Shooting Jimi: Photos by Baron Wolman
"With Jimi … his movement supported sound in a way that was unexpected and of course wonderful for a photographer because he made – I won’t say he made a better picture than a musician – but it was hard to take a bad picture of him. You would really have to work to take a bad picture of him playing."
Quotes from an interview conducted by Steven C. Pesant for Experience Hendrix magazine
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"The Hendrix performances were probably the most electric, and I don't mean in the perspective of electric music. For me, [they were] spiritually electric. As visually electric as anything I ever photographed."
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"Maybe he would have repeated his old stuff. Maybe he would have written new stuff. Maybe it would have burned him out, who knows? Maybe he would have risen to yet another enormous musical high. Impossible to even begin to imagine what it could have been like."
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"You know, he was almost like 180 degrees opposite of the way he appeared on stage. It was as if he had some sort of switch that he could turn on that he would go into another zone — this performing zone where I think he was."
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"He had to have been responding to the emotions of the moment … He would never do the same thing twice with a particular piece of music; you could go and watch him play a piece of music and see two totally different shows both times."
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"What always amazed me about Jimi was that when you were with him and taking pictures for an interview of one form or another, he was just – at least the few times I was with him – he was quiet and very soft spoken."
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"I don't think that he choreographed his music. I think he was responding to how he felt to the music. He moved around with the guitar and across the stage and with the music in such a way that nobody could have choreographed it."
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"When Jimi first started, even when I first photographed Jimi … put it this way, virtually none of the people or the musicians that I photographed at that time were really superstars when I photographed them."
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"I felt like I was playing the camera as he was playing the guitar. [Fillmore West] was where I felt that way. I was like one with the music. It was the musician and the moment."
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"The companion to the music was the visual presentation that he made. In other words, he not only made this fabulous music, but he also combined it with this visual presentation that supported the sound in the same way. And I was really blown away by all of that because I had photographed a lot of people and a lot of artists …"
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"… At the Fillmore West I just happened to be right on stage. It's a very small stage and I just happened to be standing on the side of the stage just as Jimi was playing. Unbelievable!"
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"At [Jimi's Fillmore West show], I got so in-sync with the music that I felt like I could anticipate his moves. It was almost like I could tell what was happening next."