|
Description:
THE MONKEES JIMI HENDRIX 1967 CONCERT POSTER NR Reproduction like new condition 14" by 22" poster printed on heavy cardboard stock
ink-screened reproduction. Show Press Hand Carved posters made in the
USA for more than 125 years, Showprints have been produced for Rock
& Roll's legends and for regional bands trying to get noticed.
Showprints are handcrafted with old fonts and made one at a time using
ancient printing teckniques. The hand set type and uneven registration
give these concert posters and authenticity that's hard to replicate
with today's modern technology. These Showprints were tacked to poles,
placed in the front windows of storefronts and were plastered on the
walls of neighborhood bars and restaurants........SAYS THE
MONKEES IN CONCERT...SPECIAL GUEST JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE JULY 8 1967
JACKSONVILLE COLISEUM FLORIDA...OPENING CONCERT U.S. SUMMER TOUR...One
of the more bizarre pairings in pop music history (perhaps surpassed
only by David Bowie's peforming a duet of "The Little Drummer Boy" with
Bing Crosby on the latter's "Merrie Olde Christmas Show" in 1977)
occurred in the summer of 1967, when guitar great Jimi Hendrix served as
one of the supporting acts on the Monkees' American tour. Yes, that
Jimi Hendrix. As late as mid-1967, Jimi Hendrix still wasn't a household
name in America. The Seattle-born guitarist was known to music's inner
world as a touring musician and session player, and he had developed a
strong following as a performer and a recording artist in England, but
stardom in America still eluded him. His electric and fiery performance
at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 (which he ended by lighting
his guitar on fire and holding it over his head) brought him a great
deal of notoreity, but he still lacked the chart hit (and its attendant
radio airplay and media exposure) necessary to make the breakthrough to
pop music's upper echelon. Into this breach stepped the most unlikely of
benefactors: the Monkees. A couple of members of the "pre-fab four"
were already familiar with Jimi Hendrix and his music. Micky Dolenz
later recalled: The first time I'd seen Hendrix was in New York at some
club in the Village. He was playing lead guitar for the John Hammond
band. I'd been invited down to hear "this guy play with his teeth." Sure
enough, there was this young Black guy who, besides being an
extraordinary guitar picker, would occasionally raise the instrument up
to his mouth and play it with his teeth. I was in London visiting John
Lennon, and I was having dinner with him, McCartney and Clapton. And
John was late. When he came in he said, "I'm sorry I'm late but I've got
something I want to play you guys." He had a handheld tape recorder and
he played "Hey Joe." Everybody's mouth just dropped open. He said,
"Isn't this wonderful?" So I made a mental note of Jimi Hendrix, because
Lennon had introduced me to his playing. When Dolenz and fellow Monkee
Peter Tork caught up with Hendrix again at the Monterey Pop Festival,
the idea of a Hendrix-Monkees tour was born: It just so happened that we
were due to begin our summer tour in a couple of weeks, and we still
needed another opening act. When I got back to L.A. I mentioned Hendrix
and his impressive theatrics to [our producers]. The Monkees was very
theatrical in my eyes and so was the Jimi Hendrix Experience. It would
make the perfect union. Jimi must have thought so too, because a few
weeks later he agreed to be the opening act for our upcoming summer
tour. What could have possessed the Monkees to make such an offer, or
Jimi Hendrix to accept it? After all, although the Monkees had moved
away from merely providing vocals for pre-recorded teenybopper pop songs
cranked out by professional songwriters to creating their own more
sophisticated and relevant music, their concert audience was still
largely composed of prepubescent white girls (and the mothers stuck with
the thankless task of chaperoning them). Hendrix's target audience, on
the other hand, was a bit more mature, more heavily male, and more
racially diverse -- a difference underscored by a comment Hendrix had
made about the Monkees to Melody Maker several months earlier: Oh God, I
hate them! Dishwater. I really hate somebody like that to make it so
big. You can't knock anybody for making it, but people like the Monkees?
