Jimi Hendrix Both Sides of the Sky - new album coming March 9, 2018

To this day I've never heard a single song from Crash Landing. When Jimi passed I wore black for a month, he was my musical hero! CL felt like grave robbing to me. Perhaps if it was a great record....But it isn't. It's historical significance is that it was the 1st of so many cash-grab Hendrix projects!

 

There were dozens of "cash grab" Jimi albums released before CL in 1975.
The most notorious officially sanctioned one would be the 1971 Isle of Wight lp with a paltry 6 songs.
But aside from that there was an incredible amount of pre-Experience material LPs flooding out as soon as Jimi was dead.

 

RE: "Midnight Lightning"

...but we don't know if the multi-track reels are extant, do we? I had read tales of Douglas ruining the original multis by cutting and splicing them.

So, perhaps the reason we don't have it is because the tapes we're too far gone? Obviously what we have on boots, today, is a poor copy of a period mix?

 

Live albums with a small amount of songs seem to be prevalent in the early 70s, Eric Clapton did 2, The Who did live at Leeds, there was Genesis Live.

 

I had this on cassette tape and used to play it a lot and really liked it, pre internet etc...I later found out about the Frankenfactor relating to it and never felt the same way about it. Peace in missisippi was always a favourite.

 

That is a good point, one I hadn't consiered. Even if that multi didn't survive the Alan Douglas slaughter house we should have the mix(es) Jimi and Eddie did that August.

No idea if what we have is a vintage mix, the copy I have is so poor I wouldn't want to guess. The Shaggy Dog notes may have some hints.

Now do remember McDermott mentioning a 1969 version of Midnight Lightning from the Record Plant (Jimi solo version) that only exists as a mixdown.

 

Yes but Isle Of Wight featured a very poor choice of songs.

 

Personally, I dig the Isle of Wight original LP, even the sometimes maligned version of All Along the Watchtower. Happy with it when I got it. Happy with it now. Thanks for the reminder, I’m going to put it on right now.

Mine’s the German Polydor.

 

I dig it too, but it's hardly his best recorded live performance and was likely released only to ward off the bootlegs that appeared in mainstream shops a week or so after the concert.
Funny how Eddie Kramer declined to be involved in the production of it.

 

The Isle of Wight concert was a pretty shambolic gig, hardly the appropriate source for a live album. The reasons for its original existence make sense on some level, but regardless of the track listing, creating a good live album was going to be an impossibility. The fact that EH released the complete concert so early in its tenure managing the catalogue, prior to many other superior concerts, still is baffling to this day.

 

How does it sound. I have the CD and I always liked it too. No not his his best gig but I play it a lot.

 

Did he decline or was he working on other things (likely Rainbow Bridge at that point) and Polydor just drafted Carlos Olms into doing a quickie?

 

He declined to mix it because he felt the material was inferior, same reason he declined putting together Loose Ends.
Ohlms - who actually worked with Jimi on the Eire Apparent 45 in Jan '69 - did a great job; his mixes are much better sounding than Eddie's from the 90s.
IOW wasn't released in the US if I remember correctly.

 

I hope that’s not the case. It’d be ironic that the two songs with the least amount of tinkering ended up being in the worst shape because of the exits. Thus far those are the only two for sure that the master was messed with.

 

Nope, only copy I saw for years was an import tape I ended up buying.

Another irony: Eddie declines to do aisle of Wight. Where do the first two tracks on the next album, In the West, come from?

 

Luckily, the European version of In The West had the fantastic opening one-two punch of "Johnny B. Good"/"Lover Man".

 

Yeah. And he selected the spontaneous and sloppy concert intro when there were several better performances available, for example the first real song, heard in the fadeout - Spanish Castle Magic.

 

And let's not forget the Curtis Knight albums that were cash grabs even when Jimi was still alive .

 

To be fair, In The West is one of the best single lp's in Hendrix' or anyone else's catalog.

(I'm obviously excluding the reissue with it's maddening choice to substitute inferior versions)

 

They would have been better off replacing the Isle of Wight tracks with something else in my opinion. It would have really been fantastic if the version of Hear My Train A Comin' from the Berkeley first show was included but they elected to use it on Rainbow Bridge instead.

 

They could have also used Killing Floor from Monterey Pop. Totally smoking version that wasn't released until the 80's.

 

Exactly-why did that not kick off the 1970 Monterey album, or make the 1973 movie? Instead we wait until 1984 to get it!

 

I don't know...those tracks start it off in a fun way and all of them total I think about 4 minutes, and feature mildly revolutionary sentiments, too - which is always a plus. Then you're into the most beautiful Little Wing imaginable. The sequencing is great.

 

That would have been a great choice as well or the version of Stone Free from Royal Albert Hall which later appeared on The Jimi Hendrix Concerts or one of the live versions of Tax Free. The studio version of Tax Free was still unreleased when Hendrix In The West was released. It is also surprising that they did not include a live version of Purple Haze, Hey Joe, Fire or Foxy Lady.

After a few listens I basically considered the Isle of Wight tracks as throwaways and skipped them when I listened to the album.

 

They are throwaways...but for me, when albums meant vinyl and that meant 20 minute blasts -it worked just fine. Though how many times I dropped the needle straight onto Johnny B Goode I couldn't tell you!

I still think that as an "album" it works very well. There are certainly other performances that could have been chosen - though imo not for Little Wing, Red House, Voodoo...which is pretty astonishing.