Rhythm Thief said:
That would have been an awful lot better if he'd tuned his guitar beforehand. I'm all for a bit of noise and guitar abuse, and there's some good bits in that, but from 0.25 to 1.12 his tuning's all over the place. And he's too stoned to remember to sing in the right places.
Good solo about 2.30 though.
As a muso and guitarist yourself, RT, I'm surprised at your ignorance here!
Although the youtube clips never show it, the DVD does, and that Voodoo Child intro is immediately preceded by the most awe-inspiring blitzkrieged combination of onslaught musicality and downright cacophany of to-the-edge-of-the-neck string-bending and feedback-brink precision divebombs that inevitably sent the poor instrument some way out of tune. Check out the DVD to see how during the fiery pre-riff intro he, all with his left hand, plucks strings with plectrum, adjusts volume control and manipulates the tremelo arm ALL AT THE SAME TIME. A superb display of guitar mastery that seems to pass most people by because it occurs in the lead-up to the Voodoo riff.
Yet, despite the ferocious fretting having sent it way out of tune, he still delivers the riff in tune without re-tuning before having to sort it out when he can't escape the chord problems. This he does with aplomb, of course, before going on to render an exquisite array of sounds in a performance that had to wait to the early hours of the morning at the end of a long day waiting to play.
And the singing idiosyncrasies don't really matter - in fact live performances like this are all the better for a more casual approach to singing as the voice is after all just an intermittent accompaniment to the guitar (i.e. how it should be)!
