Review: Jimi Hendrix Experience's 'Bold As Love"

The last note recorded for Are You Experienced had barely decayed before The Jimi Hendrix Experience were back in the studio to begin work on their second album. Any other group might have been creatively spent after making a debut as consistently spectacular as the Experience's, but the Experience seemed even more fired up on their second album, not just to play with their usual exuberance and imagination but to fully explore the possibilities of the studio. They still mostly kept the arrangements down to the usual power-trio stuff, but the tape and effects manipulations on things like "If Six Was Nine", "Castles Made of Sand", and the daffy "EXP" showed how much Hendrix enjoyed playing the mixing board like a fourth instrument. 

Review: 'Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision' Vinyl Box Set

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. 

Review: 'Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live At The Hollywood Bowl: August 18, 1967'

Two months to the day after The Jimi Hendrix Experience became an overnight stateside phenomenon at the Monterey Pop Festival, the group freaked out California a little further south at the Hollywood Bowl. The band was simply white hot at this point, still flying from rearranging brains en masse at the beginning of the summer and still so fresh that they hadn't even put out a sophomore LP yet. This material must have still been new enough that Jimi hadn't quite gotten it all down yet, as he kept forgetting to sing lines in "The Wind Cries Mary". But such gaffs are part of the charm of hearing a vintage, unadulterated performance, as you can on the new live disc, Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live At The Hollywood Bowl: August 18, 1967. The power of the band at this stage in their career is what makes it electrifying. 

Review: 'The Jimi Hendrix Experience- Los Angeles Forum- April 26, 1969 '

Although The Beatles blew the ceiling off concert possibilities when they played the first rock show at a sports arena in 1965, it took a few years for such venues to play home to longhairs with any regularity. The sports stadium rock show was still somewhat novel by April 26, 1969, when The Jimi Hendrix Experience played the Los Angeles Forum, then home of the Lakers. 

Review: 'Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child'

In the introduction to their new book, Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child, Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik point out that "virtually no one claimed to know Hendrix." This sort of absolves them from digging any deeper than the myriad existing books exploring the life of the guitar genius (at least 300, according to the curator of an exhaustive Hendrix website). However, their oral history approach makes one hope they might uncover something new, something personal, something that sheds at least a little new light on what made Jimi Hendrix so different, so innovative, so remarkable. Yet, even his own sister, Janie, doesn't provide any revelations. More often than not, the book's contributors react to Hendrix, like rubes recounting sightings of UFOs speeding over cornfields. He was shy. He was visually striking. He had trouble with audiences who wanted to put him in a box (more than once he is frustrated with dum-dums shrieking for "Purple Haze" while he has other things to express). He was brilliant. 

This isn't a knock against Voodoo Child, because anyone who has ever seen the special edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind knows how disappointing it is to go inside the UFO. Some mysteries are worth preserving, and if few got close to Hendrix, that fact ultimately may be the story to tell. And the Kuberniks do interview or quote people who personally knew Hendrix: producer Eddie Kramer, fellow black artist in a white scene Johnny Echols, bandmate Billy Cox, tour-mate Micky Dolenz, friend and rival Pete Townshend, and so on. Even Janie Hendrix says that she has been learning more about her own brother by curating his legacy as president of the Experience Hendrix company. Oddly, there are quotes from neither Mitch Mitchell nor Noel Redding, whom Moody Blue Justin Hayward speculates may be the only people who really knew Hendrix.

Voodoo Child is also a great-looking book, a small-scale yet photo-filled hardcover as resplendent in color as one of Hendrix's outfits or guitar solos. You may not learn anything from it, but you'll love looking at it.

Review: 'The Jimi Hendrix Experience-Live in Maui'

On August 1, 1970, Jimi Hendrix played a spur-of-the-moment free concert on a slapped together stage on a cattle ranch in Maui so filmmaker Chuck Wein could shoot some live footage to insert into an awful sounding Easy Rider rip-off called Rainbow Bridge. This was just four weeks before Hendrix’s infamously disappointing performance as the headliner of the Isle of Wight Festival— just seven weeks before his death. Under such circumstances, it’s natural to expect little of Hendrix’s Maui gig. Yet, recordings prove it was a spectacular testament to how in charge of his powers he still was so close to the end of his life.

