BRUTALLY HONEST ROCK ALBUM REVIEWS

Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland (50th Anniversary Edition)

November 18, 2018

ALBUM REVIEW

OVERALL (OUT OF 10): 10

So Eric Clapton has a new Christmas album. Pffft. This is the guy who 50 years ago left the Yardbirds because they were becoming “too pop”? And who then subsequently pissed away every shred of artistic integrity he might have once had with slop like Pilgrim and Behind the Sun? Eric Clapton, once revered as God, has frittered away his considerable talent and potential over the past five decades, stumbling clumsily through his career from one lackluster album to another, his losing streak only occasionally marred by flashes of brilliance. For every Journeyman and 461 Ocean Boulevard there have been six Augusts and three There’s One in Every Crowds and seven No Reason to Crys and two Backlesss.  The triumph of Unplugged obscures the vast wreckage of soulless, careless, listless albums in the decades that surrounded it. If a genie gave me a chance to be a legendary rock guitarist, Eric Clapton is the last one I’d ever pick. You know who I would pick? I’d pick Jimi Hendrix. Yeah, he only lasted about four years, but what an amazing four years those were. I’d rather burn up like Hendrix than burn out like Clapton. Jimi Hendrix never would have done a Christmas album.

Do not waste a single penny of your hard-earned cash on a freakin’ Eric Clapton Christmas album. Pirate it off the internet if you must, but if you do, in the name of everything that’s holy don’t ever actually listen to it. Christmas albums are the ultimate sell-out for an artist, and don’t reward Clapton for doing it by giving him your money. Save your money for the new 50th anniversary edition of Electric Ladyland (unless you already own it – honestly, the sonics of the 2018 remaster aren’t an appreciable upgrade from Eddie Kramer’s work on the 40th Anniversary Edition in 2008, or even his 1997 remaster, and it is pretty likely the 60th Anniversary Edition won’t sound a whole lot better in ten years). Let’s talk about the many things that make Electric Ladyland one of the most amazing albums ever recorded, and every bit as remarkable today as it as when it was released 50 years ago:

1. Jimi Hendrix, of course. I’m not sure any human ever walked the earth who was as cool as Jimi Hendrix. When I look at pictures of people dressed in groovy threads from the 60s, most of them look ridiculous. Not Hendrix – the guy wore 60s fashion in a way that is timeless, he was about the only person from that period who could make the scarves and the beads and the bright colors work. Just the way he talked exuded an otherworldly cool. I sometimes think he didn’t really die, he was just way too cool for this planet and some advanced alien race came and rescued him from this primitive world where he happened to be born. But no amount of cool would have mattered if he hadn’t also been the single greatest guitar player who ever existed in the known universe. Sure, Eddie Van Halen was faster, more precise and every bit as innovative, but when you come down to the simple ability to express feelings through guitar playing, Jimi Hendrix is peerless. He wasn’t just playing notes – he was opening a window to his mind and soul. I have never heard a musician with such an intimate connection to his instrument as Jimi Hendrix, and when he was on fire, there was nothing like him. And the really remarkable thing is that live he was singing and playing guitar at the same time. Have you ever watched a performance of him playing and singing? It’s jaw droppping, simply unbelievable. I can’t even pat my head and rub my belly at the same time, I have no idea how the guy played such incredible, intricate guitar parts while singing at the same time.

