Posts Tagged ‘Jimi Hendrix’
“It is generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended”*…
Scheduling note: as tomorrow is July 4, (Roughly) Daily will be off. Regular service will resume on July 5… and should continue uninterrupted for awhile. Meantime…
The “Great American State Fair,” ostensibly celebrating the 250th birthday of the U.S., is having a rocky run. After the talent for what was presented to them as a bi-partisan event largely withdrew, the Fair’s champion, President Trump, converted the opening into an unabashed “Trump Rally.” Thereafter, sparse attendance, equipment issues, high prices, and other embarassments.
As it happens, President Trump has some historical company. 100 years ago, in Philadelphia, dicey politicians hoped to replicate the success of the 1876 Centennial Exposition with a celebration of America’s 150th birthday. Instead, the 1926 “world’s fair” lost millions of dollars, hobbling the city’s finances on the eve of the Great Depression. Meilan Solly reports…
A century ago, the first visitors to Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial International Exposition—held to mark the 150th anniversary of the United States’ founding—waded through mud and wandered along unpaved sidewalks to reach the heart of the fairgrounds, only to find carpenters still at work on half-finished exhibition halls and gaping holes marking the spots where attractions had yet to be built.
Dining and shopping options were limited, and some of the few exhibits on view stretched the very definition of “entertainment.” One was a model Post Office where “you could go send yourself a letter and watch it get canceled,” says historian Thomas H. Keels, author of Sesqui! Greed, Graft and the Forgotten World’s Fair of 1926. “That was it.”
The 200,000-plus Shriners in town for their fraternal organization’s national convention realized that their parades and rallies were the main events planned for these early days of the fair. Many went home disappointed, telling family and friends that the exposition wasn’t worth visiting…
Held in Philadelphia between May 31 and December 31, 1926, the fair—referred to as the Sesqui—celebrated the 150th anniversary of the United States’ founding. Little remembered today, the event was a financial failure that Varietydeemed “America’s greatest flop.” Exact figures are hard to come by, but Keels suggests that the fair lost the equivalent of more than $410 million in today’s dollars, effectively bankrupting the city of Philadelphia.
The exposition was America’s main celebration of the sesquicentennial. Congress authorized the fair and provided limited funding for it, in addition to issuing commemorative coins and encouraging local celebrations, but the scale of federal participation paled in comparison with that of the 1976 bicentennial and this year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Attendance at the Sesquicentennial Exposition also failed to match the numbers of Philadelphia’s 1876 centennial celebration, which attracted roughly 20 percent of the country’s population in an era when planes, cars and luxury liners had yet to make long-distance travel more accessible. Organizers predicted that 30 million people would visit the 1926 fair; ultimately, fewer than five million paid to attend. [For comparison, more than 44 million people visited the “World of Tomorrow” at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. Two and a half decades later, 51 million visitors flocked to the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.]
What doomed the sesquicentennial? Poor planning and lukewarm reviews by the fair’s early visitors contributed to the disastrous outcome. So, too, did the streak of bad weather that plagued Philadelphia during the exposition’s run, with rain falling on more than half of the days the fair was open to the public.
Although some observers considered the lackluster public response a sign that the golden age of world’s fairs had come to an end, Chicago’s 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition proved this prediction wrong, drawing more visitors than any of its predecessors. Overall, Keels attributes the 1926 fair’s failure to its “association with what was being viewed as an increasingly corrupt political machine,” headed by Pennsylvania Republican William Scott Vare.
After the fair incurred “nationwide ridicule,” Keels tells Smithsonian magazine, Vare and other local politicians were eager to move on from the endeavor, selling off leftover structures piecemeal “for pennies on the hundreds of dollars.” This push to forget the sesquicentennial has reverberated into the present: Just one building constructed for the 1926 fair stands in Philadelphia today…
More of the macabre story: “America’s 150th Birthday Celebration Was Deemed the Nation’s ‘Greatest Flop.’ What Went Wrong With the Sesquicentennial?” from @smithsonianmag.bsky.social.
Apposite: “America Is Trapped in the Grossest Pool Party of All Time.”
* John Steinbeck
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As we rethink recreation, we might celebrate one of the great “public parties” of all time, recalling that it was on this date in 1970 that the Second Atlanta International Pop Festival opened in a soybean field adjacent to the Middle Georgia Raceway in Byron, Georgia. Running officially through the 5th (but actually ending around dawn on the 6th), 500-600,000 folks attended a festival designed to foster a sense of community that transcended race, region, and social class. And while the weather was boiling (local farmers brought watermelons and cantaloupes to help attendees), and there were reports of occasional nudity and recreational drug use, the three days were essentially trouble free… and a blast.
Performers included The Allman Brothers Band, the Chambers Brothers, Richie Havens, Grand Funk Railroad, It’s a Beautiful Day, B.B. King, Lee Michaels, Mott the Hoople, Mountain, Poco, Procol Harum, Rare Earth, John Sebastian, the Bob Seger System, Spirit, Ten Years After, Johnny Winter– and the Jimi Hendrix Experience who, at midnight on this date in 1970, played his rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” for nearly 500,000 people—the largest crowd of Hendrix’s career.
Georgia’s “colorful” governor at the time, Lester Maddox, who had tried repeatedly to prevent the festival from taking place, vowed that he would do whatever it took to block any similar event in the future. The state legislature willingly complied and enacted sufficient restrictions to make it much more difficult for anyone to organize another rock festival in the state. A third Atlanta Pop Festival never took place.
