"Hear My Train Comin'", a simple acoustic blues with 12-string guitar, has been singled out as the most moving segment in the film biography of Jimi Hendrix which has been running in the West End all summer and has just gone on release.
The sequence was originally part of a 1967/8 pioneering 16mm short produced by Austin John Marshall and called "Experience". Now the track has been issued as a single. Here Marshall remembers the freezing January afternoon in 1968 when it was recorded.
SOUND QUALITY . . . that was the technical problem which resulted in us capturing Hendrix with an acoustic guitar in his hands. We weren't really up to recording him loud - so we tried the other extreme.
This was just about the first time that 'anybody' had tried to film really loud rock on stage in Britain. The terrified sound Recordist, crouching in the orchestra pit of the Opera House, Blackpool, must have thought we'd been caught in a heavy artillery barrage.
The techniques just didn't exist - not at our budget level anyway - to get reasonable sound from a group like the Jimi Hendrix Experience in full cry.
So - apart from my own feelings that at heart Jimi was a really sensitive traditional blues player - there was a feeling that a quiet simple sequence would help the film and offset the horrendous distortions of the live stage stuff.
I really wanted to clear away the strobe lights, the walls of amps, the phasing, fuzz and feedback for a moment and place Jimi, this paradox of gentleness, genius and freak against a plain white photographer's studio paper background and hear how he played a simple blues.
The acoustic number followed a joke interview scene which was infact the group's idea. The film was obviously about Jimi, but we wanted to involve Mitch and Noel somehow. They were to be hard-hitting interviewers, and be allowed to ask what they all agreed were the dumbest questions they'd ever been asked.
And Jimi - always far too polite to slag of a reporter - could send up the questions without giving offence (are you listening Frank Zappa?)
So coaxed along by whisky, cokes and bonhomie, Noel, Mitch and Jimi put together a good-natured question/answer routine which included Jimi choking on a Gauloise pretending it was a joint.
But this was all a subterfuge, probably unnecessary, because Jimi was the soul of amenability. It was just that the Image-building machinery behind him seemed so relentlessly committed to presenting the world with Mister Black Acid, the Rainbow Superstud - so much so that we expected that at any moment someone would lay heavy hand on our shoulders and say, "No-one's gonna present our Heavy Star sittin' down playin' no 12-string!"
So after Mitch and Noel had split and we had about five minutes' worth of film stock in the camera we turned up this guitar . . . and my, my what a coincidence, a 12-string strung and tuned left-handed . . . (a coincidence somewhat helped by Peter Neal - no mean Old Timey picker himself -restringing the borrowed guitar that morning).
Jimi took the guitar and looked at it as if it would bite him. "12-string - shit - what the hell am I gonna do with that?"
"Um . . . well we just thought . . . as a contrast to the rest of the movie you might play a sort of slow quiet blues . . . please?"
With the absorbed, serene expression of a father who has discovered his old train set in the atic, Jimi perched himself atop the tall stool and hunched over the huge box. He had a tortoisshell pick with him and started to strum.
We hadn't much film left - but we took the risk and started turning the camera straight away.
Jimi noodled around with an intro for a while then stopped. Looking up at the camera he said "No I'd rather do that again. Can we stop the film there 'cos I was sorta scared to death by this thing."
"Oh yeah", said Peter Neal, but we all knew that there wouldn't be enough film left in the camera to finish the take.
When he'd finished Jimi gave a little chuckle and said, "I bet you didn't think I'd do that . . ."
On that freezing afternoon, Jimi had come out in a really thin leopard-skin print jacket and chiffon shirt, and as we decanted the film equipment into Charing Cross Road I watched Jimi walk off towards a neon-lit Leicester Square - apparently indifferent to the biting cold.
And at the risk of appearing wise after the event, I must say that as I watched him I was overcome by the feeling that he wouldn't be around for long.
