The Beat Patrol

This was written in the wake of Jimi’s untimely death on Sept. 18, 1970. Richard Williams wrote this for the Melody Maker the following week (Sept. 26th). It’s interesting to read what people were thinking right after hearing about his death. The world still misses him…

Yet he, above all others, brought rock into the electronic age, and his innovations were turned into cliches by a million lesser guitarists and groups.
Such is the speed of “progress” and communications these days that, very recently, Hendrix was sounding almost like a parody of himself, thanks to all the diluters and copyists who’d succeeded in debasing the currency he created.
In contrast to most of his contemporaries, he had a “feel” for rock and blues which was undeniable, and which gave force and conviction to his music. It’s no accident that many well-respected guitarists, when asked to name their favourite, unhesitatingly plump for him.
Possibly his greatest achievement was that he created a viable fusion of black and white pop music, using his blues heritage on material heavily influenced by Bob Dylan, and in this he was arguably the first one (maybe still the only one) to succeed.
The Experience was a revolutionary band. Built on the solid rock bass of Noel Redding, it was complicated rhythmically by the playing of Mitch Mitchell, whose work in the early days was perhaps the best drumming yet heard in rock, and topped off by the whining, wailing guitar of Hendrix.
Their first album, Are You Experienced (Track), contains many classics, including two tracks – ‘Manic Depression’ and ‘Love Or Confusion’ – which have the trio working with exciting circular rhythmic/melodic patterns, swirling and charging with fantastic impetus.
‘Red House’, a simple blues, has Hendrix showing where his roots lay, in that familiar long-lined development of the B. B. King style, but it was ‘3rd Stone From The Sun’ which suggested the greatest scope for development.
This track could be described as Sci-Fi Rock, a shimmering outing into deep space which compares well with Pink Floyd’s ‘Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun’, and it represented an exciting departure which he never really followed up.
Axis: Bold A Love was the second album, a refinement of the first album, rather than a development. Among the best tracks were ‘If 6 Was 9′, a superb group performance with audacious drumming; ‘Little Wing’, a delicate song which demonstrated that Jimi didn’t have to shake the room to make his point; and the title track, which had some of his best lyrics.
His double-album, Electric Ladyland, became renowned more for the 21 nude chicks on the sleeve than for its music, but the two long tracks – ‘Voodoo Chile’ and ‘1983 (A Merman I Would Turn to Be)’ – were among the best things he ever did in a studio.
The B-sides of Jimi’s early singles are well worth investigation. ‘Stone Free’ (on the back of ‘Hey Joe’) is a wild personal declaration of independence with a fantastic striding beat; ’51st Anniversary’ is a really amusing cut with great words, on the flip of ‘Purple Haze’; and ‘Highway Chile’ (back of ‘The Wind Cries Mary’) is his exultant tribute to Dylan, the man with whom he seemed to have the closest affinity.
But it seemed certain that, some time this year, he reached the end of the road with the trio format, and he intimated as much in his last interview, with the MM’s Roy Hollingworth, where he said that he was hoping to form a big band.
Listening to his records again, one is struck as much by the emotional breadth of his approach as by the rolling note-clusters and shivering high notes. Here was a man always striving to express himself as truly and as honestly as possible and when the man concerned happens to be a real innovator, we can’t ask more.
It would be putting it too highly to say, in absolute terms, that Jimi Hendrix was a genius. But he certainly did more than most to increase the scope of rock and to improve its quality. That’s quite enough.
The importance of Jimi Hendrix as a musician was sometimes forgotten behind the man’s sexuality and the flamboyance of his act and appearance.

Richard Williams

Lenny Kaye’s Rolling Stone (issue #79) review from April 1, 1971. This was the album Jimi was working on at the time of his death. It was supposed to be a larger work called First Rays of the New Rising Sun, but basically got split up (more or less) into this album and the soundtrack for Rainbow Bridge after his death…   

Maybe it’s just my imagination, but the Jimi Hendrix section of my local record bin seems to have been growing at an astonishing pace lately. In recent weeks, we’ve been offered a bland semi-jam with Lonnie Youngblood (who?) on Maple Records, a collection of ancient tapes with the Isley Brothers (a product of Buddah, from whom it would have been nice to say that they should’ve known better), and a large assortment of bootlegs, all seemingly taken from the same series of Los Angeles Forum concerts.

