Since tomorrow's the day and while I had a few secs, I figured i'd get this up early.
It's from a November issue of Goldmine magazine.

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Go back to the early years with Jimi Hendrix
November 12, 2008
by Dave Thompson (Goldmine Magazine)

It’s a sobering thought, but Nov. 27, 2008, marks what would have been the 66th birthday of Jimi Hendrix, just a couple of months after we finished mourning the 38th anniversary of his death.

And it still boggles the mind to consider just how much he accomplished during his time on earth, all the more so when you remember that the vast majority of it was actually banged down in less than two years.

“Hey Joe,” his first (British) hit 45, was recorded in December 1966, and Electric Ladyland, his third final studio album, was released in October 1968. Two years, eight full sides of long-playing vinyl (Electric Ladyland was, of course, a double), sufficient singles and B-sides to stuff a greatest hits disc, and that is before we even think about the hours and hours worth of studio outtakes and live material that have since kept the Hendrix catalog ticking over with more life than many artists with careers 10 times as long.

Certainly the last decade has been a great time to be a Hendrix collector. Ever since they assumed control of the Hendrix estate in the mid-1990s, his family’s own Experience Hendrix foundation has been diligently working to cut through the confusion (not to mention bulk) wrought by the activities of earlier administrations, reissuing and remastering each of his core albums, while supplementing the catalog with a host of live and unreleased recordings.


Nest of snakes

It is an unsurpassable legacy. Through the 1970s and 1980s, after all, a “new” Hendrix album tended to comprise a couple of handfuls of outtakes, drawn from across the four years he spent with the Reprise label (Polydor/Track in the U.K.), mixed and sometimes remixed by a variety of passing souls, and then shoved into the marketplace with little or no annotation.

War Heroes, Midnight Lightning, Crash Landing… one such set was titled Loose Ends, and the irony button must have been fully depressed when that particular title was conceived.

The material featured on those albums is still available today. But, it appears in a form that at least tries to approach that which Hendrix himself would have chosen and succeeds to such a degree that today, we have even been afforded a serious glimpse into what might have been Jimi’s fourth studio album, had he only lived to release it, The First Rays Of The Rising Sun.

As admirable as all this work has been, however, there is one thing to remember. Experience Hendrix’s efforts have concentrated exclusively upon those same four years, 1966-70, during which Hendrix was at his creative and commercial height. They completely overlook all that occurred at the opposite end of the chronological scale; more than that, they all but disown it, and certainly despise it.

This is not necessarily a terrible omission. The three years (1963-1966) worth of work with which Hendrix preceded his arrival in London represents one of the most convoluted corpuses in rock ’n’ roll history, a nest of snakes so venomous that no single record label has yet attempted to delve definitively into it.

There is some great music in there, and a lot that is worthy of our notice. But, Hendrix’s pre-fame career, what must have seemed the endless vacuum during which he worked as a mere sideman for whomever would employ him, also abounds with some absolute rubbish, and if you have spent any time browsing the Jimi bin in your friendly neighborhood used vinyl emporium, you will know exactly what we are talking about.


The Lonnie Youngblood experience

Hendrix received his discharge from the U.S. Army on July 2, 1962, walking out of Fort Campbell with nothing more than $300 and a duffel bag stuffed with a handful of possessions.

He had even sold his guitar to one of his army buddies, and his initial intention was to return to his childhood home in Seattle. Unfortunately, a visit to a local jazz bar ended that dream when he blew through almost all of his cash. So, he returned to the army base, borrowed his old guitar back from its new owner, and then settled in Clarksville, where he and another army friend, bass player Billy Cox, formed a band, The Casuals (later to become The King Casuals).

“People would say if you don’t get a job you’ll just starve to death,” Hendrix said a few years later. “But I didn’t want to take a job outside music. I tried a few jobs, including car delivery, but I always quit after a week or so...”

Many of The Casuals’ gigs took place at the army base, and they remained in Clarksville until Cox received his own discharge. From there, they relocated to Nashville, where Hendrix and Cox found their way into another band, W&W Man. There was a brief hiatus while Hendrix traveled to New York City to try his luck there, but he soon returned to Clarksville, before splitting for Vancouver, Canada, in December 1962, to stay with his grandparents.

