted off my old VHS copy of "Hendrix live at The Isle of Wight" one of the last gigs he ever played, the last on UK soil anyway just 18 days before his death. On late in the middle of the night, sound and tuning issues but some of that stuff is sublime and you can see he was still an artist with a huge amount ahead of him, we should be grateful for what we've got. I can't find but somewhere on my old blog I had a photo of me holding the very black Flying Vee he played on Red House, Dolly Dagger and Freedom in that set - it is at the Hard Rock Cafe in London and I luckily got to hold it on a tour of their vault some years back.
That's made me look at the Vintage V60 as a very cheap flying Vee! My daughter just said "Dad you aren't Hendrix"... she is soooooo correct! haha
Ah, Hendrix. A great man. I remember listening to him when I was a teenager. It's been a long time since I've listened to him. I need to remedy that.
ReplyDeleteYou should indeed do that!! :-)
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