Jimi Hendrix setlists and frustration

I love Mitch, but there are some 1970 shows where at least one of his double kick drums weren't getting that groove!

 

Can't speak for anyone else. But the thing Buddy does on Message of Love and Machine Gun and Room Full of Mirrors; Mitch couldn't play with that kind of power and groove. He played these songs very differently on the 1970 tour with a lot of syncopation, the usual Mitch style, which worked ok but something was lost in translation.

 

Jimi was vocal about having to play certain songs. Yet there were 12-15 songs that JHE played decently that seemed to get ignored in set lists and fans don't seem to know why. Unless Noel couldn't keep up.

Burning Lamp, Rolling Stone, Can You See Me, Catfish, Killing FLoor, Little Wing, Come On, Up in the Skies, Bold As Love, Mercy Mercy, Wait til Tomorrow, Little Miss Lover, Are You Experienced and Rock Me.

 

5:38 Hendrix video from Sept 1968 in vancouver talking about setlist monotony.

The little girl heard in the background is likely an elementary school aged Janie.

 

I think Buddy was good on laying it down with the straight "four on the floor " funk things whereas Mitch danced around on the drums with his jazzier chops .

In the long run I prefer Mitch's style and I guess ultimately Jimi did also.
I think Buddy played a little to0 ham fisted for the complex music Jimi was trying to fuse together.

It brings up the eternal interesting question though:
Jimi seemed to be trying to stretch and incorporate funk, soul, jazz and who knows what else into his music but also seemed to be frustrated at the end how to pull together what he was hearing in his head, or at least what he thought he wanted to hear musically.

As a great artist, he wanted to stretch and not just be "The Purple Haze Guy",
so who knows which drummer,or drummers would have fit the bill for him in the future ?

 

Pretty sure Noel could handle anything Jimi would throw at him on stage.
The show in Canada in 69 would be a good example.
Its not like Jimi would give him a heads up before the show about Little Miss Lover.

 

On this board we have people who feel that both live Zeppelin and live Hendrix are usually lacking.

I suppose next up will be threads where live Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, Allman Brothers, King Crimson, etc. are thought to be typically less than stellar too.

 

On every JHE album there's bass parts played by someone other than Noel. I thought Noel sounded rudderless on some JHE live stuff, but as long as Jimi/Mitch were in sync everyone seemed to be happy.

Did Noel ever do interesting JHE tracks when he did some Jimi related tribute gigs in Europe late in his life in the 90's? Clips on YouTube of his 1990-1998 shows don't show any remarkable playing from him.

 

I don't have a clue about any of Noel's playing during later tribute shows.
I do think Noel did some of his best playing in the original Experience post ELL.
There is some really nice playing from him on disc 3 of WCSB.
He's also credited with the bass on 12 Bar Original which to me would be some of his best playing with Jimi.
In fact its got such a nice groove to it I wonder if the credits are wrong and its someone else.
Anyone else have an opinion on if its Noel or not on that one?

 

Noel was a punk bassist . Turn it up and blast it out.

 

I always thought it was Noel, because the player sounds a bit out of his depth on such a funky number, where Billy would have been ideal.

 

I think Atlanta he was tuned a whole step down as opposed to half a step perhaps to make it easier to sing that day so I think he started Watchtower where he wanted to and started singing and realized it was too low and then you can see in the film he signals to Billy to move it up.

 

Let me start by saying my fandom for Buddy goes back to his Electric Flag days, and he was a critical part of that band, underrated imo and which did not last for reasons I don't think can be blamed on Miles. I also saw the Buddy Miles Express live, and while I can't say they were as good as the Flag, they were very good.

But having said that it's always been clear enough for me that Jimi went back to Mitch for a reason before the end, and it wasn't because Buddy got a better gig elsewhere.

It should also be obvious that in comparing two drummers where one focuses more on as you say lots of syncopation, what I would call a more jazz styled approach compared to a heavier one, that in any such comparison "something [is] lost in translation" whether moving from one to the other. In other words adding something often means something else is taken away.

But that doesn't make one approach inherently better or worse, and we are still left with Jimi's own judgment of which drummer he chose after the BoG album, and it was Mitchell.

 

True that. Perhaps Jimi could have found a drummer that could master both approaches, but then there's the fact that he seemed to value friendship and musical intuitivity over technique.