There he joined the local R&B band Bobbie Taylor and The Vancouvers — fronted by Tommy Chong, later to find fame as one half of Cheech and Chong. By spring 1963, however, he was back in the South, working the Chitlin’ Circuit with whichever touring musicians would employ him.

A return to Nashville saw him join an R&B band called The Imperials. The King Casuals reformed for a time, while a stint with Bob Fisher and The Barnesvilles introduced him to guitarist Larry Lee — six years later, Lee would play alongside Hendrix at the Woodstock Festival. For now, they were content to gig as backing band to the likes of Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions, and Motown girl group the Marvelettes.

Hendrix returned to New York in late 1963, 18 months after he left the army, and it was there that his recording career got underway, under the aegis of bluesman Lonnie Youngblood. Indeed, it has been estimated that over 200 LPs and CDs have now been issued worldwide, all claiming to feature the double act of Youngblood and Hendrix.

A year older than Hendrix, saxophonist Youngblood had been playing the club circuit since the late 1950s, when he worked with singer Pearl Reeves. The early 1960s brought him his first major success, the solo hit “Heartbreak,” but it was his discovery of the young and unknown Jimi Hendrix that has, unjustly but understandably, cemented his subsequent renown.

Youngblood’s band gigged regularly throughout the New York and Philadelphia area; one favored haunt was the Cheetah in New York, another was the Uptown Theater in Philly. What about those 200 albums, though? They must have been very, very busy.
Youngblood was signed to Fairmount Records, a Cameo-Parkway subsidiary, at the time, and did a fair amount of recording for the label. But, he utilized Hendrix on just nine songs, recorded at Abtone Studios, a tiny hideaway looking down on Broadway and 55th in New York.

The best known of these are those issued as Youngblood 45s at the time — “Go Go Shoes”/“Go Go Place,” and “Soul Food”/”Goodbye Bessie Mae.” Other songs recorded during the same sessions, but unreleased until after Hendrix’s death, include “Sweet Thang,” “Groovemaker,” “(She’s A) Fox” and multiple versions of “Wipe the Sweat” and “Under the Table.”

All were mono recordings; stereo mixes of the latter two tracks were prepared in 1971 prior to their release on the Maple label album Two Great Experiences Together, a set which actually reached #127 on the U.S. chart.

The albums Rare Hendrix, The Genius of Jimi Hendrix and For Real! round up the remainder of authentic Hendrix/Youngblood material in the most concise manner. But other titles, while possibly featuring one or two of the Hendrix performances, overwhelm them with extra-curricular Youngblood material — which is no bad thing if you’re a Youngblood completist but is disappointing for Hendrix fans.

But Youngblood feels your pain. Youngblood himself had nothing to do with the fate of his recordings — few artists did in those days. Neither did the Fairmount label.
It was other parties who ferreted them out shortly after the guitarist’s death, doubtless in the belief that they were uncovering a goldmine of previously unknown Hendrix material, and when they discovered there was just that baker’s dozen to play with… well, they just pretended otherwise.

Journalist Frank Moriarty spoke with Youngblood in 1996 and got the whole sad story. “The tapes were at the studio. Once I’d mixed them down and mastered them, I always left my tapes at the studio, because at that time that was the thing to do. When everybody recorded, they left the mother tape at the studio.

“These people, they knew where the tapes I had recorded were… [and] made a deal with this big company in Chicago. They went and bribed the guy who owned the studio, and actually went and took my tapes away. And they gave them about $100,000 for this tape. And they took all the money and didn’t give me any of the money. That was my stuff! And then these companies started to put the shit out and didn’t even put my name on it.

“They would say it was Jimi Hendrix singing, without my name on it — so many lies, man. The stuff that came out on that album called Two Great Experiences Together! — what happened with that, one company took that and tried to doctor it up to make it have more Hendrix activity. See, Hendrix is more or less just backing me up. The companies wanted to say they had a little more activity by Hendrix, so they found some Hendrix wannabes and they put them on the tracks. And what they really did was they messed the tracks up with the overdubs.”

