After recording their masterpiece, 1968's Electric Ladyland, the Jimi Hendrix Experience began to fall apart. Noel Redding's departure hardly halted Hendrix from getting right back to work though. He set up shop in his newly constructed Electric Lady Studios in NYC with Mitch Mitchell and new bassist/old friend Billy Cox to work on a funkier, less trippy batch of songs, including fierce items like "Dolly Dagger", "Ezy Rider", and "Room Full of Mirrors" and gorgeous ones like "Angel" and "Drifting". The bulk of the sessions stretched from late 1969 through August 1970.
The most coherent collection of Hendrix's final sessions was the 1997 compilation First Rays of the New Rising Sun, which assembled the bulk of the finished songs (minus a few stray things, such as a so-so cover of Dylan's "Drifter's Escape"), front loading the best of them so that if you lost patience with its 70-minute length toward the end it was no big deal.
Of course, for the most obsessive Hendrix freaks, 70-minutes doesn't even place the fingernail on the itch. Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision will be nirvana for such fans. First Rays' 17 tracks swell to 39, all presented in alternative versions and mixes, and doesn't limit itself to finished ones. There are sessions, in which we hear Hendrix shouting directions to his coworkers, alternate takes, and jams, one of which is a 26-minute medley that occupies an entire side of this five-LP set.
Electric Lady Studios is a bit of a tougher listen than First Rays because all of this stuff is presented in chronological order, which means that most of its LPs don't necessarily play like proper albums (LP 5 comes closest). Anyone who is interested in diving deeper than what's on First Rays, which is available separately on vinyl, probably won't mind, and it is a gas hearing Hendrix directing his show, or leading the guys through a jam on "Astro Man" that clearly turns into Cream's "Politician".
However, if you do want to dig First Rays of the New Rising Sun, and you aren't fundamentally devoted to vinyl, ELS very conscientiously includes that comp on a surround sound blu-ray disc, complete with a revised track order and three bonus songs: "Valleys of Neptune", "Pali Gap", and "Lover Man". Vinyl is our lord and savior here at Psychobabble, and I'm not even equipped for surround sound, so I can't comment on that audio bonus, but I can comment on the feature-length Electric Lady Studios documentary, which also appears on the blu-ray. Essentially, it feels like an installment of the "Classic Albums" documentary series, which features a bunch of talking heads discussing the genesis, sessions, and songs of a given album. This doc is as focused on the construction of Electric Lady Studios as it is on the music Hendrix made there. Talking heads include Mitch Mitchell, Buddy Guy, and engineer Eddie Kramer. There's some cool live footage too.
The video quality is pretty mediocre, especially considering that the doc was made in 2021 and not 1999, but hey, this isn't Citizen Kane. It will probably suffice for most folks. Be careful, though...the Blu-ray disc is included in a small cardboard sleeve that is popped into one of the LP jackets (in my set, it was included with LP-2, although I cannot guarantee that that is the case for every set).
Back to the vinyl, it is quiet and the music is mastered well. For what it's worth, played against my copies of these tracks on a vintage copy of The Essential Hendrix, ELS sounds punchier without getting overbearing in the bass department.
This set's value is also very, very noteworthy. In an age when a slip case will double a box set's price, Electric Lady Studios retails for around $120. For that you get five LPs and a blu-ray, which breaks down to each element running you twenty bucks... a fabulous deal. Let's call the slip case stone free.
