Jimi Hendrix - Let's Talk About How We Would Have Put Together His Posthumous Albums!

After 'War Heroes' above, my 'Loose Ends' would then be more of a career spanning rarities collection:

Hear My Train A Comin' (acoustic)
Highway Chile (stereo)
Taking Care Of No Business
Tax Free
Stars That Play With Laughing Sam's Dice (stereo)

Stone Free (1969 remake)
Somewhere
Midnight
Lover Man (1970)
Midnight Lightning (solo)

 

I always thought they should have made an Experience era posthumous release, a Band of Gypsies posthumous studio release and one of Cox & Mitchell band tracks . Instead they have the tracks from the different bands sort of mixed together on the releases.

 

Nice will have to try that how about finishing with an electric Hear My Blues !!

 

And 51st gets left out again! Seriously, I'm gonna have to give these a playlist run myself

 

You also have the era in between the Experience and
Gypsys. Where Jimi was recording with a few different
configurations. Gypsys, Sun and Rainbows for example.
There's at least an albums worth of material there.

 

Ok. You could probably also come up with one that had special guest appearances/jams as well.

 

Only on the grounds that I don't have any kind of 'variation' of that B-side (no stereo mix or remake etc).

Hear My Train? I didn't put that on because these are designed to compliment COL and RB (the latter which already has the stunning Berkeley performance).

 

Since last week I’ve playing around in my head about making Loose Ends into an Odds and Sods type of expanded release if they were to reissue it. If they have the tapes available, I think an ‘exclusive’ stereo mix for both Stone Free and 51st could be done for it. This way, it would be its own thing and separate from the stuff that was released in 1967.

 

You know, all of this posthumous stuff...

I've been listening to tons of Hendrix lately, reexamining his recordings of 1970, and it's not like I didn't know it before, but now I've given up on the whole notion of recreating First Rays of the New Rising Sun. At best, one can only come up with something that they are happy listing to.

One big problem with taking tracks from many sources is that the mastering is so different for many of the songs.

There's no single one way to do it, and aside from the grievous error of adding studio musicians, posthumously, I'm beginning to be less critical of the frankensteined numbers, because sometimes that's the only way to go in order to make sense of what Jimi was aiming for. It's all an approximation, so as long as the unaltered versions exist in collector's hands, period mash-ups aren't so bad if it gets the point across. I mean, we don't need the mash-ups, but I starting to think that they aren't as bad as people make them out to be.

 

Yep, I think the main thing people want at this point are more of the original recordings than anything else. Mr. Bad Luck is a perfect example: they included the 1998 dubbed version on VoN, but then included the original on the box set a few months later. If you don't want to listen to the dubbed version, you have the original (same thing with Cat Talking To Me). Whereas with Valleys, Crash Landing, Linda, we don't have an original to fall back on, we're left with a modified version (and in the case of CL, a really bad one). Heck, we're still waiting for the originals of some things from Midnight Lightning for crying out loud. As far as doing other thing with the recordings, imagine how annoyed you'd be if Beautiful People used unreleased Hendrix recordings for If 60s Was 90s instead of Foxy Lady, Wind Cries Mary, etc. They way they did it, it was just a different take on things you know and could be enjoyed on that level. That's what made the guitar CDs back in the late 80s so annoying since other than the Red House one, you just got snippets. At least now I have all those Winterland examples

This is probably where EH should look if they want to do anything more with studio tracks: concentrate on getting originals out there. Start looking at complete sessions, especially for anything after Electric Ladyland. Or if you do an alteration, make it something like the Stone Free stereo mix I mentioned above, something that specifically does not replace an original. And, most importantly, MAKE IT CLEAR THERE ARE CHANGES AND NOTE WHAT THEY ARE!

 

Spoken like a true fan, and in context of this thread no less!

Yeah, I'm not advocating the butchering of songs, but in Hendrix land, history has shown us that if you don't like this mix, just wait a few months and you'll get one that's more to your taste. With "Sending My Love..." yeah, that was bad. Not because they did it, but because the results were amateurish. For "Crash Landing" we have the original unaltered version, and it's not too different from the version of PH&A. If I'm not mistaken, it's the same thing, only EH decided to use one of the two available vocal tracks. All known versions are out there, though. The same with "Valleys of Neptune." It's out here. But like you, I'm sure you're wondering why they didn't use the music and vocal from the Hit Factory version. Just the Lifelines version would have sufficed. But it will surface.

 

For Crash Landing they took another take and put on the vocals from the known version but didn’t synch it up properly. Why go through the effort to make something completely new (and mess it up) when you have a perfectly good version you can use?

We’ll get it all eventually...

 

Well, yeah, which is horrible, when they could have just used the two vocal version with its original music. Not bad music at all. It's not like the alternate music take was any better.

Eventually...

...that's how they fleece us.

(And I get fleeced every time.)

 

Okay. You're right. EH can't leave well enough alone.

 

I really dug Somewhere, frankensteined or no. As a sheer listening experience it's top shelf Jimi.

 

Totally agree, it is the only Frankenstein version I like so far the rest have been terrible IMO, at least they got it right for that one !!

 

It’s just about the only one where the drumming keeps the right time!

 

See and for me, the vocal just doesn't sound properly in synch with the music to me. It FEELS like a complete patch job IMO.

 

It's better than Crash Landing!

But it is disconcerting hearing the exact same vocal take on two different backing tracks, same with Stone Free...and yes, on some level, Valleys too.

 

Well no, everyone does a very good job on the Crash Landing album version .
Probably helped they weren't drunk or stoned, as Jimi's fellow travellers often were.

 

When you’re hired to keep time you keep time!

 

The adding of the Berkeley Machine Gun is a really intriguing idea, finally got around to making my own reflecting on my other comments about it being a mirror to Rainbow Bridge and Reprise's version of Band of Gypsies. So with those templates and a few others (Like RB, 5 songs on side 1, 3 songs on side 2 and at least one old song with Noel) in mind, I came up with this:

Message of Love (Aug 22 '70 mix)
Midnight
Bleeding Heart
Beginnings
Stepping Stone (single mix)

Power of Soul
Machine Gun (live from Berkeley, 2nd show)
Izabella (single mix)

Also just swapping out some songs as others have done, they could have just as easily made this version:

Bleeding Heart
Highway Chile
Tax Free
Come Down Hard On Me
Stepping Stone
Drifter's Escape

Midnight
51st Anniversary
Beginnings
The Stat's The Play With Laughing Sam's Dice
Izabella

Boy, if you think Loose Ends was scraping the bottom of the barrel as it is, imagine if you'd used its three best songs already!

 

That's pretty good for War Heroes, and has an almost identical mix of songs as Rainbow Bridge.

Yours has Midnight, mine has Come Down Hard and Drifter's Escape instead. As much as I like Midnight, I do prefer making this album a completely Experience-free experience

 

Not comprehensive but just some of my Live ideas:

24/02/69 Albert Hall

24/05/69 San Diego

All 4 BOG shows

25/04/70 LA Forum

30/05/70 Berkeley (Both Sets)

30/07/70 Maui (Both Sets)

BOG Studio Cuts
Studio Billy Cox Sessions post BOG

Remove a certain sister in law.......?

 

That would be "step sister", Jimi's father Al's wife's daughter from another relationship, ie Al's step daughter, no blood tie whatsoever. A sister in law would be say "your brothers wife".