The album Jimi Hendrix was “resigned” to releasing
In terms of pure dollars to doughnuts, few artists have the level of efficiency that Jimi Hendrix enjoyed. With a professional career that lasted less than half a decade, Hendrix still managed to establish himself as perhaps the greatest guitar player who ever lived. Fully formed from the start, all Hendrix had to do was keep pumping out albums for his legend to grow exponentially.
That being said, Hendrix’s songbook is much smaller than his peers. In his lifetime, Hendrix released just three studio albums and one live album. An additional greatest hits compilation (Smash Hits) and a split LP between him and Otis Redding collecting highlights from their respective performances at the Monterey Pop Festival are the only officially released albums that Hendrix ever saw before his death in 1970.
Of those albums, Hendrix had his biggest gripe with Band of Gypsys. Recorded on the first day of 1970, the live LP found Hendrix playing the Fillmore East in New York City with bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles. A slight diversion from his typical bluesy psychedelic rock, Band of Gypsys sees Hendrix playing with more overt R&B and funk styles. The album is also as close as Hendrix got to being in a true band, with Miles taking the spotlight of vocals numerous times throughout the recording.
According to engineer Eddie Kramer, Miles’ exuberance started to wear on Hendrix while he was mixing the album. “Mixing the Band of Gypsys album was a challenge,” Kramer claimed in the book Ultimate Hendrix. “It was like Jimi was really almost pressured into doing it. Hearing Buddy’s [vamping or musical improvisation] seemed to bother him. We were sitting there and he was like. ‘Oh man, I wish Buddy would shut the fuck up.’”
“He would listen to him and say, ‘Can we cut some of those parts out?’” Kramer added. “I ended up editing a lot of Buddy’s quote-unquote ‘jamming’, where he would go off and sing a lot.”
The Band of Gypsys was a natural extension of Hendrix’s Woodstock band, although only Cox was carried over from that lineup. The band’s appearances at the Fillmore East were as much a contractual obligation as a new band, and at a certain point, Hendrix simply accepted the recordings as they were in order to fulfil his need to produce another album.
“I wasn’t too satisfied with the album. If it had been up to me, I never would have put it out,” Hendrix claimed in 1970. “From a musician’s point of view, it was not a good recording and I was out of tune on a few things … not enough preparation went into it and it came out a bit ‘grizzly’. The thing was, we owed the record company an album and they were pushing us, so here it is.”
“I don’t know that Jimi felt that these concerts were his best performances, but there were parts of them that he was really happy with,” Kramer claimed. “Certainly, ‘Machine Gun’ and tracks like ‘Message to Love’ sounded pretty good. At the time he didn’t want to include new songs that he wanted to finish in Electric Lady [Hendrix’s new custom-built recording studio]. Jimi was kind of resigned to the fact that here we are, we have to mix this, we got to give it to Capitol, it wasn’t a Warner’s record [his official record company], let’s do the best we can with it.”
