Cornerstone: A missed opportunity for Hendrix

Next week, “All is by My Side,” a new movie biopic about Jimi Hendrix, will be shown at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, and rollingstone.com is running a rather enticing clip from the movie (see attached clip).

It is interesting for a couple of reasons.

One is that Andre Benjamin (a.k.a. Andre 3000) of Outkast does a phenomenal job imitating Hendrix.  If you’ve ever seen or heard interviews with Hendrix, then you know Andre has nailed it when you watch that clip.  All of the vocal inflections and mannerisms are spot on.

The script also seems very good; it’s not full of those lame clichés that so often plague movies about the era.

The Chas Chandler character even closely resembles the real person, or at least how he looked in 1966.

To provide some back story to this scene, Chas Chandler was the bassist in The Animals, a British Invasion group most famous for its version of “House of the Rising Sun.”

While he was on tour, Chandler began to consider making a career change from playing in a group to managing one.  Somewhere on the tour, Chandler heard Tim Rose’s “Hey Joe” and thought that it would be a good song to take back to England to get this as-yet-imaginary group off the ground.

On one of the nights The Animals had in New York City, Chandler stopped by a club in Greenwich Village, the Café Wha?, where a certain soon-to-be-legendary guitarist was playing his version of that same song he wanted to remake in England.

Chandler then convinced Hendrix to come to London, and the rest is history.

The other noteworthy tidbit in the Rolling Stone article is that the film will not feature any of the music that Jimi Hendrix wrote, which means that only the covers that he made will be in the movie, and those will be new versions sung by Benjamin.

The songs to be included include “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band,” “Hound Dog,” “Wild Thing,” “Mannish Boy” and a couple of others Hendrix had performed with Curtis Knight and the Squires prior to his trip to England.  I would presume that “Hey Joe” would be included as well, but who knows.

The reason for this odd occurrence is that Experience Hendrix, which licenses Hendrix’s music didn’t grant permission for Hendrix’s music to be used in the film.

According to a story from last summer, Experience Hendrix wasn’t even approached because the film centers on his journey to stardom, 1966 and 1967.

So focusing on his rise to stardom makes it more possible to omit Hendrix’s music, but it is still rather odd not to include Hendrix’s own music in a movie that is about him.

It really seems like a wasted opportunity to give younger people an exposure to at least a taste of all of that wonderful music, but perhaps that’s what YouTube is for.