The great Irish-American rock band Black
47′s most recent album Bankers and Gangsters includes a very funny song, The Long
Lost Tapes of Hendrix. It’s based on the incident where Jimi Hendrix’
bassist Noel Redding absconded to Ireland with tapes of Hendrix’ last live
recordings, and used them as collateral for a mortgage there. Redding may well
have had an extra laugh at the bankers’ expense – who knows if the tapes were in
good condition, let alone if the playing was any good, considering how
notoriously uneven Hendrix’ live shows were in the months before he was
murdered. Likewise, is there any Hendrix worth hearing that hasn’t already been
unearthed in the past forty years? With any icon of this stature, caveat emptor
is the word here: just ask any former sixteen-year-old who dumped $15 or so
on one of those Curtis Knight albums in the pre-napster era. The premise of the
latest Hendrix compilation, a lavish 59-track box set titled West Coast Seattle Boy: The Jimi Hendrix
Anthology, is that there in fact is some meat left on the bones, and as it
turns out the compilers are right. To further whet Hendrix completists’
appetites, in addition to fifteen early-to-mid-60s tracks featuring Hendrix as a
sideman, original engineer Eddie Kramer was brought in for some debatable
remixes of original studio recordings. There’s also plenty of marginalia seeing
the light of day here officially for the first time, although pretty much all of
it’s been circulating for decades in one form or another. Consider this an
amazing double album further fleshed out with some obvious if welcome choices,
some stuff that will be prized by hardcore Hendrix fans plus the by-now expected
album side, or more, worth of stuff that was never released because it shouldn’t
have been.
The Hendrix-as-sideman stuff is surprisingly lightweight, notable only for
the guitar. But Rosa Lee Brooks’ shot at a top 40 soul hit, My Diary, has Jimi
stunningly foreshadowing Axis: Bold As Love; the Isley Bros. Have You Ever Been
Disappointed and The Icemen’s My Girl, She’s a Fox are rich with eerie,
tremoloing broken chords; Billy LaMont’s Sweet Thang is a deliciously snarling
one-chord funk vamp; and one of the Little Richard songs here is an
unintentionally hilarious attempt to squeeze Mr. Penniman into a cliched early
60s dance-craze style (it doesn’t work, not even close).
As much as the outtakes are also a mixed bag, this is where the real
treasures are. A ragged acoustic take of the lyrical, Dylanesque My Friend
resonates as a snide dismissal of shallow scenesters. Mr. Bad Luck, a mid-60s
Experience tune whose rhythm parts were re-recorded by Noel Redding and Mitch
Mitchell twenty years later, could be interpreted as a premonition of Hendrix’
ultimate fate. Hear My Freedom, a proto-metal instrumental jam with organ takes
a while to get going, but when the galloping beat kicks in it’s genius, a style
echoed even more intensely on a later instrumental simply titled Bolero. A
collaboration with Arthur Lee, Everlasting First, has political overtones and
would have been perfectly at home on Electric Ladyland. There are also a
deliciously Hendrixized version of Doc Pomus’ Lonely Avenue, just
crazy guitar, vocals and drums; a pretty scorching, politically charged Shame
Shame Shame, a Voodoo Chile soundalike; and inspired, peak-era psychedelic
versions of Hey Babe/New Rising Sun, New Rising Sun and In from the Storm.
The live stuff is choice, although most of it’s been readily available for a
long time: the best tracks are absolutely unhinged versions of Stone Free and
Foxey Lady, by Band of Gypsys. The remixes are uneven. Muting the psychedelia
and bring out the rock works terrifically with Are You Experienced, maybe
because that song is so hypnotic to begin with, but Love or Confusion – Hendrix’
best song – misses the cohesiveness of the original mix, a series of layers that
don’t gel well when separated from the original feedback-iced morass. Pretty
much every track here is up on youtube – it would have taken us as long to track
down the links for all of these songs as it did to put this piece up to begin
with, so we’re leaving that up to you. To experience how surprisingly rich it
sounds, you need the actual item. Interestingly, the complete edition is only
available as a cd box; itunes
is limited to just sixteen of the tracks.
December 22, 2010 - Posted by delarue | Music, music,
concert, review, Reviews, rock music
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tapes of hendrix, mitch mitchell, Music, noel redding, psychedelia, psychedelic
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