Jimi Hendrix - Live In Maui 1970 - New official release (20th November 2020)

I haven't received my set yet, unfortunately it seems in Canada so many new releases are being pushed back weeks beyond their worldwide release date. Frustrating, but oh well, I've waited years for this, what's three more weeks. A friend hooked me up with digital files though, so I've had a chance to sit through the audio portion of this entire thing four times now.

This release has long been one I've been pining for. When I first got into Jimi and started learning what was out there and what was still locked away I was quite thrilled to realize the vaults weren't completely drained and there was still quite a number of high quality releases that could be hoped for down the road. I've always enjoyed the communal experience of everyone discovering something new at the the same time and since many of my favourite artists released their music well before I was born I've had limited amounts of those experiences and really enjoy the one's I have been able to experience from the anticipation of what might to coming to the excitement of the announcement and the build up to the release is all something I often remember as fondly as the record itself. Anyways when I discovered what was still in the Hendrix vaults there were a few releases I decided to avoid bootlegs of for the most part so that I really would be experiencing those shows fresh and largely complete when they hopefully got released in their entirety. Three shows I chose to do this for was Royal Albert Hall, Band of Gypsys and Maui. All three were multitrack recordings, featuring Hendrix's three most prominent band lineups and seemed to be spoken of very highly among the fanbase. With The Gypsys material I had heard BOG and parts of At Fillmore East, but since there were four complete shows naturally there was a wealth of material I hadn't heard. Getting that release last year was so worth the wait the (mostly) complete sets all sounding so good on vinyl was well worth the wait and has gotten so many repeated plays since release. Of course RAH was also screened last year too, which had my heart palpitating, but with rumours it was a working cut and incomplete, I assumed it was still probably some time off and predicted we would see Maui this year. I literally did a first thrust in the air when it was announced, and that it would be basically the entire two sets along with a doc and some video bonuses. I'd heard people speculate throughout the years Maui would be solely a doc without an audio release so I was so thrilled when the announcement came that it would be both.

Of course I worried about the release too. While I often defend EH because of their steady stream of what I consider high quality releases with beautiful packaging at affordable pricing, there is no doubt they also do some things that leave you running a spectrum from head scratching to being downright infuriated. I had watched Rainbow Bridge and the bootleg footage of Dolly Dagger/ Villanova Junction so I had heard about a third of this show over the years so I knew it was a fiery performance by the band. 1970 could be a pretty inconsistent year for Hendrix, when he is on he puts on my favourite performances of his career, when he is off it can be sloppy, uninspired and lifeless. Often his shows were not just a matter of good nights and bad nights, he frequently would turn in amazing performances right alongside dreadful ones. I had been listening to all the known bootlegs and official releases from 1966-1970 building up to release day (still skipping RAH though) and so just the day before I heard New York Pop where Hendrix turns out probably the worst version of "Fire" I've ever heard where he gets lost, totally botches lyrics and just seems disjointed, and then in the same set turns out a blistering Red House. So I was always worried that perhaps what I had heard of Maui were some of the high points and there might be a mix of uninspired performances lurking in the set. Of course there was also fears of what it would sound like, how would they deal with the overdubbed vs original drums and so forth. Maui was so tantalizing because I honestly felt based on what I heard it could be one of my all time favourite Hendrix sets, or one of my greater disappointments.

Firstly, I don't know why EH decided to reverse the first set tracklisting. It flows much better as performed because it has a more natural build towards the end where it seems like Hendrix is just firing on all cylinders and one song is just leading into another. After one listen to their tracklisting, I immediately reverted it and there is nothing that prevents it from working that way. Jimi's introduction to the crowd is even still attached to Spanish Castle Magic, so it just makes more sense to lead with it. The sound is quite good, better than I was expecting. The one thing that always came through strong on these recordings was Jimi's guitar with sizzles and bites and has so much funky attitude. I always loved the way his guitar sounded at these gigs and it's cool how he plays a different guitar for each set changing the flavour of his tone as well. Billy Cox is pretty discernible in this mix too. I'm a huge fan of Billy's bass playing and it's great to be able to hear all that he is adding to the songs. Mitch's overdubbed drums sound pretty good, but as others have stated their is a difference in the quality, obviously being recording in the studio that make them a bit of an elephant in the room. They have done a good job at lessening that affliction here though as on previous recordings this always seemed far more pronounced and distracting then it does here, so a very nice job with that. The original drums are naturally less prominent, and when I specifically try and focus on it it's quite noticeable, but you know if I am just listening and not really paying attention to it, I really can get into a groove where it's not jarring switching between the two, so again very nice job to Eddie Kramer for salvaging the original drums enough to make this a pretty smooth listen. Jimi's vocals have a bit of a rougher muffled quality to them than on other multitracked recordings, but it didn't effect my enjoyment of the show at all. I knew of all the limitations going in and I came away pretty impressed. This sounds pretty good overall and more than I could have hoped for honestly, I was very impressed with that aspect.