But The Cry of Love is the genuine article, Hendrix’ final effort, and it is a beautiful, poignant testimonial, a fitting coda to the career of a man who was clearly the finest electric guitarist to be produced by the Sixties, bar none. This record seems more complete than the album Janis left for us, but like Pearl, it too seems strangely foreshortened, a venture caught in the process of becoming and suddenly halted. The fact that The Cry of Love is still as good as it is must serve as some sort of reminder as to just how large looms the shadow of its creator.

As a pure musician and this is not even touching his grace as a performer, or his role as the first non-Top 40 superstar–Hendrix was strangely unique in a field bred on familiarity. He was an intense craftsman, of course, as one of his earliest sides, “Red House,” attested; a fluid-fingered picker who could ripple off runs with an unexpectedly perfect style, bursting out with phrases that filled up every loose chink in a song as if they had been especially inscribed for the occasion. But more than that, Hendrix was a master of special effects, a guitarist who used electricity in a way that was never as obvious as mere volume. He took his bag of toys the fuzz-tone, the wah-wah pedal, the stack of Marshalls and used them as a series of stepping-stones to create wave upon wave of intense energy, proper settings for a scene of wrath and somehow healing destruction. It was rock and roll that was both quite in tune with and yet far ahead of its time, and in a way, I’m not sure that we’ve ever really fully caught up.

Still, and it’s important to view The Cry of Love in this light, it seems that Hendrix found it hard to sustain his creativity once he had made his initial breakthrough. His first album, Are You Experienced, was as near a total statement as he made, each cut caught in its prime and done in a way that allowed for no waste or superficiality, and try as he might, he was never able to come as close to that completeness on any of his subsequent releases. Indeed, the strengths that Hendrix displayed in his debut effort were to remain his strengths throughout his career. For one, he showed off an astonishing ability to construct a song: the opening lines to “Purple Haze” are not only remarkable in their dumb simplicity but for the fact that they set the stage for the mayhem which logically follows. For another, his music had an incongruous element of lyricism, a tender second side that could hardly be explained in the context of “Foxey Lady,” such things as “May This Be Love” or “The Wind Cries Mary.” And last, and probably most significant, he built a magnetizing presence, an overwhelming personality which totally dominated each cut, creating a flesh and blood image that had to stay with you long after you had left the record and gone home.

There were other things involved, of course, but they have more to do with the stream of rock and roll at that time rather than with Hendrix himself. The concept of the rock trio, for instance, was just beginning to strike gold, and it was bolstered by a dynamite combination of English decadence over Seattle black man that helped propel him towards success. In the end, though, even if that first album had arrived at your door in a plain blank cover, we would have known that here was something to be reckoned with, a massively exciting interstellar achievement.

But the question was, and remains, what can you do for an encore? Very early, it seemed that Hendrix had been almost captured by his audience, trapped by the totality of that first release, and he was never given room to grow. As in sports, every artist needs to work off a challenge, to have a spur in his side that makes him top himself, time after time after time. After Monterey, though, there was no challenge. At concerts, he was applauded for even the meagrest of performances, standing ovations at the most lackluster of guitar smashings, and as a result, he just didn’t try as hard. Perhaps if his supporting musicians had been stronger (and this is not to slight either Noel Redding or Mitch Mitchell, who backed Hendrix to the hilt during these early years) he might have been able to work off them and move onto some new and fresher ground. But Hendrix was a musical giant who never found anyone quite as tall as himself, and so, like all great men, he stood alone.

In actuality, Hendrix never made a bad record–his worst was usually far above most anyone else’s best–but increasingly, his albums began to break down into Good tracks and Not-So-Good tracks. Axis: Bold As Love never really lived up to the promise of its cover, composed as it was of refined explorations of some of the places “The Wind Cries Mary” had visited. Much of it was quite excellent–Hendrix was obviously looking toward moving into a new style–but it lacked the drive and kinetic force of Are You Experienced, becoming an album to be reserved for late night listening. Electric Ladyland, which came out not too long a time after, showed that things were wearing thin. The best cut on the double-record set was, almost ironically, a sort of loose blues jam around “Voodoo Child,” and despite such silver-studded highlights as “All Along The Watchtower” and “Crosstown Traffic,” the album never really got itself together.