Electric Ladyland catches him at a critical time in his evolution as an artist. His first two albums were helmed by producer and former Animal Chas Chandler, who for the most part kept him disciplined, focused, and producing songs within the confines of the customary three minutes. In 1968 Chandler departed, leaving to Hendrix revel in the joy of his newfound freedom, and Electric Ladyland is a vastly better album for it. No longer in his three minute prison, Hendrix was able to stretch out, producing a number of lengthy songs with a loose, jammy vibe (“Voodoo Chile”, “Rainy Day, Dream Away”), and showcasing what he could really do with a guitar. Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold as Love had focused blasts of guitar flash in brief but intense solo barrages in the middle of the songs – on Electric Ladyland we got the first studio glimpses of the kind of sustained, lengthy playing he was capable of, although this had always been evident in his live shows. Electric Ladyland is the moment in his career when he is racing along at breakneck speed just before losing control and flying off the track. Because the truth is, Hendrix was not well equipped to handle his new freedom and all the pressures it would bring, and without Chandler to keep him on track, over the next two years he would labor tirelessly but directionlessly in an attempt to complete his next double album. While it has been reconstructed a couple of times since his untimely death, I am honestly not sure he would ever have been able to finish it himself had he lived. Like Brian Wilson, a songwriting and production genius who was unable to muster the focus and discipline required to bring Smile to a final, complete form, it is likely Hendrix would have futzed around with the songs intended for First Rays of the New Rising Sun for years, retooling, tweaking, restlessly remolding and endlessly recasting. The whole reason Experience Hendrix has been able to foist album after album of Hendrix outtakes on us for the past two decades is because Hendrix kept re-recording his songs for his next album again and again and again, searching for something he could never quite achieve with them – but in the process giving his half-sister’s Experience Hendrix company a bottomless well of fodder for “new”, “never before heard” Hendrix recordings (usually that means take 42 of “Room Full of Mirrors” and take 63 of “Angel”, and stuff like that). For my money, I don’t think he ever would have finished the album he was working on when he died. But on Electric Ladyland, he hadn’t reached that point yet, we still have the restless searching, the wide ranging musical ideas, and the sense of breaking through the old constraints, before it all took him completely off the rails and left him in studio limbo for the next two years.

Electric Ladyland is the best, purest example of Hendrix as an artist, of his unrestrained musical vision, his wild experimentalism, his gift for extensive jamming, and all of this on top of such an abundance of musical ideas he needed a double album just to hold them all.

2. The music. It goes without saying that Hendrix was a peerless virtuoso in his time. But the triumph of the music on Electric Ladyland goes beyond just the musicianship, although that is exceptional and unsurpassed. Rarely has an artist so succesfully produced musical accompaniments that capture the spirit of the lyrics of the songs they are married to as Hendrix did on Electric Ladyland. “Crosstown Traffic” has that kazoo that mimics the horns of cars caught in Manhattan rush hour traffic. “Rainy Day, Dream Away” has that relaxed vibe that sounds like Hendrix is kicking back on a rainy day – since it’s too wet to go out, he’ll just sit home with his guitar and chill. Its laid back feel evokes a rainy day where you just want to stay in and relax. “Voodoo Chile” wasn’t recorded in a club, but he’d just been jamming in one and brought that club atmosphere back with him into the studio. Listening to the song you can close you eyes and you’re in a front table at The Scene club, watching Hendrix on stage in a small, intimate atmosphere you never find on any of the hordes of posthumously released live albums.

And could there be a greater blues song than “Voodoo Chile”? Consider this – across its fifteen minutes Hendrix never stumbles, never hesitates, spitting out the hottest blues licks imaginable while singing at the same time, not a note out of place or off key, and he did the damn thing live in the studio. Who could do that? Not only is a heartstopping performance, it is one that feels authentic, as though he had resurrected the spirits of all the dead bluesmen who had sold their souls to the devil and brought them back for one last run at the blues before being sent back to the torments of Hell. Compare it with the blues played by the English rock bands of the 60s – Jimmy Page, for example, could play the notes, but his blues songs never had that scary, authentic, this-is-the-real-blues feel. Listen to “You Shook Me” off Led Zeppelin’s debut album, and while I love the song as much as anybody, by comparison Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” takes the blues to a whole other level. Jimmy Page gets the form, but not the feel, the substance, but not the spirit. Page sounds like somebody who loves the blues and wants to play them – Hendrix sounds like someone who has lived and breathed the blues, who has walked among the blues greats and bested them all. Which song would sound more at home on a swampy, sticky night in the Mississippi Delta? Page plays a tribute to the blues – Hendrix plays the blues.

