Castles, IMO, is a major hurdle if you figure it out on your own.

i'm working on it with my teacher and he knows the whole thing already. basically i'm trying to grab as much of it as i can on my own and he's correcting my mistakes and showing me things i missed. there are a lot of overdubs and swirly phase-y sounds all over the place in it that are pretty hard to parse out though. i'm just trying to grab the most well defined licks.

Uli Roth took the do everything like your idol thing a little too far by supposedly even dating Hendrix's old girlfriend before she passed away.

Uh, no, he was God ...

I am a huge Jimi Hendrix fan, and I want to thank the initiator of this post for starting it.

I teach at a college, and one of my students (about 20 years old) came to class recently wearing a Hendrix T-shirt. I said, "Best guitarist in the history of rock." He agreed with me, and then I asked the other students what they thought. No reply. Then, I said I thought that Eric Clapton has superior technical expertise at playing the guitar, but that there was something extraordinary and innovative about Hendrix that no one to this day has. One student said Joe Perry of Aerosmith is her favorite guitarist. One other person mentioned Carlos Santana. No other suggestions were put forth.

Hendrix has staying power, and that is one criteria for greatness. Others, like Eddie Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Ingwie Malmsteen, have peaked and fallen.

SRV was doing great stuff, right up until he got on board that helicopter.

Doesn't that qualify as a "peak" and a "fall"?
































too soon?

i think the difference lies in the fact that guitar was the only thing meaningful that hendrix had in his life. his mother was a teen parent who died at an early age and he barely had a relationship with her. his father was an alcoholic who shifted between being completely absent and abusive. jimi was basically raised by various relatives and neighbors. he was poor and had no money. once he acquired a guitar, it consumed his entire life. it was the only thing that mattered to him. these circumstances combined with his obvious innate natural talent are what made him what he was. in a generation where we have endless ways to entertain our selves, it's highly unlikely that we'll ever see anything like that ever again. not to mention how increasingly unimportant the guitar is becoming in popular music.

all those other guys you mentioned are great players but they never experienced the kind of poverty that hendrix experienced. he could play the blues because he actually had the blues.

According to what I read in Clapton's autobiography he was as poor if not poorer as Jimi. Plus the dude was raised by his grandmother who he believed was his mother. That's got t o drive a kid to something, if not music.


And now I think I'll listen to Machine Gun before I go to bed.

yeah admittedly i don't know a thing about clapton, i'll have to read his autobiography at some point. you have to be seriously poor to be poorer than jimi was though, in high school the dude would wait behind hamburger stands with his brother until they closed so that they could eat the left over burgers that were going to be thrown out. i'm not saying that poverty is necessarily a criteria for great music, but in the case of the blues i think it might be.



i have to say that "machine gun" is probably the definitive example of a human being using the guitar as an instrument of pure expression. the next closest thing i can think of is "maggot brain," which in itself is openly an homage to hendrix anyway....

I agree with you about Stevie. It may not be fair to group him in with Eddie and Ingwie, but it seems like his memory is fading. He doesn't have the staying power of Hendrix.

yeah i mean i think the difference is that while stevie could play, people also forget that hendrix could not only play, but he was also a first class songwriter.

basically, as people have already touched on earlier in the thread, hendrix was the total package.

I agree about the staying power. It doesn't help SRV that he played the blues. Who listens to the blues in 2009?
Also he was not an inovator, like Hendrix and like Plaid said, Jimi was the better song writer.

As great as Hendrix was, I'll take SRV's version of "Little Wing" over Jimi any time.

to answer this in all seriousness.

1. washed up old dudes playing open mic at your local bar

2. serious collectors who have orignal 1st pressings in nm- condition and listen to them late at night on some serious audiophile rig with a glass of scotch

3. people like myself who still have a serious interest in the guitar and go back to the blues time and time again to discover the roots of their favorite rock musicians, ala hendrix.

4. people who have been fortunate enough to stumble upon fat possum records and have discovered artists like rl burnside and junior kimbrough, who are among the last relevant blues artists we will ever see

5. captain beefheart fans


that's about it.

It wasn't a serious question, but I appreciate the serious answer.

Any and every aspiring guitarist who wants to get better should not only listen to, but definitely PLAY the blues, IMO.

New Hendrix album due March 9, "Valleys of Neptunes".

http://www.legacyrecordings.com/news/jimi-...rywhere-march-9

Hm. Whole thing sounds like a wild cash-grab, but I'll obviously be listening. Not to mention hoping for the best.

My thoughts exactly. When I first read it, I thought "Hendrix estate inheritors finally master marketing plan".

Wow, 60 minutes of "new" stuff, with Eddie Kramer on the knobs? This could be worth a listen, although the track listings only seem to have about 3-4 songs tha I've never heard of.

I love Hendrix his guitar playing, songwriting, and underrated singing. I must say I am a big Eddie Van Halen fan his style is just fun sorry it is pure pleasure hearing his amazing skills together with David Lee Roth's pimp style.

Eddie was at the knobs afterwards, for the remastering (or if it's never come out before I guess it's just mastering). What I want to know is why Jimi re-recorded Stone Free, Red House, and Fire?

Highly dubious. I mean, I'd love to be wrong, but it sounds like it'll just be dicking-around-in-the-studio stuff sort of trussed up and passed off as lost gems that Jimi meant for an album which he never actually conceived.

Man, Hendrix's family need to fuck off and let Jimi rest in peace.

With every subsequent release, they rape (and diminish) his legacy just that little bit more.

I don't think they have diminished anything at all. Rape? Yes.

