Hendrix: Classic or Dud?

Yeah Cry of Love and Rainbow Bridge were two of the earliest and best (RB finally on CD a few years ago). Also, Hendrix In The West, released in '72 I think, was a party favorite of my gang. Band of Gypsies was different, really groove-strict here, cutting loose(r) there---both suiting the mood and vibe of wartime---but the much later Band of Gypsies 2 was more fluid overall, without getting too loose. Also liked Live At Winterland, Woodstock, Blues, Radio One, among other concert albums, but some of them were expanded later, maybe too much so, at least for home alone non-stoned listening

(Well Radio One wasn't a "concert album", it was his BBC sessions, along with the sequel, BBC Sessions.)

Dude! You hurt me! You hurt me in my heart!
― Sean Carruthers, Saturday, July 27, 2002 8:00 PM (sixteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

holy shit is this an accidental quotation of the Corgan/Thayil article

KPFA in Berkeley was airing this late night a few weeks ago, what I heard of it was just fantastic:

http://www.openculture.com/2016/12/hear-a-4-hour-radio-documentary-on-jimi-hendrix.html

just today i have been listening to the archival release from the avandaro festival which has armando molina doing the same thing. wild shit, btw.

― bob lefse (rushomancy), Wednesday, January 3, 2018 7:28 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this appears to be the only mention of the festival on ilx, and also of the soundtrack 2xCD i'm trying to track down. do you actually have the discs or just files ? it's good ?

Damn, Mitchell was so funky
Love dem triplets on Hey Joe

At last, not dud after all.

our long national nightmare is over

I'm learning now that "parakeet" is not always equivalent to "budgerigar" in UK parlance

so by this point, the majority of the hendrix catalogue is live recordings and i came to the realization recently that i don't really know many of them outside of band of gypsys.

what would be the definitive hendrix live recording?

Jimi Plays Monterey (available under various titles) is essential. I really like Hendrix in the West, which was reissued on CD a few years ago with bonus tracks. There was a 4CD box called Stages that had one full concert each from 1967, 1968, 1969 and 1970 that's also pretty good.

The best (concise) live release is Live at Winterland IMHO, or if you want something with more breadth, the box set for Winterland too. The film Jimi Plays Monterey is also essential because it's a great visual document of a great show (albeit short - the setlist is barely over a half-hour long). If you're a really big Hendrix fan, you'll probably get more because he was so often great on stage (and both Stages and Hendrix in the West are excellent too), but I'd definitely start with Winterland and D.A. Pennebaker's Jimi Plays Monterey film.

One slight caveat about Stages is there’s what sounds like added/overdubbed crowd noise on the 1970 set. Fortunately, that got a standalone release as Freedom: Atlanta Pop Festival

And not all the concerts on Stages are complete; a couple songs were cut from the 1970 Atlanta show.

awesome, thanks for your input guys. gonna check some of these out for sure!

I actually don't know a whole lot about Stages, that one came out before I really got into Jimi, and I don't know how available it is, but the 1970 show from that set is pretty widely available as Freedom: Atlanta Pop Festival.

Live at Monterrey (KILLING FLOOR!!!)
Atlanta Pop 1970 (HEAR MY TRAIN A COMIN'!)

+ Ryko's

Radio One (later expanded)-BBC Sessions
Live at Winterland

Ryko did a nice job on these back in the day and they sold a boodle of them.

Stages is pretty expensive to find now, it was not in print long as it came out right before Reprise lost the rights.

If you run into it cheap (doubtful), but that Experience box set has a nice mix of excellent live tracks.

I listened to this a ton in my teen years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock_(Jimi_Hendrix_album)

Try In the West too. If only for the version of little wing that he plays. A good little intro to Hendrix live.

Seconding (Thirding?) In the West, that's a great one. If you really dig Band of Gypsys, the Songs For Groovy Children box from a few years back is really killer.

That purple Experience box is great, as earlnash noted, but I had no idea it was hard to find. I found a copy for $22 at Half Price Books in 2019.

