The Jimi Hendrix Thread

[Mr Badguy]

I think it`s about time we had a thread dedicated to the father of modern day rock guitar, Jimi Hendrix.

Been a fan for a long time and recently picked up a copy of "The Jimi Hendrix Concerts" on CD, having had it on cassette for years, and it got me back into a heavy Hendrix trip.

My favourite band is still "Band of gypsies", I prefer Buddy Miles drumming to the far too busy Mitch Mitchell, although his studio work on the three Experience albums is amazing.

Let`s talk Hendrix.

[simplerhyme]

Couldn't agree with you more my friend!

Hendrix turned guitar from an accompniment into an instrument

Band of Gypsies rocks, but I thought Electric Ladyland really captured his vision best, especially the cover!

However if I had to pick one song, it would be Spanish Castle Magic

Jimi is Jesus

Eddie is God!

[Mr Badguy]

If I had to pick a favourite album, it would be "Axis : Bold as love".

I know everyone goes crazy for "Electric Ladyland" but I prefer "Axis...".

My favourite song is definetly "Machine Gun" from the "Band of Gypsies" LP.

If ever a musician put his very soul into a perfomance then that is it.

[suckitandsee]

Was Hendrix a better player than Eddie?

It's a hard call,

music isn't all about technique (Eddie would be light years ahead if it was)

Or does it just not matter

They both MADE great music, both past tense,

Sadly

[Terry]

Don't know about 'better' with Hendrix vs. EVH, or any other player vs. another...

Hendrix and Van Halen both took a variety of techniques that had come before them and synthesized them into their own styles...but I think Jimi was perhaps a little bit more innovative than EVH overall..I dunno. Tough call.

Hendrix WAS brilliant, no doubt. Not that I find much meaning in them, but there's a reason why Hendrix continues to top polls of all-time guitar greats.

[Mr Badguy]

Originally posted by suckitandsee
Was Hendrix a better player than Eddie?

It's a hard call,

music isn't all about technique (Eddie would be light years ahead if it was)

Or does it just not matter

They both MADE great music, both past tense,

Sadly

Both innovators, no doubt.

I couldn`t say who the best "player" was but "Are you experienced?" is year zero for guitar playing.

I can only imagine what it must have been like to be a guitarist in 1966 when Hendrix completely rewrote the book and came out with techniques that you had never dreamt of.

[binnie]

True to all of the above

However, where would guitar playing have been without Eruption?

[simplerhyme]

The thing about Hendrix was that he never got to make a bad album, as he died at his peak.

As a result we only saw he genius

Maybe in the 80's he have made AOR, or joined a band with Sammy!

[binnie]

Ha!

I reckon Sammy could even make Jimi sound shit,

Just imagine Tubby singing on Vodoo Chile!

[ELVIS]

Originally posted by Mr Badguy
I prefer Buddy Miles drumming to the far too busy Mitch Mitchell, although his studio work on the three Experience albums is amazing.

Let`s talk Hendrix.

Yeah, lets...

You're talking out of both sides of your ass!

So Mitch is "far too busy" and "amazing" ??

Which is it ??

Mitch Mitchell, as he will tell you, was playing directly off of Jimi's firey guitar work...

His lightning snare and tom work was the perfect compliment to Jimi's guitar...

Had Buddy Miles been in the band from the beginning, the music would not have been nearly as exciting as it was...

They were On Fire as a three piece in 1967, the year I was born...

[Terry]

Originally posted by binnie
True to all of the above

However, where would guitar playing have been without Eruption?

There's no doubt EVH had a huge impact on rock guitar, but in some ways a lot of guitarists just took the tapping and vibrato bar open E/pinched harmonic dive bomb stuff and used those things as showboating tricks, and how often do you hear that stuff being done by contemporary rock guitarists?...in many ways EVH was in a class by himself in that he was often imitated but never really duplicated, and his resonance really waned after hair metal died...which was kinda nice because a lot of the hair band axe slingers really couldn't play very well and songwriting had taken a back seat to wankfest guitar solos (even EVH at his most indulgent in CVH never let the solos eclipse the songs).

