MUSIC THAT CHANGED LIVES: Jimi Hendrix Live at the Filmore
From my liner notes the Hendrix box set released last summer
By Nelson George
June 2019
One of my best friends growing up in Brooklyn was an equally skinny, just as nerdy kid named Jimmy Barr. In size and interests we were well matched. We liked comic books, were enthusiastic but awkward athletes and acted out imaginary space adventures though we resided in one of America’s most notorious ghettos. Brownsville is located at the far east end of Brooklyn. We were far enough away from the high rises of Manhattan that any trip into it was called “going into the city” as if we were embarking a long, perilious trek.
The fall and winter of 1969 was a uniquely fun to be a sports fan in the Big Apple. The amazing Mets won the World Series over the powerful Baltimore Orioles. The Jets were heading to an historic match up against the against another high touted Baltimore team, the Colts, in Super Bowl III. The Knicks were filling up Madison Square Garden with a team oriented brand of basketball that would eventually bring them their first championship in spring 1970. Every cool kid in the city with style (and who could fight) were rocking Clyde’s, Puma sneakers known by the nickname of the Knicks’ ultra smooth guard Walt Frazier. Frazier was quickly becoming synonymous with urban cool. Big hats, side burns, long coats and a laid back demeanor that never betrayed discomfort or frustration. Jimmy and I, like out friends, aspired to that style even if we werem’t equipped physically or psychologically to pull it off.
In the streets of Brownsville the radio was always on and music flowed out of tenement windows, passing cars, and the transitor radios of people carrying them in their hands. Even as winter arrived in late ’69 music slid from under metal public housing doors when I went out to put garbage in the incinerator at night. Because Brownsville was a black and Puerto Rican neighborhood that music was primarly soul and salsa. James Brown and Johnny Pacheco, Aretha Franklin and Cecila Cruz, Marvin Gaye and Hector Lavoe were among the stars who ruled the streets of the ‘Ville. Guitars were rhythm instruments. Screaming lead guitar was, in the world Jimmy and I grew up in, for white boys with long hair, weird band names and was played on stations we skipped past on the dial.
On the nights Jimi Hendrix recorded band of Gypsies in Manhattan’s East Village Jimmy and I might as well have been on the other side of the Moon. We knew there was this black guy with crazy clothes who’d been written up in the newspapers, but we had no sonic reference for him or why he was importance. But that would change in a few months. That summer of ’70 a funny thing happened to Jimmy and me – adolescence kicked in and the axis of our taste began to shift. We went from followers of neighborhood convention to beginning the process of self-definition that becoming a teenager begins.
To his credit Jimmy was not afraid to lead the way. One day that spring some friends and I went over to the Barr family apartment and entered his room. Hung over his bed was a huge poster of Jimi Hendrix. The guitarist stood against a blue sky while shredding on his white Strat, mouth open, head to the sky. “WTF!” was our collective reaction. In our world of musical heroes the flashy, druggy Sylverster Stewart and Sly & the Family Stone was as far out as we went. The young singers of the Jackson Five were more our speed. But Hendrix was from another planet. What we didn’t understand (and maybe Jimmy didn’t fully either) was that by embracing Hendrix he was letting everyone know he wasn’t gonna be constrained by the values of his ‘hood.
Within the next year my family moved from Brownsville to an integrated area called Spring Creek. It was there I had my first white neighbors and non-school white friends. Feeling freed up to experience a wider range of music I added New York’s FM rock stations, WNEW-FM and WPLJ, to my rotation. At the record stores I increasingly frequented I expanded my album purchases to include jazz, blues and rock. I began buying books on music history. It was shortly after I smoked hash at a new neighbor’s house while listening to Led Zepplin’s “Kasmir” on his quad sound system that I finally dived into the Band of Gypsys.
My first reaction was that the album had a groove. Locked down by Buddy Miles on drums and Army pal Billy Cox on bass, the music at these shows disdained the skittish propulsion and jittery rhythms of his work with the Experience band. The sound generated by this short-lived rhythm section are rooted to the ground with a beefy low end that was a throwback to Hendrix’s years as a sideman from Wilson Picket and the Isley Brothers.
But Hendrix, clearly no longer a sideman, had evolved into a musical and spiritual force, one who’d grown tired of splattering colors all over the canvas and was focused on more restrained, but still gorgeous brush strokes. Funk, which was being invented by James Brown’s band in this same period, is a child of the blues, the same music that nurtured young Hendrix. With this band Hendrix creates his own brand of funk, one that penetrates the soul even as it delights the ears. There are several generations of axe men for whom Band of Gypsys provided a way of hearing low end oriented music over which a guitar could shred or groove or dance gracefully between the two extremes.
I wasn’t yet a music critic when I first studied Band of Gypsys, but I was on my way to being one and this album provided me a guide to going forward and backward. It led me back to the deep blues, through B.B. and Albert King and, ultimately, Son House and Robert Johnson. It led me to Hendrix’s peers, to Eric Clapton and Pete Townsend. It led me to his immediate children like Ernie Isley and Michael ‘Maggot Brain’ Hampton, and then the way forward to his great-grandchildren like Gary Clark Jr. Band of Gypsys was my gate drug for many forms of musical addiction.
For my childhood friend Jimmy Band of Gypsys in particular, and Hendrix in general, didn’t simply change his way of hearing – it changed his way of life. Listening to Hendrix Jimmy didn’t just hear chords and notes. He heard the sound of liberation. Jimmy adopted Hendrix’s white bandana. He started wearing tie die colors in a ‘hood where color coordination was king. Hendrix said to Jimmy you could step out of tradition and reinvent yourself in a new image. Hendrix changed his ears, then his clothes and then his soul. One day Jimmy announced that he was gay. It distressed all his old Brownsville friends, but Jimmy had given up on conformity. Eventually he’d leave Brownsville and hang in East Village the streets near the Fillmore East. He didn’t need that poster of Hendrix anymore because he was living the freedom it embodied. I don’t know if Band of Gypsys is Hendrix’s most innovative recording. I do know something more important than that. It changed lives.