Valleys of Neptune: like being there, in the studio, with Jimi Hendrix

Every take was a virtuoso performance. No wonder Neil McCormick adores a new album of lost versions.

Published: 11:43AM GMT 09 Mar 2010

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Room for improvement: Jimi Hendrix’s fascination for the studio ensured a treasure trove of material

Should we care about a supposedly new Jimi Hendrix album, principally comprising studio versions of live favourites and a couple of leftover originals not deemed good enough to previously crop up on any of the multitude of posthumous albums bearing his name? The short answer, perhaps surprisingly, is yes.

Forty years after his death, Hendrix might just be a face on a T-shirt, celebrated for his colourful image and short dramatic life – the stuff of rock myth. But that iconography has been effectively reinvigorated for successive generations because the music itself is so unsurpassed that it always sounds alive and of the moment.

Hendrix released only three albums in a short burst of creativity between 1967 and 1970, but such was the mercurial brilliance of his live performances and his fascination with the studio that he left behind a treasure trove of material. It hasn’t always been treated with the greatest diligence and respect but, since the Hendrix estate wrested control of the master tapes from producer Alan Douglas and Warner/Reprise records in 1995, standards have risen.

The best of the posthumous albums is the 1997 double set, First Rays of the New Rising Sun, a serious attempt to compile the funk-flavoured psychedelic epic Hendrix was working on at the time of his death. That, too, gets a deluxe reissue by Sony this week and should constitute an essential part of the Hendrix canon, alongside Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland.

It would be foolish to argue that Valleys of Neptune is in the same league, but that hasn’t stopped me from enjoying every minute of it. It is drawn principally from two sets of sessions in the early months of 1969 (following the recording of Electric Ladyland, his masterpiece) that took place in the Record Plant in New York and Olympic in London, and really represents the last days of the Experience. It has been sympathetically cleaned up and mixed by Hendrix’s original engineer and long-standing curator, Eddie Kramer. The bulk of the album is made up of live staples laid down on four tracks with very few overdubs, perhaps just a tickle of funk guitar on a sprightly Stone Free, frenzied congas on a funked up Sunshine of Your Love and some stacked backing vocals.

The tracklist may tread familiar ground but if you pay attention you can’t fail to be drawn in by Hendrix’s bravura genius, the flicks and twists and bursts of improvisation that distinguish one performance from another. These rise above the obsessive collector’s anorak-ish fascination with the minutiae of alternative takes because, for Hendrix, every take was a genuine alternative, a performance of boldness and originality.

Simple blues songs such as Hear My Train a Comin’ and Bleeding Heart become a springboard for the guitarist to take flight, while a fast and furious Fire and slow-burning Red House demonstrate the chops of a band well drilled from touring, actually improving on studio originals. There is a slice of feedback and sustain five minutes into Bleeding Heart that is as utterly thrilling as any solo Hendrix ever recorded.

American musicians replace the Experience on that track and bassist Billy Cox crops up on a couple more, including a loose-limbed Stone Free and the previously unreleased title song, a funk and psychedelia sketch that hints at the new direction Hendrix was edging towards.

He was a primitive who was also a futurist, a man born of the blues, who utterly absorbed this simple, raw roots music and used it as a gateway to something new, fearlessly exploiting the undertones and overtones offered by electric amplification. Feedback, for so long considered the enemy of musicians, didn’t revolt Hendrix, it fascinated him. He could hear the music in it, and as he chased it, fresh avenues constantly opened up.

Towards the end of his life, this was taking him into jazz and funk terrain, and on the instrumental Lullaby for the Summer (featuring two guitar parts and an Octavia effects pedal) you can hear him working out something denser and more lateral, touching on the complexity and purity of Miles Davis (a piece that would later be reworked and posthumously released as Ezy Rider). The final track is another instrumental, Crying Blue Rain, a shimmering, taut blues that suddenly and bizarrely picks up to a gallop that goes nowhere a little bit too fast.

