JIMI PLAYS MONTEREY & SHAKE! OTIS AT MONTEREY

(1989) Director: D.A. Pennebaker

DVD
NETFLIX

SUMMARY:

Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding arrived at California's Monterey International Pop Festival virtually unknown. Returning stateside from London, where he had moved to launch his musical career, Hendrix exploded onstage, flooring an unsuspecting audience with his maniacal six-string pyrotechnics. Redding, a venerable star of Memphis's Stax record label, seduced the "love crowd" in one of his best--and last-- shows. Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis at Monterey, acclaimed documentarian D. A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop companion pieces, feature the entire sets by these legendary musicians, performances that have entered rock-and-roll mythology. - The Criterion Collection

VIDEO: FULL FEATURES

Jimi Plays Monterey



Shake! Otis at Monterey

REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, CREDITS:

• Excerpt from Time magazine interview with director D.A. Pennebaker:

TIME: I understand that you had similar distribution problems with Monterey Pop, your film about the music festival, featuring breakout performances by Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

Yes. I put that in a porn house on [Manhattan's] Lower East Side. It was the only theater I could get. It ran for a year. People would come. In fact, the same people would come every Friday — and they'd all be smoking grass in the johns. The guy who ran the theater was so happy. He was making money left and right. He didn't want it to ever stop.

TIME: In that film, you recorded the now legendary footage of Hendrix's first major American concert. What was the mood in the audience like when he played?

John Phillips [of the Mamas and the Papas] had told me ahead of time, "There's this great blues player and he sets his guitar on fire." I didn't know what to expect. For some people there, his performance was noise and it upset them. In the first three or four minutes, it was noise to me, too. I didn't know what to think of it. I did know that we needed to shoot everything he did. We knew that this was different and that it was something amazing and historic.

TIME: Why do you avoid the use of narration and on-camera interviews in your films?

Really, I'm trying to be Ibsen. That's my secret hope: that I could somehow turn into [the playwright Henrik] Ibsen. There are things happening all the time to real people. You don't have to enact them or write them. I'm trying to make a play, not an educational device.

TIME: There's a dictum in anthropology that the observer changes the behavior of the observed. Have you been in situations where you felt that your presence was really affecting things?

Not a lot. Your attitude towards the camera determines that. If you're setting up lights and tripods and you've got three assistants running around, people will want to get you out as fast as they can. But if you go the opposite way, if you make the camera the least important thing in the room, then it's different. I've left it on the floor. Sometimes, I'll shoot with it on my lap. Other times, I'll put it on a table and turn it on. You don't make it a big issue.

• Washington Post review
• NY Times review

NOTES:

• The movies compile unreleased film of Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding that had been shot for the rock documentary ''Monterey Pop.''
• When Jimi Hendrix performed at the Monterey Pop Festival, the revolutionary rock guitarist was only 24 years old. A sensation in England where he had formed his trio, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, he was still virtually unknown in the United States. The festival, at which he set fire to his guitar and smashed it to pieces, helped put him on the map in America.
• Otis Redding, who was only 25 years old when he appeared at the Monterey festival, died in a plane crash six months later. Less than three years later, Jimi Hendrix died a drug-related death. He was 27.