Rating: 
Summary: Jimi Hendrix live at Woodstock-1of few daylight performances
Review: A great DVD of an even greater performance of the greatest guitar player of all time. This is the best daylight concert footage available of Jimi Hendrix. He dazzles the dwindling audience of Woodstock, those who stayed truly witnessed one of his peak performances. The sound and video of this particular version far out shine any in existence. Don't be fooled by Amazon's advertisement though, they discribe the CD not the DVD. When will they change that incorrect ad?
Rating: 
Summary: Lack of 5.1 Surround
Review: Allow me to start off by saying I am among the large majority of rock music fans to believe Hendrix to be the best guitarist of all time. That being said however, there are relatively few DVD's available showcasing Hendrix. Bnd of Gypsies: Live at the Fillimore East is an excellent one. This dvd however , is not EXCELLENT. At least, not by Hendrix standards. Here's the main reason for that. There is no option for Dolby 5.1 Surround. Based on modern Music DVD standards, this is unnaceptable. I have many music dvd's, and every single one has D5.1 SS. The lack of this option dissapointed me greatly, because although the sound isn't bad, it isn't nearly as good as it could be. But this is not a BAD dvd. It simply is not as good as other Hendrix DVD's, such as the aforementioned Live at the Fillimore East. The songs are often very messy, although there are excellent instances such as the guitar work on Voodoo Child. All in all, worth the money if you are a die hard Hendrix fan as I am, but if you want to truly Experience Hendrix (no pun intended) I suggest you opt for Live at the Fillimore East instead, as it has excellent performances AND an excellent biography.
Rating:
Summary: Geat Hendrix DVD, but...
Review: As said before, this DVD is great. However, the person who said "For once the ENTIRE Hendrix Woodstock Performance on video" is not that bright. This is only about half of the concert and we are missing great performances such as "Hey Joe". I'm not sure whether the Experience Hendrix Ltd. wanted to make more money by releasing the second half of the set later, or if the second half was just never filmed. I would be very happy to see the other half of his set because as we can hear on the audio versions, it is spectacular.
Rating:
Summary: Explanation for visuals
Review: As this video was shot and edited in 1969 and 1970 respectively, and the video (at the time was reduced to not as many songs as we would all like it to be. The thing is, It has just been remastered from these tapes, keeping it the same as the original CD (the new, extended CD has more songs.)I understand that the editing was not totally well done in that too much of Jimi is shown etc. I agree with many people that there is too much of Jimi's face and not enough of the band, his pedals...i.e. his playing with his teeth sections...should have been done much better, camera wise. I in a way hope that they redo the DVD, and in a way I don't, as this would cost me tons of money to get it again! Other than this, this is the most awesome CD/performance, I've listened to it over a hundred times. My favourite songs are Jam Back At The House, Woodstock Improvisation and Voodoo Chile (SR). Mate, Hendrix Rules!
Rating:
Summary: WOODSTOCK....! WITH JIMMY HENDRIX
Review: AWSOME MAN WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS WHAT YOUR EYES WILL EXPERIENCE WATCHING THIS GUITAR GENIUS AT PLAY MAN IT WILL BLOW YOU AWAY ........
Rating:
Summary: No cliche about it... Hendrix is the best guitar player EVER
Review: Being a guitarist as well as someone who is appreciative of music written and played by Hendrix, I purchased this DVD with the intention of learning more about the man. I had seen other footage of Hendrix, usually in some documentary form and even then he was shown only in fast clips. This DVD contains footage that is quite the opposite. Within the first few seconds of watching Hendrix play, my heart rate increased noticeably. At home, by myself, watching this DVD, I heard myself audibly mentioning my disbelief of his skill countless times. The man played the guitar like some mutated extension of his own body, and at one point I wondered if he had systematically gone up every fret on every string and memorized every note and its exact location, so that when he played he could run through his library of tones in random but orderly fashion. The camera swoops across the crowd on occasion. It is the end of Woodstock, and there are only a few people left... blankets and debris litter the field behind them (it is then that I realize that my experience at various Lolapaloozas was not truly unique). At the beginning of the Hendrix set, most of them look bored. I can't help but wonder if half of them are still there because they don't have a ride home, or if they are so exhausted from the past few days that they don't know what else to do. They couldn't possibly know that they had just taken part in a truly historic event, so the significance of the Hendrix closing set (with his hastily named "Band of Gypsies") was probably lost on them. But the crowd changes quite a bit as the show goes on. At first, Hendrix seems as if he is some crazy showboating guitarist with a knack for rockin' out the blues. But then it intensifies with unceasing persistence. Mitch Mitchell, the drummer, is banging out incredible rythms while looking like he has just run a marathon, but he keeps going, feeding off Hendrix. Hendrix falls in and out of solo-induced trances - or possibly trance-induced solos - while occasionally looking to his band mates for signals to fall back into verse. At one point he drifts so far away he is lost in minutes of feedback-ridden wailing and crunching when he suddenly pops out of it and decides to introduce the rest of the band, as if he regretted his apparent selfishness of sound and wanted to give his colleagues a chance. By then, there are people in the crowd that are bouncing about with limp arms in that way that is so utterly hippie. There are a few young men with thick-rimmed glasses