Jimi Hendrix: previously unseen Woodstock footage resurfaces – Watch the video

57 years after Jimi Hendrix's historic performance at Woodstock, “Live At Woodstock – A Second Look” is now available for free on YouTube: the footage offers a privileged view of the festival's closing set, filmed right from the stage, just a few feet from the guitarist and his band.
The footage was shot on August 18, 1969 by Albert Goodman, then a 22-year-old acting student at Bard College. The material isn't strictly unseen: recovered after more than thirty years, it was already released in 2005 as a bonus feature on a double-DVD edition of “Jimi Hendrix: Live At Woodstock”. Now, however, the documentary can be watched for free on Hendrix's official YouTube channel.

Goodman was living at the time in a commune near Bethel and had only arrived at the festival on the Sunday. When repeated delays pushed Hendrix's performance to Monday morning, he managed to get past security and reach the stage along with a friend carrying a guitar case. He had with him a Sony CV open-reel half-inch video recorder, a video camera, a tripod, and just two tapes — the only ones he could afford.
After finding a power outlet, the young man set himself up behind percussionist Juma Sultan, about fifteen feet from Hendrix. Amid the crew and the many technicians on the structure, no one paid much attention to a kid with a camera. Goodman thus managed to document much of the performance by Gypsy Sun And Rainbows, the lineup featuring Billy Cox on bass, Mitch Mitchell on drums, Larry Lee on rhythm guitar, and Juma Sultan and Jerry Velez on percussion.

The black-and-white footage is inevitably rough, with very low resolution and occasional signal dropouts, but it offers a close, almost private view of the performance. The camera lets us watch Hendrix directing the band through small cues, like tilting the neck of his Stratocaster or glancing at Billy Cox, and it also shows the view the musicians had in front of them: what remained of Woodstock's massive crowd after three days of rain, chaos and music.
The footage includes songs like "Purple Haze," "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)," "Message To Love," and the famously warped rendition of the American national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner." The most valuable document, however, is "Hear My Train A Comin'," for which Goodman's footage is the only known recording. During that performance, the official production crew was busy reloading their 16mm cameras and repositioning equipment: the gap left by the professional cameras was filled by the student's amateur tape.

The festival's own delays even played a part in making the recording possible. Had Hendrix played at midnight as originally scheduled, the low sensitivity of the technology Goodman was using would likely have produced nothing but black frames. Monday morning's daylight instead turned that improvised incursion into a historic document.
The story had one last surprising twist in the days that followed. While hitchhiking, Goodman got a ride from someone close to Hendrix's entourage. Once word got out about the footage, a private screening was arranged at the house the guitarist had rented in the area. Hendrix was able to watch the footage, showed he appreciated it, and personally thanked the young cameraman.

Goodman kept the tapes for more than thirty years before handing them over, in the early 2000s, to Experience Hendrix, the company that manages the artist's estate. The material was then digitally restored, correcting as far as possible the signal flaws and dropouts and supplementing it with some archival photographs. Today, that footage lets us rediscover one of the most celebrated concerts in rock history not from the crowd's perspective, but from within the band itself.

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