24 March : Band of Gypsys

OK, hands up, this is an admin error; Band of Gypsys (sic) was actually released 25 March 1970 not 24, but it’s too late now. In any event it didn’t appear in the UK until 12 June 1970 so on that measure I’m two and a half months early. Bite me.

Band of Gypsys is an album I have, and appreciate, but rarely play. To be honest, I don’t play much Hendrix, though I dip in from time to time, especially to the BBC sessions of 1967. As I’ve said before, I’m not much in thrall to the cult of the guitar hero as such, and I don’t exempt Hendrix from that, much as I love some of the things he did.

Hendrix seems to me to be a man trapped by his own innovation, hemmed in by commercial pressures that didn’t really allow him to progress as much as he wanted, and by the time he saw ways out of that (and Band of Gypsys points in new directions) he was dead.

This was also an album he would have preferred not to release: it was done purely to fulfil contractual obligations, though Hendrix, Miles and Cox were also intent on putting on a good show for the audiences at the shows when this was recorded. Moreover, the band itself was a direction the record companies didn’t want; Hendrix is here playing with black musicians and the companies wanted the white guys back.

An echo of this surfaces on Machine Gun, the aural reproduction by Hendrix and Miles of a battle over Cox’s deep blues bass riff. Hendrix introduces it with a dedication to ‘all the soldiers fighting in Chicago, Milwaukee and New York–and, oh yes, Vietnam,’ making a direct link to the civil rights movement and anti-war demonstrations. The NME reviewer senses this better than Chris Welch in Melody Maker, whose comment on Hendrix as ‘the first serious rival to Townshend and Clapton’ does no more than expose the parochialism of Melody Maker.

My main reservation about the album is that the selected tracks are kind of samey. Each in isolation is perfectly good, and Machine Gun deserves all the praise heaped on it, but taken together they lack variation. Sure they get funky in ways that the original Experience couldn’t, or at least didn’t, but it’s still emergent and undeveloped. By this time Hendrix had also been jamming with Rahsaan Roland Kirk and was dancing a hesitant dos-à-dos with Miles Davis and I get the sense that this album was as much a farewell to what had gone before as an ushering in of something new. It’s the new tracks played at these shows that did not go on this album that are more indicative of what was in Jimi’s head.

Spotify link is here.

There are several YouTube playlists you can find by searching, but here’s Machine Gun (on Vimeo for a change)

Machine Gun – Jimi Hendrix – Band of Gypsys from Jack Peterson on Vimeo.