watching Hendrix with mouth open, moving ever so slightly to his every string-bending note. And then he falls into Voodoo Child, a fast paced version full of 4-5 mintue jams that put Phish to shame. By now the show is at full intensity, and at one point Hendrix says "You can leave if you want to... we're just jammin'." He falls in and out of the song, collapsing into The Star Spangled Banner. I've heard the audio of this before, but the film changed my entire perspective on it. On the verse 'And the rockets red glare', Hendrix starts ripping random tones out of the Fender that I suddenly recognized to be launching rockets, followed by sounds of 'the bombs bursting in air'. Amazing. And *then* he goes into Purple Haze. I was so absorbed I forgot where I was and I felt light-headed. And then he is lost again, playing with the guitar as if he was at home in his basement, experimenting with tones and chords, and they fall into a jam from it, where somehow everyone in the band knew when and where it would start and end. Phenomenal. I've had the "Who is the best guitarist ever" debate before. I've gone back and forth from Santanna to Clapton to Page to Hendrix. No more. I have decided. It is Hendrix, and I don't care if anyone thinks it is cliche. The man was an anomaly... someone who knew the guitar like his own hands, and never thought twice about it. So the reader of this review is asking: "Should I buy it or not?". I say: "Buy it. View it. Be glad that even though you weren't at Woodstock, you at least have this to give you some idea of what it was like."
Rating: 
Summary: Not My Favorite Show, But It's Hendrix
Review: Contrary to the claims, this is not the complete performance by the Gypsy Suns, Moons and Rainbows. Nor was it Hendrix' finest performance, and to state otherwise is to demean his art. Jimi was the first to admit that this wasn't a good gig. As to my first assertion, there's no footage of his performance of "Message Of Love", a song that really didn't gel until his Fillmore shows with the Band Of Gypsys 4 months later. Additionally, Jimi stepped back and allowed his Gypsy Suns co-guitarist, Larry Lee, perform two songs. The first was a surprisingly tepid "Gypsy Woman" as written/performed by Curtis Mayfield & The Impressions. My gripe isn't that it was excluded -- I was grateful for that. Hendrix had a generous tendency to step back, relinquish the spotlight and in musician's terms, "fall", meaning to inobtrusively carry on in the background and allow the front man to represent. Lee clearly wasn't up to the task as front man, but when you think about it the task had to be kind of daunting to dare pick up a guitar and play for anyone with Jimi Hendrix on rhythm. Jimi could have saved him -- Have you ever heard "Have You Ever Been To Electric Ladyland"? Jimi had the Curtis Mayfield riff down cold. Even worse was Lee's performance of a song called "Mastermind", which also never made it to CD, VHS or DVD. Lee wore a veil over his face during the entire show, and with good reason. Also deleted from the CD and video/DVD was the encore performance of "Hey Joe". Not only were Lee's "Jimi-as-sideman" selections deleted, but also were his solos on at least "Spanish Castle Magic" and "Red House". But Jimi had already committed to a contract that would yield to his production company and handlers $180,000.00, which at the time was the highest dollar amount ever paid to a rock act. The expectation was that the show would close with the Experience, but by then, bassist Noel Redding had left the band in Denver, 6/69 amid rumors that Jimi wanted to expand the group without first consulting him. It was a career decision that still plagues him today, over 30 years after Hendrix' death. So Jimi huddled in a rented house up in Shokan, New York with a collective of NYC musicians and new bassist Billy Cox, who'd been jamming with Hendrix for months by now with the expectation that Redding was leaving the group at some point -- Jimi and Noel hadn't gotten along at all since 1968. The resulting mish-mosh was if not an ill-conceived band, at least an ill-rehearsed one. If memory serves, they only played 2 gigs at Tinker Street Cinema, and now they're at Woodstock, playing to what's left of an audience of 1/2 million at 6:00 AM. Jimi was riding high on the strength of an album called "Smash Hits", and he knew he had to deliver the goods. The band clearly wasn't up to the task. Drummer Mitch Mitchell was harboring this resentment against Bronx percussionist Jerry Velez, Jimi kept looking back at the band as a whole to get them to see what he was trying to do. It wasn't until he took over ("awww move over, Rover") that anything consequential really happened. Make no mistake, "The Star-Spangled Banner" was a pivotal moment not only of Hendrix' show, but of the festival and was a reflection of the mood of the country at the time. But that was serendipitous. The National Anthem was on Hendrix' set list since at least 1968. The version on this DVD is certainly the best and most inspired of those I've heard. He attached no particular significance to it ("I'm an American. They made me sing it in school, so I played it."), although I'm certain that the fire came from his possible inability to reconcile his pride in having served in the 101st Airborne to the de rigeur pacifist stance rockers were expected to assume. It wasn't until Graham Nash informed him that young Black men were being used as cannon fodder during VietNam that he agreed to perform at a War Moratorium show at MSG, and we won't even discuss what happened there. Since Experience Hendrix now has total control over what video of Hendrix is released on DVD, we can expect the best of the filmed Hendrix legacy to be doled out like the Jerky Treats you feed your dog. The best is yet to come: the Pennebaker film of Jimi at Monterey released on VHS, but never on DVD, an unedited Berkeley show, the Royal Albert Hall shows, international television footage of Experience shows only hinted at in last year's Experience DVD. But trust me on this -- the entire Hendrix show at Woodstock will never, ever be released.
