Jimi Hendrix never reached full musical maturity, with scads of impressive flashes of brilliance but still showing streaks of goofy amateur playfulness, based on intuition and/or being stoned, that did not come off. It’s serve-to-taste with a lot of his posthumous material. I don’t care for swaths of it, but I love what I love very much. I was interested to learn in Wikipedia that Electric Ladyland was considered a failure by many contemporary critics. Robert Christgau was all over it, in Stereo Review, but both Melody Maker in the UK and Rolling Stone in the US found it flawed, if not exactly fatally so. I admit I had to circle this album for many years before it became as important to me as it has. It’s the second-best rock album by my lights after only Highway 61 Revisited. It is obviously well within the vinyl era, which I claim as explanation for my persistent orientation to it, interpreting it by sides. My now irrelevant view was / is that any good to great album—especially a multi-LP package—must have at least one side that is perfect or close to it. Electric Ladyland has that—side 3—but it also has a sequencing dialogue going on between the various sides that is intuitively suggestive if never quite articulate.
Side 4 presents a suite that responds to one song each from the other sides, and for good measure throws in a hit song, “All Along the Watchtower.” that is arguably the greatest Bob Dylan cover ever recorded. The 15-minute “Voodoo Chile” on side 1 is answered by the five-minute “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” (The copy editor in me winces at spelling it like the South American country the first time and then just spelling it straight from the dictionary the second. If you’re going for dialect, have you ever heard of an apostrophe?! Chalk it up to the freewheeling.) “Rainy Day, Dream Away”—the sordid tale on side 3 of life in the Pacific Northwest—is answered by “Still Raining, Still Dreaming.” And—I know this is a stretcher—“Burning of the Midnight Lamp” on side 2 is answered by “House Burning Down.” (As an interesting and pointless aside, even a year ago most versions of Electric Ladyland on youtube omitted “House Burning Down”—algorithms, apparently, disapproving of arson.) All three of these tracks on side 4 are even better and more amazing than the tracks they respond to. Side 4, thus, is eccentric but also near perfect.
The first two sides are not untroubled, I admit. Side 1 features not one, not two, but three exercises trying to get the thing off the ground. Not the best way to start, but it remained worth regular visits for “Voodoo Chile” (and an easy needle drop directly to it if you didn’t want to deal with the dithering), a 15-minute joy ride that is about 92% heavy, enthralling mood and maybe 8% what could credibly be accused of as masturbatory guitar play. Masturbatory guitar play was not mainly what Hendrix was ever about, though it was there and too often the wrong lesson many later players took from him. The spaces often open up wide across the epic “Voodoo Chile” and it’s never monotonous. It roams a primeval steamy landscape on some trek to one heart of darkness or another. The sound, the mood, wraps you up. The first guitar solo threatens and moves like low cloud cover. It doesn’t hurt that the sidemen rotating in here include Steve Winwood and Jack Casady instead of the Experience. Side 2 is the most problematic for me, leading with the apparently obligatory per album Noel Redding song, “Little Miss Strange.” But things start to pick up with the cover of “Come On (Part 1),” Earl King’s variation on the Louis Jordan song “Let the Good Times Roll.” Both “Gypsy Eyes” and “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” are worth regular visits.
Side 3 is where it goes full-on psychedelic for me, resorting to a certain convention of electric guitar at will, yet capable of taking this circus to outer space and the universe. “Rainy Day, Dream Away” starts it off in fine fashion with its scene from PNW life: coughing, followed by two companions who look out the window and notice that it’s raining outside. The mood is cozy, with a tenor sax peppering in and guitar licks of various textures. The reprise will feature an amazing talking wah-wah guitar, which slaps up out of the mood laid down here—the beginning of it is heard here on the fade.
What follows is “1983 ... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” and “Moon, Turn the Tides ... Gently Gently Away.” They say it all in many ways with their flowery titles and extremes of length (13:40 and 1:02, respectively, though there are any number of ways this proximate 15-minute set could have been cut into two tracks). They say too much with their flowery titles, maybe. But lord, the musical themes of “Merman” are so stupefyingly gorgeous, darting in and out, recurring across lengths. Hendrix plays some bass too. It has the most stirring recording I’ve ever heard of the two words “straight ahead.” It speaks of the death of peers. It finally, at about 5:00, looses the bonds of gravity for outer space—or perhaps, as suggested, plummets into the ocean, seven miles deep, where the pressure somehow does not matter. “Merman” floats a lot across its 13+ minutes. It’s how you do oceanic, maybe. Compare the Velvet Underground’s “Ocean” (talking about the 10-minute 1969 live version). I understand the argument that “Merman” is boring. It took me awhile to get all the way to understanding or appreciating it and, after long periods of intense infatuation, I have to pick my times to listen to it carefully. One more curiosity: at one time, 1983 seemed impossibly far in the future. Now it seems more like 40 years ago. Just sayin’. But forget all that altogether, because it’s timeless.
Thanks to all for following along with this psych-25 countdown, which now concludes. I settled on the list a year ago and never changed it, but I would now like to make the following emendations: #5 P.M. Dawn to #14 ... #9 Terry Riley to #11 ... #11 Are You Experienced to #6 (Primal Scream, Sonic Youth, and Quicksilver each drop one notch) ... and #14 I Often Dream of Trains to #5.
Side 3 is where it goes full-on psychedelic for me, resorting to a certain convention of electric guitar at will, yet capable of taking this circus to outer space and the universe. “Rainy Day, Dream Away” starts it off in fine fashion with its scene from PNW life: coughing, followed by two companions who look out the window and notice that it’s raining outside. The mood is cozy, with a tenor sax peppering in and guitar licks of various textures. The reprise will feature an amazing talking wah-wah guitar, which slaps up out of the mood laid down here—the beginning of it is heard here on the fade.
What follows is “1983 ... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” and “Moon, Turn the Tides ... Gently Gently Away.” They say it all in many ways with their flowery titles and extremes of length (13:40 and 1:02, respectively, though there are any number of ways this proximate 15-minute set could have been cut into two tracks). They say too much with their flowery titles, maybe. But lord, the musical themes of “Merman” are so stupefyingly gorgeous, darting in and out, recurring across lengths. Hendrix plays some bass too. It has the most stirring recording I’ve ever heard of the two words “straight ahead.” It speaks of the death of peers. It finally, at about 5:00, looses the bonds of gravity for outer space—or perhaps, as suggested, plummets into the ocean, seven miles deep, where the pressure somehow does not matter. “Merman” floats a lot across its 13+ minutes. It’s how you do oceanic, maybe. Compare the Velvet Underground’s “Ocean” (talking about the 10-minute 1969 live version). I understand the argument that “Merman” is boring. It took me awhile to get all the way to understanding or appreciating it and, after long periods of intense infatuation, I have to pick my times to listen to it carefully. One more curiosity: at one time, 1983 seemed impossibly far in the future. Now it seems more like 40 years ago. Just sayin’. But forget all that altogether, because it’s timeless.
Thanks to all for following along with this psych-25 countdown, which now concludes. I settled on the list a year ago and never changed it, but I would now like to make the following emendations: #5 P.M. Dawn to #14 ... #9 Terry Riley to #11 ... #11 Are You Experienced to #6 (Primal Scream, Sonic Youth, and Quicksilver each drop one notch) ... and #14 I Often Dream of Trains to #5.
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