Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland, 1968 - Top Fifty

Not Necessarily Stoned, But Beautiful

My aural encapsulation of Hendrix’s third album Electric Ladyland is not unique I’m sure, but it is specific in that it is Part 1 of the actual release as a double album because I could only afford – I seem to recall – a single copy at the time. What this means though is I have a distorted feeling for its tracks and their chronology because Sides 1 and 2 of Part 1 constitute the record as I know it, but they are in fact an odd sequence abstracted from the whole of the double album.

What this means in a dramatic sense is that the first four tracks I know and love of my Side 1 are Still Raining, Still Raining; House Falling Down; All Along The Watchtower, and Voodoo Chile [Slight Return], but these make up Side 4 of the original double. The next three tracks I know and love and relive as the psychedelic follow-on from my Side 1 to my Side 2 are Rainy Day, Dream Away; 1983....(A Merman I Should Turn To Be), and Moon Turn The Tides.....Gently, Gently Away, but these make up Side 3 of the original double.

That’s a bit convoluted, but critical because as I have written so many times, especially with Top Fifty selections that are primarily from my formative, teenage musical years, the sequence of songs are utterly embedded in memory and then expectation when listening to the album – and the myriad of precise memories links in to that sequence indelibly. Listening to the album as intended on my cd copy does not resonate, therefore, in the way I expect and treasure, and the way my Top Fifty notion of this album must be. The ‘correct’ sequence produces a corrupted and distorted emotion if I listen to it - as brilliant as that ‘version’ is.

For example, those first four tracks on my Part 1 album are the quad-core of the whole album’s more melodic, even ‘pop’ essence, All Along The Watchtower being a prime example. Fourth track for me Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) was the only version I really knew for some time, and yet it ‘should’ follow on, albeit at a distance, from the fourteen minute live version as track four on the original double: I say distance because it is the closing track sixteen on the original double. 

I’ll leave that exposition there because although it could be expanded, there’s little point when, I trust, the essential point is made. So for me, Side 2 of Part 1 is the psychedelic arrival for Hendrix, a sound presaged by the song Are You Experienced from his debut and realised here on his self-produced third album, Chas Chandler having thrown in the towel because of his disenchantment with Hendrix’s recording habits: irregular arrival/attendance, surprise invited guests, intense repeat recordings of numbers, his drug-taking. In terms of that psychedelic/differing musical trajectory, Rainy Day, Dream Away has, for example, the jazz saxophone of Freddie Smith dancing with Jimi’s guitar licks. And then 1983../Moon.... is fourteen minutes combined of outerspace narrative and effects wrapped around one of Hendrix’s more beautifully melodic tunes - all the echoes and distorted vocals, references to beyond the will of god, clanged bells, Jimi’s own echoed bass playing, swirls of spaceship and other sounds, and guitar/effects seagull squeals giving at the very least an impression of faroutness as a teenager’s mantra for living life from then. It is this extended musical psychedelia that introduced to me in 1968, aged 14, the kind of aural trip I could take in differing ways later on.

I know I haven’t mentioned in detail Voodoo Chile, but what more can be said of this premier guitar anthem? I will, however, just mention that I bought Crosstown Traffic/Gypsy Eyes as a single, CT being a radio hit which I thought very cool at the time.

Jimi Hendrix - Axis Bold as Love, 1967 - Top Fifty

Dig My Freak Flag

I would appear to have prevaricated in deciding about putting this album into my Top Fifty, when it and Electric Ladyland are absolute givens to join Are You Experienced. Rather, I have prevaricated in keeping up with the Top Fifty, soon [perhaps] to be swelled with the bulk of John Martyn’s albums which are obvious givens too.

Aix Bold As Love contains two of the most beautiful songs ever written, by anyone: Little Wing and Castles Made of Sand, the former as magnificent as it gets, with the latter running it close and excelling in that psychedelic storytelling of the time.

It’s tempting to want to articulate some mimetic description of the guitar work, but why bother? Just listen. There are playful elaborations as Hendrix explores more on this second album in his unassailable trinity of iconic work, for example on EXP.

The album also contains the all-time great anti-establishment anthem If 6 Was 9, resonating as revolution in a teenager’s aural world at the time. It is such a funky number with its aggressive base and guitar two-step, then there is that jazz break with walking bass, a guitar that makes those unique noises, the line Point on Mr Businessman/You can’t dress like me, then rolling drums and the close-to-mic voice of Jimi claiming triumphantly So let me live my life the way I want to, and the guitar squeals and wails in its sustained independence.  

