Rock ProphecyTM

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Purpose Of His Article Is To Exclude My Role?

by Michael Fairchild

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

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