Rai5 broadcasts the documentary “Electric Church” on the historic concert in Atlanta

The documentary, directed by John McDermott, is called “Jimi Hendrix Electric Church”, which will be broadcast on Tuesday 7 January at 11.40 pm on Rai 5. It bears witness to the spectacular concert held by the most revered guitarist in history at the Atlanta Pop Festival, in front of a crowd of 300,000 spectators on July 4, 1970.
Two months after his legendary performance – precisely the one in which the national anthem of the United States of America plays in an electric version – Jimi Hendrix will leave us, at just 27 years old. The outline of what was his symbolic guitar, the Fender Stratocaster, will be engraved on the tombstone, together with his name.

The film reconstructs the festival that went down in history as the “Woodstock of the South” and recognized as the last great rock festival of the hippie era. The film contains the performance (in 16mm color) of Jimi Hendrix on Independence Day 1970, just ten weeks after his untimely death.
The concert setlist includes Hendrix classics such as “Hey Joe”, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”, “Purple Haze” and “Room Full Of Mirrors”, “Freedom” and “Straight Ahead”, unreleased at the time, but destined to be part of the album he was working on that summer. Historical images, carefully restored, alternate with interviews with Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, Rich Robinson, Kirk Hammett, Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi.

Jimi Hendrix, or the guitar that made rock history. The musician from Seattle has completely and irreversibly changed his approach to the electric guitar, for a long time the main and undisputed instrument of rock (at least until the advent of the synthesizer) and, in any case, the one that more than anyone else, since the beginning, has given this genre that adrenaline-filled and slightly wild brand, that quid which characterizes it from every other musical expression. More than the piano of Jerry Lee Lewis or Richard Pennyman, alias Little Richard (with whom Jimi Hendrix played as sessionman for a short time, among other things), more than the phantom icon of Elvis Presley. Chuck Berry docet.
With his instrument, Hendrix accomplished a Copernican revolution comparable, perhaps, only to the innovations brought to the way of playing the six strings by Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Chuck Berry and, at most, Robert Johnson. With Hendrix, the feedback becomes an art, no longer an annoying defect (perhaps Sonic Youth & C. know something about it), distortion, pushed to the maximum limits, is power and delicacy at the same time (the “hard” sound that today has infiltrated almost everywhere, especially among certain groups in the scene indiewas born here), the melodic and harmonic lines of the electric guitar intertwine and blend with naturalness and perfection like never before. The cathartic value of the musical act takes on a new and explosive meaning with the Seattle guitarist.