ddw,

Ah, "The Star Spangled Banner" maybe the most excessive of Jimi's Live performance excesses. Unfortunately for many people this is one of the few tracks that they've heard by Jimi and it is easy to discount him based on this.

Hear My Train A Comin' is one of only a few acoustic tunes I've ever heard Jimi do. I first heard it years ago, it was on the soundtrack of "A Film About Jimi Hendrix". It was a rare moment indeed and has since been re-released on the CD "Blues" that Guest refers to.

Given the dates that you mention I am guessing that you are at least 15 years older than me (I'll be 42 this month). Your musical tastes were formed before Jimi changed the way the guitar was played, mine after. I can see how he might have been hard to take for a purist. For me, he was one of the people who made me realize that I loved the Blues and had to find out more about it, yet I sure liked a lot of what he gave us. And let there be no bones about, a lot of the stuff, especially live performances that were released after his death was crap. Jimi had his demons.

Music is nothing more than sounds and lyrics. A lot of the electric blues sounds were essentially the same as those that the guys from the twenties and thirties were striving for with the slide, the modern guys did with volume and sustain. Despair and angst. I've often wondered what sounds Robert Johnson would have created had the Stratocaster and a Marshall stack been around in his day.