For those of you interested in exploring the albums of studio material and box sets released by the Experience Hendrix team between 1997 and 2018, I've put together a summary review of each release, which you might find helpful:
https://momentstransition.wordpress....ums-1997-2018/
I really like his 1969/70 studio recordings, but I agree that sequencing them seems to be quite challenging. There's a fair few tracks with a similar tempo and you run into that at some point. I think First Rays... really should have included the instrumental 'Pali Gap' (which would actually fit on the CD as is) instead of 'My Friend'. I know the latter was on Cry Of Love but it's an earlier track and IMHO does not fit on either album.
South Saturn Delta- I think the concept of rounding up the leftover tracks in a more 'finished' state was sound. (Sort of what War Heroes was- the great instrumentals like 'Midnight' and 'Tax Free' were originally on there.) It just shouldn't have had demos/inferior alternate mixes of well known songs as well. Those fit better on boxes...of which, I like the first 'purple' one, which works very well as an 'alternate history'. I can't really comment on the second one West Coast Seattle Boy as I don't have it.
Blues is indeed a good listen and one of the highlights of the highly controversial Alan Douglas tenure. I'd have preferred that it included the stereo (it's an alternate take altogether) 'Red House'. The 90s remaster of the UK Are You Experienced? already has the mono one, although I accept the mono was rarer in the US.
Valleys Of Neptune...I picked it up cheap second-hand, but it's not something I've played much. I took issue with the 'lost album'-style marketing of it. There's some good playing on it though as you'd expect.
Last edited by JJ88; 03-28-2023 at 03:02 AM.
Blues also has this version:Originally Posted by JJ88
Apparently, this is a composite of two versions.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Where do you stand on the Baggy's Rehearsal Sessions? Is this a live album or is it a studio album? Although the recording quality is good I have always found the playing a bit disappointing. Maybe it is time for a relisten.
We walked arm in arm with madness, and every little breeze whispered of the secret love we had for our disease
That's one of those collectors' club-type jobs on that Dagger label. I don't own any of those. I've read good things about the one called Hear My Music, though, which had unedited versions of material used on Alan Douglas era album Nine To The Universe.
Not really a JHE (I have all three + BoG) or a studio album, but one of my fave Hendrix posthumous release is Rainbow Bridges (the OST, not the movie) and the only one I still have.
In HS, we were all aware of those bad exploitation releases, so we consulted each other as to not fall for boots & pirates.
I also owned War Heroes and Nine To Universe for a while, but never "got into" Cry Of Love, for some reasons.
I also had In The West.
As for CD releases, I had Blues for a while too.
Oddly enough, I haven't kept any of those posthumous releases for long (other than RB) - not sure as to why.
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
Rainbow Bridge did not get a CD release until about 10 years ago. It's a bit of a mish-mash- stuff that was left off Cry Of Love, older outtakes and one live track- but most of it's good.
The mid 70s collection Loose Ends did not receive a US release as it was considered to be too poor. I do not own it...some of that Baggy's Rehearsal stuff seems to be on it. Alan Douglas entered the picture after this one.
It's not the soundtrack it claims to be. I think most, if not all, of the tracks on the Rainbow Bridge album do not appear in the movie. The Rainbow Bridge movie is trully one of the worst films I've ever seen, and the copy I got was marketed like it was a Hendrix concert film or something, which it really isn't, though there is Hendrix concert footage in it, but you have wade through more than an hour of bullshit to get to it. Talk about getting ripped off!
There was an attempt by Alan Douglas to put together the post-Electric Ladyland material as his equivalent of First Rays...:
https://www.discogs.com/master/12484...ix-Voodoo-Soup
Not sure about some of the choices made here. 'Peace In Mississippi' and 'Midnight' for instance, though excellent instrumentals, were earlier tracks than the rest. ISTR reading that Douglas did his overdubbing thing again here as well.
I managed to track down the movie in the archives (in VHS) of my library system some 12/15 years ago. Only watched it once, probably ffwd some passages. The only thing I'd call rip-off is the Hendrix-y image it uses, but then again the Hendrix Estate ripped off the name of the movie to promote the album, using fotos of the event in its innerfold. Like you,; I'm not even sure any of the tracks of the album are part of the movie
If memory serves, nothing more than a hippy-dippy montage of some vaguely (un-)interesting reportage of a new-age event, where Jimi is visible some 20 seconds (outside the concert footage itself), but I don't remember the concert taking a big place in the film.
The music-only album is much more interesting than the movie, IMHO.
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
According to Wikipedia, there's only about 17 minutes of concert footage in Rainbow Bridge. Something I always thought was interesting is, Mitch apparently had to overdub his drums in the studio, which is why if you watch the concert footage, there's lots of shots that don't match up to what you're hearing (and not just out of synch shots, but I mean things where you can see Jimi on screen, singing what you're hearing, but in the same shot Mitch is playing something different than what you're hearing). So much for "You can't overdubs drums on a live album".