So many of these songs exemplify the genius of Hendrix [and producer Chas Chandler – maybe more so him] in framing Jimi’s sound within such short pop-burst timings. The album was completed in haste in 1967, the same year as debut album Are You Experienced, but it does not suffer for that expediency. The lengthy guitar jams are what we all want to hear, but the songcraft and even pop sensibilities of many of the songs on this album are what endear and endure. And when we arrive at relatively lengthy songs like closer Bold as Love at four minutes, the dramatic storytelling is augmented by the contrast, and the sweet guitar solo leading to the distortion effects of its finish is glorious. 

Jimi Hendrix - People, Hell and Angels

Astonishing?

My vinyl copy arrived today and though the album itself isn't astonishing [well it is because it is Hendrix, a paradoxical theme of this brief post] I have been excited as if this was the first time, an urge to relive I would guess what it was like all that time ago.

I would regard myself as a significant fan of Hendrix, buying his first three albums as a teenager when they came out and being blown away all the time; thinking Hendrix on Woodstock was phenomenal: that pronouncement on the anthem, and then the pure beauty of the lyrical guitar to follow and see out the close of the film [a snippet of this as Villanova Junction being the last track on this album]; going downstairs to my basement bedroom in Oakland, Iowa - an awful small American town of small-mindedness trying to close me in before I escaped forever back to England - to cry my teenage eyes out the day he died, and his posters all over my walls still today. I think that makes me a genuine fan.

But I really haven't followed the industry of releases over the years; not even the albums post Electric Ladyland - I have them of course, but I didn't/don't listen or care for them as I do those first three. All of this really as a preamble to the fact that whilst I understand there isn't anything that new on this album as it's been collected and heard in various versions all over the place - it is fresh enough to me not having followed those years of releases [like the much 'bigger' fans than me have done]. But even though these therefore have that sense of the new by not being known [and therefore technically not astonishing in their 'newness' but astonishing because Hendrix is the personification of that adjective] I do genuinely like the raw simplicity of the playing, which in that simplicity is still......you know the word.

Not much need then to really review individual tacks, though I'll comment that there is a soul and funky feel to quite a bit, most obviously on Let Me Move You, and opener Earth Blues is brilliant just in the playing of rhythm guitar, and then second Somewhere is signature fuzz and wah-wah - and with Jimi in such fine voice, and especially in the mix - then there's Hear My Train a Comin' which is a thumping version, and a glorious solo - so I could go on and review, but there's no need, and I just enjoy being a kid again every now and then so that's what I'm doing in listening.

Note how Some Awe gets in on the act, twice.

Jimi Hendrix - Original Posters

Just ahead of the release of People, Hell and Angels and receipt of my vinyl copy, I'm posting pics of three original Hendrix posters hanging on my walls at home, circa 1968/69 I would guess. I do have facsimile concert posters as well which I have already posted:

Missed Moments

I know it's Chesterfield....couldn't find an Ipswich copy, but it must be generic

I didn't exactly 'miss' Hendrix playing Ipswich on 1st April, 1967, because I can't remember when I moved to England and Ipswich, but I do think it was later in the year. I wouldn't have been able to go anyway, being too young at 13 -  my parents wouldn't have allowed it. But what an incredibly eclectic, commercial line-up: imagine those there just to see Englebert. Hendrix did two numbers, Purple Haze and Wild Thing.

But I can't work out how I missed going to see Led Zeppelin. I really don't recall them playing Ipswich, and I'm sure I would have known. It's an amazing oversight. I can only recall seeing three other acts at St Matthews Baths Hall: Sandy Denny, Tir Na Nog, and......Sweet!

There's a very good audio recording of Stairway To Heaven from this '71 gig here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1i-tBFxfC8
There must be a bootleg of the whole concert out there somewhere.

I did, however, see many great bands at Ipswich and Felixstowe in the early 70s. Really must make a list one day, before it all disappears from memory.

Jimi Hendrix 3

Another copy I have framed and hanging on the, to be precise, Jimi Hendrix music wall

Jimi Hendrix 2

Another facsimile I have, framed and hanging on the music wall

Jimi Hendrix

I have a a copy of this poster, and a few others I will post, and an original that I really do cherish.