Jimi Hendrix and the ‘Higher Self’
Rainbow Bridge.
[Los Angeles? n.d., Summer 1970].
Price: $750.00
About the item
Title and ornaments printed in yellow; text printed in purple. Text in two columns. 1 vols. 17-1/2 x 11-1/2. Jimi Hendrix and the ‘Higher Self’. A couple of light folds. Near fine.
Item #304365
Fascinating and visionary artistic statement by director Chuck Wein on the eve of his travel to Maui to film Rainbow Bridge, “a journey into consciousness … a microcosm of what’s happening on the planet right now”. The film is notable for including a long segment filmed at a Jimi Hendrix concert on Maui, one of his last performances before his untimely death.
The broadside was transcribed from a tape recording by editor David, whose introductory note says “I could just give him the mike and he would rap and rap and ask his own questions and answer them, and I could just sit and listen with Barry and Hartley and Daniel and Theresa and Leslie while Chuck did his thing until the tape ran out …”
Wein graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and spent several years in the orbit of Andy Warhol’s Factory. He was closely involved with the 1965 films My Hustler, Poor Little Rich Girl, and Beauty #2, that made his friend Edie Sedgwick into a star, but Wein later broke with Warhol. In 1970, Wein and his Antahkarana production outfit filmed Rainbow Bridge on location in Maui. In this self-interview, Wein says he is “trying to portray the journey into consciousness most of us have been going through in the past five to ten years. Call it the dawn of the Aquarian Age or whatever … doing away with the artificial line between ‘film reality’ and ‘real reality’”.
The involvement of Jimi Hendrix was key in the production of Rainbow Bridge. Wein says that people “seem to be interested a lot in the fact that Jimi Hendrix will be doing the soundtrack. Hendrix is somebody who has tapped a very high energy source and is right now trying to find a way to channel that high energy that he’s tapped; and it’s a struggle between his Lower and Higher Self to manifest that energy in a way that will help out his fellow man. Maybe this will be the vehicle through which he’ll be able to do that — we certainly hope so.”
Wein talks about “people who are in contact with the space brothers”, the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, communal living, and “thoughtforms”. A proto-New Age manifesto.
UNRECORDED.
