Electric Ladyland (1968)

It took me awhile to catch up to the unrivaled Jimi Hendrix magnum opus, only to find out that I'm not sure it's possible to ever fully catch up to it, even now, better than 40 years later. For 20 years I never had my own copy—I listened to it in the basements of the houses of my friends in high school, and later they put tracks from it on mix tapes, and of course it even spawned a radio hit in the Bob Dylan cover, "All Along the Watchtower," and then, sure enough, at some point a lot of us began to forget about it. I've always heard it and known it on some level, even in the obscurity of memory. But it wasn't until I actually came into possession of the thing, first finally as the double-LP and later as the lengthy CD disc, that the majesties and depths started to really unfold. There's the muscular confidence and sheer blues brawn of the 15-minute "Voodoo Chile" (side 1/track 4) and the echoing "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)," which closes the thing. There's side 3 (on the CD, tracks 10-12, intended to be seamless), one of the perfect album sides in all of rock: "Rainy Day, Dream Away," which boldly starts with the sound of toking indoors as skies outdoors empty, followed by a guitar that speaks, then "1983...(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)," and finally "Moon, Turn the Tides...Gently, Gently," increasingly spacy, ambient, production-heavy sounds that nevertheless retain the swooning cathartic presence of unearthly and utterly inspired music. Then side 4 (track 13) opens on "Still Raining, Still Dreaming." All through, themes are established, elaborated on, and left, only to be taken up again elsewhere. Side 1 follows side 4, track 1 track 16, as simply and precisely as any of the sequencing throughout. And through all of it the playing of Hendrix is as self-assured and poised as any guitar player anywhere ever: pyrotechnics when he feels like it, more often the gentle touch that accomplishes what it needs to with a perfect economy of sound and texture. He's a good singer too, don't let anybody tell you otherwise. I'm not normally comfortable with bloated terms like "masterpiece," but this is one case where I can use it with no reservations whatsoever. The rest of his catalog is good, great, brilliant. Here is where all that comes into focus.