But creating a stunningly authentic blues song is just a small slice of Hendrix’s artistic vision on the album. As “Rainy Day, Dream Away” fades away Hendrix slips into his dream on a sleepy, rainy afternoon with the submarine sounds of a descending, ringing tone, and then after a brief, brilliant guitar intro, watery guitars burst on the scene to accentuate Hendrix’s fantasy dream about lovers who escape a war torn world by building a machine that allows them to “live and breathe underwater”, “not to die but to be reborn”.  “1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” is one of the most creative songs of the psychedelic era. Compare it to Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”, which also evokes an underwater world with its opening sonar ping and echoey submerged organ, but its aesthetic pales in comparison to the ocean depths Hendrix paints with his guitar and sound effects. I’ve never walked on the bottom of the ocean, but I imagine “1983” is what it might sound like. The distorted vocal effects on the bridge are spine-tingling, I have no idea how he did that in 1968. “Well it’s too bad that our friends/Can’t be with us today…”. The instruments sound so wavy and watery, shifting back and forth across the stereo spectrum with the currents, as we sink deeper and deeper with Hendrix, “so down and down and down and down we go…”. Personally I think “1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) is a masterpiece (although it is kind of amusing that Hendrix thought 1983 was so far in the future) – imaginative, innovative, and intriguing, marred only by Mitch Mitchell’s annoying cymbals banging all through the psychedelic midsection. Here Hendrix is painting underwater seascapes, and the best thing Mitch can think to do is his usual stupid jazz cymbals, they should have left those out of the final mix. I always thought he was a pretty one-dimensional drummer, Hendrix could have done a lot better. Imagine what he could have done with a Keith Moon, for example.

3. The unrivaled use of the stereo mixing. You can do amazing things with stereo, zoom sounds from one side of the room to another, move voices and instruments around, give a song a sense of dynamism and depth. Think of the marvelous ending to Zeppelin’s “When the Leavee Breaks”, where the vocals and instruments chase each other from channel to channel, or the chorus to “Whole Lotta Love” where the guitar glissando sounds like an airplane landing going from the left channel to the right channel. Stereo is really underutilized if you ask me, and with a little thought a lot of recordings could be a lot more interesting with a more active stereo mix. For some reason most audio engineers don’t seem to have a lot of imagination. I can’t think of an album with more interesting stereo mixes than Electric Ladyland. Mixing the chorus of “Crosstown Traffic” so that “cross” starts in one channel, “town” is in the other, and “traffic” ends in the first channel again is an excellent example of this. In headphones you have crosstown traffic crisscrossing between your ears, it’s a clever effect. Instruments dance around all through the stereo field in “1983”. The guitar solo on “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” moves around from side to side. Throughout the album instruments and voices move around through the song, making for a far more interesting and dynamic listening experience. That seems to be a lost art, and in the fifty years since Electric Ladyland I really can’t figure out why more artists haven’t followed its example.

4.  No filler. The first two Hendrix albums were absolute masterworks, but each had their fair share of filler. Axis is worse than Are You Experienced? in that respect, “You’ve Got Me Floatin’” is dangerously close to unlistenable – actually on the whole second side of Axis I really only think “Castles Made Of Sand” and “Bold as Love” are all that good. Not so on Electric Ladyland. “And the Gods Made Love” might be considered fillerish, but I maintain that it sets the tone for the album, and is pretty short anyway. From “Have You Ever Been to Electric Ladyland” on, every single song is essential. Even the cover “Come On” is a great blast of hard R&B. “Gypsy Eyes”, “Long Hot Summer Night”, “House Burning Down” – double albums are generally known for having filler to pad out the running time, but on Electric Ladyland it’s just one great song after another. It may well be the studio double album with the least amount of filler in history, The White Album and Blonde on Blonde included. And Bob Dylan may have written “All Along the Watchtower”, but Hendrix made it his own. The version on John Wesley Harding sounds positively anemic next to the exciting, dynamic version Hendrix put together. There is no reason to ever hear Dylan’s version again once you’ve heard Hendrix’s, and Bobby has always been the first to admit that Jimi bested him.

5. “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” Chock-chock-chocka-wakka-chock-chock-chocka-wakka, then a fantastic electric blues riff repeated four times, and then all of a sudden Hendrix tosses a hand grenade and the song explodes into a sonic maelstrom. The song is a monster. It is a fitting end to the last studio album released before Hendrix’s death, a startling summation of all of the hard rock thunder he’d brought into being over the previous two years. And the guy made the song up one morning while a TV crew was filming the Experience, just made it up right on the spot. Most artists go their whole lives without writing anything like “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”, and Hendrix just pulled it out of thin air. This song alone justifies buying the album. And as the last song on Hendrix’s last studio album, it functions as his final sign-off: “If I don’t meet you no more in this world, then I’ll meet you in the next one…and don’t be late”.

