In 1967, no one in Western Civilization looked or sounded as unique as Jimi Hendrix. From a distance, it looks like the ultimate rags to riches story, a meteor streaking across the sky. In reality, it was a toxic combination of deliberate mismanagement and self-destructive behavior. Jimi's gifts were mammoth; the only guitarist to completely change the sound of the instrument. from the first note of his first album, the sound of rock music was never the same again.
Chas Chandler brought Hendrix to Britain but Mike Jeffery became Hendrix's manager. It was a deal with the devil. Chas knew Jeffery was a crook but had the resources to make Hendrix a star. He did, but it was all talent and no management. Jeffery cooked up the stupid idea of supporting the Monkees, aborted after a handful of shows. Rumors of bad drugs and arranged kidnapping surround Jeffery, who liked to keep a very low profile.
Hendrix ran hot or cold; when he was on, he was a world beater. Fortunately, that side of Jimi showed up at Monterey and Woodstock. There was a 1968 short film, not quite a half hour, called 'Experience', amateurish, barely released for decades. Footage from the Miami Pop Festival the same year sat undeveloped for longer. In February 1969, there was a complete concert professionally filmed at the Royal Albert Hall that has yet to see the light of day.
Joe Boyd, in his excellent book 'White Bicycle', said that Jeffery would let anybody film Jimi, but he'd never sign a release form. Boyd should know; he did the excellent footage of Hendrix playing a 12 string acoustic. Things were so bad between the Royal Albert Hall producers and Jeffery that the Hendrix Estate still can't touch any of it. The bootleg that I've seen shows terrible editing, the place over lit. The actual performance, at least up to the last fifteen minutes, is excellent.
The Atlanta Pop Festival footage from 1970 sat around for twenty years before even being developed. Randall's Island in New York City and the 1970 Isle of Wight Festivals devolved into chaos, leftist radicals demanding the money, free performances. No wonder corporations wound up taking over the music business. When Hendrix died, there was footage scattered all over the world in limbo.
A typical Mike Jeffery production was 'Rainbow Bridge', twenty minutes of Jimi surrounded by 90 minutes of rambling New Age inanity. Most of the cameramen at the concert were too stones on Maui Wowie, shooting space ships that never showed up on the processed film. Mitch Mitchell reportedly had to overdub his drums; they were missing original master tapes. Both the audio and video has been noticeably absent on any posthumous Hendrix release.
Two projects were worthy of his talents, however. 'Jimi Plays Berkeley' was funded by arts grants, much to the disgust of the foundation. While incomplete, the portions shown of two concerts are outstanding, worth wading through the hippie dribble. 'Jimi Hendrix', produced by Joe Boyd in 1973 as a tribute, still remains the most clear eyed look at a troubled genius, prone to excess. It was the first unveiling of any Isle of Wight Footage from 1970; it would be twenty years before any other appeared in any form. Since the Hendrix Estate took over, they have tried to scrub his image clean. A huge mistake.
The Doors should have been a natural for cinema. Two of the members graduated from UCLA Film School, for God's sake, Ray Manzerak with a Graduate degree. They did make a series of short music videos, 'Break On through', 'The Unknown Soldier'. When it came to longer pieces, it was a disaster. Never hire your best friends when you need something done.
By 1968, the Doors had a film office, perhaps the only group outside the Beatles to have one. Electra Records treated the band fairly; no other band of that era had such a profitable contract. A lot of footage was captured, but they didn't bother with synced sound, making most of it marginally usable. The Hollywood Bowl concert was filmed that summer, but Jim Morrison, high on acid, his girlfriend making out with Mick Jagger in the front row, was nearly catatonic. The group sounded good, but under the bright lights, he looked flat. Maybe he was trying to hit his mark too diligently.
Much better was the footage captured from the Doors' only European tour. both in Britain and in Denmark. These is the only real images of a crazed Morrison provoking the audience, performing to his own poetry. Once the Miami fiasco occurred, Jim used the big hole created by all the canceled concerts to do his own vanity project, 'HWY'. He insisted that it wasn't a Doors project; the band haven't been able to use the footage in any video product to this day.
It is important to note that both 'Feat of Friends' and HWY' were finished and shown at film festivals before Morrison retired to Paris. All contractual obligations had been fulfilled; a six record deal, two movies, even a bonus live album., Unlike Hendrix, there is a smooth symmetry to the Doors career trajectory, no loose ends, no scattered fragments to be collected after death. Love him or hate him, Jim Morrison delivered exactly what he promised before leaving this mortal coil.
