JIMI HENDRIX REISSUES

RE-EXPERIENCED: Two gems from the vault get makeovers Hendrix's 70th anniversary

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: July 16, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/music/

VOODOO CHILD: Hendrix works his magic in Berkeley.

On May 30, 1970, Jimi Hendrix performed a pair of shows at the Berkeley Community Theatre in California. There was, to borrow a Dylan line, protest in the air, not just surrounding the Vietnam War, but also over the commercialization of the Woodstock Festival through the release of the Woodstock documentary just a month earlier. And there were tensions in the Hendrix camp as well, owing at least in part to Jimi's desire to forgo touring in favor of spending as much time as possible in his nearly completed Electric Lady Studios. So a deal was brokered: Hendrix and a reconstituted version of his trio the Experience, with Band of Gypsies bassist Billy Cox replacing Noel Redding alongside original drummer Mitch Mitchell, would play a series of fly-in weekend dates around the country, leaving weekdays free for recording. But, as an insurance policy of sorts, Hendrix manager Michael Jeffrey arranged for the Berkeley shows to be filmed and professionally recorded so he'd have something tucked in the vaults in the event that his increasingly flighty client went south on him. Three and a half months later, on September 18, Hendrix was found dead in London, just a little over a month shy of his 28th birthday. If he'd lived, this upcoming November 27th would mark his 70th birthday.

       Prior to his passing, Hendrix had only released three proper full-length studio albums, along with a live album featuring Band of Gypsies. But, toward the end of his all-too brief three year stint as one of rock's reigning guitar gods, he did indeed spend quite a bit of time at Electric Lady, famously committing to tape hours upon hours of song ideas and partially finished material, much of which has been packaged, repackaged, and released on dozens of posthumous albums, compilations, and box sets. In fact, as recently as 2010, Experience Hendrix L.L.C., the trust that was established by Jimi's father James in 1995 to manage the estate, approved the delivery of yet another album of a previously unavailable studio album titled Valleys of Neptune. To date, nine official collections of "new" Hendrix studio material have surfaced since his death. Add to that another several dozen live albums, and over 25 compilations and box sets, including last September’s 4-disc Winterland reissue, and you're left with a fairly formidable pile of posthumous product that is dizzyingly daunting enough to frustrate all but the most ardent of Hendrix fans.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Live at Berkeley (Sony/Legacy)

And now we've got two more archival artifacts to add to the growing stack of Hendrix mementos, both products of that May evening in Berkeley. The first, simply titled Live at Berkeley, is, as advertised, a recording of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's performance at the Community Theatre. Actually, it's a reissue of the very same live album that originally came out in 2003, featuring the second of the band's two sets that night from beginning to end, although the new one boasts a "24 page booklet with detailed liner notes and rare photos." It's available on CD and as an "audiophile 12" double album" on 200 gram vinyl.

       To go along with that, Sony's catalogue division, Legacy Recordings, has also revamped the film Jimi Plays Berkeley, not to be confused with the "soundtrack" of the same title that includes studio cuts and live tracks recorded at Woodstock and in London, and reissued it as a digitally remastered DVD and Blu-ray. As if that weren't convoluted enough, unlike the Live at Berkeley CD, Jimi Plays Berkeley isn't purely a performance film. It was created independently of the live recording and edited as a documentary, cutting together footage culled from both sets with shots of Hendrix's entourage arriving at the venue, the band sound checking, and the reaction of fans outside the theater, some of whom ended up starting a near riot when it became clear that there weren't nearly enough tickets to accommodate all of them. But it does include, as one of its "special features," an "audio only presentation of Jimi's complete Berkeley second set performance mixed in 5.1 surround sound." In other words, while you don't get the new 24-page booklet of liner notes and photos with the DVD/Blu-ray, all of the audio from the CD is there.

Jimi Hendrix, Jimi Plays Berkeley (Sony/Legacy)

The film itself has something of a tangled and, well, ugly history. The raw 16mm footage essentially sat undeveloped for several months in a freezer belonging to producer Peter Pilafian, a guy described in the liner notes as "a musical jack of all trades" who, sadly, knew very little about directing and didn't have enough equipment to shoot both sets in their entirety. A finished version by Pilafian was eventually handed over to Michael Jeffrey, who cut it down to about an hour of performance footage and sent it on a tour of colleges and indie theaters. A restored version, bumped up to 72 minutes, came out on DVD in 2003, and now it's been remastered with additional supplements like some commentary by the audio engineer who recorded both sets that night.

       Other than that, there’s really nothing particularly new here, on Jimi Plays Berkeley or the Live at Berkeley CD. And that really is a shame. Hendrix remains a fascinating icon — a domineering presence who spoke through his guitar in a language that took the blues to a whole new plane, a language that still resonates today. At the time of the Berkeley shows he was apparently at a crossroads of sorts, as he tried to forge ahead musically without leaving behind the folks who’d facilitated his meteoric rise. You get a real sense of that in the Live at Berkeley set, which opens with nearly 7 minutes of progressive jamming (a song then known at “Pass It On” that would eventually shortly morph into “Straight Ahead”), moves onto more familiar ground with a furious rendition of “Stone Free” and a notably laid back “Hey Joe,” and then closes by taking his explosive interpretation of the “Star Spangled Banner” straight into “Purple Haze” and an extended version of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” And yet, there are times when it feels like he’s a little lost, when he seems to be searching for something — a sound, an epiphany — that’s eluding him. Perhaps, for all its flaws, that’s more apparent in the footage from the film, particularly in his searing cover of “Johnny B. Goode,” a tune that tellingly didn’t make the cut for the second set. It’s certainly an inspired update of the original. But in the end, it sounds like he’s trying to take the song somewhere it’s not quite ready to go just yet. Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to dedicated Hendrix fans: They’ve had access to this material for a decade or more.