What Music Shit Are You Watching? (videos, interviews, docu's etc)

[GivenToFly]

In case anyone other than Len B'stard and DieselDaisy is reading this thread, there's an excellent recent BBC documentary/interview of David Gilmour, called Wider Horizons, and it happens to be on youtube (get it while it's hot). It's very intimate, shows him at home with his family, he talks a lot about the making of Rattle That Lock, and a bit about the past, about how he started making music, and some Pink Floyd stuff too.

[DieselDaisy]

In case anyone other than Len B'stard and DieselDaisy is reading this thread, there's an excellent recent BBC documentary/interview of David Gilmour, called Wider Horizons, and it happens to be on youtube (get it while it's hot). It's very intimate, shows him at home with his family, he talks a lot about the making of Rattle That Lock, and a bit about the past, about how he started making music, and some Pink Floyd stuff too.

What are you including me there for? I like the Floyd!

[DieselDaisy]

Remastered Hendrix at Atlanta Pop Festival (1970),

Jimi seemed to be going-through-the-motions a bit here. He wanted to be in Electric Ladyland recording but his manager insisted on him being on the road in order to generate money. Still, Jimi's ''bad days at the office'' are better than 99% of shows you'll ever see from anybody else and it is rather good - certainly tighter as a show than Isle of Wight (which might just be the worst gig Hendrix ever played) and perhaps even Woodstock - however, it doesn't reach the dizzying musical highs of Monterey, Royal Albert Hall, the Fillmore 'Band of Gypsys' shows or Berkeley.

Weirdly they were still using the Hell's Angels for security at Atlanta post-Altamont!

Be warned if you ever decide to watch this Len, hippies. Hippies everywhere! Naked hippies! Reports of hippies having sex in full view of local bystanders! Hippies invading en masse, small town America!

Edited November 23, 2015 by DieselDaisy

[J Dog]

[DieselDaisy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZhCoGsx4Oo

[Len Cnut]

Is Isle of Wight really considered a naff performance? I always thought it a blinder, first full live Hendrix show i ever saw on video.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x226o0h_jimi-hendrix-atlanta-pop-festival-7-4-70_music

[DieselDaisy]

Is Isle of Wight really considered a naff performance? I always thought it a blinder, first full live Hendrix show i ever saw on video.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x226o0h_jimi-hendrix-atlanta-pop-festival-7-4-70_music

Plagued by sound and tuning problems. If you look throughout that show, Jimi seems distracted and keeps messing around with his amplifiers. There is even a hilarious Spinal Tap moment where a roadies' walkie-talkie, a very English voice asking for 'security', leaks through Hendrix's pick-up when he is soloing (I think it happens during 'Machine Gun'); you can see all his roadies running around in the background trying to sort it out. It still has its moments however, Isle of Wight, including a fine ''All Along the Watchtower'', ''Freedom'' - new song ''Dolly Dagger', etc. It tends to pick up.

[Len Cnut]

I guess this shows my lack of actual musical understanding cuz it sounded the fucking bollocks to me, the solo during machine gun is amazing. I guess thinking about it it does have a sort of...coarse sound to it.

[DieselDaisy]

For the best filmed shows I wouldn't go past Berkeley, Royal Albert and Monterey. Jimi Plays Berkeley has some hippy-shit political stuff spliced in there and some weird editing (of Hendrix's performances) but the performance you do see is breathtaking. Try and obtain the official restored edition which has 15 minutes extra; the second night has also been recently issued officially on compact disc (I'm yet to hear this but I have the bootleg of both nights). Royal Albert is only bootlegy and again has some weird of its time editing, but is another stunning performance. I think you will really like that one. There is a bootleg dvd (although Amazon were flogging it) called Room Full of Hendrix. Monterey is as iconic as it gets - not enough superlatives for that one.

The baw footage of the Fillmore (I think it is the third show) is also very good; this is the new look Hendrix who refuses to showboat. You will find that footage on the re-released Band of Gypsy dvd however it is not complete. Maui, the Rainbow Bridge gig, is also very good but a bit of an oddity. He is playing in front of three hundred hippies in a field in daylight. Mitch's drum track was unusable so he had to replace it later, consequentially, leading to widely un-synchronised drums. Still, Hendrix was on fire here. That is the show where he has that black tracksuit top/blue bandana number. The concert was pieced together by a bootleger using Rainbow Bridge, outtakes and the soundboard audio.

