Curtain Call

THE HORDES THAT fill the sticky, smok Astor theater to see Jimi Plays Berkeley are rock concert crowds. They shout to friends in the balcony and stomp their feet impatiently. And when the house lights dim--after the usual delay peculiar to rock concerts--matches flare and shoulders hunch throughout the theater. Excited, they sit back to let the Jimi Hendrix Experience wash over them.

At his peak, Jimi Hendrix was an experience, cultivating not devoted fans, but hysterical fanatics. For a few brilliant months in 1967 and 1968, he injected explosive energy into electric blues and outrageous rock. Playing on his back, playing with his teeth or simply playing it straight, Hendrix and The Experience and their banks of tortured amplifiers seemed to own the future as they burst first upon England, and then, America.

Hendrix was labeled the black Dylan and the black Elvis and everything in between. He was trapped into an exhausted legend. Overworked and, at times, filled with drugs, Hendrix continued to tour. The Experience eased into a slow, steady decline that ended in 1970 with Hendrix's drug-linked death, one month after a listless performance at the Isle of Wight.

Jimi Plays Berkeley does not catch Hendrix at his peak, as advertised. Hendrix played Berkeley a mere three months before the end. And what is captured here is not the Hendrix experience, but just the act. Hendrix delivers spectacular performances--particularly of Purple Haze and The Star Spangled Banner--and goes through all the motions, playing on his back (once) and with his teeth (five times!). But by now, the show is deliberate and familiar and desperately boring, even in a 40 minute movie.

SOME OF THE BLAME belongs to director Peter Pilafian, who has gathered all the ingredients for a traditional rock film and mixed them poorly. Jimi offstage mumbles, cuddles a friend and sips Budweiser. Jimi in rehearsal starts, stops and starts again. Performances are broken up by audience footage and newsfilms of the Berkeley Cambodia riots. All this is welcome relief, but never convincingly related to the music.

Hendrix fanatics, after all, are fanatics, and they will loyally troop to see this and any other as yet unreleased Hendrix film. But in the Astor theater, the concert crowds slump lower and lower in their seats. Jimi Plays Berkeley brings no new excitement, no new insight. When the house lights come up, many are actually asleep, and the rest file out silently. No one calls for more.