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(Credits: Wikimedia)
When looking back on Jimi Hendrix, it’s hard to imagine him breathing the same air as us mere mortals.
He has been the benchmark of what pure guitar beauty could sound like, and half of his records all came back around to what lick was going to come out of him whenever he was jamming with his friends. But with that much creativity in one mind, there might be a few instances where things can get a little bit out of hand when you’re trying to capture that feeling on tape.
If you think about it, though, there’s no record that Hendrix put his name to anything that didn’t have a bit of magic behind it. Guitarists are still poring over the thousands of bootlegs that people have made over the years, but even beyond his work with The Jimi Hendrix Experience, hearing him play with an acoustic guitar in his hands is just as captivating as listening to The Beatles sing in harmony or watching the biggest names in jazz cut loose behind the scenes.
While his recorded output is criminally short at only three mainline studio albums, each of them does feel like its own unique entity. Are You Experienced has been properly deified as a pure masterpiece of the 1960s counterculture, but for any songwriters, Axis Bold as Love might actually be the better project, with songs like ‘Little Wing’ and ‘Spanish Castle Magic’ being equal parts heavy and beautiful whenever they come on.
But, really, the “guitar nerds” album is always going to be Electric Ladyland. Even if someone didn’t know the first thing about guitar or even Hendrix in general, his cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and both versions of ‘Voodoo Chile’ are absolute masterpieces of fretwork that most people couldn’t have even imagined at the time. And for all of the genius on display, there’s also a bit of good-natured fun along the way.
No one in their right mind would have thought to throw a kazoo in the middle of the song ‘Crosstown Traffic’, but it’s an idea that was just nutty enough to work. But if you ask Noel Redding about the sessions, maybe Hendrix was having a little too much fun when he started bringing in a few too many friends and hangers-on when he was tracking some of the tunes.
There’s nothing wrong with getting a few extra musicians to fill out the sound, but as far as Redding was concerned, it had become way too much for him to take, saying, “There were tons of people in the studio, you couldn’t even move. It was a party, not a session. He just said, ‘Relax, man…’ I’d been relaxing for months, so I relaxed my way right out of the place, not caring if I ever saw him again.”
While Hendrix’s manager, Chas Chandler, did eventually walk out on Hendrix for good, Redding did manage to pick everything back up. And to the band’s credit, you can’t really hear too much of that strain whenever they’re playing, with most of them sounding like a tight unit when tearing through Redding’s token song ‘Little Miss Strange’ or getting a bit more cerebral when working on tracks like ‘1983… A Merman I Should Turn To Be’.
The vibe may have been a little bit off when they first started making the album, but Hendrix wasn’t in the studio to make a bunch of jams. He wanted to make textured records in the same way that The Beatles had, and Electric Ladyland deserves a spot next to the great double albums in history for setting the standard for what the electric guitar could do at the time.
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