6. Hendrix’s vocals. Jimi never sang as sweetly as he did on “Have You Ever Been to Electric Ladyland”. Always self-conscious about his singing, Hendrix wasn’t a conventionally great singer, but he knew how to use his voice, knew how to inflect fire and passion and groove. By his third LP he was coming into his own as a vocalist, developing a great falsetto. He was justifiably proud of his vocals on the second track. If you want to hear Hendrix at his peak as a vocalist, this is it. He would never have been a singer with range, control, and technical proficiency, but he did an amazing job of working with what he had.

7. Expanded musical vision. Hendrix’s manager Michael Jeffery wanted to keep him chained to Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell forever in the Experience. I have never understood why Jeffery thought anybody cared about Redding or Mitchell, they could have been replaced and nobody would have even noticed. But Jeffery saw Hendrix as a cash cow, not an artist. Granted, the Experience was the greatest power trio ever, about a hundred times more interesting than Cream (well, maybe except for on Disreali Gears. But the Experience was definitely the more interesting live band). And don’t get me wrong, I greatly admire the power trio format, the idea that three guys can get on a stage and do everything, and do it well. But on Electric Ladyland you see Hendrix throw off the shackles of the power trio format and bring in some outside musicians. In fact, there are large sections of the album where Redding doesn’t even play – and who ever missed him? We have Steve Windwood on organ on “Voodoo Chile”, we have a cool sax on “Rainy Day, Dream Away” (yeah, I hate saxophones but this one works in the context), the flute in “1983”, etc. Hendrix did amazing things within the guitar/bass/drums format on this first two albums, but on Electric Ladyland he finally got the chance to break out of that format and try some new things.

8. It isn’t an Eric Clapton Christmas album.

If you already have one of the versions of Electric Ladyland from the past twenty years, there is really no need to buy the 50th Anniversary Edition. Experience Hendrix, who wrestled Hendrix’s musical legacy from the money-grubbing legacy-destroying thug Alan Douglas and then promptly began some money-grubbing legacy-destroying of their own, have rather cynically bundled this with a CD of demos and outtakes and a CD of a performance from 1968 (soundboard quality, ugh). Which might have been exciting, had they not already flooded the market with a tsunami of Hendrix demos and outtakes and live performances. If you have all of these previous releases – which I have – or even a small sampling of them, you’re not really getting anything with these extra discs you don’t already have plenty of. It’s just a greedy ploy to separate fans who’ve already bought the album several times from their hard earned cash. If you’ve already got the album, don’t fall for it.

But if you don’t have the album, you need it. No self-respecting connoisseur of fine classic rock doesn’t have Electric Ladyland in his or her collection. It is the pinnacle of the career of one of the greatest geniuses of the rock era, and among the most colorful, innovative, and musically satisfying releases of all time.

We lose rock stars all the time, it’s a occupation with a disturbingly high mortality rate, and most of the time it’s no great loss to the world of music. By the time Jim Morrison checked out he was pretty much spent. John Lennon’s death was tragic on a personal level, but with Double Fantasy he had just demonstrated he was capable of churning out merely mediocre albums for years to come, and I’m not sure the artistic loss was all that significant. Double Fantasy didn’t sell well until he was shot, and then suddenly everyone wanted a copy of his final album. Keith Moon was the greatest rock drummer ever, but by the time he slipped his mortal coil The Who had run out of gas, which they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt with their next two horrendous releases.

Jimi Hendrix was different. Yes, he may have lacked the focus to ever finish his next album, but all the same it is hard to not think he had a lot of great songs left in him, never mind his undiminished talent as a guitar god. The world of rock lost something significant with Hendrix’s passing. People like to make it sound like sex and drugs fuel rock and roll, but the truth is that drugs have taken way more from the rock world than they ever gave it. Hendrix’s passing was a cruel – and completely unnecessary – loss.

Have you ever been to Electric Ladyland? If you haven’t, then get there as soon as you can.

“I don’t really live on compliments. As a matter of fact, they have a way of distracting me. I know a whole lot of musicians, artists out there who hears the compliments and thinks “wow, I must have been really great” and so they get fat and satisfied and they get lost and forget about their actual talent and start living in another world.” – Jimi Hendrix

“Oh, Jimi my friend, if you’d lived another 45 years and had seen what had happened to all of your surviving fellow rock stars, you’d know just how right you were.” – Brutally Honest Rock Album Reviews