‘Hear My Train A Comin”: The classic song Jimi Hendrix never got to put on record
There are plenty of musical careers that were cut tragically short by an artist’s untimely passing, but if you had to pick one sadly deceased artist that it would’ve been great to hear in their later years, then for many, Jimi Hendrix would be at the top of the list. Considered a pioneering talent, there was seemingly no limit to what the guitarist could’ve achieved, but his passing in 1970 prevented the world from seeing him ascend to even greater heights.
Famously a part of the so-called ‘27 Club’, having passed away at the same young age as the likes of Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin, among others, Hendrix would only release three studio albums with his band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, during his lifetime. However, there was a wealth of material uncovered after his death that showed him to be far more prolific than this, and the amount of unreleased and unfinished material that he amassed is remarkable for someone who died so young.
It’s entirely plausible that Hendrix could’ve burnt bright early and eventually reached a point of stagnation later in his career had he lived to see it. But considering the singular talent he was, it wouldn’t be surprising if he had continued to release music of the highest calibre. During the 1960s, his work pushed his contemporaries to up their game, and save for the emergence of other great guitarists in the decades that followed; you can imagine he’d have continued to innovate and inspire.
Hendrix was also known and widely celebrated for his incendiary live performances, and this is another place where he would often debut unheard material that never made it onto any of his studio releases. Among those tracks that were unfortunate enough to never see the light of day, despite being a staple of live performances, was a track now referred to as ‘Hear My Train A Comin’’.
While also sometimes referred to as ‘Getting My Heart Back Together Again’, the track’s origins go all the way back to 1967 when Hendrix was being photographed during a studio session. When asked by the photographer to pretend to play something on the guitar, his off-the-cuff response was to improvise, and he ended up producing the track, which was eventually developed into a full composition.
There are multiple recordings of the track that exist, though none of them were finished and mastered at the time. Alongside Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, he would record one rendition of the track, which ended up featuring on the 2010 compilation Valleys of Neptune. He would later record another version with his Band of Gypsys trio that formed after the Experience disbanded, which also surfaced on a posthumous album, People, Hell & Angels.
In addition to the original recording from the shoot, uncovered by producer Eddie Kramer in 1993, there is a live rendition taken from one of Hendrix’s last concerts in 1970, which appears on the Blues album from 1994. It’s a shame that there was never an opportunity to hear a fully fleshed-out version of the track as Hendrix intended for it to be heard, but regardless of that, it still remains a firm favourite of die-hard fans and is a gem for anyone willing to dig through the treasure trove that is Hendrix’s archival material.
