Which songs did Noel Redding write for the Jimi Hendrix Experience?
From virtual anonymity, a 20-year-old guitarist from the south of England was catapulted to the cutting edge of rock and roll when he was asked to play the bass guitar in the new band of James Marshall Hendrix. Noel Redding had done his musical apprenticeship touring Britain and Germany with several bands, including the Burnettes with lifelong collaborator Neil Landon, the Lonely Ones and the Loving Kind. But he was about to get to experience music on a whole different plane.
In mid-1966, he read in Melody Maker magazine that the lead singer of The Animals, Eric Burdon, was auditioning for new members of his band in London. Redding knew that Burdon had previously seen his band, the Loving Kind, perform and felt he had a good chance of passing the audition. By the time he arrived, though, he found that the position of guitarist had already been filled.
Animals bassist Chas Chandler was also there, however, and asked Redding, “Can you play bass?” Redding replied sheepishly that he didn’t but added, “I’ll have a go.” Chandler then introduced him to a young American musician who invited him to the pub for a pint of bitter. There, the two sat for hours and exchanged their knowledge of the music scene on their own respective sides of the Atlantic. After his pub session, Redding found that he’d passed the audition for a whole different band. The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
For the next three years, he formed half of the rhythm section supporting the guitarist widely considered rock’s greatest of all time. Hendrix was the name, the face, the voice, the words and the music of the band. Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell were essential to its success and complemented the guitar hero’s playing and compositional styles perfectly, as hard as they often found it to work with their bandleader. But they were very much in the background, performing supporting roles.
That is, except for the moments when Redding brought his own songs to the table. By the Experience’s second album, Axis: Bold as Love, he felt confident enough to add his own voice into the mix, and Hendrix was more than happy to oblige him.
So, what were Redding’s songs?
On that sophomore LP, Redding’s number ‘She’s So Fine’ stands out amid the softest collection of songs Hendrix ever put out, led out by a scatty bass riff and punctuated by pounding rhythms. Redding gives his best impression of Jack Bruce from Cream by singing a descending verse melody that tumbles towards psychedelic harmonies at the end of each line.
The record that followed, Electric Ladyland, would be Hendrix’s last with the Experience and was conceived as his magnum opus. Redding did well to squeeze one of his compositions onto the track listing between 70 minutes of Hendrix tracks that the guitarist spent five months obsessing over after sessions with his bandmates had been completed. ‘Little Miss Strange’ features similar elements to his previous songwriting effort, from its frenetic pacing to the prominent wandering bassline, but is far more complex structurally and includes some wonderful fuzz-guitar harmonics from Hendrix.
This was the second song Redding contributed to the band, and it was to be the last. Exhausted by Hendrix’s creative ill-discipline and angered by a suggestion that Hendrix had replaced him with American bassist Billy Cox, he quit the Experience on June 30th, 1969. By then, he’d already formed the prog rock band Fat Mattress with Neil Landon, the vocalist who’d given him his first break in the music industry back in 1962.
The two songs Redding wrote, and song might not be among the best-known by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. But they play an important role on Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland, providing a change of pace and mood that serves to emphasise the genius of tracks like ‘Castles Made of Sand’, ‘One Rainy Wish’ and ‘Voodoo Chile’ while preventing us from ever taking Hendrix for granted. And beyond their wider role, the songs themselves prove that Redding was more than capable of holding his own as a lead singer and songwriter.
