The one instrument that made Jimi Hendrix’s truly ‘Little Wing’ legendary: “Genius”
There are all kinds of glittering alchemy that elevate Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Little Wing’ to a gem of the psychedelic era.
At its drop in December 1967, ‘Little Wing’ and the Axis: Bold as Love LP were riding high on serious momentum behind Hendrix’s Experience trio. He hadn’t been in London long. Arriving in September 1966 after floating around the New York club circuit fronting Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, Hendrix quickly turned heads with his guitar virtuosity and a packed show in Soho’s The Bag O’Nails two months later, wowing the who’s who of the swinging counterculture in attendance and prompting Record Mirror’s “Mr Phenomenon” headline.
Hendrix had brought over several songs from across the Atlantic. It’s thought that ‘Little Wing’s basic phrasing was sparked by his session guitar work on the Iceman R&B duo’s ‘(My Girl) She’s a Fox’, but the shimmering love song would take its own shape when still playing the Greenwich Village circuit prior to finding fame in the UK, with further evolution after the positive vibes of Monterey Pop Festival the Experience cracked America with.
“Everybody’s really flyin’ and they’re really in a nice mood, like the police and everybody was really, really great out there,” Hendrix told Swedish journalist Christian Stafström in 1968. “So I just took all these things and put them in one very, very small little matchbox, you know, into a girl and then do it. It was very simple, but I like it though.”
By the time Experience came to commence the ‘Little Wing’ sessions in October 1967, Hendrix was keen to sonically expand the band’s sound toward the lysergic hinterland LSD was pointing to. The lyrics were miles ahead already, painting a prismatic fantasy realm where his feminine guardian angel-come-erotic Gaia dances with surrealist abandon: “With a circus mind that’s running wild / Butterflies and zebras, and moonbeams and fairy tales / That’s all she ever thinks about, riding with the wind.”
Such tinctured dreamscapes deserved a soundtrack matching ‘Little Wing’s transportive energy. All kinds of recording trickery were thrown at Hendrix’s slice of kaleidoscopic romance at Olympic Studios; the final version, in fact, a third take from co-manager and producer Chas Chandler’s push to slow the tempo of the initially more urgent rock character. For the overdubs, Hendrix played about with his guitar for all kinds of sonic finesse, from altering his pickup selector to unusual positions for a hollow tone, to feeding the lead guitar through a Leslie speaker and rotating the sound for extra, pulsing warmth.
‘Little Wing’s most distinctive feature, however, was its simplest. Still stuck in overdubs, Hendrix’s curiosity found himself rummaging through the leftover percussion from a previous session at Olympic’s Studio A, chancing upon a glockenspiel and presenting the carillon keyboard to engineer Eddie Kramer. It turned out that the metallophone pitches it created hit an evocative bullseye.
“Within five minutes, he figured out exactly what he wanted,” Kramer reflected to Rick Beato on his YouTube series. “I grabbed the mic, stuck it overhead, rolled tape, and he put those beautiful pointed marks, which to me was like the only instrument that wasn’t electric, right? And it added this wonderful tonality with the reverb and all the rest of that. So that was Jimi taking an instrument that he had never played before and introducing it into the song. Genius.”
All it took was those twinkling mallets to completely coat ‘Little Wing’ in its extra charge of trippy sensuality. While never released as a single, Hendrix’s glockenspiel droplets seem to hold up ‘Little Wing’ as the Experience’s beckoning gateway song, both in their work and in the iridescent realms the guitar maestro was dreaming of in his chase for divine, cosmic, female companionship.