Some links of interest,

http://www.digitalhighway.co.uk/axis/index.asp(concert guide with reviews and sets)

http://worldofhendrixbootlegs.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/DVDs(good download site).

PS

That version of Atlanta has recently been re-remastered as a DVD called Electric Church.

Edited November 25, 2015 by DieselDaisy

[Len Cnut]

I seen the berkley one, Monterrey, Isle of Wight, Woodstock, Rainbow Bridge etc.

I'll be picking up this Atlanta thingie though, cheers for the heads up. In recent years theres been two really solid documentaries about Jimi, one where Bootsy Collins narrates it as Jimi and one other one where his little brother i recall featured quite heavily, i wish i could remember their names for ya.

[DieselDaisy]

Hear My Train A Comin' DVD bonuses consists of footage from the Miami pop festival apparently. I do not have it - I only saw the documentary when it aired on the BBC. That is a fairly recent documentary as is West Coast Seattle Boy which uses the Hendrix letters.

What do you think of that weird drunken hippy bit on Rainbow Bridge when Hendrix starts talking about Cleopatra and rescuing a Vietnam vet?

[Len Cnut]

Hear My Train A Comin' DVD bonuses consists of footage from the Miami pop festival apparently. I do not have it - I only saw the documentary when it aired on the BBC. That is a fairly recent documentary as is West Coast Seattle Boy which uses the Hendrix letters.

What do you think of that weird drunken hippy bit on Rainbow Bridge when Hendrix starts talking about Cleopatra and rescuing a Vietnam vet?

Thats the Hawaii one isn't it? To be honest I've only seen it the once and i couldn't make head nor tail of it It just seemed like bits of concert footage interspersed with a load of bollocks, i remember Hendrix looking fucked while there was either a guy or a girl or two of em just talking at him while he was just nodding and agreeing and sort of talking a bit in there too. I remember the audio quality being bad too, is that something synonymous with the recording or did i just have a shit copy? I found the whole thing quite frustrating to be honest, the concert footage is chopped up but i was even excited at the prospect of seeing Jimi in an interview or speaking cuz there's not ever so much of Jimi about in that sense, recorded interviews, there's that famous Dick Cavett one but not a lot besides that.

Edited November 25, 2015 by Len B'stard

[DieselDaisy]

You've watched the film then. There is actually a fan made video bootleg which uses the soundboard audio and film footage, outtakes and other bits (footage from Easy Rider) to reconstruct the entire concert - or as much as can be reconstructed. I think you can download it on that link I posted, or just do a search of ''Hendrix Maui'' or ''Hendrix Live in Maui'' or something similar.

The official film is load of bollocks. It was Mike Jeffery's thing. He sunk loads of money into it and Jimi had no interest. Jimi just turned up to play that Maui show and filmed that one drunken scene. The entire mess was released a year after his death.

PS

http://worldofhendrixbootlegs.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/new-jimi-hendrix-live-in-maui-1970-1dvd.html

Don't know if it is a dead link though but this is the one to get.

Edited November 25, 2015 by DieselDaisy

[Len Cnut]

Hendrix was a canny sort of fellow really. If anything really bothers me about him it's this impression that the uninitiated have of him as just some kind of braindead drug-head fool who just played off his tits all the time and just went off on one but the more you know about him he was soft spoken and in the few bits of recorded interview he does talk a load of hippie stuff, that electric church stuff he went on about with Dick Cavett...but this guy survived the chitlin circuit, was in the army, lived in Harlem, could be quite hard-arsed about what was going on in the studio, its a shame that he gets written off my a certain group.

I read an interesting thing about him that stated basically that he was something to all but none of it was what he really saw himself as or wanted to be percieved as. White folk loved him but, to his reckoning, they kind of fell in love with some kind of wild performing animal thing with him which he felt he was more than, black people kinda almost rejected him for some reason...and still to this day he's not really lauded by American black people in the way someone like Marvin Gaye is, and Marv' had as much about him if not more than Hendrix that you'd think would nark the black community off. For example, in the beginning Marv' didn't wanna do RnB or race music, he was almost pushed into doing that stuff for commercial purposes, he wanted to be more of a Frank Sinatra/Bing Crosby type artist, his first album wasn't him doing some crazy RnB it was The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye...it has Sinatras Witchcraft on it...and this ain't the only one of his early albums like that, Hello Broadway was like that, he REALLY had to be pushed into the RnB/soul type music. I also heard a theory that Jimi was 'too faggy' for black American audiences, Christ almighty, you won't find a person with a more fucked up sexual outlook than Marv', his old man was a cross-dressing preacher, he had an E put on the end of his name to stop it from being Gay and hate his 'effeminate' voice.

