Magic music: The classic song Jimi Hendrix only pretended to record
With a guitar in his hand, there was very little that Jimi Hendrix couldn’t do. While his on-stage performances are what made him the incendiary icon capable of either branding the music world with his style or burning the whole thing to the ground, Hendrix was a studio whizz. A unique proposition, if ever there was one, was that he stood in the studio like a magic incarnate, unable to put a foot wrong while seemingly levitating the entire time.
Unafraid to start new projects or allow the infiltration of new instruments and techniques into his work, Hendrix was a beacon of creativity. It extended to his band, The Experience, too, with both Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums, considered equally expansive in their own right. But Hendrix was the sun to this sonic solar system, and as he burst with ideas, so too his gravitational pull became too strong.
It would mean that he would often find his studio awash with performers and musicians, all wanting to get a glimpse of Hendrix in his experimental element. One such invasion of his privacy, this time from a documentary team sent by ABC, would see him seize the opportunity to teach his band a new song, all while faking a recording session. A tune that would prove to not only be seen as one of his best but a pivotal moment in the evolution of heavy metal.
‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’ is one of Hendrix’s most bombastic deliveries, which is really saying something. Never afraid to throw his hips behind his work, this track belts out of the speakers with the swaggering braggadocio of a leather-clad Fonzie with a set of twins on his arms. It not only saw Hendrix help to pioneer the use of the wah-wah pedal, which, at the time, was still a rarely used piece of equipment, but, in 1968, arguably set out the blueprint for Led Zeppelin’s rise to dominance in the following decade.
Perhaps what is most impressive is that the song, with all its energy and verve, was actually laid down as the group pretended to record something. With the ABC cameras rolling, Hendrix admitted: “We learned that song in the studio … They had the cameras rolling on us as we played it.”
“We did that about three times because they wanted to film us in the studio, to make us [imitates a pompous voice] ‘Make it look like you’re recording boys’,” Hendrix told John Burks of Rolling Stone the lucky moment that the group faked their way into recording one of their finest moments on tapes with the casual ease of a true genius.
“One of them scenes, you know, so,” he notes, referring to the staged set-up, “‘OK, let’s play this in E; now a-one and-a-two and-a-three,’ and then we went into ‘Voodoo Child.’ ”
Sadly, the TV footage of the electric moment was lost. Instead, all that remains from the lightning striking is what we have on the recording. It’s a moment where Hendrix sealed the identity of heavy metal, popularised the wah-wah pedal and laid down one of his best songs in his short career. And it all happened within a fake recording scenario.