Why? More of the reason is tied up with Hendrix’ personality and artistic temperament than we’ll ever be able to guess. But the problem, as I see it, appears to have been one of material, rather than any disintegration in his style or approach to that material. Hendrix learned his chops in blues and rhythm and blues, where a musician is given a formalized, set structure to work with, and operates within that structure, embellishing and interpreting as he will. Hendrix, however, chose to make his stand in the dawning field of rock, which though it was easily as formalized a music, still carried a different set of traditions with it: for our purposes here, the two most important being that you write your own music and that, though it should always sound familiar, should never be note-for-note the same as something you did before. Where Hendrix could spend two years backing up Little Richard, who essentially did the same song in a variety of minutely different ways, he wasn’t about to be able to pull off the same thing on his own.

And so after the first album and parts of the second, where his creativity was able to function under the new ground rules, it was becoming clear by the time of Electric Ladyland that he couldn’t keep it up. In that sense, it’s interesting that when he took on other people’s material (such as “All Along the Watchtower”) he turned in a job that was nothing short of marvelous. But as for his own compositions, it was as if he had lost the touch. They sounded contrived, put together because he was bored with the old stuff and needed something new, and the consequent artificiality only caused him to fall back on his crowd-pleasing tricks, things that time had taught him would generate some kind of response.

After Electric Ladyland, Hendrix seemed to retreat back into his guitar. The Experience dissolved, there was talk of new bands, but nothing that amounted to much. He seemed to move away from areas that were troubling him, back to the things he knew best. In large part he gave up studio recording concentrating on live appearances and jamming instead. When he appeared with Buddy Miles and Billy Cox at the Fillmore on the New Year’s Eve spanning 1969-70, it was more with the intent to be a member of a band than a solo star. Buddy did a large part of the singing and clowning around, and Hendrix seemed content to move in the shadow, working his guitar with a flair that brought all his assets to the fore. He played his instrument better than anyone else I could dream of that night, and his best moments came not in his long solos, which tended to overextend themselves, but in his fills and punctuations, the little added extras in which he most seemed to delight.

This was the way he spent his last two years–playing around, building a new studio, everything, in fact, but recording a new album – and now, after the end, we have The Cry of Love. In the sense of a breakthrough, it’s not anything we might not have expected from Hendrix. Still, the songs are all uniquely his, stylized in his unique way, and after so long an absence, they are more than welcome. Because of the general excellence of the engineering and production, it’s hard to say just how complete the album was before his death, but it is clear that if these tracks were mostly finished and in the can, then the only thing holding up their release must have been Jimi himself. They are that good.

The album opens with “Freedom,” all flashes and exuberance, and it pointedly sets the tone for the record. The tune is one of Hendrix’ best, full of straining tensions and masterful releases, ripping along at a pace that is not to be believed, picking up speed as it goes. Hendrix always knew how to kick a band, and he is at his peak here. Mitch Mitchell follows him along perfectly, and shows a few of the reasons why he was always Hendrix’ greatest foundation.

If “Freedom” exemplifies one side of Hendrix, the next cut, “Drifting,” aptly show off his other. As a composer (though that word seems somewhat out of place in this setting), Hendrix had the uncanny knack of molding his music perfectly to his lyrics. “Manic Depression” is the obvious example here, though this quality tended to come through better on his slower, prettier material. “Drifting” is no exception. A beautiful guitar figure opens the track, soft and formless, and waits as the rest of the instruments slowly slide in, seemingly revolving one around the other. Hendrix’ vocal is right up front, almost studied, filled with lovely images of “Driftin’/On a sea of forgotten teardrops/On a lifeboat …” and floating off from there. It’s a ghostly cut, one of the most moving pieces Hendrix ever created, and it says much for the breadth and scope of his talent.

