The acid-fried session that led to Jimi Hendrix’s lost album: “That’s my life”
Art is never finished, only abandoned, or so the saying goes, and today there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of unfinished albums and abandoned projects gathering dust in the attics of artists and producers across the land.
Inevitably, though, in the case of an artist like Jimi Hendrix, those abandoned projects aren’t likely to be forgotten any time soon.
Looking back through the pages of rock history, you get the impression that Hendrix was this universally beloved figure, tearing down the rock and roll establishment and opening the third eyes of audiences across the globe. With the reputation that has been built upon around the guitarist over the years, particularly in the wake of his death, it is easy to forget that the bulk of his discography spanned a little over one year, and he was afforded very little in the way of mainstream attention.
With The Jimi Hendrix Experience, the guitarist left behind a perfect trilogy of albums between 1967 and 1968, with the final project being Electric Ladyland. Judging by the seemingly endless deluge of material that has been released in the decades since his untimely passing, though, Hendrix was sitting on multiple albums’ worth of unfinished or underdeveloped ideas.
One such project has been dubbed Black Gold, and even today it remains shrouded in the kind of mystery that has tortured Hendrix devotees since his death in 1970. The story goes that, following on from Electric Ladyland, the guitarist was laying foundations for an expansive and ambitious concept album or rock opera, akin to Pete Townshend’s Tommy, which was revolutionising rock at that time.
The exact narrative of Black Gold remains largely unknown, with Hendrix speaking about the project only very briefly during his lifetime. “Here was this cat came around, called Black Gold,” he once shared in an interview, raising more questions than he went on to answer. “And there was this other cat came around, called Captain Coconut. Other people came around. I was all these people… That’s my life until something else comes about.”
From the sounds of it, the album was set to revolve around this cartoonish landscape of cats in conflict – a rather stark departure from Hendrix’s previous material. It has been suggested that the subtext of the record would have focused on the guitarist’s grappling with the cult status he struck upon during the late 1960s, but it sounds as though it was the artist’s mind-expanding experiments with LSD that conjured up images of cartoon cats.
Regardless of its inspiration, though, Black Gold has never seen the light of day since it was first conjured up in the mind of Jimi Hendrix. Reportedly, after having laid down the framework on some tapes, the guitarist gave those tracks to his drummer, Mitch Mitchell, during the Experience’s legendary trip to the Isle of Wight Festival back in 1970, which would turn out to be one of his final live appearances.
Mitchell, apparently unaware of the fact that he was in possession of Black Gold’s only master tapes, promptly forgot about the project. Although some select tracks have since been released on live albums like Band Of Gypsys, the bulk have been left to collect dust, untouched and unheard for over half a century.
Originally, the whereabouts of the tapes were entirely unknown, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that Mitchell was discovered to still be in possession of them, yet by the time the drummer passed away in 2008, they still hadn’t been released. In the wake of Mitchell’s death, the tapes were returned to Hendrix’s family, and his step-sister, Janie, claimed in 2010 that Black Gold would be released “this decade”.
Yet, over a decade and a half on from that claim, the rock and roll world appears no closer to hearing Black Gold; perhaps the tapes have deteriorated beyond saving, or perhaps the demos were so bare-bones that they would require a level of overdubbing and reworks that would change them beyond all recognition. Either way, Black Gold remains the ultimate holy grail of unreleased Hendrix.
