BEFORE: I finally finished "Stranger Things" season 2 a few nights ago, there was about a 9 or 10 month break for me between episodes 4 and 5. Simply put, there's less new TV during the summer and I've got some more time to catch up on my binge-watching. The fact that most documentaries tend to be on the shorter side is also helping, so now I'm working my way through "Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp", watching 1 or 2 episodes after each music doc. Rock and roll plus camp equals rock fantasy camp, get it? And it clears one more thing off my Netflix list, down to just over 80 items now. I'm hoping by Labor Day to have it down to 50 or even 40 items.
This whole week has been a chance to catch up, since I'm not in San Diego, where I usually am at this time of year. (I haven't even seen much coverage yet of what's taking place at Comic-Con, because a clean break is usually best.). When I get back from that trip, it always feels like I spend the next two weeks catching up on what I missed at the office, plus whatever was on TV, and my wife reminded me that I usually come back sick in addition to exhausted, angry and stressed-out. So none of that is happening now, and those are all good things.
And I didn't have to put my countdown on hold for a week, so the Summer Rock-Doc-a-Thon can keep moving forward. Jimi Hendrix obviously carries over from "Jimi Hendrix" into "Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child". And I'll move on to another musical act for big movie #3,000 tomorrow.
THE PLOT: Jimi Hendrix talking about how he became who he is.
AFTER: This documentary (currently on Netflix, though who knows for how much longer) was released in 2010, 37 years after last night's doc. Though it tells the same story, it does so in a different way - thank God, or I'd end up watching the same film twice in a row, like I did with those "Eleanor Rigby" films. Gone are the interviews with Jimi's friends, many of whom were incapable of putting a coherent sentence together, and instead Jimi's own words from letters, diaries and interviews are used. When not spoken by Jimi directly, those words are spoken by Bootsy Collins, in sort of a dramatic re-creation. Even though entire films in that format are being rejected in my chain, I'll allow this because it's only a portion of the film, and it sheds light on times in Jimi's life when his words weren't being recorded, like when he was in the Army, or playing the little clubs in Greenwich Village.
I've got another one of those "This Day in Music History" coincidences - on this date in 1966, Jimi Hendrix went over to his girlfriend's house, because he hadn't seen her in about 99 1/2 days, and found that his key wouldn't unlock the door. "Wait a minute, something's wrong," he thought, and paused to consider that maybe his girl didn't live there no more. "Aha, perhaps there's a song there," thought Jimi. OK, I'm kidding about this. The song "Red House" was really based on blues songs that Jimi performed with Curtis Knight and the Squires, especially an Albert King number called "Traveling to California".
(You may notice that one group is notoriously absent from my Rock Doc chain - Led Zeppelin. This is partially because musicologists have proven that they ripped off nearly all of their songs from older blues singers like Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson, and never credited those men as songwriters. Unlike Clapton and Hendrix, who from what I can tell, always acknowledged when they were covering another person's songs. So Zeppelin is hereby banned - this is helped by the fact that I've already seen "The Song Remains the Same", and don't have any other movies made about them available to me.).
Once again, I find that someone did not do their due diligence in keeping track of who appeared in archive footage (much like "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars") so once again I have to keep notes as I watch the film. Fortunately my linking was possible just with the 4 names listed on the IMDB, but it could have been made easier. I guess I'll have to step up and update the IMDB myself.
In terms of concert footage, there's a lot of overlap between this film and last night's documentary from 1973, which itself used clips from the "Woodstock" and "Monterey Pop" movies. There's no way around the fact, I'm guessing, that there's just not that much footage of Hendrix out there, and every film is drawing from the same small pool. But at least it's all used coherently here, where last night's film tried to go mostly chronologically. After Hendrix talks about Chuck Berry as an influence, this film drops in his high-speed cover of "Johnny B. Goode". When it talks about him meeting Bob Dylan in the Village, that's the time to cut to Hendrix performing Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone". That all works.
Jimi talks about what it was like to play Woodstock, and for a guy who didn't like large crowds, what could have been worse than playing for 400,000 people? The footage of him playing "The Star Spangled Banner" there is repeated here, but at least it's preceded by "Fire" and followed by him going into "Purple Haze" so there's a little more context. The Isle of Wight performance of "Machine Gun" is also repeated, but it's mixed with footage of Vietnam, and when you think about how Jimi started out in the Army's Airborne division, it's not hard to draw the conclusion that the greatest guitarist ever easily could have been sent to Vietnam if he hadn't injured his foot on a parachuting exercise.
Jimi's thoughts end up being very insightful, with his musings on touring in the U.K. and how it's different from touring in the U.S., and even his thoughts on drug use - though once you know how his story ended, this moment becomes chillingly ironic, much like John Lennon in "Eight Days a Week" when he mentioned the dangers of touring, and his fear of being shot by a fan. I didn't know before last night that Hendrix played in Little Richard's band, and then suddenly left for some unspoken reason (though I've got a theory...). But he apparently played in a couple dozen bands, and was willing to sign a contract with just about anybody if it meant a paycheck. At one point Hendrix toured with and opened for the Monkees, and that must have been an interesting show.
Also starring the voice of Bootsy Collins, with archive footage of Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell, Dick Cavett, Al Hendrix, Billy Cox, Buddy Miles, Little Richard (all carrying over from "Jimi Hendrix"), Muddy Waters (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Bob Dylan (ditto), Brian Jones (ditto), Maurice Gibb (last seen in "It Was Fifty Years Ago Today"), Chas Chandler, The Isley Brothers.
RATING: 6 out of 10 Screaming Eagles patches
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