Jimi Hendrix – Happy Birthday
Jimi Hendrix – Hornet's Nest
Jimi Hendrix – Fool For You Baby
Today would have been Jimi Hendrix’s 70th birthday. Having been too busy to post anything up prior to today, it makes perfect sense to post another Hendrix record this year from my collection. Flashing is a fairly rare LP, released in 1968 after Jimi found great success with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In some ways it’s a very opportunistic record. Jimi played with Curtis Knight & the Squires before forming his own band (Jimmy James & the Blue Flames) and finding success initially in the UK, then the US and worldwide with the Experience. He’d recorded a few sides with Knight and his group around 1966, including what I believe might be recognized as his first penned track, the very “buzzy” surf inspired instrumental “Hornet’s Nest.”
In 1967, perhaps out of contractual obligations, perhaps out of loyalty to old friends, Jimi returned to the studio to jam with some of Knight’s crew. Some of those tracks ended up on a couple of Curtis Knight records on the Capitol record label (the Band of Gypsies album more or less completed his contractual obligations with Capitol). Flashing represents the best collection of these, with a mix of the tracks from 1966 and 1967. It’s an interesting document, hearing Jimi Hendrix before he was really Jimi Hendrix and also hearing Jimi after he WAS Jimi Hendrix all at the same time, without it techinically being a Jimi Hendrix album (if that makes any sense).
I can’t for the life of me remember where I got this record, I’m pretty sure it was in Atlanta, perhaps at Red, Beans & Rice, probably at the Atlanta Record Show. I’m just about 100% sure that when I bought it I had NO idea that “Happy Birthday” was sampled by the Beastie Boys of “Jimmy James” (in addition to a few other Jimi tracks):
“Happy Birthday” features some of Hendrix’s earliest use of the Wah-Wah pedal and is funky as all get out for 1967. The same basic beat turns up on this album as “Love, Love” and as far as I understand it, the basic track was laid down out of a jam session and Knight’s vocals were added much later along with a bit of snappy editing to make it seem like it was a specific track. On some other Hendrix release the instrumental version is featured that is probably worth tracking down. “Fool For You Baby” is a pretty straight ahead R&B number, with a really nice sound, along with the music he recorded with the Isley brothers it’s sort of a reminder of what kind of soul music Jimi might have made if he had not become the visionary, transcendent rock’n’roll guitar player he did become (though I always file Jimi’s music in the soul section, personally).
It took the Hendrix family a really long time in order to get all of Jimi’s contractual situations worked out, particularly getting the proper royalities from these recordings from Ed Chalpin, the producer who “signed” Jimi to this particular contract. Hopefully someday in the future, we’ll get a full account of the music that Jimi recorded during this period of time pre/post-Experience, but still so very early in his career.
Cheers,
Michael