WNEW | Where Rock Lives: Chopping Block: The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Electricladyland Let’s face it: If anyone in rock and roll is worthy of a sprawling two-record album, it’s Jimi Hendrix.

A genius in the strictest sense of the word, Hendrix's musical output is as legitimate and worthy of study as anything produced by John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Yeah, he’s that important.

And as double albums go, Electric Ladyland is pretty darned tight, with only 16 songs over four sides. (To compare, the latest official release of debut Are You Experienced?, which mashes the American and British versions together, has 17 songs.)

In many ways, Electric Ladyland is the purest of Hendrix documents, since it captures the artist enjoying near total creative freedom. After two albums establishing him as the American guitar hero of his time, Hendrix no longer had to worry about producing radio-friendly singles or cutting down his guitar solos.

But for those of us more interested in good music than Good Music, let’s see if we can’t trim some of the fat off this lady:

We start off with 1:23 of tympani drums and electronic belches known as … And the Gods Made Love. In a 1968 interview, Hendrix himself said he put it first because it would get the criticism out of the way.

But I’m not going to criticize it. I’m just going to cut it.

Things get cooking soon enough with song number two, Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland). It’s strange, to be sure – all gauzy, swirling background noises as Jimi does his damnedest to sound like the Temptations’ Eddie Kendricks. It’s a bit of a reach, but you’ve got to respect the effort. Cream certainly never tried this sort of thing. Let’s keep it.

Crosstown Traffic comes next, a wonderful combination of clever writing, (‘All you do is slow me down / And I’ve got better things on the other side of town’), futuristic production (backup vocals and guitars continually swirl from one side of your speakers to the other), and kazoos. A keeper.

And then it’s Voodoo Chile, a fifteen-minute slow blooze featuring Traffic’s Steve Winwood on keyboards and the Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Casady on bass. Recorded at seven o’clock in the morning after a night out in New York City, it’s not nearly as sloppy as it could have been.

But there are literally hundreds of Hendrix blues jams out there, many of which are actually fun to listen to. (Killing Floor from Live at Monterey, Catfish Blues from BBC Sessions, and Red House from Are You Experienced? come immediately to mind.) Really, Voodoo Chile is why the Chopping Block exists. It’s gone.

Make way for Little Miss Strange, written and sung by Experience bassist Noel Redding. The only appropriate reaction to this song is head-shaking disbelief at the fact that someone actually had the balls to ask Jimi Freakin’ Hendrix to sing backup on this crappy little song. Buh-bye.

Long Hot Summer Night gets us back on track, with its creepy guitar riff, otherworldly backup vocals and lyrics about candy cane windows and screaming telephones. It’s followed by a fiery cover of Earl King’s Come On and original Gypsy Eyes, which counterpoints Mitch Mitchell’s marching band drums with wheezy, atmospheric swaths of guitar. These three songs are all amazing, groundbreaking and classic, though in totally different ways.

As is Burning of the Midnight Lamp, a song which The Rolling Stone Record Guide points out, “featured perhaps the only example of a wah-wah pedal employed elegantly.” It also featured a harpsichord and one of the album’s few moments of straightforward exposition: ‘Loneliness is such a drag.’ It stays.

The three songs on side three are linked by water. We start with Rainy Day, Dream Away, an ultra-mellow celebration of staying indoors and chilling out. Featuring Electric Flag drummer and future Hendrix cohort Buddy Miles, the song slowly bleeds into 1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) which bleeds into Moon, Turn the Tides… Gently Gently Away.

There’s a kind of narrative linking the latter two songs, something about Jimi and his girlfriend taking refuge in the ocean while "giant pencil and lipstick-tube shaped things/Continue to rain and cause screaming pain." It’s either a masterpiece or a bore, depending on who you ask. I’ll allow them because the guitar solo that links the two songs is incredible without calling too much attention to itself.

Was it all a dream? Hendrix may have wanted the listener to think so, what with the return to precipitation-fueled reverie in Still Raining, Still Dreaming. In the interest of completing this show-within-the-show, I’ll allow it.

House Burning Down is yet another left turn, with amazing guitars and lyrics that could be seen as a metaphor for any number of 1960s struggles – Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, the Youth Movement, et cetera. But I’ve never met anyone who puts it in his Hendrix top ten. Consider it chopped.

The cover of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower is next. Let’s keep that, since it happens to be one of the best rock songs of all time. And we finish strong with Voodoo Chile (Slight Return). With its massive riff and boasts of bringing down mountains with one’s bare hands, there’s nothing slight about it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the new and only slightly improved Electric Ladyland:

Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland), Crosstown Traffic, Long Hot Summer Night, Come On, Part 1, Gypsy Eyes, Burning of the Midnight Lamp, Rainy Day, Dream Away, 1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be), Moon, Turn the Tides … Gently Gently Away, Still Raining, Still Dreaming, All Along the Watchtower, Voodoo Chile (Slight Return).