Jimi Hendrix: Live at Monterey DVD Review

By: Rick Landers

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Experience Hendrix has released a thoroughly captivating DVD, Jimi Hendrix: Live at Monterey that takes us back to 1967 during the Summer of Love when nearly 200,000 concert goers converged on the California seaside hamlet of Monterey. The three-day rock concert was the first of its kind and was headlined by such ‘60s music giants as the Mamas and the Papas, the Who, Simon and Garfunkel, Otis Redding, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead and a trio that cracked the musical landscape wide open, the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Hendrix showed up at Monterey as a virtual unknown. He’d left the States for England a year earlier at the behest of producer and ex-Animals bassist Chas Chandler, who was looking for an American artist to cover the song “Hey Joe.” While visiting the States, Chandler found out about Hendrix and invited him to join him in the U.K. where Jimi was embraced by the young lions of British rock, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

The film opens with vintage Southern California footage during the era when flower power blossomed and a generation of youth embraced the notion that love could change the world. Scott Mckenzie’s hit “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” plays out to take us back to Haight-Ashbury and the day John Phillips, the leader of the Mamas and the Papas, came up with the epiphany for one of the first multi-day rock festivals.

It’s our good fortune that filming was allowed and given license to roll behind the scenes during work sessions when festival coordinators negotiated the logistics and the deal making that made things fall into place. We’re given some insights into the loose-knit business rules and politicking that was needed to pull the event together, as well as to gather local support that would accept a massive influx of hippies to invade the quaint village of Monterey.

Off stage clips of Janice Joplin, Brian Jones, Mickey Dolenz, Michelle Phillips, Mama Cass and Johnny Rivers often surprise us since they appear to have been able to blend in with the crowd either unnoticed or ignored.

Before Monterey Hendrix was virtually unknown, but rumors of the day told of a hot young American guitarist who was going to set the world ablaze. In one scene a British friend of Jimi, Pete Townshend, explains how he and Hendrix bantered over who was going to follow the other on stage, the Who or the Experience. Pete insisted that he wasn’t going to follow Hendrix, so Jimi smiled and let him know that if that was the case all bets were off and he was going to “pull out the stops.”

By all accounts the Who played an amazing set and the video shows a glimpse of the group kicking and smashing their instruments on a smoke filled stage. Later, Jimi can be seen in Townshend fashion slamming his Stratocaster against the stage floor in a fitful frenzy.

A highlight of Monterey shows Brian Jones, guitarist for the Rolling Stones, quietly introducing his friend before Hendrix opens with a bone crushing “Killing Floor” that launches Jimi’s takeover of America. Running full throttle Jimi, Noel and Mitch roll out future classics like “Hey Joe,” “Rock Me Baby,” “Purple Haze” and Jimi’s very cool cover of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Here we see Hendrix caressing erotic passages of “The Wind Cries Mary” and pummeling orgasmic convulsions out of “Purple Haze” and the Troggs’ “Wild Thing.”

Experience members Noel Redding (bass) and Mitch Mitchell (drums) revisit the day the power trio elevated rock to a new sonic art form. But it’s not simply the music that grabs the Monterey crowd. It’s Jimi’s languid hipness and cool showmanship that yanks the crowd into his world. Even today, forty years later, the most profound moment of the festival is Jimi on his knees washing down his Stratocaster with lighter fluid and torching it as a personal sacrifice, a love ritual.

Jimi Hendrix: Live at Monterey DVD is visually and aurally stunning. The film captures a moment in time when the tectonic plates of the music world lunged forward with Hendrix redefining the very meaning of the word “guitar” by making his axe whine, scream, ache, moan, groan and ultimately burn. Few moments in rock history have redirected the course of rock history.

Hendrix at Monterey falls within the realm of rock upheavals like Elvis, the Beatles invasion of America and Dylan going electric. Live at Monterey invites us all back to amplify and memorialize the centerpiece of the Summer of Love, Jimi Hendrix.