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Jimi Hendrix: 'You never told me he was that good' | Music | The Observer
The 'extraordinary' Jimi Hendrix with the Experience at Olympia, London, on 22 December 1967. Photograph: Ray Stevenson/Rex Features
On the morning of 21 September 1966, a Pan Am airliner from New York landed at Heathrow, carrying among its passengers a black American musician from a poor home. Barely known in his own country and a complete stranger to England, he had just flown first class for the first time in his life. His name was James Marshall Hendrix.
On 18 September 1970, four years later, I picked up a copy of London's Evening Standard on my way home from school, something I never usually did. There was a story of extreme urgency on the front page and a picture of Hendrix playing at a concert – still ringing in my ears – at the Isle of Wight festival, only 18 days earlier. The text reported how Hendrix had died that morning in a hotel in the street, Lansdowne Crescent in Notting Hill, in which I had been born, and a block away from where I now lived.
During those three years and 362 days living in London, Hendrix had conjured – with his vision and sense of sound, his personality and genius – the most extraordinary guitar music ever played, the most remarkable sound-scape ever created; of that there is little argument. Opinion varies only over the effect his music has on people: elation, fear, sexual stimulation, sublimation, disgust – all or none of these – but always drop-jawed amazement.
The 40th anniversary of Hendrix's death next month will be marked by the opening of an exhibition of curios and memorabilia at the only place he ever called home – a flat diagonally above that once occupied by the composer George Frideric Handel, on Brook Street in central London, in the double building now known as Handel House. The flat will be opened to the public for 12 days in September and there is talk about plans for a joint museum, adding Hendrix's presence to that already established in the museum devoted to Handel. Involved in the discussions is the woman with whom Hendrix furnished the top flat of 23 Brook St, and with whom he lived: the only woman he ever really loved, Kathy Etchingham.
Woodstock: The 1969 Music and Art Fair
The Woodstock festival consisted of more than three days of free concerting in a natural amphitheater on a 600-acre farm in Bethel, New York. The event officially kicked off just after 5:00 P.M. on the night of August 15 with Richie Havens performing "Freedom," and it continued until about 8:30 A.M. on the morning of the 18th, when Jimi Hendrix ended the festivities with the now-immortalized (and improvised) version of The Star-Spangled Banner. A concert day always consisted of a late night that sometimes stretched into an early morning of continuous concerting. It rained some over the weekend, leaving the area a mud-soaked mess with a complete lack of facilities. Food was also scarce at the festival, because planners had only anticipated a crowd of 200,000 people to show up. This made for some pretty poor concerting conditions, and the "city" had to be saved by National Guard helicopter flights of food and medical supplies. Amazingly, no major unrest or violence was recorded at the event.
If you poison us, do we not sing?
Sara Halevi, the creative director of Way Off Productions, is excited. Her theater company is starting out with a bang, putting together the world premiere of Arsenic and Old Lace as a musical. Joseph Kesselring’s classic black comedy has been performed countless times around the world since its inception in the early 1930s and was made into a movie in 1944. But Way Off Productions’s musical adaptation of the play provides a unique twist to the already twisted tale of the Brewsters. “Every time a play is produced, every actor provides a fresh interpretation of the character,” says Halevi. “We have our own twists.”
Set in Brooklyn in the 1920s, the story opens with two seemingly harmless elderly sisters, Abby and Martha Brewster, discussing their latest “good deed.” “The two sisters poison old men who are lonely and don’t have families,” explains Halevi. “They put arsenic and cyanide in elderberry wine and kill off these lonely old men as an act of charity and bury them in their basement.”
