Sam Feinsilver/Authentic Hendrix, LLC

This month marks 45 years since Jimi Hendrix left this earth. But arguably more than any of the innumerable legends we've lost—Elvis Presley, John Lennon, even Bob Marley—Hendrix feels at once still alive and ahead of the times.

The newly unearthed 16mm footage of one of his last concerts certainly helps. While audio from Hendrix's scorching performance at the Atlanta International Pop Festival on July 4, 1970,has long been traded in bootleg form, it just got a complete, cleaned-up , and tonight Showtime premieres the documentary Jimi Hendrix: Electric Church (9 p.m. ET). Featuring a near-complete performance by the Jimi Hendrix Experience of that era—Hendrix, drummer Mitch Mitchell, and bassist Billy Cox—the first third of the movie chronicles the road to the festival through the eyes of Hendrix's bandmates, the promoter Alex Cooley, filmmaker Steve Rash, those close to Hendrix at the time, and locals from Byron, Georgia, the sleepy town that the golden-era rock festival took over during Independence Day weekend.The footage will take your breath away, but it's the insight of the early part of the film that's perhaps most intriguing. In an almost mundane way, it tells the story of a small-time promoter's efforts to bring the counterculture to the Deep South, amid the fury of the times. Here are 10 things that even the most die-hard of Hendrix fans will learn from Electric Church.

1. This is the definitive Hendrix cover of "Star-Spangled Banner."

Playing to a sea of lighters, owing to the lack of power that Georgia Rural Power was able to send to the festival grounds, and almost in syncopation to the pyrotechnics overhead (a feat for the era), Hendrix's scorching version of the "Star-Spangled Banner" at the Georgia festival eclipses even his famous Woodstock version. While that performance the prior summer was an undeniable festival showstopper, playing it to 300,000 people in the dark with fireworks overhead on the Fourth of July made this the ultimate Hendrix performance of the song.

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2. The footage sat untouched for more than 30 years.

"There were no ancillary methods of getting a film out there," director Steve Rash says in Electric Church what he had shot. "There was no home video, or anything else. If you didn't make the [next] summer's schedule, that was it." The film then languished in his barn, undeveloped for "30 some odd years," until it became clear to the Hendrix family and some of the other participants just what a piece of history Rash had on his hands.

3. Hendrix was very confident about his next album.

Bassist Billy Cox recalls Hendrix being ecstatic that the crowd liked his new material, which sadly was released posthumously. "We played songs they'd never heard and they loved it," Hendrix told Cox after coming offstage.

4. Even when he messed up, Hendrix was a master.

"He got a lot of energy from that gig," Cox says, before telling a story about Hendrix starting the Bob Dylan classic "All Along the Watchtower," which Hendrix reinvented on his 1968 album Electric Ladyland, in the wrong key. "After about two bars he goes, 'As I was saying...' and I knew he was going to switch to the right key."

5. Hendrix was a civil rights leader, in his own way.

Hendrix's performance at the second Atlanta International Pop Festival was a political statement as much as a musical one. The notorious segregationist and then-governor of Georgia Lester Maddox, shown early in the film, was no friend to the people the festival was set to attract. Atlanta Pop organizers wanted to show that rural audiences and "longhair" bands, and black and white artists, could coexist at the same festival. Hendrix's message of peace, love, and brotherhood made him an ideal vehicle for the mission. "Success made him a target," rock journalist Anthony DeCurtis says in the film. But Hendrix was crafty, and told an interviewer before going onstage that he was simply "thinking about the obsolete versus the new," thus making his message less political (and less threatening) to the powers that be.

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6. The festival was chaos, but Hendrix wasn't fazed.

It was 104 degrees in rural Byron, Georgia, and the stage was an "unorganized mess," according to one of Hendrix's roadies. The local sheriff (and lone police officer in the area) stayed on the festival perimeter and deputized bikers to keep the peace. Fire trucks hosed down festival-goes, and locals made a few extra dollars by selling fruit, Cokes, and sandwiches. Mild-mannered college kids would go into a bathroom and come out decked in hippie-wear, or just completely naked. "You could see anything there," one local in the film remembers. "Anything!" Even with a crowd that swelled to 300,000 after the festival became free, Hendrix was calm, and turned in one of the best performances committed to film. Bill Mankin who worked in stage crews for the festival, writes in liner notes for the new live album: "At the center of the vortex was the master magician on guitar: the personification of a life lived fully and wildly, with no boundaries, no limitations, and aiming for the stars at light speed."

7. It was literally a disaster area.

Governor Lester Maddox flew over the site in a helicopter just prior to Hendrix's performance and declared the site a disaster area. In the aftermath, festival-goers left behind detritus that took weeks to clear.

8. A local moonshiner made it all possible.

Promoter Alex Cooley says in Electric Church that he knew he wanted to bring the festival to an area in the Deep South, but didn't have a location until he found a local pecan orchard adjacent to the Middle Georgia Raceway in Byron, Georgia. The town, about 100 miles south of Atlanta on I75, was ill-equipped to handle the festival, but the local farmer who owned the property was desperate for cash, making for a fit. "He was a moonshiner," Cooley says in the film. "He was on our side."

9. It was Hendrix's largest U.S. performance.

About 100 miles south of Atlanta, next to a field just outside of the town of Byron, Georgia, is a plaque erected by the Georgia Historical Society marking the location of the second Atlanta International Pop Festival, which ran from July 3-5, 1970. It reads: "Over thirty musical acts performed, including rock icon Jimi Hendrix playing to the largest American audience of this career." Despite the overwhelming attendance—which some estimates actually put as high as 400,000—the festival, and Hendrix's performance in particular, have not received their due until now.

10. The "Southern Woodstock" was the end of an era.

The Atlanta International Pop Festival was the last of a dying breed. By the time the Jimi Hendrix Experience took the stage at about 12:30 on the final night, that sort of massive, anarchic music gathering in the U.S. would soon be extinct. "This was a great end to an era," Glenn Phillips of the Hampton Grease Band says in the film. "It was a powerful moment."

Jeff Slate Jeff Slate is a New York City-based songwriter and journalist who has contributed music and culture articles to Esquire since 2013.

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