Anyway, the Wikipedia page says that producers wanted to make a "youth film", with it being an "anti-Easy Rider", i.e. showing something more positive. But what I think they did they did was they improvised a film around a model named Pat Hartley. At one point, it was supposed to be a "psychedelic Candid Camera", i.e. they were gonna set up situations with Pat, and jsut filmed whatever happened. And I think that must be what they did: they just filmed "whatever happened", and then made a 2 hour film out of it, about 17 minutes of which is Jimi playing live. I thought The Beatles demonstrated with Magical Mystery Tour that "filming whatever happens" isn't a good way to go about making a movie.
But yeah, I think the reason I felt ripped off was the package of the VHS edition I bought had all these pictures of him on the cover, making it seem like it was "Jimi Hendrix" film, which as I said, it really isn't. It would be like calling National Lampoon's Vacation "a John Candy movie", or referring to The Pink Panther Strikes Again as "a Omar Sharif movie". And not only isn't Jimi not featured for most of the film, but when he does finally appear, there's this long, boring conversation he's having with these other people, it's like "When does he start playing some music?". Then there's "fantasy sequence" where Jimi assassinates this guy who looks like an escapee from a Gregg Allman look alike contest. It's like "Who the frell is responsible for this mess?!"
I didn't even remember these partsI guess I was snoozing at that point.
I guess I'm less bitter than you about RB, because I only borrowed the VHS from the library, which cost me a whole lot less than buying it.
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
If you watch the recent film Jimi Hendrix Live in Maui you will see some of the characters behind the making of Rainbow Bridge and it really is no surprise that Rainbow Bridge is such a mess. Still, to this day, these people are talking about flying saucers hovering over Hawaii on the day Hendrix played there. The Live in Maui movie, on the other hand, is pretty good.
Last edited by Munster; 04-11-2023 at 10:23 AM.
We walked arm in arm with madness, and every little breeze whispered of the secret love we had for our disease
I saw this documentary on TV- I understand the actual CD/Blu-ray release does have more concert footage. I thought the documentary was pretty dull as I had no interest in any of those people. But as you say it explained a lot.
I've read that Cry Of Love originally had a different tracklist- from memory, 'Dolly Dagger' and 'Room Full Of Mirrors' would have been on it instead of some of the weaker tracks ('My Friend' and I think maybe 'Straight Ahead'). I think that artistically at least, this would have meant that most of the better 1969/70 songs would have been on one album. But obviously that made less sense from a financial perspective, so this material got spread out all over the place.
Last edited by JJ88; 04-12-2023 at 11:13 AM.
I just had a book out from the library that reprinted some interviews from late August/early September 1970. In one Hendrix said "Dolly Dagger" b/w "Night Bird Flying" would probably be his next single, and that he had plans to try to pick the best 15 out of over 100 tracks he had recorded for a double album.
I think Voodoo Soup came out around the same time that I became aware of Douglas' SOP of editing, remixing, overdubbing stuff in a way that had no real connection to what Jimi might have wanted. I mean, anything that wasn't mixed after September 1970 isn't gonna reflect Jimi's vision. You can only guess about what Jimi might have wanted any given song to sound like. But man, overdubbing musicians who'd never even met Jimi, never mind playing with him (e.g. a couple of the tracks on Voodoo Soup has Bruce Gary, the drummer from THE KNACK, on them!), and doing who knows what else to them...
So anyway, Voodoo Soup was one of a number of titles I ended up taking a pass on, just because I was becoming aware that the consensus was that some of Douglas' choices were...uhm, at best dodgy.
BTW, my impression is that Jimi never fully finalized what he wanted First Rays Of The New Rising Sun to be. He was constantly revising the track list, etc, so the actual album that came out is again, at best, just someone's educated guess about what Jimi would have done with that album.
As good as it is, it's hard to get all that material to flow as an album, as there's a lot of uptempo rock tracks and not enough slower ones. Something like 'Pali Gap' does break that up a bit- I'd have included that instead of 'Beginnings' which is more 'composed' perhaps, but is an earlier track (and was played at Woodstock).
I'm not so bothered about Alan Douglas doing overdubs on (unfinished) tracks per se, but he seemed to like a slicker approach than Hendrix and that's an issue. And worst of all, the word is that when doing this stuff, Douglas allegedly left the multi-tracks in a mess.
Last edited by JJ88; 04-14-2023 at 02:05 AM.
From what I've read way back then, his next album (sopposedly titled Rays of the Rising Sun) was supposed to carry tracks found on CoL, RB and WH (and maybe even LE).
From what I remember (haven't heard WH and LE in decades),I suppose that there is enough stuff to make a killer single album from all the stuff on those records, but probably not a double-disc affair (at least not a "killer").
Never even bothered to listen to Crash Landing and Midnight Lightning, where the producers removed Mitchell and the bass player (whether Redding or Cox) to replace them by studio musicians. Total hoax, IMHO.
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
There was definitely enough for two good albums of the more 'finished' studio material, although the second one would perhaps have been less so. There are a few like 'Straight Ahead' and 'Hey Baby' (the latter of which I like) that sound like run-throughs to me, and more silly ones like 'Astro Man'.
At the time Eddie Kramer felt War Heroes was already getting into barrel-scraping...and nearly 50 years on, we know they'd barely started.
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