An Early, Northern New Jersey-Centric, Clue to the New Direction!!!

From the fabulous George's Club 20 (in reality, a tiny little dive) in Hackensack, New Jersey -- the Paris of the Tri-State Metro area, and the current home (and childhood neighborhood) of your humble scribe -- please enjoy Jimi Hendrix (doing business as Jimmy James) with Curtis Knight and the Squires, in a spirited performance of "Driving South."

Recorded live, with better sound than you might expect, on the day after Christmas of 1965.




It is perhaps amusing to contemplate that barely a year after this performance was committed to tape Hendrix was a pop star in England on the cusp of becoming one of the most indelible icons of the 60s.

It is also amusing to contemplate the fact that I was Christmas vacationing in the neighborhood on 12-26-65, and had I had a clue who Hendrix was going to be -- or a little more courage about being the only white teenager in a bar on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks -- I could have attended the gig in question.

In any case, a coveted PowerPop No-Prize will be awarded to the first reader who gleans the clip's relevance to the theme of tomorrow's Weekend Listomania.

POSTSCRIPT: George's Club 20 was at the corner of Moore and Bridge Streets in Hackensack, so I took a walk over there yesterday with my new twenty dollar digital camera. Imagine my disappointment at finding that the building no longer exists.



A line from a Joni Mitchell song seems to come to mind, for some reason....

POST-POSCRIPT: The center photo below shows what that corner looked like in 1965. You can't see it in the photo I took, but the house next door is still there, unchanged.



I particularly like that George's is called the "Mecca of Cafe Society."