How bout that Bill Graham— the most famous concert promoter ever and a sixties-seventies rock-culture guru— scoring one from the grave for the hacker ethic, his people seriously allowing forty years of live rock shows— some very high-end ultra-commodifiable information— to roam wild in cyberspace, free to stream onto your desktop and into your ears at no cost, as in free of charge, as if it were 1996! Check it out.

Last night I cued up Jimi Hendrix at Winterland in San Francisco, 1968. (Apparently just minutes before it became the site’s “concert of the week”!) At one point Hendrix is talking to the crowd, which is growing anxious during a tuning session: “Now, some of you are getting uptight. We don’t want nobody to be uptight. We want everybody to dig it, you know, properly.” He’s all soft-spoken and gentlemanly, sort of British-sounding, but not really, more just shockingly alive. Then he introduces “a new song,” Voodoo Child. “This is about a cat who’s talking about cutting down a mountain with his hand. We’re gonna show you exactly what he’s trying to say.” Silence. Then the upsidedown Stratocaster hauls off, the fingers sliding audibly on the strings. It knocks you out, like you’re sitting there listening to all the Vietnam-era fedoras in the country blowing straight up into the air at once. Voodoo Child? Yeah I think so!