narrowcast: Deep Album Cuts Vol. 200: Jimi Hendrix

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 200: Jimi Hendrix

This column has been one of my favorite things I've done on this site over the years, but it's crazy that I got to 200 installments, and still have so many artists on my wishlist that I can easily imagine passing 300 and beyond that. Narrowcast had its 15th anniversary last year, and in June the blog passed the 1 million views mark (or maybe that happened a long time ago, it's hard to tell if Blogger's current traffic stats go all the way back to 2004). The site's 3000th post is also on the horizon, will probably happen in September. I've written for a lot of places for money and larger audiences over the last 15 years. But I like having this place as my home base to write about whatever I want without thinking about who's the audience or how to monetize it. And it's always felt really good to have this outlet, especially lately when there's not much I can do but hang out at home and listen to music and write. Big thanks to anyone reading this and anyone who's ever taken a look at the site over the years.

Since the 100th deep album cuts playlist was Stevie Wonder, I wanted #200 to be someone special too, and Jimi Hendrix has been one of my favorite musicians for about as long as I've cared about music. September 18th will be the 50th anniversary of Jimi's death -- obviously he released a relatively small amount of music in his lifetime, and his posthumous discography has been a bit odd and scattered. So I wanted to do a mix of less heralded gems from the Jimi Hendrix Experience albums while also trying to find the best of the posthumous records.

Jimi Hendrix deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Are You Experienced?

2. May This Be Love

3. I Don't Live Today

4. Third Stone From The Sun

5. Spanish Castle Magic

6. If 6 Was 9

7. Little Miss Lover

8. Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)

9. 1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)

10. Gypsy Eyes

11. Machine Gun (live)

12. Night Bird Flying

13. Drifting

14. In From The Storm

15. Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)

Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced (1967)
Tracks 5, 6 and 7 from the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Axis: Bold As Love (1967)
Tracks 8, 9 and 10 from the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Electric Ladyland (1968)
Track 11 from Band Of Gypsys (1970)
Tracks 12 and 13 from The Cry Of Love (1971)
Tracks 14 and 15 from First Rays Of The New Rising Sun (1997)

As far as I'm concerned, the Jimi Hendrix Experience's only 3 albums are as good as just about anybody's 3 best albums, those records are simply an enormous achievement. And each of them has been my favorite at different points -- Electric Ladyland was an early standard bearer for what a rock artist could do with the sprawl of a double LP studio album, and Are You Experienced is just remarkably packed with titanic, immortal classic rock standards. Axis: Bold As Love is kind of the awkward middle child of the trio -- none of its songs have really entered permanent classic rock rotation like the hits from the other 2 albums, but it being less overplayed means it's still kind of a fresh listen to me. "Spanish Castle Magic" just kicks so much ass, I'm obsessed with it.

Jimi is my favorite guitarist, but Mitch Mitchell is also one of my favorite guitarists, I think he doesn't get mentioned enough alongside Bonham and Moon and Baker as one of the really inventive powerhouse drummers that helped push rock into louder and wilder areas in the late '60s. There's a great story in Elvis Costello's book Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink about his drummer Pete Thomas (another of my personal favorites) as a teenager idolizing Mitchell, who lived in his hometown, and hanging out outside Mitchell's house until he was invited in.

"Little Miss Lover" provided the breakbeat for A Tribe Called Quest's "Scenario," and "Are You Experienced" was sampled on no less than 3 classic hip hop songs: Pharcyde's "Passin' Me By" and Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill A Man," and Beastie Boys' "B-Boy Bouillabaisse"(it's also one of 3 Hendrix samples on "Jimmy James"). And of course, "Third Stone From The Sun" was interpolated on Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy."

There's a fairly little music by Hendrix from before the formation of the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966. In the mid-'60s, Jimi played guitar with the Isley Brothers, and then was in Little Richard's backing band. There are only a couple of known studio tracks of them playing together, and I included one, "Dancing All Around The World," on my Little Richard deep album cuts playlist a few months ago.

Hendrix made a lot of music in the nearly two years between the release of Electric Ladyland and his death, most of which came out posthumously. And it seemed to be a really interesting period that he never got to see through to fruition. Hendrix wanted to expand the Experience to a larger ensemble, which Noel Redding wasn't into and quit. The larger Gypsy Sun And Rainbows band played Woodstock, and then evolved into a new trio, Band Of Gypsys with Billy Cox and Buddy Miles. The last album Hendrix completed and approved for release in his lifetime was the Band Of Gypsys live album, released to fulfill a contractual dispute and buy him some time as he worked on the next studio album. It featured all new songs, including an epic 12-minute version of "Machine Gun."

After Hendrix's death, his collaborators and producers sorted through all the unreleased recordings for his uncompleted 4th album, which was planned as a double album. But they kind of split up the unreleased songs across several albums, two in 1971 and one in 1972, then several more over the next few decades. The way I first heard a lot of Hendrix posthumous songs was when Voodoo Soup was released in 1995 -- I liked that record, but it and other albums overseen by Alan Douglas drew criticism for having overdubbed instruments from musicians who weren't in the studio with Hendrix. So when the Hendrix family regained control of the catalog, they released more highly regarded attempts to construct Jimi's 4th album like 1997's First Rays of the New Rising Sun. There's also a whole lo-fi solo demo Jimi made in early 1970 for an album called Black Gold that has yet to come out other than one track, I really hope that surfaces someday.

It's kind of sad to me that Jimi left behind so much unreleased music that he's kind of had a much more muddled posthumous output that hasn't endured in the same way as some other stars who died young in that era. Janis Joplin, who died 2 weeks after Jimi, had a posthumous #1 album and #1 single a few months later. By comparison, Jimi has had dozens of posthumous albums, including a few that were top 5 on Billboard. But only a couple of his post-1970 singles charted on the lower reaches of the Hot 100, and never became part of his canon of classic rock staples, much less major hits on the scale of "Me and Bobby McGee" or "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay."

I love some of those posthumous Jimi songs, though, especially "Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)." I first heard it via the cover on the 1993 Stone Free tribute album (by every member of Temple Of The Dog except...uh, Stone). And that rules and is in some ways more polished than any of the Hendrix recordings of the song, but I think I picked the best of the ones available and it's pretty awesome. And "Drifting" is gorgeous. Of all the musicians that died young, Hendrix is the one I think about the most in terms of what he could've made, just imagining what the '70s would have been like with him experimenting even more freely thoughout the decade.