Then you've probably seen the full illustration originally on the French twofer double LP reissue of the first two Experience albums, but if not it's a much better presentation than the crop on front of Voodoo Soup.
Yes! It’s really cool for sure. Funny enough, I’m a 90’s kid and my older cousin had a Voodoo Soup t-shirt back then and I thought it was awesome. She also told me that my Butthole Surfers’ album, Electriclarryland, was a ripoff!
It might be cool to make our own “alternate versions” of Voodoo Soup and Midnight Lightning with the Experience Hendrix tracks, that is if they ever get around to releasing them all!
As for the Douglas cds, the original artwork was printed on the other side of the booklet...just flip it over, hardly a capitol crime. The sound was duff on AYE and Ladyland though. Axis sounded rather good.
I read an interview with Alan Douglas at the time when he was administering the catalog, and they asked him why he had made that decision, and he chalked it up to his then-teenage daughter telling him Jimi Hendrix is "cool" but not "cool for today" or something like that, so it was an attempt to modernize the brand, which absolutely no one needed to do. He justified bringing in Bruce Gary and making tragic overdubbing decisions as part of the same effort, as well as keeping a lot of music out of print on the basis that it was "corny." People can say what they want about Janie and EH but they left the core catalog alone and restored what could be restored. I find that a billion times less objectionable than what Douglas did, and every time there's grousing here about EH I just close my eyes, think of Voodoo Soup, and remain grateful that Douglas is not involved any more.
The dangers of immediately responding to a thread before reading all of it is that I'll say something someone else already said a few responses up. I co-sign everything you said. I sometimes ask my 15-year-old questions about current popular culture because he's certainly more plugged in than I am, but it would never occur to me to let him make decisions about how a reissue campaign of a beloved artist should be handled. I was reading the interview where he said that while I was on the subway and I remember audibly gasping involuntarily.
It's almost 30 years later and that interview STILL leaves a bad taste in my mouth. However flawed First Rays is, the songs that basically should've been there are there (how they're arranged ands how they sound, well, that's another matter...)
I'm kind of relieved to hear that because I thought maybe I was overreacting by still being able to invoke it decades later, but it was indeed a spectacularly horrible interview. I remember the journalist asking what people should do who want to hear the stuff he wanted to keep out of print, and he said, "Well, they have their old records to listen to!" What an a**hole.
Could be any number of reasons. Cry of Love and Rainbow Bridge were such a pleasant surprise, a lot of us thought it might be coming up soon. Apparently not unfortunately.
I agree to a degree. But, had it not been for Douglas we would have waited a long time to hear Winterland, BBC, and Monterey Pop in full. Douglas made some bad decisions for sure, but so has Experience Hendrix. To be fair, a lot of record labels in the 1990s did some dumb moves.
I thought “Blues” was a really good release that he was involved with, and I always liked “Nine to the Universe,” so I concede that he put some good releases out there. I’ve just always bristled at attempts to “modernize” classic artist catalogs. To me the best example is the ZZ Top “Six Pack,” where they remixed the band’s classic 70s albums so they sound like “Eliminator.” It sounds more dated than the original mixes.
My guess is that’s it’s not considered substantial enough for a reissue. COL and Rainbow Bridge were full of tunes that were finished or close to it. War Heroes was mostly a collection of leftovers, as obviously was Loose Ends.
Not necessarily couldn’t but wouldn’t. The LA show is a good example, most people would just want that and not the whole radio show fro Lifelines. The first half of the Jeffrey posthumous catalog is back on the market, the second half (War Heroes/Jimi Hendrix soundtrack/Loose Ends) is not.
Yes, and I think the choice comes down to Kramer. I get the impression that he was very proud of those early 70s albums COL/RB and In The West (and quite rightly so!) but in an 80s interview he said that he felt that WH was really scraping the barrel and he thought Loose Ends was a step too far and declined to work it. I suppose he feels that South Saturn Delta takes care of things. I didn't see War Heroes as a real barrel scraper (apart from Peter Gunne/Catastophe , 3 Little Bears and the incluson of Highway Chile) but Loose Ends was real let-down at the time.
My comment was more that EH's attitude is "let's get as much Jimi out there as we can," while Alan Douglas saw a lot of Jimi's catalog outside of the core albums as not releasable, even though a lot of it had already been released in one form or another. He thought he was doing quality control and protecting us consumers from songs like "Earth Blues," which he said was too "corny" to release, despite the fact that it had already been released. It kind of felt like someone walking into your home and taking away half your furniture, for your own good.
The remarkable thing is that EH did not re-release War Heroes, but had no problem with releasing one of the oddest tracks (3 Little Bears) as a single. I do like that song by the way, but if that track is fit for release than I don't understand why War Heroes should be a problem.
Nothing remarkable about that: They simply decided early on not to reissue War Heroes as an album, but to re-release every track seperately. They did the same thing with Loose Ends (apart from Blue Suede Shoes).