Rating:
Summary: Hendrix was no Hypnotized Flag Waving Drone that's for Sure!
Review: Do these guys really think they can co-opt Jimi Hendrix's name so easily for their absurd new 'holy war' of 'infinite justice' (a little too bold it was, so they quickly changed the 'catch-phrase' to 'Enduring Freedom," as a security measure, to avoid some of the ironic remarks that were sure to snowball into an avalanche on the still-free press of the Internet if the hypocrisies of the U.S. Government in curtailing 'freedom' all over the world, were ever exposed enough to people used to getting their news from the controlled mainstream-press during their big 'crusade against terror')? Who do these guys think Hendrix was, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan? Hendrix was the exact opposite of what those guys stood for, or what the traditional power-structure of America stood for. Everything in his art railed against it! His version of Star Spangled Banner was as feedback frenzied and crazy as it was because it was meant to be ironic and only respectful of America's best traditions, the America of the Slave-Owning-At-time-but-foresighted-and-freedom-loving Founding Fathers of the Constitution, that could've been, should've been, and tragically wasn't, and due to a disastrous foreign policy instigated by a criminal government running amok, still isn't 30 years after Jimi's death; he certainly wasn't applauding its jingoistic worst, and to pretend that he was, is an insult to the values of complete dissent and freedom his art stood for. He sure as hell wasn't celebrating America's napalming of Vietnam or the Military; it's laughable to even suggest that he was! You want direct proof? Just go and listen to "Machine Gun" or "If 6 was 9" (Hendrix didn't give one hoot if "All the Hippies cut off all their hair" either, as the famous lyric goes; he was an individualist, who saw through his own eyes, first & foremost!). In fact, you'd probably have a hard time finding ONE person in the entire Woodstock crowd that was in favor of the Vietnam War! And at the time, it was just as 'Holy' a war, from the government's perspective & that of most of the soldiers fighting it, as this new one W. Bush is embarking on. Having deep sympathy with the victims of the tragic events of Sept. 11 is one thing; being blind to powerful people taking advantage of easily given trust to use this tragedy as an excuse to curtail all our freedoms forever and kill huge numbers of innocent civilians in far-away countries as "collateral damage," is another. And I'm sure as Sherlock, my man Jimi would agree, whole-heartedly, if only he had survived his hectic times to see the absurdities of the present.
Rating:
Summary: Historic, But Not the Best Jimi
Review: Hendrix at Woodstock - a legendary concert. Does that mean it's worth watching? Well, it's shot outside in daylight, so visuals are better, and the footage is from one show, so continuity is better than other Hendrix compilations. There are ample crowd shots, which are interesting, and there are not the impossible closeups that mar other Hendrix films (Monterey Pop). Those are the film's good points. The downer is that Hendrix doesn't seem inspired. At times he appears annoyed with his bandmates, and he was debuting a new band at Woodstock, who's members muddied the usually clean power trio Hendrix sound. Voodoo Chile loses its power here due to the "fuzz" (see Jimi Plays Berkley for the best video capture of this song) and other than his masterpiece, Star Spangled Banner, most of these songs can be found played live far better. Woodstock was made famous by the film of the same name, and the best of the Hendrix footage from Woodstock was in that film. This tape, Hendrix at Woodstock, is interesting, nothing more.
Rating:
Summary: a brilliant document of a jaw- dropping concert
Review: I am happy to announce that this DVD is a joy to watch repeatedly. The sound is immaculately re-engineered by Eddie Kramer (who handled the concert sound in '69). The editing is superb! You get to watch Hendrix w/o the distraction of overly quick cutting or poor shot choices. The Hendrix Estate should be really proud of this one!My only complaint is that "Hear My Train A'comin" is , for some reason, absent from the playlist, although he did play it at the show.
|