If I were to pick a group from the 1960s that could not help but be a huge hit in film, it would have been the Who. Four strong individuals, with two managers from cinema, both of whom worked as assistant producers. Yet the Who nearly didn't make it to the end of the decade, despite being discovered by Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert to be the group for a 'Hard Day's Night' style movie . At one point, they even did test shorts, trying to sign up as Britain's answer to the Monkees.
'Tommy' changed all that, but it didn't simplify thing. The Who's 1969 stage performance was filmed by Lambert and Stamp at the London Coliseum in the most incompetent way, bad lighting and cameras running out of film at the worse possible moments, rendering it unusable. Performances at Woodstock and the Isle of Wight put the band in the elite status, contender for Best Live Band ever. They even flogged 'Tommy' around Europe in America performed in actual opera house. They were a bona fide cultural phenomenon.
Lambert in particular wanted to produce a 'Tommy' film, trying to get it into production as early as 1970. The entire 'Lifehouse' fiasco was a misunderstanding between Pete Townshend, thinking his management wanted to do his new concept piece. and Lambert, who was trying to leverage a film of the last concept album. By the time the film was made in 1974, English visionary madman Ken Russell directing, Lambert wasn't even in the equation anymore.
A perfect representation of the excesses of the mid 1970s, 'Tommy' is a masterpiece of bad taste. Ken Russel had been a resident BBC director, specializing in biographies of classical composers, also doing an old-fashioned musical, 'The Boy Friend'. Anyone seeing either 'The Devils' from 1971 or 'Mahler' from 1973 knew it was going to be a wild ride. He was hired for his vision, and he delivered in spades.
The Who delivered as well, Roger Daltrey displaying leading man charisma, Keith Moon comic potential. Townshend spent a year on the score, every sound effect achieved with synthesizers, mixed in quadrophonic splendor. A huge hit, it inspired such dreck as 'St. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band'. There was even a sequel of sorts, 'Lisztomania', even more extreme. The lunatics were in charge of the asylum, or so it seemed.
Flush with cash after shedding Lambert and Stamp's erratic management. the Who bought a film studio at a bargain price in 1977. An American fan came up with idea of a clip movie, telling the story of the group through interviews and performances. 'The Kids Are Alright' was the result, my favorite rock movie of all time, anarchic, hysterically funny. Unfortunately, Keith Moon died soon after. With a huge financial burden on their shoulders, instead of folding the group, the Who found another drummer and began all over.
Their movie venture started successfully, not only with 'The Kids Are Alright'. but also 'Quadrophenia', based on Townshend's 1973 concept album. Very British, self referential, it brilliantly captures both the mood and the music of the times, both 1964 and 1979. Going so far as to recreate riots between Mods and Rockers in seaside resorts, it feels real. While not featuring the Who except in music, it boosted their career even higher.
Daltrey tried to continue his career as an actor, especially with 1980's 'McVicar', a grimy story of the most wanted man in Britain. In the right part he was good, better than Mick Jagger, able to lose his own personality, but music was his first love. He still shows up in bits parts, and the Who's movie company dissolved around the same time as they did, around 1982. They managed to make a dent in world cinema; sustaining momentum was another thing.
Led Zeppelin took over as the Biggest Band in the World in 1970s. They were heavier; so was their management, lead by the mammoth Peter Grant, known for physically abusing anyone who dared cross him. You didn't get near the group without his authorization, a complete turn around from the media hungry groups of the 1960s, all desperate for exposure. It was all about controlling access, creating demand by denying supply.
Grant was no dummy, having years of experience with the Jeff Beck Group and the Yardbirds. Zeppelin were something else, a world-wide phenomenon. He filmed them on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in early 1970, getting better results than Lambert and Stamp, good footage, marred only by the cameras running short of stock towards the end. Unreleased but bootlegged, he next set about doing a proper concert film. Captured during 1973's Madison Square Garden run, it was one big headache.
First, the band secretly spent months recreating the atmosphere on stage for all the close ups that were missing, miming to their own live playback. Then someone got the brilliant idea to supplement the visuals with fantasy sequences. The results were largely embarrassing, especially Jimmy Page's pseudo-mystical bullshit. Never mind; the results made Zeppelin sized profits no matter what the quality.
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