The fact that the fraudulent issues include some of the best-known of all “early” Hendrix titles only amplifies the sheer audacity of these claims. For the record, such “early Hendrix” classics as “Spiked With Heady Dreams,” “She Went To Bed With My Guitar” and “Strokin’ A Lady On Each Hip,” first issued on a series of LPs by the Pan/Saga labels in the early 1970s, are nothing of the kind.

Neither are such enticing titles as “Funky,” “Feel That Soul,” “Gangster Of Love,” “Hey Leroy” and “Young Generation.” Some feature Youngblood alone, and date from years on either side of Hendrix’s recruitment to his band. Others may date from the right period but do not feature Jimi. And there’s a few cuts that have nothing to do with either player.


Hendrix and The Isley Brothers

Youngblood and Hendrix parted company in 1964, and Hendrix moved onto The Isley Brothers’ band.

Five years had elapsed since the Isleys broke through with the monster smash “Shout,” years during which the Isleys moved from vital R&B to luscious Motown-style soul, shot through with an instinctive understanding of what one day emerged as funk and all draped in the brothers’ trademark soaring vocals.

In 1962, their take on The Top Notes’ “Twist And Shout” had in turn inspired a cover by The Beatles, suggesting a rock-and-soul fusion which the Isleys adopted as a virtual blueprint over the next four years; two years later, “Testify” found them publicly allying themselves with the hard-hitting likes of James Brown, Little Richard, Ray Charles and the then-prodigious talent of Little Stevie Wonder.

But, “Testify” occupies another, even weightier, place in history, as it marked Hendrix’s debut in their band. The guitarist was a member of the Isleys’ backing group for four months, June through October 1964, arriving at a time when the Isleys themselves were going through a transitional phase, caught in the four-year no-man’s land which separated their last hit, “Twistin’ With Linda,” from their next, “This Old Heart Of Mine.”

They were also in the process of setting up their own record label, T-Neck (named for their New Jersey home base), and looking for a new guitarist when a friend, Tony Rice, saw Hendrix playing in the house-band at New York’s Palm Cafe and recommended him to the Isleys.

A churning, rhythmic blues, “Testify” was haunted by at least an echo of all that Hendrix journeyed on to achieve; touring with the Isleys in the record’s wake, he showed off even more of his repertoire, including playing his guitar with his teeth. It was a trick which the Isleys were more than happy to encourage — unlike other acts with whom he worked, anything which added to their reputation was welcome, even a flashy backing musician with a taste for crowd-pleasing novelty.

“They used to let me do my own thing because it made them more bucks,” Hendrix said later, but he also knew that the Isleys’ own trip was based around more than neat presentation and sweet vocal harmony. They wanted excitement, action, drama. It oozed from their records, it issued from their live shows, and now, it poured from their guitarist.

Interviewed for the Experience Hendrix magazine in 1999, younger brother Ernie Isley recalled watching from the side of the stage as Kelly called Hendrix to the front, to “show them how it’s done. And [Jimi’d] do something like play the guitar behind his back and everyone would go, ‘my God, how did he do that?’ They did a show with Eric Burdon and The Animals in 1964, and the Animals were going out of their minds.”
Two years later, Animals bassist Chas Chandler, coincidentally or otherwise, became Hendrix’s manager.

Hendrix quit the Isleys in October 1964, following the “Last Girl” single. He reunited with them in August 1965, meeting them in New York to cut a new single, “Move Over And Let Me Dance.” A year after that, as Ronnie Isley remarked in the liner notes to the Hendrix-era Isleys compilation In The Beginning, “He went to England, we went to Detroit.” But buyer beware! In The Beginning’s Hendrix content might be authentic, but it has been either remixed or even replaced with alternate takes to the originally issued sides. The original 45 version of “Testify,” for example, would remain unavailable until its inclusion on the Isleys’ It’s Your Thing box set in 1999.

Still, Hendrix’s sojourn with the Isleys marks an oasis of relative calm in his pre-fame discography. His next port of call, however, returns us to more turbulent waters.