I didn't go to the purple Experience box for the live stuff as much as for the unreleased studio jams, especially the studio Band of Gypsys material and the long jam(s) with Larry Young.

https://www.discogs.com/Jimi-Hendrix-Experience-Paris-1967-San-Francisco-1968/release/5539113

i have this and enjoyed it.
the experience were really on fire.
and in the second show on here, buddy miles swaps with mitch mitchell to play the drums, which is very cool to hear, just cos its quite different to what he did with hendrix on BOG. buddy miles gets a bit of an unfair rep with many hendrix fans, and on the BOG stuff, he def was quite repetitive, sturdy to the point of metronomic at times, but you cant dismiss his work with hendrix entirely as he played on some of the best songs on electric ladyland.

i do like billy cox, and i def appreciate what he brought to hendrix, something very sturdy, a bit deeper, and sometimes just mean and lean low end, but other times, i think he was a bit anonymous. noel redding obv had his own flaws, but he had a wilder style, which IMO, fit hendrix better. im not sure trying to sound 'grounded' was that good for hendrix. my favourite stuff on the BOG/fillmore east shows, is actually hearing the BOG take on old experience songs (some of the new songs are good, machine gun obv, but a lot just arent complete, and sound tentative, which is also why ive never found the first rays of the rising sun songs that satisfying), and bringing something totally different to it.

Re: Woodstock, it's actually a disappointing set for me, so much that I eventually sold off the expanded reissues because I rarely listened to them. The Woodstock movie may be disappointing musically-speaking (the long running time compounds the uneven quality of the musical numbers), but it's pretty great in terms of filmmaking and Jimi's part makes a great ending. I got my Blu-ray copy for like $8, so it can be found for dirt cheap prices. I also prefer the original soundtrack album mixes over the later remixes used for the expanded reissues, and I believe Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab reissued both soundtrack LP's on CD back in the day. Again, I thought the music was very uneven, so I just burned the Hendrix numbers on to my own CD-R. In total, his portion runs about a half-hour long, and a few tracks were edited down for those LP's, but I don't mind. Between that and his appearance in the film, that's all I've really wanted to revisit from his Woodstock performance.

The BBC stuff is great, but both Rykodisc's Radio One and the expanded two-CD set from the Hendrix family are plagued by fake-stereo processing (and excessive compression in the case of the latter). I wish someone would reissue that set from flat mono sources without messing with the sound.

tbh it was just the first live set I heard, probably the only one that was available at the local sam goody at the time or something, so it was the one I listened to a lot when I got into hendrix. Izabella is still a favorite.

https://100greatestbootlegs.blogspot.com/2020/01/jimi-hendrix-la-forum-1970-flac.html

I just wanna talk to you
I won’t do you no harm

Another add: the Rainbow Bridge soundtrack---concert music in the movie recently got its own release, but have long made do with the likes of moon power instrumental "Pali Gap," still one of my faves in this whole universe, even though I've long since stopped shrooming. Also "Dolly Dagger," one of his girlfriend tributes, and I used to live in a room full of mirrors
All I could see was me
Then I take my spirit and I smash my mirrors
And now the whole world is here for me to see
Now I'm searching for my love to be, Hey!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!
All right
A broken glass was solvin' my brain
Cut and screamin' crowdin' in my head
A broken glass was loud in my brain
It used to fall on my dreams and cut me in my bed
It used to fall on my dreams and cut me in my bed
I say making love was strange in my bed
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

What was ILM like in 2001? Ironic? I started posting here in 2005 which I can assume was a continuation of those days but I can’t really remember myself. I just know every time one of these old threads pops up the first post(s) usually call these canon musicians a dud.

It was like a troll farm back then.

"Ironic" isn't the term I would use to describe those posters. "Contrarian" and "blinkered" are a better fit. À chacun son goût and all that, but many Old ILM mainstays were consistently wrong about pretty much everything.

