Unlike this surreptitious recording, the audio fidelity improves over the course of near eighty minutes of The Early Takes, studio culls as well as demos Hendrix recorded on reel-to-reel in his New York hotel in 1968.
Even so, the thin sound quality and amateurish segues still can't really muffle the impact of the Hendrix Experience's courageous drive to venture beyond the boundaries of their standard repertoire (as preferred by both the group's audience and its management) while the trio cull only "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" from the (then) forthcoming album, on this ten-minute rendition of "Are You Experienced" they reinvent the original, and sound liberated (and liberating) during nearly twelve minutes of the slow blues "Red House." And then, after all the affable repartee with an increasingly disruptive audience, plus quick run-throughs of "Foxey Lady" and "Fire," there's an instrumental take on Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" that sets the stage for the coup de grace of "I Don't Live Today" and "Little Wing," That alternately explosive and tender combination effectively renders "Star Spangled Banner" and "Purple Haze" an encore, the guitarist's socially-conscious intro here hearkening back to the outset of the show and his dedication of dissonance to the Black Panthers
In addition to overseeing the 5.1 Surround mix, Kramer might well have also supervised the remastering of the original album: his 2010 collaboration with George Marino resulted in sound more full and deep, though not quite so bright and tactile in its presence, as Bernie Grundman's new work on the original tapes as enclosed here.Īpparently there wasn't much to be done at all to improve the audio of this previously-unreleased concert recording Live At The Hollywood Bowl 9/14/68. That said, pragmatically speaking, there would be no reasonable means to scale down this package without sacrificing one essential component or another. Yet even as this three-CD plus Blu-ray set goes significantly further in delineating the creative evolution of the late rock icon, an inexorable process only fitfully outlined by the litany of prior posthumous reissues, the package does resemble the checkered likes of those titles: it is a mixed blessing of sorts (and not just for the naysayers who so vehemently criticize the Experience Hendrix team of the late guitarist's sister Janie, long-time engineer Eddie Kramer and biographer/archivist John McDermott).įor one thing, it's got to be somewhat disappointing, to certain music lovers, collectors and fans, that there is no condensed configuration corresponding to the larger set (with or without a DVD). 14 of The Bootleg Series of Bob Dylan and the 50th Anniversary editions of The Beatles (Apple, 1968) a/k/a 'The White Album.'
This 3-CD plus Blu-ray set compares favorably to similarly-conceived archive presentations released coincidental to it, specifically More Blood, More Tracks (Legacy Music, 2018), Vol. Given the voluminous prior excavations of Jimi Hendrix' vault, the producers of and contributors to The Jimi Hendrix Experience's Electric Ladyland 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition deserve some kudos.