This is Hear My Train A-Comin', my newly assembled album and the final one by the original lineup of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. When Hendrix died, he left a huge wealth of studio material in varying states of completion, and in this fan's humble opinion, not a single official posthumous studio album has been up to par with the three incredible ones he released during his lifetime. I have taken it upon myself to reassemble the best collections that I can out of the stuff he never got the chance to release, and this is the second installment in this series. Hear My Train, along with more soon-to-come albums, is meant to complement and sit alongside Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold As Love, and Electric Ladyland (and my already-posted War Heroes). There are very few overlapping songs, and all tracks are taken from a specific set of sessions so as to show where the fast-evolving guitarist was at that point in his too-short career. Most importantly, the track sequence has been laboured over to create the most satisfying and cohesive collection of music as is possible with the material at hand, to the point where it sounds like a normal studio album.
I'll start with some background info. After finishing his psychedelic magnum opus Electric Ladyland in the summer of 1968, Hendrix reentered the studio a few months later to produce (and play all over) Eire Aparent's only album, Sunrise, which is well worth a listen (especially for the single "Let Me Stay") because you can hear his fingers all over it. That work served as impetus for Jimi's band to get working on new material, and it turned out that the Experience recorded a tremendous amount from October '68 to mid-April '69, when bassist Noel Redding stopped attending studio sessions (they continued as a live act for a few more months before he finally called it quits). The thing is though, these recordings were really rough in terms of quality, generally being rehearsals, jams, run-throughs, sketches, demos, etc. - new songs with good vocals could be counted on just one or two hands. It seems that, with a few exeptions, Hendrix wasn't really interested in finishing these; he might not have even been recording an album, because, as the result of a lawsuit, this next LP needed to be delivered to a different label than he was on - it ended up being the Band Of G****s live album from 1970, but this may explain his reticency throughout 1969 to deliver new musical product to the public. At the very end though, in early April, some real gems started flowing out of him, and they form a good chunk of this collection; the rest is filled up with the best of the Electric Ladyland outtakes.
The album kicks off with the feedback intro of a new recording of the band's first b-side, "Stone Free," here retitled "Stone Free Again" (as it was called on Crash Landing, 1975) to differentiate. This is a tight song with a killer solo, and I take it from the Y2K-released Jimi Hendrix Experience box set (although I faded it out a little quicker so the song doesn't break down too much). It was originally recorded for the US version of the Smash Hits compilation, but the original 1966 b-side was used on that instead. This one got as far as the rough mix stage though, and I don't know if a single other song made it to the mixing stage in this entire sea of sessions. And coming right on its' heels is "Look Over Yonder," a rerecording of a 1967 Axis: Bold As Love outtake. This is the most polished thing to come out of the October 1968 T.T.G. sessions which kicked off this album's recording, and is a vintage posthumous mix from the sublime 2014 Rainbow Bridge CD (I'd actually add that that album is one of Hendrix's very best posthumous collections despite being a real hodgepodge. But just like Cry Of Love, I aim to render it redundant).
Next up, and also from early April, is the electrifying, possibly autobiographical, live-in-the-studio blues-rock workout called "Hear My Train A-Comin'." There are official releases of several different recordings from these sessions, each of them highly enjoyable, but I think this one, Take 1 off of the uneven Valleys Of Neptune compilation (and in overdubbed form on Midnight Lightning, 1975) is best, because his singing is strongest. Unlike the bulk of this album, both this, "Stone Free Again," and later on "Gloria" are modern digital mixes from the last 30 years. I don't think they stand out too badly among the early '70s mixes, luckily. This searing song is the title track for a reason, and with it the electric energy that has been building up since the start peaks before the album slows down for something of a breather with... "My Friend," a folksy, dylanesque, faux-barroom number where Jimi shows off his lyrical talent to close out the first side of this album's imaginary LP. Recorded March 1968, this is the first of three Electric Ladyland outtakes that I chose to fill out this collection, and was originally released on The Cry Of Love, among nine other songs recorded several years after it (apparently Hendrix really enjoyed listening back to this song while going through old tapes, so I suppose Eddie Kramer and Mitch Mitchell's sentimentality got in the way of compiling the album a bit). This is from the sublime 2014 remastered CD of The Cry Of Love.
After flipping the imaginary record, side two opens with two instrumentals, the first being the high-energy Electric Ladyland outtake (and cover) "Tax Free," that had a drum overdub in the early '70s. Originally released War Heroes (1972), it ends in a climax that leads us into the next song, the thrashing instrumental "Midnight," from April 1969. Both of these songs are taken from a CD of South Saturn Delta (1997), which I found had better tape transfers than the more dynamic but thinner old War Heroes CD I've got from the 1980s. That goes right into the penultimate track, an exciting jam on "Gloria," originally a song by Them, and later covered by Patti Smith (In her book Just Kids, she wrote that the two of them actually met the day of the Electric Lady Studios opening party just before Hendrix left America for the final time in late August 1970). This live-in-the-studio take is from the same October '68 sessions as "Look Over Yonder." I take it from the 2000 box set, but with the opening studio chatter edited out. I have so much fun whenever I listen to this one, with its' churning guitar, throbbing bass (Noel gets a rare solo), furious drums, lyrics about Hendrix's plug bringing him some "groovy grass," and even a shout-out the rythm section! Since the Experience were a live powerhouse at this point, I thought that having a band intruduction at the end was perfect, because that's what lots of artists do near the end of their gigs, and this is just about the end of that lineup's final album.
Closing out the album is a return to the title track, but this time stripped down to a delta blues and renamed "Here My Train A-Comin' Blues," a rare recording of Hendrix on acoustic guitar. This was put to tape spontaniously at a photo session in late December 1967, and was actually filmed - one could consider that a music video of sorts for this album. The audio recording is less than perfect, but with the song being a blues I consider the drop in fidelity an artistic decision within the context of the album. Returning to the main theme is, in my eyes, a nice conclusion, I think.
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