All of this makes it sound as though Jimi Hendrix would have been the
last musician to agree to tour as a supporting act for the Monkees.
Nonetheless, Hendrix had pragmatic reasons for accepting an offer from
promoter Dick Clark to join The Sundowners and Australian singer Lynn
Randell on the Monkees tour: Hendrix and [his co-manager Chas] Chandler
had their own reasons for accepting the dates. They had achieved three
top ten hits in England, but they were yet to chart in America. The
scorching set at Monterey was a start, but it needed to be capitalized
upon immediately, and Dick Clark's offer of playing before hundreds of
thousands of record-buying American kids was hard to refuse. For their
part, the Monkees just wanted the opportunity to watch Hendrix up close.
To Monkees producer and songwriter Tommy Boyce, it was "A personal
trip. They wanted to watch Jimi Hendrix every night; they didn't care if
he didn't fit." As Mike Nesmith admitted: The Jimi Hendrix experience .
. . were the apotheosis of sixties psychedelic ribbon shirts and
tie-dye, they had pinwheels for eyes and their hair was out to here . . .
I thought, "Man, I gotta see this thing live." So that night, I stood
in front of the stage and listened to Hendrix at sound check. And I
thought, "Well, this guy's from Mars; he's from some other planet, but
whatever it is, thank heaven for this visitation." And I listened to him
play the sound checks and the concert. I thought, "This is some of the
best music I've heard in my life." Peter Tork was more candid, and more
on the mark: Nobody thought, "This is screaming,
scaring-the-balls-off-your-daddy music compared with the Monkees," you
know? It didn't cross anybody's mind that it wasn't gonna fly. And
there's poor Jimi, and the kids go, "We want the Monkees, we want the
Monkees." . . . [W]e went early to the show and listened to what this
man could do because he really was a world class musician. As everyone
should have expected, things went badly right from the start, as
precious few of the anxiously screaming Monkees fans cared to sit
through an act they could neither comprehend nor appreciate. Micky
Dolenz noted: Jimi would amble out onto the stage, fire up the amps, and
break into "Purple Haze," and the kids in the audience would instantly
drown him out with, "We want Daavy!" God, was it embarrassing. And Mike
Nesmith observed: Th[e] night he opened in front of us . . . he walked
into the beast. There were twenty thousand pink waving arms. He would
sing "Foxy" and they would shout, "Davy" -- "Foxy" -- "Davy . . ." Oh,
man, it was a seriously twisted moment. He lasted seven dates. To make a
bad situation even worse, Hendrix joined the tour in progress in
Jacksonville, Florida on 8 July 1967, just before the Monkees were
scheduled to play a couple of shows in North Carolina. One would have
been hard pressed to have found a part of America less likely to
appreciate what Micky Dolenz described as "this Black guy in a
psychedelic Day-Glo blouse, playing music from hell, holding his guitar
like he was making love to it, then lighting it on fire" and what Eric
Lefcowitz termed "the cacophonic strains of Hendrix's feedback orgies
mixed with his lascivious sexuality." Matters came to head a few days
later as the Monkees played a trio of dates in New York: After a handful
of gigs, Hendrix grew sick of the "We want the Monkees" chant that met
his every performance. Finally, he flipped the bird at the
less-than-enthusiastic crowd at Forest Hills Stadium in New York and
stormed offstage. Hendrix had had enough, "Purple Haze" was starting to
dent the American record charts, and it was time for him to head out on
his own and play for audiences who wanted to see him. He asked to be let
out of his contract, and he and the Monkees amicably parted ways. But
one last bit of Monkee business turned an unforgettable experience into a
legendary one. THIS MUST BE SHIPPED FLAT... . This
must be shipped flat in a large flat parcel (Combined shipping on this
item only allowed with other items that are shipped flat) and this is suitable for framing..
|
|