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Whitney Houston’s mom sang backing vocals on “Burning of the Midnight Lamp.” In honor of the album’s 50th anniversary, here are 10 things you might not know about Electric Ladyland. On November 9th, Sony Legacy will offer additional insight into the multi-layered and -hued work with the release of a massive 50th- anniversary box set that includes outtakes, demos, a new 5.1 surround-sound mix by Electric Ladyland engineer Eddie Kramer and the 1987 documentary At Last … the Beginning: The Making of Electric Ladyland. And even in its completed state, Electric Ladyland didn’t end up sounding (or looking) quite like Hendrix had envisioned. Hendrix found himself frequently frustrated by trying to make the music on tape match the sounds in his head, while his drive for perfectionism and his endless fascination with sonic experimentation wound up alienating some of his most trusted colleagues.
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Recording sessions for the album, mostly split between London’s Olympic Studios and New York’s Record Plant, were regularly interrupted by touring commitments.
#The jimi hendrix experience electric ladyland 50 full
While the stomping “Crosstown Traffic” and the smoldering psych pop of “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” wouldn’t have sounded particularly out of place on either of those records, Electric Ladyland was full of bold new sonic colors, flavors and adventures, including “And the Gods Made Love,” a “sound painting” featuring vari-speeded drums, distorted vocals and backwards cymbals the lilting Curtis Mayfield-influenced lullaby “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)” the angry protest of “House Burning Down” “Voodoo Chile,” a 15-minute live blues jam with Steve Winwood and the Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Casady the slinky soul-jazz groove of “Rainy Day, Dream Away” and the epic psychedelic apocalypse of “1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be).” The album also contained two tracks that would forever loom large in the Hendrix legend - the megalithically heavy “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and his radical reworking of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.”īut while many Hendrix fans today regard Electric Ladyland as his true masterpiece, its birth was a profoundly difficult one. The final studio album ever recorded by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and their only one to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, Electric Ladyland saw Hendrix moving light years beyond his two previous works, Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold as Love, both of which had been released in 1967.
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No one knew it at the time, but the new tracks Hendrix was referring to - which he, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell had been working on intermittently since the previous summer - would form the nucleus of Electric Ladyland, the sprawling double album that would finally see the light of day October 16th, 1968. You want to hurry up and get back to the things you were doing in the studio, because that’s the way you gear your mind….We wanted to play, quite naturally, but you’re thinking about all these tracks, which is completely different from what you’re doing now.” “We’ve been doing new tracks that are really fantastic and we’ve just been getting into them,” Jimi Hendrix told Rolling Stone in February 1968, right after he and the Experience had played San Francisco’s Fillmore West.