In May 2000, thirty-two
years after Jimi's concert in my hometown, a local magazine in
Rochester, New York decides to review the show. Writer Pontius Pilata
reports a lotta details seemingly lifted right outta my 1993 short
story titled
Really A Strange Town about Hendrix
in Rochester.
Strange Town (Jimi named us that in
his diary when he visited our city) became the longest article ever
published (2 parts) in an international magazine called
UniVibes
(May & Aug. 1993), and the story was
reviewed in the Rochester
Democrat & Chronicle on
March 25, 1993 and again on October 22, 1993. Local R-News TV reported
the story on November 23, 1993, and
Really A Strange Town
is listed among the credits in my booklet notes for MCA's 1994
Hendrix :Blues CD,
and also listed in the credits for Atlantic Record's 1994
Woodstock Diary
CD of music from the 1969 festival, for which I wrote the CD
booklet.
The research I did for Jimi's Rochester concert
included locating more than a dozen pictures taken backstage and during
the show in 1968. In 1993 I gave copies of some shots to Pontius Pilata
along with a copy of Jimi's diary pages about Rochester. Later that
year Pontius produced a music festival, during which I premiered the
then unreleased film Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. I'd
worked as consultant on that film and wrote the screen legend seen at
the beginning of it (my credits appear on the video box released by MCA
in August 1994). But in 1993, publicity releases for the premier of Jimi
Hendrix At Woodstock at Pilata's local festival neglected
to mention my credits and role in the production of the movie. It was
as if Pontius were trying to hide my work away from people in my
hometown.
So then, in May 2000, he did it again! His article
in the local magazine is a watered down re-hash of my story titled Really
A Strange Town, and he used pictures of Jimi in Rochester
that I'd given him, quoting from Jimi's diary pages I'd given him.
Pontius retraced my research published seven years ago, and used quotes
from a 1992 article I'd given him that spring - all without mentioning
my role. But my work broke ground and paved the way for his story. I am
the source for much of what this local magazine published in May 2000
(the photographer of the used Hendrix shots has never heard of Pontius
Pilata, and never gave permission for the pictures to be published.)
Pontius ends his story by glorifying the current
Hendrix company, run by a Japanese American women who was given my job
so unjustly. She deleted my writings from Jimi's 14 official albums and
replaced them with bogus junk, as if to erase every trace of the 7
years during which I orchestrated the highest charting, highest profile
Hendrix events of the 1990s. So here is Pontius Pilata applauding these
creeps in my hometown, while no media here reports what those
hateful/ungrateful Seattle brats did. His intention seems to be to wipe
my role out of history, to "silence the seer" and shut up the source
for his miscredited "work."
Magnifying this incident a thousand times puts in
relief media treatment of me and Rock Prophecy.
Nationwide, as we struggle through the underground to surface word of
Jimi's prediction and the Microsoft hate mongers, Rock
Prophecy is living proof of an intensely censored media.
- Michael Fairchild
.