John Lee Hooker (1917-2001) was one of the great bluesmen of our times and his impact on rock'n'roll was immense. (His songs were covered by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, The Doors, The Animals and doznes of other artists.) He grew up in Mississippi ran off to Memphis and then Detroit as a teenager, got a job at a Ford Motors plant and was past 30 when he started recording. He was an early inductee into the Rock'n'roll Hall of Fame and the year before he died he was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. "Dimples" is typical of his style and today's LNMC special.

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Happy Birthday, Mike. He's been a huge inspiration to me in my life and is one of those people that if you are fortunate to meet, they change your life forever.

In this video he's discussing playing a track and jamming with Jimi Hendrix on Electric Ladyland.

The shuffle Rainy Day, Dream Away is an incredible spontaneous jam as Mike Finnegan tells it in the DVD. Finnegan is playing organ/ bass on this, with Miles again on drums and Larry Fawcett on tenor sax. Miles says it’s the track he is proudest of in his entire career.

If there's a better player than Mike in the music industry, I'd like to meet him. And the man sings like the wind.

We're lucky enough to have him on C&L always contributing to the awesomeness that is 'Mike's Blog Round Up.' It's a tribute to him and the entire blogosphere. We're working together and Mike continues to be the bridge that links us.

Via Blogcritics:

Sony/Legacy is now the major label home for Jimi Hendrix and that means we're getting re-issues of Are You Experienced?, Axis: Bold As Love, Electric Ladyland, and the posthumous recording First Rays Of The New Rising Sun, the album Hendrix was working on at the time of his death. All four of these albums have been remastered from the original mix tapes.

What are you listening to tonight?

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Jimi is our chief hometown hero here in Seattle (Kurt Cobain being a very close second). This is from probably his most famous performance after Woodstock, live at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. (At the end of his gig, he climaxed "Wild Thing" by lighting his guitar on fire.) Anyway, I used to have an LP from Monterey with Jimi on Side One and Otis Redding on Side Two. (What a great album. Somewhere I lent it to someone and it vanished.) However, it didn't have the whole performance, and this was one of the songs left off -- which was dumb, since this is one of the finest versions of it. "Hey Joe" has been a rock standard for years, but Jimi's version is the standard by which all others are judged. Anyway, it's in the film version, and the newly remastered copy of the film is well worth owning.

PS Our sister site Newstalgia proudly features The Jags -- Live at the Paris Theatre, London, 1979 for your Saturday night listening pleasure.

From Wikipedia:

In 2004, Tedeschi was featured on the PBS show, Austin City Limits, flanked by William Green, on Hammond organ, Jason Crosby, playing keyboards, violin, and vocals, bassist Ron Perry, and Jeff Sipe, on drums. The performance was extremely well received.[4] In the same year, Tedeschi turned a few heads when she was listed by Peter Gammons of ESPN in his list of "all time top 20 favorite albums." She came in at a respectable #15 for her album, Just Won't Burn. Not to be outdone, husband Derek Trucks also made the list, at #9 for Joyful Noise, both surprising accomplishments, given that both artists play blues, a genre often overlooked. In addition, the other musicians on the list were some of rock's elite, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Little Feat, and Jackson Browne, to name a few.

I love excuses for posting Hendrix embeds, and this piece of news is definitely a valid one.

Jimi's sister Janie, the President and CEO of Experience Hendrix, told Gibson guitars that she plans to release unreleased Hendrix material every 12 to 18 months for the next ten years. Gibson is releasing a line of Hendrix signature guitars, including a signature Flying V.

"We probably have another decade of music, including video. Every 12 to 18 months we'll continue to have new releases and Dagger [Experience Hendrix's label for live recordings] official bootlegs," she told Gibson.

"Jimi was a workaholic. After Electric Lady studios was built he was able to record constantly for as many hours as he wanted to. It's almost as if he knew he had only four years to accomplish everything that he did. We have an amazing amount of original masters, including a lot of material that hasn't been previously released."

The prospect of new original material from the studio is an exciting one, as the consensus is generally that the best live recordings of Hendrix's career have mostly seen the light of day. New compositions, however, are another story. We'll see.

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We had a great discussion here last week about our favorite Beatles covers. What about Dylan covers? Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" might be Jimi's best known, but "Like a Rolling Stone" live at Monterey is my favorite Dylan cover, hands down.

What's yours?

Experience Hendrix: The Best Of Jimi Hendrix

Today would have been Jimi Hendrix's 70th Birthday. Wow. Got a favorite?

Jimi Hendrix: Live at Monterey

From the Jimi Hendrix Experience's American debut at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival: If anything more electrifying in the world of music has ever been captured on film or video, I'd like to see it.

The San Francisco-based promoters that are putting on WestFest, a free 40th Anniversary Woodstock concert on October 25th, will announce today that they do not plan to comply with a cease and desist order from New York's Woodstock Ventures, the production company that put on the original Woodstock in 1969.

According to a press release from Boots Houghston, producer of WestFest, Woodstock Ventures has been shutting down "any event in the world that plans to celebrate the "40th Anniversary of Woodstock," as well as anyone who tries to use the phrase "Peace and Love." Houghston claims that since at least 18 of the original artists that were at the original 1969 festival were from San Francisco, that they have as much a right to use the name as anyone.

Among the SF performers are DFH veteran and Country Joe McDonald, a performer at the original Woodstock, and an ensemble of 3,000 guitar players playing Jimi Hendrix's 'Purple Haze' at the same time.

Understandably and predictably, folks involved with the San Francisco production think that going to the mat on trademark issues over the word "Woodstock" is not exactly in the spirit of Woodstock itself, and that Woodstock has plenty of a debt to settle with San Francisco. "We're the ones who started the whole vibe to begin with," Hughston said.