The Complete Jimi Hendrix catalog in review--copyright Aaron Poehler

It's not too hard to find people to agree to the statement that quintessential American rocker Jimi Hendrix made some excellent music during his short recording career--his albums are routinely lauded in record guides, his face still pops up on magazine covers over twenty-five years after his death, and merchandise bearing his face tends to move briskly. What's more difficult sometimes is figuring out where to find that great music. Ever since Hendrix's death in September 1970, a flood of reissues, repackagings, and rehashes have clogged the market and confused customers--the most recent debacle occurred in 1993, when MCA acquired reissue rights and then-Hendrix curator Alan Douglas changed the covers of his three classic albums to generic computer-processed shots of Jimi and the Experience. Recently, though, the Hendrix family has taken control of the estate and the resulting organization Experience Hendrix has issued new versions of these albums as well as new compilations of material that was not assembled into album form by Hendrix during his lifetime. I sat down with the new CDs and some older versions of the original albums for comparison to sort the gold from the gold digging--and what I found was often surprising.

Jimi's debut album Are You Experienced? has always been the screwiest of the Hendrix albums put out during Jimi's lifetime: different covers and different track listings for US and import versions of the album have plagued the record since its original release in 1967. The 1993 MCA reissue attempted to put an end to that by creating a 'standard' AYE? album featuring the original British track listing (the first track of the UK AYE? is "Foxy Lady", the US album opens with "Purple Haze"), preceded by the three pre-LP UK singles ("Hey Joe" backed with "Stone Free", "Purple Haze" b/w "51st Anniversary", and "The Wind Cries Mary" b/w "Highway Chile") and substituting the version of "Red House" that appeared on the American compilation 'Smash Hits' for the version that appeared on the original British LP. The new AYE? CD reverts to having different running orders for the US and import versions, retaining all 17 songs from various AYE? editions, restores the original covers on both US and overseas versions, and restores the 'UK' version of "Red House" to overseas versions of the album. The new CD's remastered sound is a slight improvement over the 1993 CD, with more high-end clarity and detail--and I personally prefer the American running order, which concentrates the best tracks up front; the new booklet also restores all graphic elements from the original US LP cover and adds complete lyrics and some nice photos, while the '93 edition contained more track-by-track recording info--plus a useless sheet of stamps obviously included to entice completist collectors. Comparing the liner notes of the two versions points up the behind-the-scenes political struggle for the Hendrix legacy: the '93 edition's engineering credit reads 'Mike Ross, Dave Siddle, Eddie Kramer' and the liner notes state "Eddie Kramer got a lot of credit, but he literally had nothing to do with it", while the new CD--remastered by Kramer--have credits that read 'Engineer: Eddie Kramer, additional engineering: Mike Ross, Dave Siddle', and the new liner notes by Dave Marsh claim "without Eddie's knowledge, empathy, and imagination behind the board, the Hendrix sound would have been lost altogether." Whatever.

Jimi's second album, Axis: Bold As Love never fell into the muddle that engulfed Are You Experienced?, so it's not as crucial an issue which version to buy--you'll still get the same songs in the same versions and the same order, with the same cover. Still, the new CD does have a much higher output level than my old Warner/Reprise CD, resulting in clearer sound: the high-frequency details (like crash cymbals and vocal phasing) on the older disc sometimes dissolve into sonic mush, but the new disc has much more distinct imaging. The front cover of the new disc retains more of the original LP jacket design, much of which was cropped off for the low-budget Reprise disc. The new booklet has all the graphics of the older CD's packaging (including the lyrics) and adds several excellent photos and a well-written essay by Jym Fahey, which reveals the telling detail that Axis' entire first (vinyl) side had to be mixed in one night when Jimi lost the original master tape. The Experience Hendrix/MCA CD is the flat-out winner here; comparatively, the Reprise CD is a hack job.

The double-length album Electric Ladyland is often referred to as Jimi's masterwork, but here again the reissues were screwed up time and again over the years--including one wacky UK edition that put sides one and four on the first disc and sides two and three on disc two! Fortunately the whole thing's been on one CD (in the correct order, naturally) since the 1993 reissues, but the remastering job on the new version of the disc deserves special mention, being clearly superior to older CDs as well as bettering my old vinyl copy of the album. There's absolutely no comparison: the new CD is fuller, clearer, not as hissy or tinny-sounding, and has better bass response--plus it doesn't have a skip right in the middle of "…And the Gods Made Love" like my record does. Unfortunately, the new regime completely drops the ball in terms of the updated Electric Ladyland packaging; they did restore the original American cover (apparently Hendrix hated the UK cover, which featured a variety of naked women louging about languidly) , but the liner notes by Derek Taylor are namedropping "I was there" gibberish that say nothing at all about the album itself--except to recommend that if you do want to know something about the album you should see this movie about its making. Gee, thanks, Derek, hope the check cleared okay and all. They do reproduce Hendrix' original handwritten notes for the packaging, including his "Letter To The Room full of mirrors" essay, but in an act of redundancy they print it typeset as well as the handwritten version despite the clear legibility of Jimi's writing. Worse, they omit over half of the black and white photos included on the inside of the gatefold record sleeve, despite including Jimi's written directions to "Please use ALL the pictures [emphasis in original]…any other drastic change from these directions would not be appropriate according to the music and our group's present stage...and we have enough personal problems without having to worry about this simple yet effective layout." The B&W photos that are included are grainy and look like they were badly scanned off an old LP jacket, and the front and back covers of the CD are both cropped in too closely, losing over an inch of the outside border of the LP jacket. The Experience Hendrix team did a terrible job here--too bad the packaging's so awful when the sound is so good.