 

OK what are the facts. Or are you just shouting Judas

 

I wonder how many people who actually went to the gigs (especially Hendrix) came away thinking about any of the myriad of issues that are raised on this forum.

I saw Led Zeppelin once (one of my first ever concerts). It is still the measuring stick that I use to compare all the other concerts I've been to. Very few rate higher.

 

Factually, yes.......culturally, right on the money.
Buddy was a 'Brother' in a culture movement that gave voice to the underground elements of society at that time.
Damn right Buddy was pushing Jimi to do the black thing along with the Panthers! What an opportunity for HIM!
But Jimi seemed to not be politically motivated in his music like somebody like Springsteen is, so that whole 'black' thing really didn't take hold with him, which them probably frustrated him even M O RE. He couldn't get away from all these things wanting a piece of him.
Poor guy actually, how phuched up to finally make it and the have to deal with all that carp???
Beave

 

Not true, but "culturally true". OK

Though no doubt there were those pressures...

 

Lots of quotes here that I've read and wanted to respond to or comment. Feel free to skip this post, it will be useless. Suffice to say, I very much wish he had varied his setlists more. It would make listening to multiple shows much more interesting in 2018. But obviously they were playing for the fans in the room.

This is a key thing to me. There was tons of room. Somebody said something about "just go out and play Tax Man" as though Tax Man was a hit or something. He could have easily done more, and the musicians were good enough to do without a ton of rehearsal. It's really a mystery to me, for a musician of his depth who did complain about playing the hits.

Is it a confirmed fact there's no footage of the second show? I always took seeing footage of the first as a sign that the second might also exist. Not that it's a Holy Grail, but I had a 2 disc boot from way back in the late 80's or so and the second show is considerably better than the first.

I'll combine my response to these into one recollection of Mitch Mitchell saying that there he had to take acid in order to feel normal. These were not your dorky uncle's wah-wah pedals.

That's the thing, too, that makes it a mystery. There were plenty of songs the could have played, just by giving it a spin in soundcheck or backstage unplugged. Rock and roll is, structurally speaking, pretty damned easy to play. And it's not like they were afraid of taking chances onstage. I really don't get it.

 

It is either true or it is not. I do not even know what "culturally true" means. The BoG was not the result of the Black Panthers pressuring Hendrix to form an all black band. You are correct, the "pressures" were there. It has been documented that certain social/political groups leaned on Hendrix at various times and wanted Hendrix to be more politically involved with issues effecting the black community, but the end result was not the BoG. Hendrix knew Cox from his Army days and befriended Buddy during '68. They played together at different times. As a trio, they laid down some recordings as early as the spring of 1969. Then reconvened during the fall of 1969 through January 1970 before Hendrix allegedly disbanded the trio. Either way, it was short-lived considering they never released a formal studio album and only played 5 concerts. The BoG LP was a compromise that Hendrix made to fulfill the PPX settlement; had Hendrix not been forced to release the Fillmore East tapes, there is a possibility that only a few examples of the BoG would have ever been released on album later in 1970.

 

I promise you, in seeing Jimi Hendrix live twice I did not find his sets lacking! The second time I saw him was at the Santa Clara Pop Festival and the crowd was a bit of a downer and Jimi was having big-time equipment trouble but no, that set was not lacking either!

 

miles actually played with hendrix in 1967 when hendrix was at stills house. then they became friends through the friendship hendrix had with mike bloomfield i thought

 

I'm with you in that I don't think it's true, and was laughing a bit about the idea of "cultural truth" trumping actual truth, while simply acknowledging that those pressures existed. Sorry if I was misunderstood.

 

The Panthers didn't resonate with a lot of Black people.
They were very much on the fringe of the civil rights
movement.

The Ghetto Fighters have a good story in "A Film
About Jimi Hendrix" about Jimi's interaction with
one of the Panthers

 

Cultural Truth, the way I meant it, is 'Truth on the the street's. Think Rap culture here. It's what's going on in the street's and nowhere else, not the newspapers, the talk shows, the talking heads, it's as Rev Al says, the streets 'keeping it real'.
And Jimi had to deal with street pressure, like that. But Buddy REVELED in that street connection. And he probably thought Jimi felt the same way initially. He had NO idea the business pressure Jimi was under.
Beave