Date: 1978
Release: Point #536847
Cover Art: view / download
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It’s August 18, 1969, and Jimi Hendrix takes the stage playing the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock. In doing so, he puts the entire tenor of his times through his guitar. You can hear it: Vietnam. Civil rights. Riots. People dying in the streets. People dying in a far off land. Now compare this to a performance of the Boston Pops done that same year for the Fourth of July. It’s the same song, right? So why do we remember the Woodstock performance and not the Boston Pops? It is because music moved on. It moved beyond the sheer recitation of notes on a page into intangible qualities of texture. Through distortion, chorus, flanging, and a myriad of other guitar tricks, you had for the first time in music, synthetic sounds that directly approximated natural ones.
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