Stumbled on this today; Jimi Hendrix live New Year's Day, 1970, at the Fillmore East, performing his song
Machine Gun; there have been many versions of this clip on YT, most of them of poor quality, primarily owing to the only known footage of the concert is from tapes taken from the then newly installed giant overhead video displays Fillmore East owner Bill Graham started using (Graham pioneered the use of giant screens at rock concerts as a means of letting even the cheapest, nosebleed seats have a shot at seeing what was going on onstage; Graham's innovation is now standard at any and all musical venues over 50 years later); this clip is colorized and appears to have either come from a rather good source or has been cleaned up rather a bit; the guitar he is playing is of particular note: it is also the last guitar Jimi ever played and was his most beloved guitar, surviving several years with Hendrix while he trashed and discarded others; he had it with him when he was staying at his girlfriend Monika Danneman's flat in London in his last days; there is a photo of Jimi with the guitar taken by Monika less than 24 hours before he died...
When JImi died, almost all of his personal possessions were looted by various people and very little verifiable Hendrix materials survive, but the guitar was among the possessions Monika managed to hide away from the crowd; while she was still alive, she was offered stunning amounts of money to sell the guitar, but always refused, wanting to keep some part of Hendrix for herself; when she passed away in 1996, the guitar went to her estate, administered by her surviving relatives and offers to buy were made again in even higher amounts, but the estate declined saying they wished to respect Monika's memory by putting the guitar in a vault: if Monika would not sell it, neither would they...
It would be rather interesting to see what the guitar would bring at auction nowadays...
You can hear where guitarists like Van Halen copped some of their licks in this clip...
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