With Hendrix, you listen to what was going on rock guitar-wise before he got famous and then check out the scene after he died, I'd stake a claim that he influenced a wider range of artists in his wake...

I mean, even just listening to the NWOBHM explosion that was happening simultaneously with CVH's rise to the top in the states, I'm not hearing a lot of EVH in what JP, Maiden and the like were putting out back then...

EVH had a big impact, but Hendrix's influence was wider-reaching.

[Mr Badguy]

Originally posted by ELVIS
Yeah, lets...

You're talking out of both sides of your ass!

So Mitch is "far too busy" and "amazing" ??

Which is it ??

Mitch Mitchell, as he will tell you, was playing directly off of Jimi's firey guitar work...

His lightning snare and tom work was the perfect compliment to Jimi's guitar...

Had Buddy Miles been in the band from the beginning, the music would not have been nearly as exciting as it was...

They were On Fire as a three piece in 1967, the year I was born...

OOOOOOO!

Well, Mitchell`s work in the studio in 67/68 was amazing but live he seemed to be all over the place.

Never played a steady beat and was too busy playing fills all over the place.

His work on the stuff Hendrix was working on in 1970 doesn`t seem to fit as Hendrix was moving into a more...erm..."groovy" style.

I find Buddy`s more simplistic stuff gave Hendrix`s guitar playing more room to breathe.

I never said I didn`t rate Mitchell, I just said I prefer Buddy Miles.

You only have the two to compare as noone else played on an "official" Hendrix album.

[binnie]

Quite frankly with Hendrix on guitar, does it matter who is on drums?

Personally I prefer Mitch, but the style of music was really different, Band Of Gypsies is more jazz orientated, the earlier stuff was based around 3-4 minutes songs, for the most part, so it's hard to compare.

Also agree with you guys that Jimi had more influence than Eddie, but I'd rather listen to Eddie play, he gives me more of a 'wow' factor overall.

But hell, I'm listening to "Axis" right now and it's just from a different plannet

[binnie]

Just finished Axis, it's time for Electric Ladlyland!

Spanish Castle Magic is out of this world!

[binnie]

Favourtie Jimi songs anyone?

[Hardrock69]

Billy Cox & Buddy Miles just released a new album called "Band Of Gypsys Return".

A friend of mine played guitar on the two original R & B-flavored tracks. All the rest are Hendrix covers.

[binnie]

Is it any good?

Will have to check that one out

[Mr Badguy]

Originally posted by Hardrock69
Billy Cox & Buddy Miles just released a new album called "Band Of Gypsys Return".

A friend of mine played guitar on the two original R & B-flavored tracks. All the rest are Hendrix covers.

Yeah, I saw that over at the authentic Hendrix website.

One for the real hardcore, I suppose.

I don`t fancy it, the only CD I ever bought like that was the "In from the storm" album put together by Eddie Kramer about ten years ago.

Steve Vai did an amazing version of "Bold as love" but stuff like that only stays interesting for a couple of listens.

Tribute albums suck.

[binnie]

What record is that Vai tribute on, I'd like to check it out!

[DrMaddVibe]

Originally posted by binnie
Favourtie Jimi songs anyone?

Voodoo Chile...slight return

[rustoffa]

What we have here is a classic "copy and paste." I'm sure all the Hendrix fans know about this, but it bears' copying and pasting. You can really have no idea how "rural" this area was @ the time....a pretty good ways from what would be known as "The ATL." I have friends in that area....it's a little north of Lake Blackshear. One of 'em used to scout peanuts as a summer job. Anyway, he said everyone was freaking out about the logjam on the highway before it even started. Fucking RURAL I tell ya!

Enjoy!