Voodoo chili (slow Return)

How could I have never heard “51st anniversary” until today? Damn

Seems like maybe Mitchell was the secret weapon on those early albums, his groove is ridiculous

For sure

Mitch Mitchell > Dino Danelli >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Ginger Baker

Didn't Ginger Baker slag off Mitch Mitchell too? Though what drummer didn't he slag off?

Been re-listening to his work since it's now on YT. Electric Ladyland specially.

Yup: “Mitchell was a journeyman. He was hopeless.” On Hendrix when he first sat in with Cream: “I wasn’t impressed at all.”

https://www.loudersound.com/features/ginger-baker-interview-an-afternoon-with-the-worlds-most-irascible-drummer

xp

LOL he was such an irredeemable dick

Though what drummer didn't he slag off?

Ginger Baker, funnily enough, who I always thought the most lifeless and unimpressive of the classic rock drum virtuosos, Fela collab notwithstanding. If you thought he seemed a prick in that documentary, give his autobiog a read - the most self-pitying and pathetic junkie bullshit, allied with an egotism his playing never earned, and an orneriness he should never have been able to get away with.

Mitch Mitchell was an endless joy. Even on the few weak JHE tracks (thinking specifically She's So Fine off Axis), there he is, embroidering the humdrum and every day with easygoing and undeniable magic.

Sad that he never did much else of note, other than failing an audition for Wings.

I really liked Cream's singles, but at least within rock music, he rarely put his much-vaunted technical prowess to effective use. The more he tried to show off, the more he betrayed a lack of taste and judgment. Maybe he was better on his jazz records, but I've never felt compelled to investigate.

Love Mitch Mitchell. I didn't really follow his career after Hendrix, but looking him up on Wikipedia, it says he was semi-retired from the mid-'70s on. To be fair, it's hard to see how he would've topped his work with Hendrix. I guess it's rare that a great drummer in a truly great rock band continues on to become the right drummer in another great band. Bill Bruford did that with King Crimson after Yes, but otherwise the list seems mighty short.

I saw the Ramatam s/t album out in the wild today. Any good?

Ginger played as though he was using hammers instead of sticks.

Toad? Turd morelike.

Baker's best stuff came late in his career — the first Ginger Baker Trio album and what I think was his final release, Why?, are both good. I also like the album he did with Peter Brötzmann and Sonny Sharrock, No Material. He wasn't amazing but he could be put to good use in the proper context.

No Material was the first or second CD I ever bought, credited to Baker: a live rave-up with Brotzmann and Sharrock, yeah, also guitarist Nicky Skopelitis and bassist Jan Kadar (of Das Pferd(---all I can say about Baker is that he fit right in, which is no small thing. Another show eventually appeared, Live in Munich 1987, also cred to Baker alone (didn't know about that one 'til unperson mentioned it---thanks again!). Both performances are available on one CD/MP3/stream, under the title of the first release: https://www.amazon.com/No-Material-Ginger-Baker/dp/B00A9V1QYY/ref=sr_1_18?ie=UTF8&qid=1464022599&sr=8-18&keywords=ginger+baker

Let us be honest, Baker's opinions are not out of the realm of many musicians in the "jazz" world to anything not of that place. The dude wanted to be thought of a level with musicians like Art Blakey or Tony Williams. That said, he seemed to have a taste for a lifestyle way beyond your usual jazz purist would be able to afford, which means he had to mercenary whore out. And his general volatility probably steered many musicians who could have perhaps utilized his talents to not seek him out.

Thing I got from reading on Mitch Mitchell was that really everything else he got into seemed pretty crap after playing with Jimi and others just wanted him for the Jimi connection so he hung it up. The lifestyle also was not too good for him.

Out this year! Looks like it might be good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Forum:_April_26,_1969
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix_posthumous_discography

I can't think of many jazz drummers who have been integral parts of a truly great rock album and a truly great jazz album (not counting "fusion" albums that can be categorized as both). Connie Kay is the only one that comes to mind at the moment (Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Modern Jazz Quartet's best albums particularly Dedicated to Connie)