The last of the Hendrix LPs released during his lifetime, Band Of Gypsys, is not part of the Experience Hendrix reissue program--the original album was a quickie live album of new material recorded New Year's Eve at the end of the sixties, intended to fulfill a contractual obligation with Capitol Records. Nevertheless, it too spent many years languishing out of print and has been reissued on CD by Capitol only relatively recently as well. Hendrix expressed some dissatisfaction with the album so it's no surprise that it's the least of his 'official' albums, containing only four Hendrix songs alongside two written by drummer Buddy Miles, extended through improvisational jamming to fill the album-length playing time. The sound on the CD is a bit thin, probably owing as much to the circumstances of its recording as the remastering job, but certainly adequate, and though Band Of Gypsys is a bit light on the tunes "Machine Gun" stands with the best of Hendrix' work. Still, the album should certainly fall below the previous three albums in terms of priority for neophyte Hendrix fans. One interesting note is that Hendrix insisted that contractually, the record label cannot alter any aspect of the packaging or content of Band Of Gypsys in this country under any circumstances, so while the CD exactly replicates the original LP cover and gatefold spread, European import copies of the album contain a bonus track which legally cannot be added to the American album. It also calls into question the motives of the various caretakers of the Hendrix estate, taking into account how Jimi might have felt about the altered packaging on his other releases.

The remaining Experience Hendrix CDs are all attempts to make some sense of the mountain of unreleased tapes Jimi left behind when he died. The first CD, First Rays of the New Rising Sun, is a new compilation representing the music intended for the album Jimi was working on at the time of his death. Its contents comprise the entirety of The Cry Of Love, which was the first posthumous Hendrix album (from 1971), and cuts originally released as part of the soundtrack to the film Rainbow Bridge and the compilation War Heroes (1972). The new regime claims the track sequence on First Rays is based on a listing in Hendrix' hand, but I don't see it reproduced anywhere in the booklet; regardless, First Rays is a first-rate collection of almost uniformly excellent material that shows Jimi moving in a harder-edged funk rock direction, with less space exploration and jazz-fusion influence. The Alan Douglas-curated regime's attempt at a compilation representing this period, Voodoo Soup (out of print, but still available on the shelves of many record stores) maintains no such claims to consistency, combining some prime material with lame outtake cuts and (perhaps worst of all) replacing original Mitch Mitchell drum tracks with new overdubs by Bruce Gary, the drummer for the Knack! First Rays at least sounds like an album of contemporaneous material that belongs together, whereas Voodoo Soup was just a mess.

The second Experience Hendrix compilation CD, South Saturn Delta, is a little more problematic. The First Rays material is really the only substantial chunk of material that was left unreleased at the time of Hendrix' death, so Delta is made up of a variety of tracks from across the breadth of Jimi's career. There are some sterling cuts here, ranging from burning rock outtakes with the original Experience to jazz-inflected improvisational instrumentals, but it's hard to shake the feeling that everything on the record is second-rate for one reason or another, often simply because Jimi's backing musicians couldn't keep up with the man himself--several tracks on South Saturn Delta feature nice guitarwork with drumming and basslines that are kind of lame. By the last third of the album, the quality has thinned considerably, the low point being a weak demo version of "Angel" which would be filler even on a bootleg album. Hendrix aficionados will surely consider Delta a must, since there are certainly several points of interest here, and it does successfully compile some otherwise unavailable tracks, most notably the original Experience lineup outtakes "Look Over Yonder", the 1967 B-side "The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam's Dice" and the amazing guitar-soaked "Here He Comes (Lover Man)"--it's just that the album is truthfully more interesting than it is good, and unless you're just desperate for Hendrix you haven't heard and you've got all the real albums, this stuff simply won't blow you away.

The newest Experience Hendrix release is the double-CD BBC Sessions, which basically expands upon the 1988 Rykodisc release, Radio One, a superb collection of live-in-the-studio tracks selected from the JHExperience's five 1967 BBC Radio sessions across the pond. Radio One contained the best of Hendrix' radio sessions, omitting only spoken studio introductions and interviews, so to fill out BBC Sessions they dug up some alternate takes that went unused and expanded the purview of the CD to include BBC television sessions. These TV sessions are (with a couple of exceptions) the only worthwhile new music on the new release that wasn't included on Radio One, including a priceless appearance on A Happening For Lulu for which the band did a solid "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)", then when coaxed into playing "Hey Joe" yet again they break into improvisation, do a couple of verses of "Joe" and then break off, saying "We'd like to stop playing this rubbish" and tearing into the "Sunshine Of Your Love" riff. After about a minute you hear Jimi say "We're being put off the air..." as the whole thing gradually grinds to a halt. A great little crystallized and captured moment of spontaneous anarchy. This incident sparked Elvis Costello to pull the same stunt years later on Saturday Night Live, turning to his band just as they went on and saying "Let's pull a Hendrix..." Other notable tracks new for BBC Sessions include a decent version of Dylan's "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" and an R&B jam session with Stevie Wonder on drums. The sound on BBC Sessions is better-mastered than Radio One, and the essay helpfully and thoroughly explains just what BBC Sessions are for bewildered American fans.