What a splash: Recalling Georgia's `Woodstock'

"There were so darn many of 'em, they ran the alligators and the water moccasins right out of the Echeconnee Creek," is how Byron Police Chief James Barbour explains the holiday weekend 25 years ago.

It was July 4, 1970. U.S. Secretary of State William P. Rogers was in Saigon attending talks with foreign ministers trying to negotiate a settlement in the Vietnam War. A British airliner had crashed into a mountain in Spain, killing 105 passengers.

And in the tiny central Georgia town of Byron - in a pecan grove and on the adjacent Middle Georgia Raceway - 350,000 to 500,000 people swarmed in for the second annual Atlanta International Pop Festival.

Like Woodstock the previous summer, the event was promoted as "three days of peace, love and music." On the bill were Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers, Jethro Tull, B.B. King, Ravi Shankar, 10 Years After, Johnny Winter, John Sebastian and others. Tickets for the music fest were $14.

"We were expecting maybe 100,000 people," says Atlanta promoter Alex Cooley, 56, who organized the festival and the first one at Atlanta International Raceway in 1969. "I remember going up in a helicopter on Friday afternoon before the first act went on. Traffic was backed up 90 miles to Atlanta. I was scared to death."

While the Atlanta festival never garnered the national attention of the festivals near Woodstock, N.Y., Altamont, Calif., or Monterey, Calif., it provided Southerners with a last - and for many, an only - glimpse of Hendrix before his drug overdose in London 10 weeks later.

"It was our Woodstock," says R. Palmer Marsh, who drove down from Atlanta with friends. "Most of us here didn't go to New York in '69, and Byron brought it south to us. It was a phenomenon, a once- in-a-lifetime event. I didn't even really go for the music. The scene was the attraction."

The three-day weekend turned out to be the talk of Byron for 25 years. As the counterculture youth - disillusioned by the prolonged war and the violence at Kent State that spring - piled into Peach County, water supplies slowed to a trickle and 50-cent bags of ice went for $5 as temperatures soared.

"It was miserably hot," 47-year-old Marsh recalls. "We finally found a camping area by 5 a.m. and fell off to sleep. When we woke up at 10 it was over 100 degrees. . . . Everything is pretty hazy after that."

Barbour says Byron's police department had one officer, two dispatchers and "maybe a part-timer." No arrests were made that weekend, he recalls. "There were just too many of 'em."

J.B. Richards, 17 at the time, was busy at the converted circus tent, "O.D. Tent One," where he helped to treat hundreds of people on bad trips.

"I was a member of a communal group, the Lighthouse Family, and we had come down with some doctors from Grady to help out," says Richards, a 43-year-old Atlanta carpenter. "It was a constant stream of paranoid people until about midnight each night. Then it would slow down until about 9 a.m . . ."

Somehow, he managed to slip in a musical moment: "I'll never forget seeing Richie Havens play `Here Comes the Sun' as the sun rose on Sunday morning."

Not everyone was excited, though, about being thrust into the middle of music history.

Mary Marsh, a local artist and mother of two teenage girls, remembers being less impressed. "I had just graduated from high school and was still living with my parents in Macon," she says.

"It was all pretty overwhelming. I wouldn't look when he [her date] told me there was a naked man painting himself with Campbell' s Soup. It was real hot and nobody was selling Coca-Colas, only Kool- Aid with LSD in it. We didn't stay long."

She and her date missed the hottest moment of all.

"We had it all set where Jimi Hendrix would play his `Star-Spangled Banner' right at midnight on the Fourth," Cooley says. "We told him to signal us when he was about 10 minutes from being done because we needed that much leeway to set off the fireworks above the stage. Jimi got so into his solo he just forgot. . . . Apparently Jimi also forgot about the fireworks because when the first one went off, he jumped about 10 feet!"

When it was all over, Cooley told The Atlanta Constitution that huge outdoor festivals such as Woodstock and Byron were finished. And 25 years later, he stands by that statement: "It was a time, an era that is now frozen in history. Thomas Wolfe said it best: `You can't go home again.'

