Woodstock: Music From The Original Soundtrack And More (1970)

Woodstock: Music From The Original Soundtrack And More (1970)



Face 6

2. JIMI HENDRIX
- Star Spangled Banner
- Purple Haze & Instrumental Solo

John B. Sebastian, Canned Heat, Richie Havens, Country Joe & The Fish, Arlo Guthrie, Sha-Na-Na, Country Joe McDonald, Joan Baez avec Jeffrey Shurtleff, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Who, Joe Cocker, Santana, Ten Years After, Jefferson Airplane, Sly & The Family Stone et le Butterfield Blues Band sont eux aussi présents sur ce triple album produit par Eric Blackstead, publié le 24 mai 1970, du vivant de Jimi donc.

Comme ce fut le cas au festival de Woodstock, c'est avec Jimi Hendrix que "Woodstock: Music From The Original Soundtrack And More" trouve sa conclusion. Et de quelle manière ! Bien que, a priori, Jimi n'ai pas eu son mot à dire sur la sélection des près de 13 minutes de musique qui occupe la moitié de la sixième face du triple album, force est de reconnaître qu'il était difficile de mieux mettre en valeur la performance du Gypsy Sun & Rainbows.
La sélection débute avec la fin de "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)", lorsque Jimi dit à son audience "you can leave if you want to, we're just jammin that's all". Nous avons alors droit au court duo entre Jimi et Larry Lee, dont le mixage plus égalitaire montre que ce dernier n'a pas toujours démérité lors du concert.
Jimi continue ensuite avec l'introduction de "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)", qui sert de conclusion au titre... et contribue à la dramatisation du moment : il ne pouvait pas mieux introduire "Star Spangled Banner" - dont c'est la version définitive. En effet, sans la fin du titre précédent, l'impact de "Star Spangled Banner" ne serait peut-être pas tout à fait le même.
"Purple Haze" connaissait ici sa première publication Live officielle, dans une version tout à fait exceptionnelle.
L'"Instrumental Solo" qui termine la face n'est pas constitué de la fameuse "Woodstock Improvisation", absente du montage, mais du sublime blues en La mineur désormais connu sous le nom de "Villanova Junction". On notera que le mixage met ici en valeur l'ensemble du groupe, et non le seul trio Hendrix/Cox/Mitchell - et que le résultat est parfaitement concluant, ce qui ne sera pas forcément le cas des titres publiés sur "Woodstock 2".
   
Plus de quatre semaines à la tête du Billboard durant l'été 1970, "Woodstock: Music From The Original Soundtrack And More" ne pouvait mieux relancer la carrière de Jimi, dont la performance constituait l'un des sommets du triple album. Le destin en décidera autrement...

Comme cela fut le cas à l'époque pour beaucoup de monde, je crois bien que c'est avec cet album que j'ai moi aussi entendu les premiers titres de la performance de Jimi à Woodstock, et ça ne pouvait que donner envie d'en entendre plus !

Chose faite avec Woodstock Two et ses trois titres en plus, puis en mettant la main sur un bootleg avec la prestation complète (sauf le premier titre ). Puis les officiels ont suivi... mais que de temps après !!! Quelle honte !

Citation :

When Jimi Hendrix took the stage on the final morning of Woodstock--"by the dawn's early light," as it were--the audience had dwindled from hundreds of thousands down to an exhausted, mud-covered remnant. But the stubborn 25,000 saw Hendrix unexpectedly pause mid-way in his set to rip apart "The Star-Spangled Banner." In that chaotic year of 1969, the Vietnam War and the protests against it were two of the storms raging, and Jimi channeled some of that national anger into his electric and electrifying deconstruction of the national anthem--"rockets red glare," indeed.

Several musicians were on stage, but this is a straight duel between Hendrix and drummer Mitch Mitchell. The latter simply flails steadily for three minutes, while Jimi unleashes his full arsenal: echo, reverb, string-pulling, fingerpicking, atonal shrieks, wailing sirens and fire alarms, martial music and incoming missiles, bombs bursting in air, white noise. Shards of the hallowed, hard-to-sing melody can be heard at the relatively calm launch, and here and there throughout the cataclysmic performance, but the rest is Hendrix shredding his guitar, the national anthem, and the history of music.