One of my favorite musicians. I haven't listened to him in a few months, but I always find myself returning to his Live at Berkeley performance a few times every year. Such a delight to watch him live. It's almost surreal every time I watch one of his DVDs.



See that? $3.50 for one of his shows. I'd be lucky to get a beer at a show for that price.

It does sorta appear that way at first glance, but when I think about it the vast majority of the releases have all been worthwile and a huge improvement over the previous Alan Douglas era.

First Rays of the New Rising Sun, the box set, Live at the Fillmore East, Live at Berkley, BBC Sessions...all excellent stuff. And in the cases of stuff like BBC Sessions, Woodstock, Isle of Wight...they're all big improvements over previous releases of that material.


This new one does look a bit iffy, and some of it does look familiar...I suspect Stone Free is the same version that's on the box set (and it's a great version by the way) But of course I'll probably end up getting it. If there's just one great unheard track here then, for me anyway as a big Hendrix fan, it's worth it...

woxy.com just played "Valleys of Neptune" - whoa.

WHOA!

It's a cool song, but it's not quite as unreleased or unheard as they're pretending it is.
I heard it 20 years ago on this thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelines:_Th...i_Hendrix_Story

so my copies of all the remasters arrived today and i plan on gradually listening through all of them. did anyone else pick them up?

i listened to are you experienced? this morning and wasn't terribly impressed. the only thing i noticed is that it was just a lot louder, maybe too loud. they did a nice job with the packaging, however. not sure about the DVDS, i plan on watching those at some point over the weekend...........

after my first listen through the valleys of neptune release my initial impression is that this is a CASH GRAB for sure.

as a music listener there is almost nothing here that is really worthwhile. as a guitar player this disc has some value, because hendrix is hendrix and it's always nice to get more of those solos and licks. however, the editing is pretty bad in some spots. many of these recordings were clearly left unfinished.

the highlight for me is probably the cover of "sunshine of your love." it's pretty amazing to hear how hendrix could knock somebody else's song completely out of the park and make it sound like his own. it's pretty cool even without the vocals.

hm. i was gonna pick that up but yr review is interesting. might hafta have a listen to it first methinks.

yeah unless you are a diehard hendrix fan, i would DEFINITELY listen to this before you buy it.

Most of the posthumous Jimi Hendrix releases are marred by excessive overdubbing, even though Jimi himself was known to add track upon track, especially on Electric Ladyland. I don't like a lot of post-production, I prefer to hear the performances raw.

the 1st black guy 2 make white music. dont know much about him really which is weird since i am a militant black person. i get the sense Jimi aint that loved in the black community.

^ As usual, no idea what you're on about here. Hendrix may have had a following in the Bay Area, but his psychedelia was a London/New York thing. He played some great shows at the Fillmore West and Berkeley, but that was mandatory for anyone on the touring circuit in those years. His music has almost nothing in common with the SF template, which was Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead-derived.

Near as I can tell, you've assumed anyone who took acid and played guitar was inextricably linked to San Francisco, which is an interesting but utterly wrong theory.

if hendrix didnt die young would he be called the GOAT. u know how dying young automatically elevate u.

Reread the post in which you claim Hendrix's music was assimilated into the SF hippie community?

Why would I reread you being as wrong as ever?

the race issue with Hendrix is a tricky one. he started out in the Black Community playing mostly with Little Richard in the Chitlin Circuit, he played with the Isley Bros and some others as well. the problem was that Hendrix wanted to be a star, not a member of the backing band, and would constantly pull out flashy moves. Little Richard hated this competition and would do everything he could to hold Hendrix back, so Hendrix left Little Richard's band and headed to New York to do everything he could to get famous. i can't remember who it was, but someone in New York sent him to England and he was a star within a week. the thing about England is that it's full of white people, so he ended up with a white band and a white audience and that was that. the dude just wanted to live off of playing guitar and making his own music and that's what he got to do finally.

he was aware of his alienation of the black audience, however. there is a pretty good discussion of this on the Live at the Fillmore East DVD. from what i gather, getting Billy Cox and especially Buddy Miles together in the Band of Gypsys was his first attempt at crossing over to a black audience. you can hear more funk and soul influence in the songs on the Band of Gypsys album.

problem is that the dude died shortly after and never got to continue in the direction he was headed. he just left a huge mess of studio tapes, but i tend to believe that where he was headed was even farther away from rock music than what the leftovers suggest.

also, he was working on some stuff with Miles Davis prior to his death, but they never made it to a recording studio. now that would have been some shit!

I agree - it can't be any clearer that this assimilation you speak of never happened.

I don't mind that you're a repellent personality unworthy of the time which I waste on you. I don't mind your constant "Look, I have a penis!" bids for attention. I do mind that you're almost always factually wrong yet have the arrogance to claim otherwise even after you've been outed as such, and your consistent refusal to document the absurd statements you want us all to accept at face value. Shake your head and chide me all you wish - the facts remain: That you and reality are on a nodding acquaintance at best and that every time you blather off, I'm gonna own your ass again.

Probably.

There is are a lot of people out there who still place Clapton as one of the best ever, when for the most part he is boring.

Yep. Also, Hendrix was known for being a great live performer, great guitarist/singer and innovator while he was alive. I'm 100% certain that he'd be atop the pantheon of classic-rock guitar gods, were he alive right now.

Chas Chandler, former bassist of the Animals, saw Jimi perform in NY, became his manager and took him to the UK, whereby Jimi proceeded to wow the the English audiences.

You're welcome, Mr. Coward. Thanks for proving me right.


Again.

Hey all, there's a Jimi Hendrix comic adaptation of "Wait Until Tomorrow" at Prefix Magazine:
http://www.prefixmag.com/news/sights-sound...rrow-par/38634/