The show itself honestly left me floored. Hendrix played just eight more concerts after this with the only other pro recording being IOW which is pretty all over the place. This show has the band just locked in the performances never dip below an average 1970 performance and several here could be in the running for best all time. What really impressed me about that is that many of Hendrix's shows in 1970 had been in the one hour range and featured pretty consistent setlists. The shows in Berkeley were an exception to this where with two sets Jimi added a number of rare tracks and the performances burned down the house, but both sets also featured several of the same songs. In Atlanta Hendrix again elongated his set, but the performance was a bit shambolic, some great moments blended in with some pretty average ones. In Maui though Hendrix really sinks his teeth into his newer material. I can't believe how strong and confidently he is performing these songs. In From The Storm is debuting here and it's just a monster of a performance. Hendrix seems like he's screaming to the Gods during it and his guitar playing is so fierce and fluid. The past few months I've listened to a ton of Hendrix, I've been averaging about 2.5 hours of Hendrix listening per day since September 18th. When you overindulge in an artists career like that, at times it can get pretty routine, where things feel a little too samey. With Hendrix though there are always these moments where I just kind of stop and listen and am completely wowed by something he is doing, something unique I haven't heard before, even in a song I've heard him play 100 times before. Maui has many of those moments. I don't know what it is about this concert, it almost feels like it's all one song. Everything just seems to lead into the next so smoothly, there barely feels like there are any breaks and this is incredible because a decent slice of this material either hand't been performed live before, has rarely been performed live, or hasn't been performed in quite some time. I mean look at the second set. Hendrix starts with the live debut of Dolly Dagger, a brand new song he just wrote and then it morphs into Villanova Junction, a song Hendrix was playing back with Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, so familiar to Cox and Mitchell, but must have been pretty tenuous footing, certainly not something they were just day in day out working up on the road and it all just flows so perfectly. Throughout the whole second set the band is just locked in and jamming, you can barely tell where one song ends and the next begins, Hendrix is just throwing in references to other songs here and there and the band is just with him every step of the way. What a treat to hear that cohesion they could have on nights where everyone was on.

After listening to it several times now, I realize all my worries about it are laid to rest. It sounds more than satisfying and better than I had expected, and the parts of the show I hadn't heard previously are just as strong, if not even better than the parts I was more familiar with. This will be a record I will be coming back to over and over. This concert was such a last minute thing, and through all the craziness of the film and it's particulars, how can I be anything but incredibly grateful it happened because without it the film and multitrack recordings of this show wouldn't exist and we'd be left with Atlanta, NY Pop and IOW as the pro recorded live documents of Jimi's final couple of months. This show and Berkeley truly show just how incredible Jimi could be in the latter stages of his life and I'm just immensely thankful to have this recording now and am pretty happy with the choices EH made in giving us this as fully and definitively as they have. Another little thing I wanted to add that I am happy with is that EH doesn't always prune any moments of imperfection. One of my favourite moments on the Atlanta release is when Hendrix starts "All Along The Watchtower" but he's in the wrong key when he starts singing, so he changes key and steps up to the mic and prefaces it with "as I was saying...There must be some kinda way outta here." It just adds so much to the realism of the man and a shows a bit of his humour and how he could at times turn something nearly disastrous and embarrassing into something special and humanizing. As I mentioned at NY Pop he screws up the "Fire" lyrics and it totally derails the song, and here at Maui he screws up the "Foxey Lady" lyrics and just ad libs about forgetting the words with a smile and carries on. It can be tempting to alter something like that to make someone seem flawless, cut the video portion away to a crowd shot, replace the lyric with one from a different show or something along those lines, I'm glad EH doesn't do that, and lets the recordings remain true to the performance in that regard here, it just adds a little comic relief and flavour. We have dozens of live Foxey Lady's I don't need everyone to be picture perfect, in fact I love that they aren't! So kudos for not being tempted to fix those little subtleties.

Finally I just love that Hendrix seems to be enjoying these performances so much. When you watch footage from the other summer 1970 gigs Jimi at times seems tired, frustrated and focused, but he seems a very different Jimi Hendrix from say the one we saw at Monterey. Here he has a lot more of that playful spirit going on, winking and gesturing to people in the crowd, smiling and just with such a playfulness to his performance, it is seriously so great to see. I don't know if it was just the day, or the setting or the crowd or what but Jimi is having a great time performing these gigs and I think because of it the crowd that day, and all of us 50 years on reap the benefits of that. I think it's telling that he didn't perform Machine Gun here like he did at most of the shows in 1970. It just wasn't the right mood for this show and that's why this Maui show stands out so much for me. In spite of all the pressure, turmoil, addictions, legal issues and everything else surrounding the man in 1970, on this afternoon in a field in the Maui country side he could just put all that away and do the thing he most loved for all the right reasons and that's why this release is such a treasure.

