The drum section that floored Jimi Hendrix: “A monumental part”
In their time, no 1960s band had a bigger task on their hands than Jimi Hendrix‘s.
While there were several bands looking for members in this heady decade, some of which were the most potent supergroups of the era, there was no one operating on the same frequency as Hendrix. He was the undisputed king of the guitar, taking music to heights that it hadn’t yet seen, and so the members of The Jimi Hendrix Experience were tasked with simply keeping up and letting him rip.
But it wasn’t so simple. Hendrix was almost jazz-like in the way he approached performing, and so the rest of the band were constantly kept on their toes. The rhythm section had to hold a steady anchor while understanding when the phasing might change, and the guitarists had to follow the melody that could change in an instant, depending on what mood struck the genius.
While the musical storm would brew inside the walls of the studio, it was then the mountainous task of the producer to bring this all together, to pull all the moving aspects of Hendrix’s frenzied experimentation into something coherent. Luckily for those involved, his rise to fame came at a somewhat crucial point in music production.
In the late ‘60s, the humble mono recording was given the boot by its more elaborate counterpart, stereo recording, which, for a musician like Hendrix, was groundbreaking. Essentially, it turned the studio into another instrument entirely and suddenly, The Jimi Hendrix Experience could expand and facilitate the expansive sounds of its leader.
The man who brought this into action was the legendary engineer Eddie Kramer, who layered panning and effects into the mix of Hendrix’s songs to give it that all-important, three-dimensional feel. Ultimately, for an engineer still learning his trade, working with Hendrix was the seminal moment and pushed his creativity to boundaries that he hadn’t yet reached.
“I think that’s when I really started to expand my musical horizons,” Kramer said, adding, “When Jimi was doing solos, I loved the fact that I could sort of move them from side to side and try different phasing effects.”
But with the producer’s more pared-back view, he could introduce some methods that would have benefited the great guitarist, too. While Kramer was challenged to keep up with Hendrix’s guitar playing, Hendrix was also challenged to respond to the producer’s tricks, and it was on ‘Bold As Love’ that Hendrix was confronted with that fact. Kramer explained, “In fact, you know that drum break in the middle of ‘Bold as Love’ where the phasing first kicks in? That was a monumental part for Jimi when he first witnessed it.”
It was a drum phasing that they had noticed The Beatles were also doing, but had only done it in mono at that point. So seizing an opportunity, Kramer and Hendrix also used it in their more elevated setting to help stretch the realms of possibility within psychedelic rock and simultaneously announce Hendrix as the new creative force to be reckoned with.