Thus the album ends, like Hendrix’s career, not with a bang but an unresolved fade. It feels unfinished, which itself feels curiously appropriate. But it doesn’t feel like a waste of time. There may have been technically more accomplished guitarists since, players who are arguably faster, cleverer, more precise, but Hendrix trumps them all because he was such an emotional player, so innately musical that his every touch brought the instrument to vivid life.

• Valleys of Neptune (Sony) £12.99, is released on Monday

The Science of Magic Guitars

Let’s talk science when it comes to singing guitars. Magic is fun. It adds mystery and excitement to things. But it can deceive, and as Azimov said: “Any science that’s sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” That’s why magic sometimes needs the steely cold blade of science between its shoulder blades if we’re going to get past the mystery and get productive with real knowledge. The magic of a highly resonant guitar is intoxicating. The guitar seems unnaturally light, it makes you play differently and you seem to play better. You do play better! But why?

Sympathetic frequencies are the answer. How we achieve them is the question. Sympathetic frequencies are in a nutshell, the natural frequencies left over after joining several items into one. Now, certain woods are naturals together like mahogany and ebony or ash/alder and maple but still some of the most respected luthiers I know have confessed that only about one in ten guitars they make are truly exceptional. One never really knows until the finish is done. I think the ratio of truly exceptional guitars coming from a manufacturer is about one in a hundred. It took me almost three years and 2 NAMM shows to find a great J-45, three years for a great SJ-200, over a year for a D-28 etc.

Everything has its own resonant frequencies, which are basically the frequencies most easily vibrated in a given item. Layering two items like a neck and a fingerboard and then joining them to a body (ash, alder – mahogany?) present further complications in figuring which frequencies are sympathetic and will create a whole with the finished instrument. Each item and its own frequencies can either compliment or clash with other frequencies from other parts of the guitar, and they can all be altered with the application of the finish. Heavy or light tailpiece- altered. String gauge changed- altered. String composition changed- altered. Different tuners- altered.

What’s the take away from all of this?
1. Don’t settle for less than inspiring. If the guitar doesn’t take you to the next level of playing comfort and ease, don’t make the investment.
2. Keep sound and feel above appearance.
3. Even with electrics, get a guitar that rings and feels good acoustically. You can always change the pickups.
4. Magic also becomes relative when an intermediate player with a marginal guitar trades up. The technology it took to give the new guitar better fit and finish and surpass the old guitar becomes in fact “indistinguishable from magic”.

Tone Myths 101

Here’s a post to start things off:
Tonal confusion-

The guitars that made the vintage tones, weren’t vintage when they made them.  The were made with the available methods and materials which were different then.  They sounded different because they were made differently.

Early rockers and bluesmen and women used 12 to 16s with wound 3rd strings, you don’t.  As bending became necessary, players made cheater sets of slinkies with banjo strings, and by tuning down the guitar a half or a whole step (like Hendrix and his greatest imitator SRV).  Most players don’t do that either today and either would be a tone changer.

The vintage sound was also in part to huge iron rigs of 100 watts or more with stacks of 12in speakers that were used to compensate for small and inadequate PA systems.  Who wants to haul around a 100 watt rig and then muffle the sound with an attenuator?  There are too many light weight amps that give up the goods for that.

And finally to really press the point, the story of SRV getting set up at his first gig with his new Monster cables only to decline saying ‘they’re passing to much electricity, go to radio shack and get me all the grey 1/4 in. cable they have.’  In other words just changing that link in his tone chain was enough to put him off his sound. Tone is built as a chain with what you got available to you.  I’m sure SRV could have built a tone using super low capacitance cables like Analysis or Evidence Audio cables, etc. but of course he needed to do a gig at that particular moment!

Considering these few things, artists clearly made use of whatever sounded good and had no guide to making vintage tone.  And this is what we must do: make our own sounds to suit our own musical environments.