Jimi Hendrix
Live At Woodstock

Have you ever listened to Jimi Hendrix?

Do you know who Jimi Hendrix was?

And now answer this, have you ever found a Picasso painting in the toilet of a disco-pub?!

Of course, you might think what does this question have to do with the previous ones? Well, it has a lot to do, I'm sick and tired of seeing Picasso imitations, passed off as originals, in the toilet of any bar.

My misanthropy is now at its limit, already spoiled by a mix of alienation, pride, and anger, the latter I might better define as empathy or passion, much more suitable to what I feel for what is considered the art par excellence, the genesis of human perceptions “…that combination of sounds which, according to certain physical laws and formal conventions, express and evoke a physical and emotional stimulus through the auditory apparatus……through that perception and emotional and auditory experience willed by the artist”, namely Music.

The term music did not refer to a particular art, but rather all the arts of the Muses - in the Greek and Roman mythological framework - and referred to something "perfect" and "beautiful"; however, this should be told to the masses that so represent our society stereotyped by a pornography now become amoral, imposed by the Media; it's customary to think that what we drink, eat, listen to, and watch flows within tracks that delimit who we “must” be.

It seems then a paradox, to think that you might spend hours and hours looking at a Picasso painting and not understand a damn thing about life, at least for a neophyte in the field, when all you would need is to learn to listen to something by Hendrix, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, Beethoven, Brian Wilson, Battisti, and others, and start having a more complete picture of where you are and who you are; like a slogan, “music makes you smarter, so drink music instead of drinking the B…… of the Media!”

Music more than a simple prayer to reach God, and know its light, for something "perfect" and "beautiful", to be reborn in the sounds of someone I consider not just a musician, but a researcher and experimenter of sounds, in the full upheaval and deconstruction of the pentatonic "double-stop" scale of Chuck Berry, in an unprecedented fusion of blues, rhythm and blues, acid rock, psychedelia and funky and in that spasmodic, delirious, and visionary need to extract new sounds from his Fender Stratocaster in the search for the impossible and perfection… in the pure madness and genius of Hendrix.

The endless jam sessions dictated by that aggressive verve and by that furious guitar attitude that our "axe man" carried forward to the utmost, well supported by the new band, not flattered by having in front of them the highest expression of what music represents.

An extraordinary, noteworthy Mitch Mitchell, in full feeling of that sound, now dictated only by an iconoclastic wandering instinct without a goal, in the full delirium and in that endless and never predictable genius; all wrapped in a catharsis of typically psychedelic sounds, contributing and creating what today is the myth, the icon.

An sweep-picking extremely clean, aggressive, sharp and acidic cleverly combined with that warm and full sound, of typical blues extraction contributed to taming and "forcing" that damned Stratocaster into the result of an absolutely personal, distorted, dense sound, never too thin and metallic but full-bodied and still defined and never muddy.

I will not dwell on what those 3 days in Woodstock were for music or the delicate and intense period or the beauty of those years, perhaps the only ones in which changes were "really" possible, in the full awareness and civic consciousness of "each" of us, in which we knew how to "roll up" our sleeves and knew the essence of life and its real importance, unlike today.

I will not dare conjectures about the historic performance regarding the splendid, irreverent, and visionary guitar transfiguration on the theme of The Star-Spangled Banner, anthem of the United States of America, I will enjoy that splendid interpretation introduced by a relentless Voodoo Child (Slight Return) in which Hendrix drove himself first, two hundred thousand people into delirium in all his fervor and in all his wildness, engraving that moment in the musical collective imagination as a turning point in rock history.

The incredible amount of unpublished and alternative material recorded by Hendrix in his so brief activity is attributed precisely to that continuous making, unmaking, trying and retrying in search of the "beautiful" and "perfect"…… music.

In the last part of the setlist, as seen in the dvd, namely with the encore of “Hey Joe”, where the audience leaving slowly and exhausted, abandoning the farm on which the event was held, seems to wake up from that experience and journey (Editor's note: hoping they didn't take too much LSD), so strangely Woodstock and Hendrix's performance, regain that reality forgotten for 3 days, the sense of normalcy, of the everyday, all made so real through the use of the camera with interspersed scenes and unstable images.

No mother ever loved that child who first picked up a guitar at only 9 years old, no father ever accompanied him to school, no brother ever played with him, simply because Jimi Hendrix was never born, never died, never existed, he was a flash in our consciousness, he was that constant, like in a "Fibonacci sequence", in the infinite temporal space to restore order to things in his madness, in his genius…and in his perfection, even just for a moment.

Quoting the beautiful words of another external review to Debaser: “…They did not understand him the musicians who accompanied him, the public did not understand him, neither the present nor the absent. The Woodstock concert, just because it is not the best performance of Jimi Hendrix, brings us, therefore, today more than ever to think that that man, often referred to over the decades as an alien for lack of another adjective, was indeed an alien…...”

No glamour, no hysteria it's just Jimi Hendrix.-