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Hendrix

daytona600

Registered User
Monday, October 21, 2019

AFTER MORE THAN 50 YEARS THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE RETURNS TO THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL FOR A CINEMATIC WORLD PREMIERE
One of the greatest and most anticipated, unseen treasures in musical history will finally be revealed next month in London. The Jimi Hendrix Experience: The Royal Albert Hall, a feature-length film that documents the last European performance of the original line up of the Jimi Hendrix Experience will be screened to the public for the very first time since it was shot 50 years ago at the very location where it was primarily filmed: London’s historic Royal Albert Hall. The surprise announcement came from Experience Hendrix, L.L.C. and The Last Experience,
Experience Hendrix, headed by Janie Hendrix, is the family owned company that administers the rights to recordings, performances and publishing associated with the late superstar. The Last Experience, Inc. is the production company, led by Jerry Goldstein, that originally partnered with Hendrix and documented the legendary performance on February 24, 1969.

 
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.
 
Is it just the Hendrix performance on that film or are any of the support acts included: Fat Mattress, Van Der Graaf Generator, and Soft Machine?
 
Amplifiers were much lower powered back then and musicians were only just moving from individual amplification on stage. The bad sound was probably due to an early PA cranked up into clippng
 


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