So yeah, something to everyone but nothing like what he wanted. Weird, how some people are forgiven things and others are pilloried.

[DieselDaisy]

The Band of Gypsy thing was an attempt to integrate with black audiences, to play a more RaB, soul, funky sort of music rather than psychedelic pop/hard rock of the Experience, and to play with black musicians instead of two Englishmen. Buddy Miles, as the Buddy Miles Express, also carried a black fanbase with him, people who would normally not attend a show of Jimi's. I'm not sure how successful it was but people like Living Color and Lenny Krazvitz were influenced by that album.

[Len Cnut]

Jimi seemed to soak up the best of every guitarist, Chuck Berry, BB King, Clapton, Townshend...even like Curtis Mayfield, whoose influence on Jimi is often ignored. It'd be interesting to see what Jimi would make of his being made a sort of deity.

[DieselDaisy]

He used to listen to classical music.

[DieselDaisy]

They used to call it the chitlin' circuit because they would play these black clubs in the east, south and mid-west of racially segregated America. They would serve chitlins which were a soul food of stewed intestines (the British used to eat them also, back in the days when we ate offal). The Regal where BB King recorded his immortal live album was a chitlin club as was Harlem's Apollo. Every (black) act from Muddy Waters to the Jackson Five played it. Hendrix first met Buddy Miles on the circuit, and played with Billy Cox and Larry Lee, his old army buddies.

Edited November 25, 2015 by DieselDaisy

[DieselDaisy]

[Len Cnut]

The first ones off his TV show Rotten TV, you should check it out, i think you'll like it, in one episode he's destroying all this valuable memorabilia like Sids suicide note etc etc. He gets thrown off the Roseanne Barr show on it too.

[Rovim]

[DieselDaisy]

In 1979 he said he wanted to kill Jimmy Saville for certain seedy things (obviously kiddy fiddling) and in 1997 on Tom Synder he said Blair was a Thatcherite (this was when Blair was popular and it was all ''cool Britannia'' and Oasis and other members of the rock fraternity sucking Blairs dick).

The chap has remarkable foresight.

[Len Cnut]

In 1979 he said he wanted to kill Jimmy Saville for certain seedy things (obviously kiddy fiddling) and in 1997 on Tom Synder he said Blair was a Thatcherite (this was when Blair was popular and it was all ''cool Britannia'' and Oasis and other members of the rock fraternity sucking Blairs dick).

The chap has remarkable foresight.

He's called Blair some pretty awful things over the years

The whole thing was The Sex Pistols was that the establishment media you are presented with, whilst calling us filth for being poor working class and foul mouthed, are up to all sorts of fuckeries, the same people that would condemn The Pistols and have them blacklisted and banned were actually massive cunts. And it has indeed come to pass that they were correct.

A lot of these television personalities he clashed with, Noel Edmunds, Bill Grundy, all came to be regarded as cunts eventually. Cliff Richard lighting candles in Leicester Square 'for Jesus and in protest of The Sex Pistols'...all the while dippin' his wick down The Elm Guest House.

There was a truth to their instinctive judgements and assessments.

Edited November 26, 2015 by Len B'stard

[Len Cnut]

SID VICIOUS ON THE GENERAL PUBLIC:

I’ve got absolutely no interest in pleasing the general public at all. I don’t want to because I think that largely they’re scum and they make me physically sick, the general public. They are scum. And I hope you print that. Because that is my opinion of like 99 per cent of the shit you find in the street who don’t know a fucking thing.

SID VICIOUS ON TELEVISION:

I hate it and everything to do with it. It’s the worst - it’s depressing, television, it frightens me. The way they kiss arse, you know what I mean? The way they say: ‘And now the wonderful this, that and the other'. They don’t mean one word you know what I mean? So why do it? I hate insincerity. If you do something you should only do it because you like it and you want to do it. ‘Cos anything you gain is just a load of hogwash anyway.

Now its all very coarse in the way he's presenting his opinion and perhaps not getting it all right but at the same time there's a good sort of...broad grasp of value there, if you get to the point of what he is trying to say, for a 19 yr old uneducated lad from London is the 70s with very limited life experience he's actually got a point, bless him.

[DieselDaisy]

I just do not know how America and Americans can ever grasp the Pistols, their milieu, humour and cultural tropes being so thoroughly English. There again, England accepted Chuck Berry and all of that 'Americana'.