Little Richard and other encounters

1964 also saw Hendrix encounter and, according to some sources, record with Steve Cropper, ace guitarist with Booker T and the MGs.

Hendrix was in Memphis as a backing musician with Gorgeous George Odell, one of the lesser acts on Sam Cooke’s latest tour, and Hendrix later recalled, “Steve Cropper turned me on millions of years ago, and I turned him on millions of years ago, too, but because of different songs. He turned me on to a lot of things. He showed me how to play certain songs, and I showed him how I played “Mercy, Mercy”, or something like that....”

It was a visit to Atlanta during the same tour that brought him into Little Richard’s orbit. It was a short-lived stint, characterized by the erstwhile Richard Penniman growing increasingly impatient with Hendrix’s burgeoning showmanship and flamboyance. But, it did give Hendrix his first taste of chart success, as guitarist on Little Richard’s latest single, the two part “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got, But It’s Got Me.” The record reached #12 on the Billboard R&B chart and also made #92 on the pop listings.

Another song from the same session, “Dancin’ All Around The World,” was unearthed for the 1971 Little Richard compilation Mr. Big, together with a composite version of the single. Which isn’t really much of an output, but don’t tell the Little Richard discography that!

The oft-released compilation Friends From The Beginning is just one of several titles that claim to feature the two legends playing together; sadly, you have to take the rough with the smooth and wade through a lot of non-Hendrix material to find the nuggets. Dig deeper into the catalog and even more spurious associations emerge. A lot of the things, in fact.

Although Little Richard remained the main source of Hendrix’s bread and butter until June 1965 (when the guitarist was sacked for missing the tour bus), Jimi did engage in a few extra-curricular projects. In February 1965, in Los Angeles, he met up with Arthur Lee, whose band Love was just beginning to pick up local attention.

Under Lee’s aegis, Hendrix sessioned on a single by singer Rosa Lee Brooks, “My Diary.” He also cut 45s with Ray Sharpe & The King Curtis Orchestra (“Help Me”), and Don Covay and the Goodtimers (“Can’t Stay Away”).

None of these cuts has yet resurfaced on any generally available Hendrix-related LP, although the Brooks single (erroneously dated to 1962) made an appearance in 1990 on the limited-edition radio promo On the Radio Rarities Bonus CD Volume One, produced by the Santa Monica, Calif.,-based On The Radio Syndication Company.

Cut loose by Little Richard, Hendrix again headed for New York, and, in October, he joined singer Curtis Knight’s band, The Squires, and was quickly rewarded when Knight’s manager, Ed Chalpin, landed Hendrix a stint in the studio with actress Jayne Mansfield.

Although his labors were not issued until summer 1967 — “Suey” was the B-side to Mansfield’s “As The Clouds Drift By” single — it was a paying session, and one of many that Hendrix would now embark upon, as Chalpin produced Knight and The Squires through what now feels like several albums’ worth of material. All of which has now been spread over several hundred albums.

Thanks in part to Knight’s incredibly readable (if not always accurate) biography of Hendrix, this is the best documented phase of Hendrix’s pre-fame career, a prolific period that saw the guitarist featured on some 65 studio recordings with Knight. Also circulating are around 2½ hours worth of live material, apparently recorded at two separate shows in late 1965.

This vast body of work has appeared across a colossal number of releases over the years, beginning with two singles released during 1966, “How Would You Feel” and “Hornet’s Nest.” More appeared following Hendrix’s breakthrough in 1967, and there are definitely some collectibles to be found among them.

A reissue of “How Would You Feel,” with new B-side “You Don’t Want Me,” for example, was scheduled for release on the U.K. Decca label in August, 1967. An injunction threatened by Track, Hendrix’s own current label, saw the release switched to that imprint before any Decca pressings were issued. However, that was not the end of the story. Further legal investigation then restored the rights to Decca (Capitol in the U.S.); it also ignited the breach of contract disagreement that would finally be resolved by Hendrix delivering a full album of new material to Capitol, the Band Of Gypsies live album.