 

Yeah, that's what I thought the footage might be from, in context of the film, but I needed confirmation. I didn't know it existed.

Piggybacking off of the film topic, I wouldn't be surprised if EH has the audio from that gig. It's mentioned several times in this new documentary and Billy Cox waxed on about how much greater the August 1st gig was than the Maui gig.

So, either Billy is going by a 50 year old memory, to single out that one gig out of many, or he's heard the tape. Perhaps maybe the Honolulu gig just sticks out to him more than others. But the audio against the video that they show in the documentary is miles above anything else I've heard from that show. Indeed, it sounded near priststine, very clear. Nothing like that YouTube vid nor the audience tape that circulates

 

I am skeptical that the Honolulu concert was professionally recorded because one would think something would have been released from it at some point over the past five decades.

 

Well it is said in this Maui set the Multitrack recorder they used to record the gig was sourced from Honolulu, so they probably returned it when they went there for the show two days later as the Wein crew wouldn't have had further use of it. Knowing the Maui gig clearly had recording problems with them needing to do windscreens and such, I could see a situation where they thought, why not record this gig too. Although to your point, if they had, it does seem strange that if that gig was truly a better gig and the sound was superior to Maui that we'd be here 50 years on without any previous evidence of it. But then you have Dallas 1970 which had video and audio and was offered up way back in 1971 and we have none of that audio or video official or bootleg, so it can happen.

 

Right. Perhaps not professionally recorded, but maybe a damn good audience tape. Listen to that section on the documentary. It's much better than anything circulating.

 

Agreed. In hindsight it would seem like a real possibility for additional recording to take place in Honolulu, not only because that is where the recording equipment came from, but because of the obvious recording issues that partially plagued the Maui tapes. That said, who knows what the thought process was in 1970. Who was going to pay for additional recording? It may not have made financial sense to increase the recording budget for a film project that was already hemorrhaging money.

 

Well I won't pour salt in the guy's wounds if he reads/posts here but I know someone who attended the Honolulu show and made a supposedly very nice audience recording. Unfortunately he loaned the master cassette to a friend and he never got it back . I believe there was an article in Univibes about it a LONG time ago. Some concert eyewitness spotted a guy with a recorder leaving the gig, so that was the legend for a long time. Eventually they tracked the guy down and he's the one that loaned out his master that never got recovered. When the internet took off, the gentleman in question joined a few forums and we got the full (painful) story.

 

One point is that they probably didn't know how bad the Maui recording was at that point. Most likely they didn't have a chance to listen to the multitracks until they were shipped to Electric Lady.

 

Great review. Yes, Jimi really enjoying this outdoor club gig. An afternoon in the park... on the volcano slopes... in Hawaii. Magical.

 

Deifnitely they wouldn't have heard them yet, but when you are cutting foam out of guitar cases for windscreens and mics are being blown over on the drum kit, you can probably come to some conclusions that it may not sound so great.

The project was definitely hemorrhaging money, but the soundtrack album was the life preserver, it's the aspect that got Warner to put up the money for the film in the first place, I'm fairly confident they wouldn't have used the studio recordings as they did for Rainbow Bridge had Hendrix lived, it seems they wanted it to be a live album soundtrack, so if there was anything at that point they might have thought was worthwhile to invest further money in, the soundtrack album was probably it as it was their chance at recouping the cost overruns of the film. All clearly speculation on my part and I've no evidence it happened that way, but I can definitely see how it could have, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out the Honolulu show was recorded. I haven't seen the clip in the doc yet as I don't have it it. @EVOLVIST does it sound like an audio tape then? Surely if EH had a pro recording of Honolulu they would sync it too the footage, so if it just has audience tape quality audio that would probably nail that coffin closed, but still that Honolulu tape is pretty rough and obviously incomplete, so even knowing EH had a better sound audience recording would be exciting!

 

They probably did. But i guess nobody was really in charge of anything, let alone organizing a proper live recording.

 

True, but as @Doctor Flang pointed out, they likely were not aware of the issues with the tapes until they played them back at Electric Lady, well after the Honolulu concert. Up until that point, they knew they had professionally recorded and captured two Hendrix concerts. They did take precautions prior to the recording (i.e. the windscreens and microphone coverings), so they must have been confident that they were properly capturing the music on tape. I agree that as a safety net, recording an additional show would have made sense, but again, recording was not cheap and they had already financed the recording of two concerts.

