“Happy New Year first of all. I hope we have a million or two million more…” I have been quoting that one for years but the person I heard it from was Jimi Hendrix about to play “Machine Gun” with Billy Cox and Buddy Miles in one of the greatest concerts in the entire history of Rock and Roll.

You cannot possibly overestimate the impact Jimi Hendrix has on me to this day. You see when my grandmother, my mother’s mother, the sister of Blues guitarist Roy Gaines, heaps compliments on a great instrumentalist she would say, “You tore it up!” And nobody tore up a guitar like Jimi Hendrix. He could literally dismantle and rebuild the device while he was playing it. At about 6:40 in this YouTube.com video you begin to see what I am trying to say but the video goes bad and skips over the sequence!

New technology had to be invented in order to accommodate his mod’s. His work with sound designers on Electric Ladyland helped paved the way for more uses of the synthesizer in music (it is important to remember that this album did not use synthesizers). It is quite an easy task to understand how Jimi Hendrix, one of the most highly paid musicians in history, was bigger than his so-called art form. It has taken decades for most of this video content to be made easily available without documentarian cuts and without regard to pristine sound quality. Get all you can now because even YouTube.com will not last forever!