So where is there to go from here? Well, the obvious gap in the Experience Hendrix line is the lack of a good, solid live album--a problem that has plagued the Hendrix catalog from the beginning. Despite much of Hendrix' fame being based upon his live performances, his live recordings have never really been successfully packaged despite numerous attempts ranging from the live EP Johnny B. Goode to the sprawling four-disc box set Stages (both out of print). Right now, the best bet is probably the previous administration's release of the most famous single Hendrix performance: Woodstock. The cuts contained in the original Woodstock film and soundtrack albums (both of them) were expanded to contain nearly the entire Hendrix set and released both as a commercial videotape and as a CD, which may technically be out of print but is still on the racks of many stores. Both the sound and the booklet of the CD are striking, and the performance given by Hendrix is inspired considering the early-morning hours of his set, not to mention the fact that most of the crowd had already gone home. Of course, Jimi's then-heretical, now-heralded reinterpretation of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is included here, but if you can't find the all-Hendrix Woodstock releases, "Banner" (along with "Purple Haze" and the subsequent improvisation) is included on the Woodstock movie and the first soundtrack album, either of which is widely available.

Other worthwhile CDs you might run into buried deep in the 'H' section of your favorite CD shop include: the aforementioned Radio One, the matching 1987 Ryko release Live at Winterland, a solid live compilation of the Experience performing at the legendary San Francisco venue across three nights in October 1968; and the one-disc greatest hits collection The Ultimate Experience, the track listing of which was arrived at through polling Hendrix fans at to their favorite tracks--the results were tallied and the disc compiled in the order of the number of votes each track received. There also tend to be a number of pricey bootleg and semi-legitimate Hendrix discs floating around, generally with names like 'Ultra Rare Trax' or 'PPX Studio Sessions Volume 5'; these should generally be avoided at all costs unless you're both a rabid fan and the type of person for whom cost is not an object. Tape trading is probably a cheaper and easier way to acquire these recordings if you're so inclined.

The current dearth of live Hendrix releases doesn't extend to the video racks; extensive live Hendrix footage has been issued on videotape, all available for your perusal. The best of the commercially-issued Jimi videos include: the all-Hendrix Woodstock video; the 1973 Warner Bros. film Jimi Hendrix (which combines interviews and live footage for an effective documentary overview of Jimi's career and a good cross-section of live footage); the Jimi Hendrix Live At Monterey videotape, containing the legendary debut American performance of the original JHExperience and his most notorious guitar-burning display (this concert is the source of the oft-played Hendrix version of "Wild Thing", originally by the Troggs); and Jimi Plays Berkeley, a quality (and relatively well-filmed)1970 California concert with the last Experience lineup. Among the less valuable documents of Jimi on film are the 1967 33 minute promo film Jimi Hendrix Experience (the best part of which, a solo acoustic performance of "Hear My Train A' Coming", is included in the 1973 film), and the infamous movie Rainbow Bridge, which includes about 20 minutes of fairly uninspired live footage from Jimi's Maui, Hawaii concert (though "Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)" is striking) and about an hour of seemingly endless moronic hippie commune gibberish that has nothing to do with Hendrix or anything else.

If that still doesn't satiate your Hendrix needs, it's time to dig into the pile of Hendrix-related books in your local library or bookstore's stacks (the best of which I've encountered is the well-researched biography Electric Gypsy). Included with the beautifully painted but scriptually lacking hardcover graphic novel Voodoo Child you'll find a bonus CD--the book plays it a little loose with the facts, but Bill Sienkiewicz' art is breathtaking. The bonus CD, Jimi By Himself: the Home Recordings allows the listener to eavesdrop into Jimi's flat circa April, 1968 as he lays down demos of new songs for himself--at one point, Jimi's phone even rings (he ignores it). While certainly not among the most compelling Hendrix tracks ever released, they make a nice addition and counterpoint to the hyperbole-laden script, and I think most would agree that it's still cheaper to hear them this way than on an expensive and illegal bootleg CD.

It's incredible to realize that all of Jimi Hendrix' best known work, including all of the various releases detailed here, were created over a brief, four-year period. It's all too easy to engage in idle speculation about 'what if' he had survived the death toll of the early seventies, but the fact is that the work he left behind should be plenty to occupy the idle music fan--perhaps not for a parallel four-year period, then at least for a season or two of psychedelic guitar licks and distorted rock & roll. Have fun.