Whether the entire Rainbow Bridge soundtrack would have been comprised of live material is unclear. I think the idea was to release some of that material, and I suspect a couple of live tracks from Maui would have made the track-listing, but most of the set-lists were made up of new songs earmarked for his 4th studio album or overplayed classics, so who knows if they could have made an entire soundtrack from those tapes.

 

Oh okay, I didn't realize they had the multitracks.

 

According to the documentary (for what it's worth) they lamented that the film crew couldn't be there for the Honolulu gig, but no mention of the audio, whereupon they then showed what appears to be very clear video (probably the master audience video), yet with extremely clean audio to go along with it.

I don't want to get my hopes up about Honolulu, because even if it's a SBD or Multi, a previously unknown audience source, or they found the one that @jhm mentioned, it still might be incomplete, or who knows.

But as @Doctor Flang mentioned - and Eddie Kramer alluded to in the documentary - nobody knew how the Maui gig sounded until it got back to Electric Lady studios. Yet, if they elected to record Honolulu as a backup plan, it would seem to me that Eddie would have gotten the August 1st multis in the mail, too.

 

4-5 local places in Vancouver came up dry. It's happened with a bunch of box sets in recent years. Sony delivered the Pink Floyd with same release date just fine.

My 2 theories are extra demand in the US means they take away from Canada allocation. Or Amazon have a back room deal with Sony for an unofficial exclusive release date window(mildly illegal). A Sunrise manager said Jimi Maui is only listed as "special order" in their computer which left me stunned.

 

The Randall's Island concert was the Mother of Cluster****'s. Take EVERY 1960's goofball trope and x10 it.. Gate crashers, people demanding it be a free concert, a gang stealing the money from the box office, etc. etc.

In 1982 I was watching TV late one night, USA Network Life Flight I think they called it. They played the "documentary" of that concert and I swear to God I thought it was the most clever PARODY of the 60's I had ever seen. Spinal Tap had NOTHING on this. I realized after a bit it was not a parody. OMG, what a mess. Jimi didn't go on until about 4 a.m.(!) the audience was out of control, as you can hear on the bootleg. In other words he was 'a bit upset' by the crowd. The "fiery" Red House you mentioned, i.e. the solo, was Jimi telling the audience to **** off. He was channelling that.

A lot of the performance quality of any gig is based on what the band gets from the audience. If you get a chance try to find that film online. I forget the actual name of it. It's a hoot. Has some good Jimi footage though.

 

That is something to look forward to!

 

Eddie Kramer mixed 7 songs from the Maui sets on Sept 10th 1970. Jimi was still alive and before the MM overdub.

SCM/Lover/Hey/Storm/Message/Foxey/Train. Unreleased Jimi era mixes?

NYC’s rock Apocalypse: ‘The Day The Music Died’ (with Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison)

 

Pretty sure whatever music is playing over tbe HIC footage is not actually from HIC. I could be wrong may have to check it again.

 

Can anyone comment on sound quality on CD?

 

I think that the quality of some bootleg releases is far better than this one.
They altered the tracklist for the first show and omitted part of Hey Babe intro.
Anyway it has been an important show, much bootlegged show and Jimi did great things during the entire concert.

 

"One of the greatest concerts that's ever been" according to Billy. The 2 guys after him called it "very spectacular" and "one of my most memorable Hendrix moments". Nice tease, if EH does have it we probably won't see it for a long, long time so I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

Jimi plays very well during this concert, but upon closer examination, even if Hendrix had lived, it is difficult to imagine much of this material being released as part of the Rainbow Bridge soundtrack. As I previously mentioned, most of the "new" songs were earmarked for his 4th studio album, and none of these live renditions come close to the studio work. Would he have really wanted to release inferior live versions so soon after the release of the studio album? He need roughly 15-18 minutes per LP side, so it would not have taken much to fill it up, but I am not convinced most of it would have been sourced from the Maui shows. Granted, I don't think Hendrix cared much about Rainbow Bridge, but after mailing-in Band of Gypsys, which became a classic even though Jimi viewed it as a compromise, would he have wanted another album of inferior quality issued so soon after (not counting the handful of Curtis Knight/PPX albums in the marketplace)? Perhaps he would have revisited the Berkeley tapes for use.

 

Yeah, I will be surprised if a professional recording surfaces. In the Experience Hendrix book, McDermott states the concert was not professionally recorded, so unless he was being evasive or simply didn't know at the time of publication of a recording, it is probably safe to conclude it wasn't captured via multi-track. Billy's statements are likely just a recollection.

 

I love Billy but I think the hash they were smoking before the gig may have influenced his recall. Sure, fun gig, but I doubt it would have ever seen the light of day had Jimi not checked out.