Beauty

Jagger took off his shirt off and walked around; Albert [Mayles] followed him, filming. Mick Taylor and I sat on a bench with Hendrix, who seemed subdued but pleasant. I told him about seeing Little Richard, and he said, smiling as if it cheered him up to think about it, that once when he was with Richard, he and the bass player bought ruffled shirts to wear onstage, and Richard made them change: "I am the beauty! Nobody spose to wear ruffles but Richard!"
-- from Stanley Booth's The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

He had watched me work and just loved the way I wore these headbands around my hair and how wild I dressed....He began to dress like me and even grew a little moustache like mine.
-- Little Richard to his biographer Charles White

Here's The Georgia Peach raving about Jimi. You ain't gonna believe your eyes or ears:


Told you so. Now here's Richard in 1973 playing a wicked version of "Lucille" and flashing some threads which bear a striking resemblance to Jimi's, headband and all.


And then we have Jimi in 1967 at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival, his real coming out party in the States, rocking the ruffles Little Richard had denied him.

this, that, the other

Sitting in Boston, Big Sur dreamin'

Ed tells me the Echo & the Bunnymen tour in the USofA has been halted by those fun loving guys and gals in the IRS. And, yep, the Bunnymen's website confirms it. Spare us the cutter!
Echo and the Bunnymen - The Cutter [buy]

Wilco has a loft. How many guitars do these fellows have?
Image from LoftLifeMagazine

GarageHangover has some wonderful photos of Hendrix, Soft Machine, and The Who.

If you ain't, you should be listening to a Country Song of the Day.

This is a tough month for Sean, so this one's for him...


And, for good measure, the theme song from Fellini's Amarcord.

Nino Rota - Amarcord

If you've got eyes and ears, you wanna let them take a stroll with this film.

Loons at night in Lac Saint Paul, Quebec, Canada

fly through the night

The spotlighted show over at the Dead archive is a Fillmore East concert from September 19th, 1970 -- the day after Hendrix died. It was only the day after Hendrix passed away that the band got the terrible news. They dedicated that night’s set to Jimi. Besides being capped by a "Lovelight" with Pigpen giving everyone some frank and important instructions, there is the matter of the Dark Star. With this version they certainly did justice to Jimi. A glowing Star all the way through, with a let-the-sunshine-in groove to ride-out the song, the utterly transfixing sonic landscape -- with a brilliant use of silence -- starting around the 8 minute mark is to this fella’s ears one of the Dead's most sublime moments.


(The second song is Dark Star.)

In his history of the band, Dennis McNally notes that:

Hendrix’s loss was all the more poignant because they had never jammed with him; on the one occasion that he’d come to a show, ax in hand, the Dead had gotten so high on LSD and so deep in their music that when Mickey Hart finally remembered to signal for him to join them, it was hours later and he’d departed.

That’s the Good Ol’ Grateful Dead, folks. But while they might have missed him that particular day, on the 19th Hendrix was playing in the band.

Horribly, less than a month later, Janis would fly away. On the day Jerry died (14 years ago today), McNally was on NPR talking about Garcia. The song he chose to play was this jazzy accoustic version of “Bird Song” -- a Robert Hunter tune dedicated to Joplin -- from the band’s 1981 album Reckoning. What a sad day that was.

If you hear that same sweet song again, will you know why?
Anyone who sings a tune so sweet is passin' by,
Laugh in the sunshine, sing, cry in the dark, fly through the night.

Grateful Dead - Bird Song [buy]