| J-Card Comment | 1. introduction
2. Who Knows
3. Earth Blues
4. Buddy's Apology
From Chris Dixon's 30th Anniversary Series ? C S Dixon:
January 28, 2000, marks 30 years since the Band of Gypsys' final public
appearance at Madison Square Garden in NYC. The show was an antiwar benefit
billed as 'The Winter Festival For Peace' and also featured Peter Paul & Mary,
Blood Sweat & Tears, Richie Havens, Judy Collins, Dave Brubeck and others.
The BoG set turned out to be a very brief performance of 2 songs as Jimi
was apparently too stoned and/or ill, most likely tripping in combination
with other things, to continue playing by the time the (typical for the times)
drastically late-running show got them onstage somewhere around 3 am.
Theories have abounded ever since about Jimi's condition this night,
i.e. whether he was dosed by choice, by a well meaning hanger-on,
or by a manager bent on breaking up BoG. The first is contradicted by the
fact that Jimi usually knew how to craft his buzz, as it were,
and the latter is contradicted by the fact that Mike Jeffrey had gone
to some expense to film the performance and would seem unlikely to sabotage it.
Could've simply been a combination of bad timing of witting and/or
unwitting ingestions, but ultimately I've no desire to pick through
the extra-musical aspects of the night so let's look at the show.
I've only got the audience recording for this show (a soundboard is said to exist)
and it's very good for an audience tape, given the large hall
and vintage production values (i.e. sound systems and tape recorders).
Not exactly hi-fi but well balanced and quite listenable.
(Setlist): Who Knows; Earth Blues
The band is introduced by Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul & Mary,
one of the event's organizers. Jimi starts by saying "Anyone want any
flowers (maybe a stage decoration)?" then gives his standard rap about
forgetting all that came before and building a little world in the here and now.
Jimi introduces Billy and Buddy on their respective instruments and himself
as "...(MAD Magazine figure) Alfred E. Newman on page 17...". Jimi's offhand
humor usually a good sign but, possibly bugged by a shouted request and/or
a restless audience, he takes an uncharacteristically dark turn on
a longtime joke to refer to a "Foxy Lady over there with the yellow underwear...
stained and dirty with blood". A warning of things to come....
The riff for 'Who Knows' starts a little slow put it picks up as Buddy
enters (probably a good thing if he rushes the beat this night!).
WK never got the same lyrics twice, and on this night Jimi throws in
some references to the "..war is over..in your heart...", reflecting
the antiwar theme of the concert. We get a first solo at 1:40.
Like most of the solos this night, there's some good playing but Jimi
seems to take a little longer than usual between phrases,
as if struggling to gather his thoughts or stay connected,
and jumps abruptly between ideas and/or sounds at times.
At 3:00 he switches to some muted percussive strums followed by some
lighter touch playing then improvises another vocal verse,
at one point using some words familiar from the song 'Honeybed'
which he'd explored with BoG the previous month ("Do I laugh, do I cry,
do I live, do I die..."). At 4:30 he slips into some nice sliding octaves,
then switches to some wah work before trailing off around 6:45.
Buddy fills in with some scatting, then Jimi comes back more aggressively
with the Octavio, hitting some nice licks and building some momentum
but again trailing off, this time to end the song. This is the last
known time Jimi ever plays 'Who Knows'.
The audience, somewhat predictably, shouts out requests for old Experience songs.
Jimi briefly plays the 'Foxy Lady' riff as if to taunt them,
then starts 'Earth Blues'. This is the last known in-concert performance
of EB, though it does get a workout with Mitch and Billy at the Berkeley
soundcheck the following May (work on a studio version would continue, too).
Jimi misses the second chord of the opening but the song settles into
it's groove fairly well. The first verse and chorus go fine,
with Buddy and Billy providing support vocals on the latter,
but Jimi starts forgetting words in the second verse, stretching it out
so they lose their place and do the chorus a few bars late, sans vocals.
They do the bridge per usual and Jimi takes a solo starting at 2:15.
The solo goes pretty well even if it does lack the organic flow of
ideas that marked his explorations of EB at the Fillmore shows (the
flow he almost always exhibited, for that matter...).
At 4:30 he returns to the vocals, again improvising words and extending
the verse, then does not sing at all on the chorus and bridge that
follow (though Billy and Buddy do the backing vocal parts as before).
At 5:50 he tries some longer flowing single string lines which works
well but, again, is brief. There's one last flash of brilliance in a
nice arpeggiated and embellished chord at 6:50 but it turns out to be
the end of the song, Jimi stopping with the cryptic announcement "That's
what happens when earth fucks with space...never forget that".
Buddy and Billy continue the riff briefly but then stop,
and most accounts have Jimi sitting down onstage with his head in his hands.
A few random guitar strums are heard as Buddy apologizes to the crowd,
telling them to give them a minute to get it together, but it's over.
Jimi is said to have been helped from the stage and some accounts have
him falling off of it, though unhurt. Michael Jeffreys fires Buddy
after the show, maybe or maybe not at Jimi's direction but in any case
this stands as the Band of Gypsys anticlimactic final performance.
Only one other show, Arhus 9/70, would be cut this short because
of Jimi's condition. Kind of strange that some of Jimi's finest
moments (the New Years Fillmore shows) should be so directly followed by
what was possibly the nadir of his career, but maybe it shouldn't be
a surprise given the compressed timeline of Jimi's brightly burning time with us.
Onward and decidedly upward...
-Chris
|
