Michael Hedges Last Videotaped Performance Two Weeks Before He Died 11-12-97 Somerville Mass
Complete Full Concert, Full Show. This is the last video we have of the brilliant man that was Michael Hedges. This was filmed two weeks before he died. The story behind the video, blessings to the person who filmed this, was he called all the venues on Michael's tour looking for one that would allow a video camera. He found one, at the beginning of the tour, in Somerville, Massachusetts. And we have this. This performance has everything that would show off how brilliant he was, I don't really want to spoil it by mentioning examples (grabbing his collar while he sings 'You were perverted too' during Gently Weeps would be a classic case). This performance has been uploaded already as individual songs by another kind soul that has an entire channel dedicated to Michael Hedges, but he used auto contrast on the source copy which gives it a choppy look, and also requires the audio to be re-encoded. So here we have the darker, less well lit version, the video isn't choppy, and the sound is in all it's original audio source glory, turn the audio up L O U D for the full effect (nobody was more of a perfectionist about his sound than Michael Hedges, cept maybe Kimock or Garcia). A very sad day for Northern California and the world when he drove over a foggy cliff on the way home to Mendocino.
Dedicated to Shanti and Odele, whom I saw Michael with in Berkeley back in the early 90's. I only got to see him maybe ten times, the first time was in '86 at concord pavillion for some windham hill sampler, just the fact that he was a dreadie playing that kind of music had me hooked from that first time, also I was turned on to him by a very cool woman which didn't hurt. The last time was when he played the High Sierra Music Festival in '97, right before he died, i'm still kicking myself for being 15 minutes late for that set.
Michael Hedges home page: http://www.nomadland.com