Capitol itself issued two albums of Hendrix/Knight recordings during 1967-68, Get That Feeling and Flashing: Jimi Hendrix Plays, Curtis Knight Sings; the British London label, in the meantime, issued a single of “Hush Now” in October 1967, following through with a U.K. release of Get That Feeling, a second collection, Strange Things and a double album apparently issued in the Netherlands only, The Great Jimi Hendrix In New York.

All included material recorded both during Knight and Hendrix’s original partnership, supplemented with a clutch more songs recorded in 1967, when the pair reunited for a jam during Hendrix’s first “post-stardom” visit to New York. Unfortunately, record keeping of any kind seems to have been furthest from anybody’s mind at the time, and there is no way of knowing which songs were recorded when… or even by whom, sniff some purists. A case in point is Knight’s “The Ballad Of Jimi” 45.

Interest in these releases was low at the time, and, by late 1968, both London and Capitol had given up on this archive. Perhaps inevitably, however, London returned to it immediately following Hendrix’s death, rushing out the somewhat sensationally titled “The Ballad Of Jimi” 45, but defraying the inevitable accusations of opportunistic sensationalism by including (with the German release) a purported copy of the original studio sheet, giving the song’s recording date as Sept. 18, 1965.

Knight himself claimed this possibly premonitory song was composed after Hendrix himself predicted his death earlier that year. Which does not explain how the guitarist was able to accompany Knight’s lyrics with a very audible wah-wah, some two years before the effect unit itself was actually available.

Another single rushed into production in late 1970 was the now very scarce “No Such Animal,” deceptively credited to Hendrix alone, but in reality dating again from the Knight sessions. Since 1970, a number of labels have licensed Knight’s Hendrix archive for a succession of releases, many of which have continued to draw new and unheard performances from the vault without ever coming close to offering a complete survey of the duo’s entire recorded repertoire.

Significant among these are the early 1970s U.K. LPs What’d I Say/Early Jimi Hendrix and Birth Of Success, budget price releases that introduced the first live recordings to the catalog.

They were followed into this same poorly recorded, but generally entertaining territory, by the Ember label’s Early Jimi Hendrix, In The Beginning (complete with added false applause) and Looking Back With Jimi Hendrix. These, and several other similar albums were all issued between 1971-’75 and are generally regarded as worth picking up, if only as examples of period kitsch (the sleeves are generally pricelessly garish).


A short leash

The bewildering plethora of such albums issued since then, however, has seriously impacted both the collectibility of the material and the patience of even the most devoted completist collector. And, while some attempt to correlate the catalog has been undertaken, culminating in the SPV label’s release of the six-CD anthology Hendrix: The Complete PPX Studio Recordings in 2000, it really is too little, too late.

Indeed, the anthology is basically as shoddy as all the releases it supplanted, as it retains the same non-existent annotation that has scarred every other release and makes no attempt to either improve the sound quality or even guess at chronology. True, it gathers together almost every single track the pair cut in tandem — 57 cuts, including numerous retakes, sprawl across the musical spectrum. But, you need considerable patience to make your way through the entire package.

Still, it’s there if you need it, as are all the other LPs and CDs (not to mention cassettes and eight-tracks) out there, bearing the name, if not the genius, of Jimi Hendrix. The question is, do you need it?

Particularly over the last couple of decades, it has become almost second nature among Hendrix fans to disregard any attempt to repackage the guitarist’s pre-fame material, for reasons ranging from the aforementioned lack of concrete information (not to mention Hendrix), to wariness of investing in another fly-by-night budget label’s wares, and on to a general weariness with the subject in general.

Discussing the possibility of Experience Hendrix ever remastering and releasing any of this music, producer Eddie Kramer simply asked, “Why? That stuff is really crap. It plays a part in the story, but do I personally want to put it out? No. It’s not really Jimi, is it? I mean it is, but it isn’t. He’s playing bloody rhythm guitar for God’s sake.”

And that is true. Listening to the music he was making, even on the Knight sessions, where he was encouraged to let fly, Hendrix sounds markedly unambitious. Leading his own Blue Flames around the New York circuit during 1966, he knew that Mike Bloomfield was watching him play, but not once did he make a move in that direction.