Review: Jimi Hendrix's 'Electric Ladyland: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition'

Jimi Hendrix’s abilities as a musician came together immediately. On his very first album, he was already manipulating the strings like a master puppeteer. It took him slightly longer to fully develop as a songwriter and record maker, but once he did—holy shit!—Electric Ladyland. Like all great double albums from Blonde on Blonde to Sign O’ the Times and beyond, this is the sound of an artist of limitless imagination free to explore and exploit his every idea with magical abandon. Everything great about Jimi Hendrix froths from the grooves of Electric Ladyland. Hendrix the interpreter was never better than when teaching Bob Dylan—Bob Dylan!—how it’s done with “All Along the Watchtower”. Hendrix the singer reaches heights never before hinted at with his Curtis Mayfield-worthy falsetto on “Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)”. Hendrix the bluesman stretches from the Mississippi Delta to Neptune on “Voodoo Chile”. With “Burning of the Midnight Lamp”, Hendrix the pop craftsman pulls one of psychedelia’s bubbliest nuggets from his cauldron. Hendrix the doobie-sucking jazzbo lays back and grooves on “Rainy Day, Dream Away”. Hendrix the town crier shouts of racial injustice in “House Burning Down”.  Hendrix the mind melting prankster forges “…And the Gods Made Love”, and Hendrix the avant-garde-sci-fi-Walt Disney animates “1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”/ “Moon, Turn the Tides…Gently, Gently Away”. Hendrix the guitarist, of course, shines and burns and glows on every goddamn track.

Review: Jimi Hendrix's 'Both Sides of the Sky'

Jimi Hendrix hadn’t been dead for six months before the archive raids began with The Cry of Love. Over the next near-five decades, compilations of unreleased Hendrix tracks would be downright notorious in their abundance. That’s not to say there wasn’t gold worth mining, and the best of this stuff is condensed on 1997’s First Rays of the New Rising Son.

After about a dozen major outtakes comps in total since Hendrix passed, a new one titled Both Sides of the Sky appears this year. As is to be expected at this point, you should not prepare yourself for the discovery of anything on the level of “Ezy Rider”, “Dolly Dagger”, “Freedom”, “Drifting”, or “Stepping Stone”, though there is an urgent version of the latter on this new double-LP. And performance, rather than songwriting, is certainly the focus of Both Sides of the Sky. Band of Gypsys are behind the most impressive ones, with fierce versions of Muddy’s “Mannish Boy” and Hendrix’s own “Lover Man”. “Hear My Train A Comin’” is the sole track with the Experience (though Mitch Mitchell does drum on three others) and it is probably the set’s best showcase for Hendrix’s sci-fi, six-string showmanship.

A few tracks are curious for their lack of that showmanship. A couple with Stephen Stills on vocals—Stills’s own minor-league “$20 Fine” and the future smash “Woodstock”— are historically notable, but Hendrix never asserts himself on the former and only contributes some gnarly bass to the latter. What these are doing on a Jimi Hendrix record is anyone’s guess. He dominates the instrumental blues jam “Jungle”, but only on rhythm guitar.

A few oddities are more than worth hearing, such as the sensual “Power of Soul”, the menacing powerhouse “Send My Love to Linda”, and “Cherokee Mist”, a groovy instrumental that provides the ultra-rare opportunity to hear the master on electric sitar. For the majority who don’t already have it in their collection, the previously issued version of Guitar Slim’s “The Things I Used to Do” featuring Johnny Winter is top shelf.

While few will rate Both Sides of the Sky among Hendrix’s most essential releases, the packaging is unquestionably nice. For the most part, the sound is excellent (some tracks, such as “Cherokee Mist”, are more on the noisy side), the 180 gram vinyl is stored in anti-static sleeves (why don’t more contemporary vinyl releases utilize these things?!?), and the gatefold contains an LP-size booklet with extensive track-by-track notes and a slew of terrific photos.

Review: 'The Jimi Hendrix Experience'

Listen to Jimi Hendrix play and you’ll hear him express an unparalleled rainbow of feelings through his electric guitar: rage and violence and tripped-out mysticism and sadness and confusion and turmoil and extreme horniness and beauty. These same feelings infused his existence despite the sort of benevolent space cadet persona he usually projected in interviews and on stage. In 1983, author Jerry Hopkins got behind the alluring images of an outer-space virtuoso to reveal the real man in his essential biography The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix did spend a lot of time in the cosmos because of the ridiculous amount of chemicals he regularly ingested, but there is an earthier tale here too. James Marshall Hendrix’s impoverished upbringing was as unglamorous as you can imagine. He spent his young adult years drugging and stealing cars and stumbled his way into the army where his greatest dream was to ascend to a low-pressure job as a file clerk. 

