The sessions were also wide open and guests would drop by, among them Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Cassidy, Dylan offsider Al Kooper on piano and Stevie Winwood on organ who were all credited. Yet he was meticulous in the studio and recorded multiple takes of every track and every part. So in his lifetime just three studio albums, the last of which is Electric Ladyland, an extraordinary if sprawling collection of pop-rock, blues, psychedelic explorations, sonic effects, the prototype for heavy metal and much, much more.Īlthough that debut had a couple of flat points - Can You See Me and Remember aren't his most memorable moments - and this one has accordingly a few more simply by virtue of being so much longer (would anyone miss Noel Redding's Little Miss Strange which sounds grounded in the pre-67 past?), these are the two pivots on which any Hendrix discussion (and collection) rests.Īmong the more remarkable aspects of this album - widely considered one of the finest in rock - is that it was being recorded at a time when Hendrix was constantly touring. But the pop hits were being quickly relegated to the past. The unfinished albums, hundreds hours of studio sessions or late live recordings leave no clear hint at what was going to come from a man who had already proven the impossible on guitar was right there in his finger-tips. The trajectory of Hendrix's recordings offers no easy answer to any direction: after that debut there was the pallid Axis: Bold As Love then this ambitious double album of studio recordings and jams and finally the live Band of Gypsys which had him going a kind a funk route.
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Had he lived he may well have explored the jazz-fusion connection with Miles Davis (he almost did but as Hendrix's friend and late-in-life mentor Alan Douglas says, Davis held out for a ridiculous amount of money at the last minute) or he could have gone the whole free jazz/James Blood Ulmer direction. This was an album which changed the boundaries of what was possible on guitar - and by extension in rock music - and in it Hendrix wrote the template for all that would follow in his meteoric and short life.
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(Indeed I hope I made the case for Are You Experienced at Elsewhere with my free-ranging, autobiographical essay Jimi Hendrix: In My Life). There's a very good case to be made that The Jimi Hendrix Experience album of 1967 was the most accomplished and innovative debut of the rock era.