"They tried it last year with that Woodstock event," Cooley says. "It was a horrible travesty."

Twenty-five years later, Hendrix and Duane Allman are rock history deities. The company hired to document the festival went bankrupt a week later; and the film remains in a vault somewhere in Philadelphia. The Byron music scene came - and went.

But Cooley, who went on to found Atlanta's Music Midtown festival, says the man he hired in Jacksonville to put up festival posters all over South Florida that summer of 1970 is keeping the Atlanta International Pop Festival alive - in his own way: "He never put [the posters] up. Now he's making a living selling them for $250 a pop."

Richard L. Eldredge FOR THE JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, Arts & Entertainment: What a splash: Recalling Georgia's `Woodstock'., The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 07-04-1995, pp E/07.

link

[binnie]

Thanks for that, a great read!

[Mr Badguy]

Originally posted by binnie
What record is that Vai tribute on, I'd like to check it out!

It`s called "In through the storm" by various artists although you`ll probably get it in a search for Jimi Hendrix at Amazon or something.

It`s not a listen with any longevity.

Spend your money on a Hendrix album that you haven`t got, that would be a whole lot more worthwhile.

[binnie]

Cheers for the heads up!

don't think there's an awful lot by Jimi I don't own tho'

[Mr Badguy]

I just got the "Band of gypsies" DVD today.

I had it on video which had only a documentary on it.

It features film of them playing, frustratingly cut with interviews with guys that have fuck all to do with Jimi like Lenny Kravitz or Slash.

The DVD extras have all the footage, uninterupted, that they have from the January 1st first show, including the definitive version of "Machine gun" with THAT solo.

Hell yes!

[Hardrock69]

I have found some footage from the Band Of Gypsys shows on a VHS I have. It is in color, and is one or two songs uninterrupted.

I think there are bits and pieces of it on the DVD, but not uninteruppted footage.

One of these days when I get to that tape while working on my ongoing VHS to DVD transfer project (which is going to take years literally) I will post it.

[Nickdfresh]

Just picked this up last week for like $10.



FUCKING-A-MAZING!!

Sound is great, and the "Star Spangled Banner" guitar instrumental followed by "Purple Haze" is as great as anything ever laid down on a rock performance venue...

[MAPRamone]

Hendrix is overrated. He revolutionized guitarplaying, but come on, he's not THAT much above everyone else. Eddie didn't just revolutionize playing but also guitar technology. Jimi was/is utterly incredible, but i've grown tired of always putting him ahead of every other guitarist.

[Mr Badguy]

Originally posted by MAPRamone
Hendrix is overrated. He revolutionized guitarplaying, but come on, he's not THAT much above everyone else. Eddie didn't just revolutionize playing but also guitar technology. Jimi was/is utterly incredible, but i've grown tired of always putting him ahead of every other guitarist.

Man, that ain`t what it`s about.

That`s like saying the guy who invented the wheel wasn`t really that great because they can make them a lot better these days.

Anyone who knows the history of rock guitar playing know that pre 1966 nothing sounded like Hendrix and after that almost everything in the rock field is infuenced by him.

Don`t take my word for it, ask Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townsend or any of the greatest guitarists ever.

[MAPRamone]

Originally posted by Mr Badguy
Man, that ain`t what it`s about.

That`s like saying the guy who invented the wheel wasn`t really that great because they can make them a lot better these days.

Anyone who knows the history of rock guitar playing know that pre 1966 nothing sounded like Hendrix and after that almost everything in the rock field is infuenced by him.

Don`t take my word for it, ask Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townsend or any of the greatest guitarists ever.

True, i'm not disputing his greatness. I guess i'm just annoyed when folks like Rolling Stone dismiss many other great guitarists while deifying him. I agree that he was the most influential rock guitarist. Ofcourse because of his technological innoventions Eds influence is greater than one might think even among folks who don't like Van Halen. Trying to put all these guitar geniuses in order of merit is an exercise in futility anyways.