JIMI HENDRIX :BLUES (1994 MCA Records) vs. PAUL ALLEN'S "BLUES" (2003 PBS TV)

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Paul Allen = RED / Michael Fairchild = BLUE
HEAR MY TRAIN

PBS 2003: Hear My Train played on acoustic guitar opens the Hendrix segment.

[NOTE: These same two recordings are the ones I choose to open and close the Hendrix :Blues CD.]

RP 1999: I did receive a "programming consultant" credit for my work on the Jimi Hendrix :Blues CD, released by MCA in 1994. In addition to writing the critically acclaimed 28-page booklet included with that 1994 CD, I also selected several of the songs to be included (like the acoustic version of Hear My Train A'Comin' that opens the CD, and the electric version at the end). I also suggested the order for the tracks. :Blues reached the Top-10 on Billboard charts in May 1994, making it the third highest charting Hendrix release since 1971.

MCA 1994: Widely considered to be the most perfectly formed and satisfying of all Hendrix blues performances. Hear My Train A Comin' follows an ugly-ducking-to-peacock transformation familiar from Jimi's Voodoo Child cycle, but with different symbols. Hendrix recognized this "transformation" connection between the two songs and commented about it on stage…


INFLUENCES

PBS 2003: Where Jimi's musical legacy came in was listening to his father's records, his father was into listening to the blues and a lot of old time jazz and I think that's where Jimi learned to play, by listening to his dad's records, until he could play that song on the record.

MCA 1994: [Jimi father] remembers, "I had listened to blues records ever since I was a kid. I had B.B. King and Muddy Waters records, they were 45s. Jimi used to listen to B.B. King and Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and some others. I had a lot of records and he used to be playing them all the time and he'd plunk the guitar along with them."


BLUE FLAMES

PBS 2003: He was having a real tough time, a real struggle making it, his name at that time was Jimmy James and the Flames, that was the group he had when he was discovered.

[NOTE: No it wasn't, the name of Jimi's band was Jimmy James & the BLUE Flames. We might say "minor error" but it comes from one of the people who was given my job after Paul Allen spent millions to remove me from the Hendrix company. He put a fool named Jane in the position I had and she delegated the "manager" job to a cousin of the Hendrix family, so she could say, "See, RELATIVES of Jimi are now running the company." Yes, and because of Mr. Allen's bogus lawsuit, they dumb down portrayls of Jimi to the delight of dominator media.]


ROOTS OF DELTA BLUES

PBS 2003: Jimi took blues from the mud of the Mississippi Delta to Venus.

MCA 1994: Hendrix plays Delta blues for sure - only the Delta may have been on Mars.

PBS 2003: You listen to it and you feel the mud and the blood of the Mississippi Delta, because this is the land where the blues was born…It's the roots that make the fruits.

WOODSTOCK CD 1994: The Evil Wind headed for the Mississippi Delta, racing towards the birthplace of the blues, aimed at the origins of rock 'n' roll. The roots of Woodstock were in Mississippi. As this weekend progressed, both roots and fruits of blues became covered in mud.

PBS 2003: Jimi was very rooted in the blues and R&B. The restrictions of R&B ultimately were the things and the restrictions around him in his life, the restrictions of being a black man in America - eventually he just burst out of all of those restrictions.

RP 1999: We struggled to free ourselves from war, heavy industry, pollution, class, race, sexual discrimination - and Hendrix was there creating the soundtrack…no sooner had musicians like Hendrix begun the sexual revolution than something horrible happened. Men in general discovered what women and homosexuals already knew. Blurring gender lines causes hysterical panic. More than anything else, the sexual revolution rather than any anti-Vietnam marches provoked the police.

PBS 2003: I heard him as a guy coming out of the blues, a really good blues player but taking it to another place. Similar to Charlie Parker or Lewis Armstrong or John Coltrane…He was mixing the old and the new. He was taking the blues sound of Muddy Waters and all the other old timers and he was taking that sound to another plateau.

MCA 1994: Jimi was making these extraordinary futuristic guitar sounds, but also you could hear almost the whole history of the blues in it. There was a connection between the blues history of the guitar and the way that Jimi was taking it into the future.


EXHAUST

PBS 2003: He just put the pyrotechnics into the guitar, into the blues, and nobody has come close and I don't think that you can really do more than Hendrix did, I don't think it's possible, I don't think there's more that you can do on the guitar than he did with the blues.

GANNETT NEWSPAPER FAIRCHILD INTERVIEW 1993: Hendrix is the furthest expansion of blues we have ever seen, I think it exhausted the blues' function.

DESTROY

PBS 2003: Ed Kramer, "Jimi came over to England…When Hendrix hit the stage playing in London, he destroyed everybody, I mean the Beatles and Stones, everybody who came to listen to him was freaked out."

Jimi & Eric Clapton

RP 1999: When Hendrix arrived in London to spearhead the 1966 British blues boom, he was performing for a hippie culture…"I had hooked up with Clapton, George Harrison, Lennon and McCartney for dinner," recalls Mike Nesmith of The Monkees, "and Lennon had a little transistor cassette player, and he said, 'you gotta hear this thing', and he played Hey Joe. Everybody sat around sort of reverentially listening to this Hey Joe. Of course it was so stunning to hear this particular record, because it completely and utterly altered the way we all thought about music. And to see these guys standing there with their jaws dropped was even more impressive."

[NOTE: Ed Kramer was not even there when Jimi debuted in London. Kramer didn't meet Jimi until five months later, after the first record by the Experience became a hit in February "1967." (sic) And how fitting for Kramer to describe Jimi's affect on the London musicians as "destroyed everybody" - this dominator is so concerned with destruction, he goes out of his way to persuade anyone who'll listen to ignore my insights about Hendrix, simply because he's too dumb to comprehend what I'm saying, and jealous that my input with the Hendrix legacy got the CDs back into the top of the charts and caught the interest of perceptive writers, something he can't do, because, other than his "destroy everybody" urges, he has nothing to say.]

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