For all its warts, it could be your own worn-out bootleg tape.Īt Last… The Beginning: The Making of Electric Ladyland, a behind-the-scenes look into the album from 1997, rounds out the new collection. Although much more polished live Hendrix is readily available on the market, the gnarly sound of this LA date only adds to the fun. For live Hendrix collectors, there may not be a version of Purple Haze, Red House or Fire quite like this out there. Its blown-out sound wasn’t a label-approved Hendrix recording, but a previously unknown soundboard recording drawn from the console by a bootlegging fan.Īt the Hollywood Bowl, the Experience’s sound is blown out it gasps, sputters and hisses. Disc three offers a sonically flawed but high-energy Experience concert recording, taken from their Hollywood Bowl gig on Sept. The Electric Ladyland boxset also ventures beyond the studio walls. “He was using this small, blond, 30-watt Fender Showman amp,” he writes.
“Having heard Jimi’s first two albums, I thought he’d be using stacks and stacks of amplifiers and electronic toys to get his sound,” he recalls in the notes.īut as he found, Hendrix’s hair-raising lead sound mostly came from consumer-grade technology.
Ladyland’s organist, Mike Finnigan, was just in awe that Hendrix could summon such otherworldly sounds from relatively basic equipment. He wanted to open the album with the sound of a spaceship landing. “The track is phased and we put a lot of Mitch’s cymbals in backward for the effect.” All this gonzo experimentation was to fulfill Hendrix’s science-fiction vision for Ladyland. “Jimi’s voice comes in backward and Mitch’s tom-toms were slowed down ridiculously,” he writes. John McDermott, who manages Hendrix’s catalog, is especially effusive about how …And the Gods Made Love, an eerie drone that kicks off the album, came to be. Specifically, we hear how they overloaded the interstitial tracks with tape delay and reverb to create otherworldly sounds.Ĭourtesy of Sony Legacy (click for larger view) Half the fun of Electric Ladyland was Hendrix’s mad-scientist use of recording technology, though - and the bonus material here provides a unique look into how Hendrix achieved his psychedelic textures. There, the Experience works out electric odysseys like Crosstown Traffic, Gypsy Eyes and Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) with a little help from some familiar faces: drummer Buddy Miles, pianist Al Kooper, and - oddly enough - a guest appearance from Stephen Stills on bass. Then, the listener is transported to within the studio walls at London’s Mayfair and Olympic studios and New York’s Record Plant. The effect of hearing these early run-throughs of Gypsy Eyes, Cherokee Mist and more, possibly minutes after Hendrix dreamt them up, is shockingly intimate. Most beguiling to fans may be the Drake Hotel demos Hendrix lived at the Manhattan building for a time, laying down ideas on a Teac tape machine as they popped into his head. There’s the original album, freshly remastered by Bernie Grundman, but also a wealth of unreleased Ladyland material that captures Hendrix’s prodigious pace and limitless imagination. There’s a lot for Hendrix fans and the uninitiated to feast on across these 48 tracks. Public controversy aside, fans should be happy to know that this new Ladyland box set not only presents the album as intended, but sounds better than ever a blown-up, 48-track version of Hendrix’s spaciest, grandest, most quintessentially bold-as-love studio project. In a booklet photo, he pretends to rend the cover with his teeth.
The “nude” sleeve embarrassed Hendrix and was a turnoff for the record market UK record dealers either turned the cover inside-out or refused to stock it altogether. The latter went through their own art department, using celebrity photographer David Montgomery to shoot a seedy-looking tableau of nude women for the outer sleeve against Hendrix’s wishes. Hendrix had no hand in the concept, calling it disrespectful.Īnd for Electric Ladyland, both Reprise and the UK label Track Records ignored his cover submission. The sleeve of his previous album, 1967’s Axis: Bold As Love, depicted Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell as incarnations of Vishnu on a generic religious poster. Courtesy of Sony Legacy (click here for larger view)īut in Hendrix’s day, his wishes were often ignored or circumvented.