After these two opening classics, The Cry of Love seems to get down to business. “Ezy Rider” is a rocker, plain and simple, and Hendrix and Co. light into it with a fury. The guitar leads are short and to the point, and there isn’t a wasted moment. The cut fades at the end and then returns with a sudden lick, almost as an afterthought–a nice touch. “Night Bird Flying” starts sluggishly, as if most of the musicians weren’t quite sure what to do with it, but picks up a little as Hendrix begins to jam with his own guitar work on another track.

“My Friend,” with its tinkling glasses and nightclub noises, could just have been the usual end-of-side-one throwaway, except for a set of lyrics which Hendrix almost casually injects. The style is Dylanesque, circa “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: slightly surrealistic, a lot of friendly nonsense, and some very aware, deeply personal lines. “And, uh, sometimes it’s not so easy, specially when your only friend Talks, sees, looks and feels like you/And you do just the same as him …” Not much. Just a little something to think about.

“Straight Ahead” greets you as you turn the album over to side two, and it’s not a particularly noteworthy way to begin. Hendrix plays a nice wah-wah guitar, but the song is dragged down by some fairly obvious Socially Significant lyrics and a lethargic reading. “Astro Man” is a whole different story, however. Of all the cuts on the album, this one has the most incomplete feel, with nobody really sure of where the song is heading. Yet building from the same science fiction chords that the Jefferson Airplane used to open “The House on Pooneil Corners,” it easily overcomes any of its deficiencies, loose limbed and rocking at every turn.

If whoever put together the pieces of The Cry of Love had a flair for the melodramatic, “Angel” might have been placed at the end of the record, its deathlike images of salvation and resurrection providing the final touch to a memorial album. But programmed as it is, side two, band three, it stands on its own merits, a beautiful piece of work. It moves nicely into a frantic “In From The Storm,” Hendrix shining at his most furious, changing the structure of the song three or four times until things finally run out of steam. The final touch is saved for “Belly Button Window,” a kind of slow and mellow blues which Hendrix performs accompanied only by his guitar, a sly smile on his face, a few light whistles as the fade comes in. You can almost see him waving as he moves in the distance.

So there you have it. If The Cry of Love had come out while Hendrix was alive, we probably would have said it was a good album, bought a million copies, and left it at that. But now that he’s gone, it has to become that much more precious, something to savor slowly because there’ll be no others. It does him justice no mean feat and I don’t think we could have ever wanted anything more than that.

I once knew a guitarist who could, upon request, imitate any and all of your favorites. Ask him for Danny Kalb, and his fingers would fly so fast that they’d be a blur on the fretboard. Jeff Beck? He could play anything from Truth, note for note, with or without the record. Request Fric Clapton, and you’d have “Spoonful,” complete even to the hint of a Jack Bruce bass line underneath. Jimmy Page? Alvin Lee? Jerry Garcia? He had them all down, one by one.

I asked him once upon a time to do Hendrix for me. He smiled a little bit, set up his fuzz-tone, hooked up an echo unit, threw a few switches here and there, and gave it a try. He couldn’t do it.

And neither, for that matter, could have anyone else. Whatever his secrets, Jimi Hendrix took them with him. 

Lenny Kaye

Tony Glover’s review of this brilliant double album from Rolling Stone (issue #21) – 1968…

