Blackpool (Opera House) : 25 novembre 1967

Blackpool (Opera House) : 25 novembre 1967


Titres :

1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
2. Fire
3. Hey Joe
4. The Wind Cries Mary
5. Purple Haze
6. Wild Thing

Sources :

- Les deux derniers titres sont présents en tant que bonus sur le DVD officiel "Experience" ;
- On retrouve l'intégralité du concert sur le pirate "Psychedelic Experience".


Si les deux titres filmés jouissent d'une qualité audio à peu près correcte (l'enregistrement est rugueux, mais musical - la guitare de Jimi sortant relativement bien), les quatre premiers titres présentent une qualité audio inférieure, avec pas mal de distorsion, et un aspect sourd désagréable. On rencontrera malheureusement pire par la suite...

Le concert de l'Experience débute par "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", accueilli par les cris d'une partie de l'audience : on se rapproche plus de la Beatlesmania que des concerts scandinaves du Jimi Hendrix Experience ! Comme lors des précédentes versions documentées, l'Experience ne se rate pas sur le (déjà !) classique des Bealtes.

Le titre suivant est "Fire", dont l'introduction est légèrement coupée. L'Experience est au sommet de sa puissance et balaie tout sur son passage.

La popularité de l'Experience ne se manifeste pas que sur la seule reprise des Beatles : les couplets de "Hey Joe", parfaitement chantés, sont ponctués par les cris d'enthousiasme du public. Le solo central de Jimi, joué avec les dents, est assez moyen. Le second solo, sans doute joué derrière le dos, est nettement meilleur... ce qui n'a rien de surprenant, dans la mesure où si l'effet est très visuel, il ne perturbe pas trop le jeu - ce qui n'est pas le cas du jeu avec les dents...

On peut regretter que la qualité audio des premiers titres ne soit pas meilleure à l'écoute de "The Wind Cries Mary", dont la version semble l'une des plus belles de celles qui soient documentées. Le chant de Jimi se fait aussi subtil que son jeu de guitare. La bande, dont le son est sourd, se coupe en début de dernier couplet.

Le son s'améliore donc avec "Purple Haze" (filmé), peut-être amputé de son introduction bruitiste (on prend en cours d'introduction, lorsque Jimi et Noel invoque le Diabolus in Musica).
On y voit comment le Jimi Hendrix Experience sombrait par moments dans le Jimi Hendrix Circus : Jimi le showman prend ici trop le pas sur le guitariste. La qualité musicale de la performance n'en sort pas indemne. On comprend pourquoi Jimi s'est rapidement senti emprisonné dans ce rôle, bien étroit au regard du virtuose qu'il était devenu au fil des mois.

C'est un Jimi Hendrix complètement désaccordé qui annonce à son public : "On s'accorde parce qu'on fait attention à vos oreilles, c'est pourquoi nous ne jouons pas si fort..." Jimi ne cessera de répéter cette blague dans les quelques années qui suivront.
"Wild Thing" est elle-aussi largement amputée : on enchaîne rapidement avec le solo central, où Jimi cite le "Stranger In The Night" de Sinatra. Plus encore que sur "Purple Haze", le visuel l'emporte sur toute considération musicale, sans pour autant retrouver l'intensité dramatique que le final de Monterey pouvait avoir.

Au final ? Un très bon concert cuvée 1967 (Jimi est en top forme)... avec toutes les limites que cela comporte.

BLACKPOOL EVENING GAZETTE - ‘Pop Stars Find Equipment Damaged’:
“Musical equipment belonging to five top pop groups was damaged by an intruder at the Opera House, Blackpool, after Saturday [25th]night’s beat show. After their two performances at the theatre on Saturday night, they left their guitars, amplifiers and electrical equipment on the stage before going to their hotel.
Strings cut
When they returned yesterday morning to collect it, they found that leads had been ripped from amplifiers and guitars, amplifiers had been damaged and one guitar had been trampled on and had its strings cut. They estimated the damage as £350. Blackpool CID are investigating and a police spokesman said, ”We do not think there has been a break-in. Someone may have hidden in the theatre after the show had finished.” The groups collected the rest of their equipment and left Blackpool for Manchester for a show last night."

Austin Mitchell in Univibes #15: ): “The first time I ever saw a photo of Hendrix it flipped me out. It was on the cover of Melody Maker, early in ‘67. It was two years before I even touched hallucinogens, but I had this hallucination; I was seeing his face through a hole burned in the paper, and seeing a live, laughing face behind the page. All I could get from this was a premonition that Hendrix would become a significant figure in my life. With 20/20 hindsight, I can testify that this was accurate…”

“…I was trying to avoid a growing conviction that Jimi wouldn’t be around too long. This feeling was connected to the premonition which had hit me when I first saw his picture on the cover of Melody Maker.
What the piece [I wrote in the Observer] lacked in conveying him, was the vivid, searing impact of his live performance. All the text and pictures that could be created on a page could never even hint at this.
Over the following week I started ringing up my few contacts in film and TV – ‘Somebody should preserve this man’s work on film.’ Mostly I met with a ho-hum. This was still an era when rock music on TV was strictly confined to the top twenty shows like ‘Top Of The Pops’. Rock had no status as an art form; there was no Rolling Stone; no sort of intelligent context to work in. A colleague of mine on The Observer, Brian Haynes, told me that David Frost’s company was thinking of producing some independent music films for TV – ‘Why don’t you make a film yourself?’
I had a friend called Peter Neal, who worked for an independent documentary company struggling along making low- budget, gritty 16mm movies with a strong left bias. Peter had directed a fine black-and-white film about ‘The Watersons’, a traditional a cappella singing group from Yorkshire, poles apart from the hyper-amplified, strobe lit circus of ‘acid rock’. But Peter, who played fine bluegrass guitar was as smitten as I was when I took him see Hendrix warming up at the Royal Albert Hall for the opening concert of his first headlining UK tour 14 November]. Peter cobbled together a budget and we managed to get a couple of hundred pounds from the Frost organization to make a start.
At 1967 prices, this was sufficient to buy some film stock, hire three cameramen and a sound man, plus equipment and a van for the nine-hour drive north to Blackpool, to catch Jimi on one of his tour dates, at Blackpool’s Opera House. The cameramen took a look at the early evening show and voted to turn around and go home, since they felt that there was insufficient light to film, and the tour’s stage manager wouldn’t give us any more light. Peter told the cameramen to boost the exposure to the max and pray.
The Opera House manager had generously given us camera positions in the royal box, in the orchestra pit and allowed us access to the stage. Meanwhile, the sound man had his problems. No one bed ever tried to make a ‘live’ recording of anything like the volume at which Jimi Hendrix played, which was like trying to tape an artillery bombardment.
Hendrix gave me a fraternal greeting and told me to watch out for Keith Emerson, playing with one of the support acts [‘Nice’]: “He’s doing everything on keyboards that I do on guitar.”
We filmed “Purple Haze” and “Wild Thing,” the latter badly out of tune up to the second chorus. Back in London prayers were answered; when the film came back from the labs we had good takes on all three cameras, and the sound was pretty good. Peter had put together an all-pro crew. Better still, he quickly edited together a rough cut of “Wild Thing” which got shown on BBC TV the week that my piece finally appeared in The Observer [on 6 December on BBC2’s first colour broadcast during ‘Late Night Line Up’]. This was a great encouragement to the backers.'

Noel Redding, Bass guitar player in the Jimi Hendrix Experience later wrote in his diary:

“Audience was terrible both shows, but the sound was exceptionally good.”

Source :
http://novdec1967.blogspot.fr/2010/02/25-november-1967-opera-house-blackpool.html