Jimi Hendrix - Live at Woodstock
by Chris Hegedus, Erez Laufer

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DVD Reviews of Jimi Hendrix - Live at Woodstock

DVD Review: No cliche about it... Hendrix is the best guitar player EVER
Summary: 5 Stars

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."

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