Being a bit fed up with music as “reactive noise” (“God man, the world’s a drag, let’s play loud and drown it out”), I was sort of set not to dig this LP, but I had to. Hendrix is a good musician and his science fiction concepts surmount noise. There isn’t really a concept (no Sgt. Pepper trips here)—instead there’s a unity, an energy flow. The LP opens with an electronic track using tape loops and phasing (think of “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces for an example of phasing) called “And the Gods Made Love.” Hendrix said in an interview, “We knew this was the track that most people will jump on to criticize, so I put it first to get it over with.”
The “I” in that sentence is true—Hendrix produced and directed these sides himself. Following is “Electric Ladyland,” a fairytale trip that serves as introduction to the rest on the LP; “I want to show you the angels spread their wings.” Next is “Crosstown Traffic,” a stomp under with a heavy beat. “90 miles an hour is the speed I drive, girl,” sings Hendrix as he compares the woman with a traffic jam—”It’s so hard to get through you.”
Then a live cut, which sounds as though it was recorded late at night in a small club, at one of the jamming sessions Hendrix is known for. It features Stevie Winwood on organ and Jack Casady on bass, and is called “Voodoo Chile.” It begins with a very John Lee Hooker-like guitar intro, and keeps a blues feeling all the way through, although Hendrix’s lyrics (“My arrows are made of desire/From as far away as Jupiter’s sulphur mines”) are a far cry from “Rolling Stone” (the Muddy Waters song that’s an ancestor to this track, as well as a lot of other things). After some feedback screech, a listener says “Turn that damn guitar down!” and the track ends with Hendrix and a chick discovering that the bar in the club is closed. “The bar is closed?” she says unbelievingly.
But yes it is. Side B opens with a song by bassist Noel Redding, “Little Miss Strange,” probably the most commercial of the numbers included. Basically hard rock, the best thing about it is some nice unison guitar lines, probably an overdub, unless Hendrix has grown another couple of arms. “Long Hot Summer Night” is next, a song set in the “Visions of Johanna” scene, although Hendrix has a way out—”my baby’s coming to rescue me—.” An Earl King number, “Come On,” follows. Mostly rock/soul, the guitar break in the middle is one of the nicest things Hendrix has done.
“Gypsy Eyes” begins with a drum thumping, a simple bass line and a compelling guitar line, it’s a light groovy tune that really sticks to your synapses. (If it was possible to hum or whistle Hendrix, this would be the tune you’d most likely do.)
The side ends with “Burning of the Midnight Lamp,” which was Hendrix’s last single in England, released a year ago this summer. It’s a freaky ballad, with particularly nothing lyrics and on the whole a drag … it goes nowhere. Side C is the sea or water side. It opens with “Rainy Day, Dream Away,” using a small group that includes Buddy Miles from the Flag on drums. In it Hendrix does a lot to restore the grooviness of rainy days, previously much maligned in many songs.
This fades to “1983: A Merman I Should Turn to Be” (a merman is a mermaid’s mate, of course). Hendrix’s vision of the future shows a world torn by war, on the verge of destruction as he and his lady go for a walk by the sea, and dream of living in the water. With tape loops, melancholy guitar and the flute of Chris Wood (also from Traffic) Hendrix structures a beautiful undersea mood — only to destroy it with some heavy handed guitar. My first reaction was, why did he have to do that? Then I thought that he created a beautiful thing, but lost faith in it, and so destroyed it before anybody else could—in several ways, a bummer.
Another electronic track, “Moon Turn the Tides Gently Gently Away,” heals some of the rent in your head, and the side ends peacefully. Side D opens with a continuation of “Still Raining, Still Dreaming,” only heavier and funkier—maybe just a bit too much so (iron raindrops hurt, man.) “House Burning Down” could be taken as Hendrix’s first socially conscious statement, but it ends in typical Hendrix fashion; “an eerie man from space … come down and take the dead away.”
Then comes the new single, Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”—in many ways one of the most interesting cuts here. On Hendrix’s original numbers, it’s sometimes hard to see the structure at first; the rhythm starts and stops, the changes are a bit hard to follow sometimes. But here, if you listen to the rhythm guitar track, and keep the original song in your mind, you can see the way Hendrix overlays his beautifully freaky sound on the already established framework of the song. He is true to its mood and really illustrates the line “the wind began to howl.” Last is “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” done this time with his usual backup men in a studio cut, heavier and more driving.
In other words, an extended look into Hendrix’s head, and mostly it seems to have some pretty good things in it (who among us is totally free of mental garbage?) A few random thoughts to sum up; Hendrix is the Robert Johnson of the Sixties, and really the first cat to ever totally play electric guitar. Remember, he used the wah-wah pedal before “Brave Ulysses,” and he’s still the boss. And it’s nice to see that he is confident enough so he can play some blues again—I’d like to hear more.
Hendrix, psychedelic superspade??? Or just a damn good musician/producer? Depends on whether you want to believe the image or your ears. (And if you wanna flow, dig this on earphones, and watch the guitar swoop back and forth through your head.) Hendrix is amazing, and I hope he gets to the moon first. If he keeps up the way he’s going here, he will. 

Tony Glover