Jimi jams

A new Hendrix experience

by Ted Drozdowski

What's most fascinating in the collection of artifacts from the life and music of Jimi Hendrix currently on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland isn't the guitars. They're mostly bit players in his saga, like a double-neck Mosrite and a black Stratocaster. It isn't the surround-sound performance film from the Isle of Wight, or the stage costumes, which include his velvet psychedelic butterfly suit, or the pictures he drew as a child, which serve as a keyhole into Hendrix family life and Jimi's young imagination. Not even the couch and phonograph from his father Al's house, which are positioned on a piece of carpet to reconstruct the very spot where Jimi learned to play.

No, the most illuminating thing is the pages of song lyrics, for "Machine Gun," "Spanish Castle Magic," "Message to Love," and others. They're hand-written on hotel stationery, reflecting the restless life of a rock-and-roll troubadour. And what's beautiful and enlightening isn't what they say but how they look. Jimi wrote in a script bold, florid, smooth, and ornate. Each letter is large and well-defined, yet full of decorative loops and filigrees. Even the bottoms of each "t" and "h" curve up, as if aiming their intentions skyward. So the lines of his ink are clear and readable and yet unsparing in baroque ornamentation. In short, Hendrix wrote exactly as he played guitar, his words as crisp and recognizable as the melodies and themes of his songs, and as ceaselessly embellished.

In his music, this was the result of constant labor and evolution on his part -- not just the bottomless inspiration he displayed even when stoned to the gills at Woodstock. That's the message of The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Experience Hendrix/MCA), a magnificent recently released four-CD box. The set captures Hendrix in his most potent periods: during the heyday of his original Jimi Hendrix Experience band, with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell; and post-Band of Gypsys, with an Experience that swapped Redding for his old Army buddy Billy Cox, a brilliant, underappreciated funk/blues/rock bassist.

The first disc spotlights Hendrix's initial fusion of R&B fire -- fanned by a background in blues and nearly five years in the roadhouse trenches with Little Richard, the Isleys, and his own Jimmy James and the Blues Flames -- with pop songcraft. There's an alternate take of "Purple Haze" that finds the Experience experimenting with different vocal harmonies and an expanded coda. There's also an isolated track of Jimi's famous voiceover for "Third Stone . . . from the Sun" that captures his stoned humor and sense of adventure. And, as luck had it, the moment he discovered the harpsichord and decided to pluck out the melody to "Burning of the Midnight Lamp" was caught on tape and is issued here, so we hear the spark of inspiration for the song's sonic character.

There are also steaming live renditions of Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor" and Jimi's "Hey Joe" that predate the Experience's Are You Experienced? debut by several months. These capture the furious live energy and improvisational drive of Hendrix -- his ability to transform plain Delta blues and Top 40 statements into castles of Germanic architecture. The set builds in intensity, revealing skeletal versions of "Little Wing" and unreleased curiosities like his funny blues "Taking Care of No Business" along the way, and dispensing live rarities like the in-concert debut of "Burning of the Midnight Lamp." Even tracks like the previously poor-sounding Isle of Wight's "All Along the Watchtower" take on a new power with John McDermott's remixes. Mitchell's kick drum thumps the chest, Cox's bass plows a fat-assed groove, and Hendrix's Stratocaster burns the air with its filthy, unrestrained, seamless tone.

For guitar nuts, the sweetest juice is on disc three. There are barrier-shattering outbursts of creativity from a series of 1969 concerts; there's an early experimental take on "Room Full of Mirrors" from Hendrix's first studio session with Cox, plus live in-studio recordings of "Spanish Castle Magic" and "Hear My Train a-Comin'." These last two were cut on February 17, 1969, in London's Olympia Studios, where the final Experience had gone to ensure that their concert versions were ready for the Royal Albert Hall stage. Both are breathtaking, but "Spanish Castle Magic" is quintessential Hendrix -- raw power channeled through classic R&B strumming, playful spoken asides, exploratory blues-based riffing, shivery bends, deep funk, an unexpected breakdown, and the kind of extended melodic departure previously essayed only by the likes of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.

Listening to these CDs -- as with the single-disc Voodoo Soup and South Saturn Delta collections of recent years -- reveals how poorly Hendrix's legacy had been treated before McDermott and Jimi's family became involved in its stewardship in 1995, when Al Hendrix won the rights to Jimi's work in court. Previously there were posthumous albums with session guitarists dubbed all over Jimi's sterling and crap mixes of his live and studio recordings. McDermott time and again has peeled away the shit to show us the silver in Jimi's music. So now, in releases like this, it can truly be experienced.