113. The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland (1968)












Track Listing

1. ...And The Gods Made Love
2. Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)
3. Crosstown traffic
4. Voodoo Chile
5. Little miss strange
6. Long hot summer night
7. Come on (let the good times roll)
8. Gypsy eyes
9. Burning of the midnight lamp
10. Rainy day dream away
11. 1983 (a merman I should turn to be)
12. Moon turn the tides...gently gently away
13. Still raining, still dreaming
14. House burning down
15. All along the watchtower
16. Voodoo Child (slight return)

Review

Electric Ladyland is the last, longest and probably most famous of Jimi's albums. It is definitely impressive and although many consider it his best album, I actually prefer Axis and Experienced for some strange reason. Yet, that's being a bit precious. If all albums on the list were as good as this I'd be a very happy man.

Basically Hendrix could do no wrong, but sometimes he could do better than others. A clear example of this is the whole Voodoo Chile, Voodoo Child thing. While Voodoo Chile is an amazing piece of work spanning the whole of 14 minutes, Voodoo Child picks it up at the end and in 3 minutes does what Chile didn't. It's just better. Again it's a bit like comparing diamonds, but there is something of the self-indulgent to Voodoo Chile.

Then you have the amazing cover of All Along The Watchtower and that amazing cover of nakedness, which seems to have fallen in disuse today. It's quite hard to buy the album with that cover. Actually Hendrix didn't like the nekkid cover, and it was only put out because the intended artwork was to late reaching the press in the UK and they used the girls instead... Stream it from Napster or buy it from Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. All Along The Watchtower
2. Crosstown Traffic
3. Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
4. Burning of The Midnight Lamp

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

In the early morning hours of September 18, 1970, Jimi Hendrix was found dead in the basement flat of the Samarkand Hotel at 22 Lansdowne Crescent in London. Hendrix died amid circumstances which have never been fully explained, and the exact details of his death will probably never be confirmed. He had spent the night with his German girlfriend, Monika Dannemann, and likely died in bed after drinking wine and taking nine Vesperax sleeping pills, then asphyxiating on his own vomit. For years, Dannemann publicly claimed that Hendrix was alive when placed in the back of the ambulance; however, her comments about that morning were often contradictory and confused, varying from interview to interview. Police and ambulance reports reveal that not only was Hendrix dead when they arrived on the scene, but he had been dead for some time, the apartment's front door was wide open, and the apartment itself empty. Following a libel case brought in 1996 by Hendrix's long-term British girlfriend Kathy Etchingham, Monika Dannemann allegedly took her own life.

A sad poem written by Hendrix that was found in the apartment has led some to believe that he committed suicide. More speculative is the belief that Hendrix was murdered—forcibly given the sleeping pills and wine, then asphyxiated with a scarf by professionals hired by manager Michael Jeffery. The most accepted theory, however, is that he simply misjudged the potency of the sleeping pills, and asphyxiated in his sleep due to an inability to regain consciousness when he vomited.

Reports that Hendrix's tapes of the concept album Black Gold had been stolen from the London flat are in fact wrong: the tapes were handed to Mitch Mitchell by Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival three weeks prior to his death. Hendrix's Greenwich Village apartment, however, was indeed plundered by an unknown series of vandals who stole numerous personal items, tapes, and countless pages of lyrics and poems, some of which have resurfaced in the hands of collectors or at auctions.