OPO hendrix

holy shit, tyler. I haven't checked out your blog to the point where I had totally forgot about it.

xp Thanks! And...and holy crap, calling your blog an embarrassment of riches is an insult to embarrassments of riches. I may spend the weekend there.

lol yes. it's definitely one of the top 3 or 4 blogs on the internet imo.

I think that came out wrong. I love it, is what I meant.

2cd set of Carole King outtakes! Jesus fuck man, I've got some catching up to do.

Ok, this thing is definitely sick. Just finished the first side.

y'all: http://ow.ly/9Q9tb

tx, will give this a listen in a bit.

cool thx

lol being a guitar student turned me into a hendrix fan

who knows what kind of horrible albums hendrix might've made had he lived, but he would've made some amazing ones, too. dude was capable of pretty much anything, i think.

y'all: http://ow.ly/9Q9tb

Woo-hoo! Thanks, tylerw! Can't wait to listen.

Thanks for posting that "First Rays" and listened to it all wknd, it sort of blew my mind. Some of those songs are incredible, the whole thing is brilliant!

Yes, thanks again, tylerw. Even though I was pretty familiar with most of these songs, I was blown away by how cinematic the presentation of the material is here. The problem with all previous First Rays assumpilations was that they were all just collections of songs rather than continuations of the kind of thematic flow he exploited on Ladyland.

yeah that's what i like about it -- as opposed to an odds-n-sods collection, this one really feels like a rad early 70s double LP.

Listening now. Fucking loving it. It's like one of those Bill Laswell "mix translation" things like Panthalassa or the Bob Marley one or the Santana one...only, you know, really fucking good instead of half-baked and lazy.

^^^ Haha hugely OTM

As if Teo Macero did it instead, then, you say.

this first rays boot mix might be the best hendrix album

it is so rad!

I'd like to think that if Jimi and Gil got together, the results would be more along the lines of There Comes A Time--the original LP, or the radically extrapolated CD edition, one of the very first CDs I bought, in a longbox, with Gil's furrowed Canadian brow quietly welcoming me to the brain-jelly jungle (some sylvan glades in there too). An exemplary do-over--I thought a lot of CDs were gonna be like that.

For some unknown reason I never bothered to get the tracklist for First Rays. Does anyone still have the list handy so I could append them to my 4 tracks? Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Message to the Universe>Izabella>Power of Soul>Astro Man>Valleys of Neptune>Angel

Slow Version>Night Bird Flying>Trashman>EZY Rider>Pali Gap>Hey Gypsy Boy

Message to Love>Roomful of Mirrors>Villanova Junction>Dolly Dagger>Burning Desire>Freedom>South Saturn Delta>Drifter's Escape

Stepping Stone>Somewhere>Burning Desire>Hey Baby>Drifting

!! thanks!! you have my eternal devotion :)

Little Wing came on the random playlist yesterday, prompting Emma to say "why do we like Hendrix? We don't really like any other widdly-widdly guitar muso shit from that era". He's just better than Led Zep or Pink Floyd or whoever, isn't he? But how? Why?

The best explanation I can think of is this anecdote from Robert Wyatt in Charles Shaar Murray's Crosstown Traffic:

Robert Wyatt, whose Soft Machine toured the US as opening act with Hendrix for over a year, recalls, "I saw [Larry] Coryell once -- he was one of the few people who ever got up and tried to cut Hendrix. It was at the old Scene Club in New York, and he was leaping backwards and forwards, his fingers flying, and Hendrix -- when it came to his solo -- just went 'ba-WO-O-O-OWWWW' and it just erased the last ten minutes [laughs] with one note. It was silly for Coryell even to try. It was like walking into a blowtorch . . . the fool!"

why don't you listen to widdly-widdly guitar muso shit?

Well I don't particularly like it, and my wife fucking hates it (apart from Hendrix).

It seems pretty reductive. They're three profoundly different bands.

similar mainly in a "classic rock radio" kinda way. hendrix was on another level musically though, probably better to compare him to an instrumentalist like charlie parker than jimmy page...

yeah he had an awesome jazz feel for improvisation, ... but he also has this killer bluesman way of making his riffs sound like an emotion rather than *just* sounding like guitar widdly widdly wankery. everything he does is in service of the soul of the song, it's never really about hey look how amazing I am. At least I don't think so.

and I think he's a lovely soulful singer as well. I think it's harder to dismiss him because he brought more than just straight guitar shredding.

The Experience gave him that nice tight platform for him to play around on too, and they could go pretty much anwhere he went and make it work. They really helped to elevate his music and take it where it needed to go to make it reallllly fucking great.

okay I'm done

:D

but he also has this killer bluesman way of making his riffs sound like an emotion rather than *just* sounding like guitar widdly widdly wankery. everything he does is in service of the soul of the song, it's never really about hey look how amazing I am. At least I don't think so.

OTM

this is and old thread now but i don't even think of hendrix as particularly widdly-widdly. of course he could do that, and did. i think what made him great is his ability to slip between roles & methods of playing seamlessly and instantly. there isn't any division between his chord playing, low-register delta-ish riff playing, mid-register r&b backing type playing, and albert/bb-king-ish lead stuff. he had a really big physical vocabulary on the neck and could do whatever, whenever

That sums it up very well, goole.

yeah great post, goole

People, Hell and Angels is very satisfying, btw. Nice to hear him play funky guitarslinging sideman to Lonnie Youngblood and the Ghetto Fighters. Plus yet another "Hear My Train a-Comin'" for us train-a-comin'-spotters

izabella

I wish someone had told me earlier that Stepping Stone was not the Monkees/Minor Threat song.Probably my favorite of his rave-ups now.

Machine Gun

Would be Machine Gun but for 1983

yea 1983

or third stone

WATCHTOWER

May This Be Love for me, but I'm a huge fan of 1983 as well.

I think Isabella @ Woodstock is still my fav, but 1983 also a strong contender and lately I love this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki5AfK0sFrs

btw are we including "Moon Turn the Tides" in "1983" or treating that as a separate song, bc those two combined probably did the most to open up my idea of what recorded music could sound like at a formative age

After that probably Electric Ladyland or Power of Soul

'Dolly Dagger'

i'm gonna change my vote