Thanks to Coltrane and his acolytes, a New Thing was happening "o'er the Land of the Free," and ravenous Jimi tapped into that too--and in so doing he set the course, and the bar, for scores of jazz guitarists ever since, from John McLaughlin to Vernon Reid and Bill Frisell, from Sonny Sharrock to Blood Ulmer and John Zorn. These days, chord changes may still be observed, but otherwise anything goes, from the initial count-off till "the twilight's last gleaming" and final cymbal crash.

Source : http://www.jazz.com/music/2009/5/14/jimi-hendrix-the-star-spangled-banner

40 years post-Woodstock, Hendrix's anthem still reigns
By ANDREW DANSBY

Forty years later, it's easy to take Jimi Hendrix's interpretation of The Star-Spangled Banner for granted.

It was a performance many Woodstock attendees didn't hear since half, maybe more, had flown the farm. And unlike today, when the performance would be Flip-filmed, iPhone-photographed and digitally recorded — all of it uploaded instantly — Hendrix's performance on the morning of Aug. 18, 1969 was largely unheard until the Woodstock movie and soundtrack came out the next year.

“I'm grateful we're able to revisit it,” says ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons, whose girlfriend at the time urged him to accompany her via Volks-wagen bus to Woodstock, N.Y. He regrets passing. “That performance is still meaningful and moving four decades later.”

It might be the greatest protest song ever, a cacophonous deconstruction of something sacred that those gathered felt had grown profane.

So much of Woodstock's legend is based on the shared experience. The honest account of the music is that it was spotty. Some bands were troubled by sound problems. Many acts, including Sly and the Family Stone, distinguished themselves. Others didn't. Crosby Stills & Nash, who could usually bank on gorgeous harmonies, sounded at times like fighting cats.

But Hendrix's take on the national anthem remains the enduring moment from the festival. All the stage patter about war, delivered with utmost conviction, failed to say what a guy and his guitar did.

Hendrix's Banner was an arty statement, yet the deconstructed/reconstructed song still sounds startling. Such wildly dissonant guitar playing wasn't new; jazz great Sonny Sharrock had already been making unholy sounds with his instrument. But for a pop artist to strangle a song this way on a guitar was bracing stylistically as well as politically.

“The delivery of the Star Spangled Banner — with the pyrotechnic guitar work that Hendrix provided — really opened the eyes of so many aspiring guitar players,” Gibbons says.

“If nothing else, the dive-bomb, whammy-bar effect he injected in the middle of that performance proved once and for all that he was a guy who was making a guitar do things that it was not necessarily designed to do.”

Vernon Reid, guitarist in Living Colour, suggests Hendrix “did it as a patriotic act.” He points out that Hendrix, unlike many of his Woodstock performer peers, was a veteran, having joined the Army in the early '60s. That said, accounts of the guitarist's enlistment and service suggest it was neither entirely voluntary nor dutifully served.

It seemed to come together like a tropical storm.

“Thank you ... you can leave if you want to, we're just jamming,” Hendrix told the crowd. He noodled his way through a blues jam, briefly quoting Voodoo Chile, before playing the anthem's first piercing notes. For a minute it's raw but borderline reverent, and then Hendrix takes it off the rails during the “rockets' red glare” bit, perhaps the hardest part of the song to sing. Around the two-minute mark he's wrenching out sounds that resemble air-raid sirens and falling bombs, with a snippet of Taps.

He streams the song into Purple Haze, but unlike that Hendrix staple, his Banner isn't about confusion and disorientation. It was as deliberate and direct as abstract art gets.

“It's no accident that happened near the end of the '60s,” Reid says. “If there's a single piece of music to survive the '60s, to represent it, that's it.”

Source : http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/features/6571655.html

Une chronique intéressante - d'autant qu'elle est parue du vivant de Jimi :

upfromtheskies a écrit:

R&F n° 42 de juillet 70:

Woodstock Cotillion 60.001/2/3 Made in France (P)1970 stereo

Longtemps j'ai écouté ce triple album en commençant par les deux faces du disque 1, 2 et 3, erreur ! car le sens de lecture prévu par les esprits tordus et psychédéliques de l'époque est toute autre, on lit les premières face de chaque disques qui correspondes à la face 1, 2 et 3 puis la seconde face du disque 3, du disque 2 et du disque 1 qui correspondes aux faces 4, 5 et 6.

J'avais les K7 (deux). Pareil je les ai beaucoup écoutées.
Pour l'ordre des faces c'était du coup plus facile.