He was aware, too, that both The Rolling Stones’ brilliant young manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, and New York industry bigwig Seymour Stein were interested in him. But he never gave those admirers any overt encouragement either, and both eventually drifted away.

Musically, Hendrix was equally naive. The tide of rock musicianship was fast turning from the day when one could make a living from simply turning out the same old blues standards, but representative set lists from the Blue Flames era made few concessions to the changing times: “Money,” “Walkin’ The Dog,” “Bo Diddley,” “Twist And Shout.” Even when he came upon “Hey Joe,” the song which (with a new arrangement) would soon be establishing his fame, it was simply a bluesy rearrangement of a century-old cowboy song, and the most contemporary things in Jimi’s arsenal were “Hang On, Sloopy” and a distinctive rendition of “Like A Rolling Stone.”

The exhibitionism which became such a marked part of Hendrix’s London persona “probably always was there,” Kramer mused. “It was one of the reasons he got sacked from Little Richard’s band, because he kept wanting to leap upfront and steal the thunder and Richard wasn’t having any of that shit.”

But, Hendrix, nevertheless, kept his exuberance on a comparatively short leash, and it shows in the music.

Kramer might have been over-harsh with his dismissal of Hendrix’s early canon, but he was not too far off the mark either. Though the Hendrix heard on these early recordings, the Isleys material in particular, was already unquestionably a decent guitarist, the innovation and inventiveness that became his trademarks are scarcely even hinted at.
Fascinating glimpses into his future are present — from the Curtis Knight days, the Beatles’ “Day Tripper,” the Albert Collins-inspired “Drivin’ South” and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killin’ Floor” would all reappear in the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s live repertoire. However, it is also plain that much of the material was either simply a job to be done, or, again among the Knight material, a bit of fun laid down while the tape was still rolling.

For the sake of the historical record, there is a need for this material to be compiled together into one cohesive and, most essentially, well-annotated package. Particularly as there really cannot be too many more previously unissued takes of “1983 (A Merman I Should Be)” and “EXP” in the vault to tempt us into buying another studio compilation.
Indeed, as we approach the 40th anniversary of Hendrix’s death, in 2010, what better tribute to him could there be than to finally clear up the mess that devours fully one-half of his recording career and show him as he really was during that period. The music may not always be brilliant, and some of it certainly isn’t.

But do we despise the Silver Beatles because they didn’t make Sgt. Pepper? Are The Rolling Stones’ IBC demos any less valid than Exile On Main Street? Did David Bowie really record “The Laughing Gnome?”

An artist’s past is valuable because it is his past, and to try and sweep it under the carpet simply because it doesn’t meet the same standards of his later output isn’t simply dubious, it’s practically dishonest.

And if there’s one word that you never want to hear applied to Hendrix’s legacy, that’s it.

http://www.goldminemag.co...i_Hendrix/

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...Excerpt medley



Together again





tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431
[Edited 11/26/08 16:38pm]

In tribute:

Timmy84 said:

i'll see that and raise ya this.....

http://www.imeem.com/rock..._paradise/

Wow Jimi would've been 66? Happy Birthday Jimi.

[Edited 11/27/08 0:58am]

Happy Birthday to the Voodoo Child!

Thanks for posting that Aud. Happy B-day to James Marshall...and Happy T-day to you all (if you celebrate).

and split fingers to the celebration .

Happy Birthday... RIP...

RIP... Happy Birthday !

And as some people who are more familiar with Hendrix than I am may be on this thread can anybody tell me if this CD set is really rare and expensive? I own it and was thinking about giving it as a present to somebody for christmas. Any help would be very much appreciated.
http://cgi.ebay.com/JIMI-...2008r13831

Serious said:

Not familiar with this specific box set but it's a combination of these 2 releases...




...The Jimi Hendrix Concerts (Warner Brothers - 1982) + The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Radio One (Radio One - 1989)

Since this box set is not exactly brand spanking new condition, minus the t-shirt you can get both of these individually for less than $50.


I have both of these releases on vinyl and they're very listenable.



tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

theAudience said:

Thank you!