Guided by Voices reunion at Terminal 5: 11/7/2010

When Robert Pollard broke up Guided By Voices after 20-odd years of 4-track experimentation, beer guzzling, wacko on-stage rants, and middle-aged scissor-kicking, he said he was interested in seeing how history might contextualize his band. Would GBV be squished into the upper-echelon with their idols The Beatles and The Who? Typically, Pollard never gave Rock & Roll archivists a chance to sit back, catch their breaths, and take a moment to reflect on his history with Dayton’s booziest sons. He never stopped releasing music at a dementedly prolific rate, whether as a solo act or as a member of The Circus Devils or Keene Brothers or The Moping Swans or The Takeovers or Psycho and the Birds. More importantly, he only kept the band broken up for a mere six years before reuniting to help Matador Records celebrate its 20th anniversary and taking the “classic” line-up of the ever-metamorphosing group on a short tour. Ostensibly, that tour came to an end last night. I say “ostensibly” because they just added an extra New Year’s Eve show at Irving Plaza in NYC. But that’s a typical GBV move. The tour is never really over. The night of drinking has never really dried up. The club is never really closed. And GBV— if we’re to consider their one constant member to be the band’s essence— never really broke up.

But, to some fans, they did, indeed, break up, and a lot longer ago than 2004. For the hardcore cultists that favored the group’s cassette-tape recordings, Guided by Voices broke up in 1996 when Pollard shit-canned Tobin Sprout* (guitar-vocals), Mitch Mitchell (guitar), Kevin Fennell (drums), and Greg Demos (bass) after making their final lo-fi freak-out, Under the Bushes, Under the Stars. Pollard then hired Cobra Verde to serve as his back-up band, and he cut Mag Earwig! the first fully polished GBV record (the band’s ‘80s output recorded in proper studios never really sounded that much slicker than the stuff they cut on home 4-track machines in the mid-‘90s). Those lo-fi fans felt just as betrayed as Sprout, Mitchell, and the rest must have when they received their pink slips.

* (See correction in the comments below...sorry, Tobin!)

Personally, I adore Mag Earwig! and the widely reviled Do the Collapse (produced by Ric Ocasek), and all those other “sell out” records that weeded out the fair-weather fans. Yet there is an incomparable magic to those records the guys made in Mitchell’s basement while sucking back Rolling Rocks and indulging in their weirdest whims. Records like Vampire on Titus and Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes sound like they were never meant for public consumption. Like they were just made for the guys’ personal use. They sound like bootlegs, like The Beatles Anthology albums, like the recordings you amateur songwriters out there used to record in your own bedroom on your own Tascam 4-track machine long before digital technology made even home-recording into an act as soulless as watching a feature film on your fucking cell phone. The Guided by Voices I saw last night at Terminal 5 in Manhattan was purely a product of an age before cell phones and Garage Band and MP3s. They were cassettes wound with crinkled tape and smelly basements and old dudes who kicked out Rock & Roll with way more genuine joy than the poseurs who followed them. Songs were as likely to be sloppy messes as they were to be powerful. Mitch Mitchell seemed so happy to be back on stage with the band that he wasted not an opportunity to shout inanities (some with a lack of political correctness that also seemed to creep in from a long-gone era) into his microphone or shred on his guitar in inappropriate place. He personally sabotaged Sprout’s dramatic intro to “Cut-Out Witch” with his overzealous riffing. After the rest of the group left the stage following each encore, Mitchell stuck around to tell the audience how much he loves them. When the band came back out, Pollard slurred his trademark banter with a complete lack of the sort of self-conscious irony that threatened to annihilate Rock & Roll throughout the past twenty-or-so years. Guided by Voices never played Rock & Roll because they thought the idea of a bunch of middle-aged dudes bashing out off-kilter tributes to The Who or King Crimson or Wire was cute or clever. They did it because that’s what they wanted to do more than anything else in the world. And that’s what made last night’s show a transcendent experience despite the raggedness and the flubbed guitar-lines and the poorly laid out, acoustically shitty venue (Terminal 5? Bleck). Robert Pollard really did seem to be thrilled to be back with the guys he played with before he “sold out” (Editor's note: Robert Pollard never sold out). And Mitch Mitchell seemed thrilled to be king for a day.