RE-EXPERIENCED:
Two gems from the vault get makeovers Hendrix's 70th anniversary
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.
The funny/sad thing is that "Here My Train A'comin" from the first set is one of the greatest things ever recorded but it gets edited down severely in the movie. It is available on the "Blues" comp that came out in 94 (which is pretty good) and it was available on the original Rainbow Bridge soundtrack album. I'm a Hendrix nerd!
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