The Jimi Hendrix Experience: "The Royal Albert Hall" Film, One Off Showing in London!!

This is so true. I’m a second generation Hendrix fan, and I’ve reached the point in life where I’m not going to be around forever. I’m sure Jimi’s music will survive after his original fans are all gone, but I agree, if everyone involved wants to cash in on this Albert Hall movie and soundtrack, there’s more money to be made from it now than ten or twenty years from now.

 

If they were smart they would release a box set containing the original film, complete RAH 2/24/69 concert, 2/18/69 RAH concert, RAH rehearsals, and perhaps some additional Euro '69 material if it exists in decent quality. I know, not holding my breath but this is a great start.

 

My concern is that there will never be a full performance of "Hear My Train" (especially a very good one like this show) released on film. No others exist. And it looks like, from the description, that "Hear My Train" may not be a part of this new film's. Of course, it's not in full on the old cut, as well.

No, I wouldn't expect the extra expenditure to restore the old cut, but as we've seen with many special features, on DVD and BD, more often than not, extra or extended scenes are not restored, but they are included for posterity, or an extra view into the filming, or for whatever reason, because fans want extras. I mean, if they put extras on a BD of this release, no matter the quality, e.g. raw footage of songs, Jimi backstage, songs from the first RAH show on 03-18-1969, would you you balk at it because it's not restored? I wouldn't. Plus, I'm sure even a straight transfer of the old cut, in 1080p, would look better from the old boot that I own, as well, even if it's to a small degree. It wouldn't cost $400k to sync the new stereo mix to the old footage for an alternate angle.

 

I think the 2000's made a ton of sense for whole sale catalog releases. You had the main demographic at a state of their lives where many were at a point of having a little disposable income and you had the burgeoning DVD market, which saw a lot of concert films released for the first time. To some degree we did, many bands put out awesome archive releases. But some of the clearly best stuff like this RAH concert was held back and as pointed out the DVD market has collapsed along with most physical media. I think the best way to maximize profits on this would be a round of theater screenings, followed by a netflix exclusive deal, followed by a physical/digital release. Unfortunately, that means probably a couple years of waiting for the physical media as I'm sure they'd wait a few months after theater showings for a netflix release and it seems like netflix premieres usually take at least a year before they are released in a physical format.

As others have echoed though, for all this stuff, the time is now. 20 years from now a huge portion of the potential buying public for this kind of thing will be gone, and once it gets to the point where it has little financial value, there is little impetus to get behind doing projects like this, which if done right can cost a pretty penny to restore, edit, mix and so on.

 

This film release may protect the film from going into the public domain, but it doesn’t protect the complete audio from both concerts. The lack of an audio release therefore is curious.

 

This is great news for those that live over there!
For the rest of us it may mean nothing in the near future. Or it could be a nice way to stoke interest.

 

I'm hoping they are just waiting to announce an audio release at a later date.

 

Maybe I'm being naive or overtly optimistic, but I'm bettinh on a Feb 2020 boxset for the audio and video of this show.

It would match a time line, both for the show and how EH releases their stuff for the 1st quarter and 4th quarter.

 

There is a crap ton of editing on the release. It doesn't sound like the original by any stretch. I also think - although unable to verify - that Goldstein brought in Hendrix Clones to replay different parts. It sure sounds fake to me.

 

Who shot JFK?

 

Is this the concert The Beatles (or George & Paul?) saw and said they felt the Pepper bookends needed redoing after hearing what Jimi did?

 

if Proven could their be a class action lawsuit?

 

CDs and vinyl will be coming!

 

Shea? Or RAH?

The Beatles At Shea Stadium film was mired in lawsuits from the concert promoter's family, who felt the promoter owned the film rights. The Shea film was shown in conjunction with the Eight Days A Week tour documentary that was in theaters in 2016, as a double feature, but hasn't seen a digital streaming, soundtrack, or DVD release. But, it didn't need copyright protection, since it aired already as a TV special in 1966-67.

You'd think that if RAH was going to get an audio, digital, soundtrack tapes, DVD release, they'd announce it at the same time as the ticketed RAH film showing?

Hopefully they're buying time while they work out the rest of the deal.

 

They need to do it by the end of the year to stop the unreleased audio from entering the public domain in the UK, which seems unlikely considering they just announced a Fillmore East box set. Perhaps they don’t care at this point because so much RAH audio has been issued by UK grey area labels for so long, but if EH releases both shows next year, the PD labels will simply rip the audio and legally reissue it as their own.

 

Glyn Johns writes an interesting piece about recording Jimi Hendrix at the Albert Hall gig in Feb ‘69 in his autobiography Sound Man. He said it was a complete disaster, saying the acoustic of the hall then was unsuited to loud music. It has since been much improved of course.

After the soundcheck Glyn spoke to Jimi and said if he wanted the recording to work, and if he wanted the audience to hear, he would need to use smaller amps and play quieter than they were used to. Glyn said Jimi understood and was charming about it, but ignored the suggestion and turned up louder than normal at the show.

The result was “an unuseable cacophony of sound”. Glyn had the recording gear set up in a dressing room backstage and realised how bad it was early on, so he got his assistant engineer to take over and went. He says in the book that the following morning “the recording was completely useless”.

Modern digital gear can clean audio up of course but it would be interesting to know whether that was possible in this case.

 

sorry to pee on anyone's parade!

It in both parties mutual interest to put this out as a one off. The initial investment was for an official release so by a one off screening they protect both that investment and the royalty rights to both audio and visual.

Having spent a bit of time digesting this today the one thing that is clear, this screening is set as a one off. More difficult to understand is if there is likely to be a full release following this or if the divide between the two parties is still too great.

 

Just when we thought the BS posts could not get any better, ha ha!

 

I will NOT buy this one...

First... the performances were poor to other stellar JHE performances.

Second... the sound is bootleg quality, even when they used the newest tools to clean the sound.

 

see post 117!

especially as there has been nothing announced to buy!!!!

 

Makes no sense. We already know that it sounds fabulous as the music has been out for decades. First on Ember Records as Experience and More Experience, then on Hendrix In The West, then on in the purple box. Even the copies of the tapes that have circulated on Charly, Purple Haze Records and others have sounded very good.

 

I agree. I'll stick to my original Curtis Knight bootlegs. They represent the REAL Jimi Hendrix.

 

But wouldn't that mean that in order to protect full royalties for both audio and video that the entire audio and video would need to be presented? I can't keep a copyright just from a piece of a song, even if that piece is the whole recording except for the the last 30 seconds. In other words, a copyright is based upon the entire work. If this film of theirs is presented as the entire work, fine, but they are leaving much on the table if it's not, including the 03-18-69 show. Doesn't Gold & Goldstein own that one, as well...at least the video portion?