Jimi Hendrix Photo Poster
The Fillmore East crowds on New Year's Eve and New Year's day of 1969-1970 paid Jimi Hendrix and his Band of Gypsys the ultimate compliment: they were silent, awestruck by his performance. Playing as if all the social and personal chaos of the late sixties was ripped from his being and raced through his fingers to explode from his guitar, the performances were a cry from the heart of the man, by turn angry, introspective and tumultuous. Recorded live, the New Year's Day concert was to be Hendrix's requiem. By October 1970, the incredibly talented artist, never truly comfortable with his fame, was dead.
Joe Sia was a shooting star, a genuine, hands-down, everyone-agrees-on-this star at shooting [photographs], and his departure from this planet in 2003 at the tender age of 57 was too soon for a man of his talent. Born in the Bronx and a committed Yankees man, Joe loved music and gravitated around the Fillmore East and the flower-power youth-culture rock scene from whence he set out to capture some of the most incredible sounds of the last half-century. How could Joe capture sounds on camera film? He did it by focusing on the faces of the performers and the woozing-oozing crowd and by giving the background, whether simple or wild, the importance it deserved in defining the artist and event. Sia's entire archive consists more than a quarter of a million photographs that document almost 35 years of music genre and giants.