Georgia’s loss. As “Abraham Lincoln” said (in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), “Be excellent to each other. And… PARTY ON, DUDES!”
“Every record I put on was like a baptism”*…
The sensation of being “in the groove” is the holy grail of jazz. As the renowned drummer Charli Persip described it, “When you get in that groove, you ride right down that groove with no strain and no pain—you can’t lay back or go forward. That’s why they call it a groove. It’s where the beat is, and we’re always trying to find that.”
This expression from the Roaring Twenties is an allusion to an insect secretion. The close fit between a phonograph needle and the grooves in early shellac 78 rpm records determined the quality of the playback. Shellac—a resinous, amber-colored secretion of the tiny scale insect Kerria lacca—served as the key ingredient in the first generation of phonographic disks. Odd as it may seem, a gummy substance manufactured by bugs and their human hosts in South Asia was the pioneering medium for the transmission of recorded sound.
The curious story of how a sticky discharge from billions of insect bodies became a vehicle for the globalization of audio culture spans millennia and crosses oceans…
The miraculous properties, and fascinating history, of shellac: “Like Jazz, Bowling, and Old Hollywood Hairdos? Thank Insects.“
* Questlove, Mo’ Meta Blues
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As we gently lower the needle, we might send tuneful birthday greetings to James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix; he was born (Johnny Allen Hendrix) on this date in 1942. Though his career as a front man lasted only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. Indeed, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as “arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music.”
“Where words leave off, music begins”*…
We are often immersed in what the ancient world looked like when we visit a museum or an archaeological site. However, the vibrant soundscapes heard at festivals, funerals, courtly feasts, theatrical performances, gladiatorial shows or just while shopping in the ancient world are important to reconstructing the past. A number of ancient historians are hard at work to bring the music of antiquity back to life for the enjoyment of the modern world…
Read about– and hear– the results of their efforts at: “Five Ways To Listen To The Music Of The Ancient World Today.”
* Heinrich Heine
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As we commune with our ancestors, we might recall that it was on the is night in 1969 that Jimi Hendrix appeared on the BBC’s The Lulu Show. He had been booked to perform two songs, “Voodoo Child,” which he and the Experience did in its entirety. Then, he stopped midway through the performance his new single “Hey Joe,” announcing, “We’d like to stop playing this rubbish and dedicate this song to The Cream.” The Experience then launched into a version of “Sunshine Of Your Love” as a tribute to the group who had split a few days earlier. Hendrix proceeded to continuing jamming, running over their allocated time slot on the live show, and preventing the show’s host, the pop singer Lulu, from closing the show properly… for which Hendrix was banned from the BBC. (See the performance here; read about Elvis Costello’s similar experience on Saturday Night Live here.)
Jimi and the boys on The Lulu Show
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little”*…
When I published Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think in February 2012, I included about 80 charts in the back of the book showing very strong evidence that the world is getting better. Over the last five years, this trend has continued and accelerated.
This page includes charts and graphs that you can share with friends and family to change their mindset. We truly are living in the most exciting time to be alive…
In “answer” to yesterday’s excursion into dystopia, a collection of evidence from Peter Diamandis that things are on the upswing: “Evidence of Abundance.”
* Franklin D. Roosevelt
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As we look on the bright side, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that Jimi Hendrix played Philharmonic Hall in New York. The concert, “An Electronic Thanksgiving,” was originally planned for Carnegie Hall, but the managers there got cold feet, fearful of a rowdy audience. Promoter Ron Delsener scrambled:
I had to convince Louise Homer, who was the Director of Philharmonic Hall,
that I had to ‘marry’ Rock and Roll to classical music (eclectic music). I then moved the event to Philharmonic Hall… I had to do everything to convince them. I had to hire The New York Brass Quintet and a harpsichord virtuoso (therefore, an eclectic evening). Both would play during the first half of the program. They would be joined by one or two of Jimi’s musicians on several selections.I informed Michael Jeffery, as well as the attorney, Stevens Weiss, that Noel and/or Mitch must play during the first half of the program for several numbers with a classical group. Naturally, the show went on sale, sold out, and no one wanted to play the first half of the program with the classical musicians.
I begged Mitch Mitchell to please sit in and ‘fake it’ as best as he could, which he did much to the delight of the audience. To Mitch, it was a ‘goof,’ to me it was a lifesaver. To the ushers at Philharmonic Hall, it was a frightening experience because everyone stood in front of their seats for the entire show and clogged all the aisles leading to the stage. [source]
“That’s what music’s all about, messing with people’s heads”*…
Musicians and dancers, stair riser, Pakistan, first century.
I look at music and language in their deep histories, reaching back to a point before there was any music or language in their modern forms. So we’re talking, say, a 500,000-year stretch, perhaps all the way back to Homo heidelbergensis. I see the antecedents of these things falling into place along parallel tracks that overlap one another but are not the same track, and I follow the parallelism and the distinctness of those tracks from a very deep period. Which is to say that what we are left with as human beings in the world today, as the product of those tracks, is in fact a set of overlapping yet distinct capacities, functions, and capabilities in dealing with our world and our environment and in our social interactions with each other.
And so these things are loaded into both language and music in very complex but different ways…
Explore the deep history of humans and music with Gary Tomlinson, author of A Million Years of Music: “The Prehistory of Music.”
* Jimi Hendrix (whose third album, Electric Ladyland, was released on this date in 1968)
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As we get the beat, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that the Velvet Underground (see also here and here) made their live debut, playing at Summit High School in New Jersey; the group was paid $75 for the show.
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