THIS year marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Jimi Hendrix, and, predictably, that event will be commemorated with the release of a new CD, the freshening up of his classic titles, a tribute tour and a version of the video game Rock Band devoted to him. He will be a hard figure to avoid, as viewers of the Super Bowl who heard his song “Fire” on a commercial promoting “Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains” have already learned.
As the business continues to reel from declining CD sales, figures like Hendrix, the guitarist who enjoys an Olympian stature rivaled only by the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, continue to be dominant forces in the marketplace. Their older fans remain loyal consumers, and for younger audiences they are essential rites of passage; in a typical year the Hendrix catalog is estimated to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
On March 9 “Valleys of Neptune,” the first album of previously unreleased studio recordings by Hendrix in more than a decade, comes out, the inaugural product of a deal announced last year between Experience Hendrix, the company that oversees his musical estate, and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment.
Lawsuits swirled around aspects of Hendrix’s work during his lifetime, and, partly because he did not leave a will, that problem only intensified after his death. Over the years albums have been issued, contested and withdrawn, as claims and counterclaims, Dickensian in their complexity, flew.
Many of those issues have now been resolved, and the deal with Legacy, combined with a significant anniversary, has whetted the ambitions of Experience Hendrix. “Valleys of Neptune” is being marketed as a contemporary album, with the title track actively promoted across radio and other media platforms. The Hendrix Rock Band game is just one of the efforts being employed to introduce him to younger audiences, though, unlike some of his classic-rock peers, Hendrix is not a figure who requires rehabilitation. In 2003 he topped Rolling Stone’s list of all-time great guitarists and the “freak flag” iconography surrounding him — his wild hair, wilder clothing and daring performance antics — have made him an enduring symbol of personal freedom.
But far beyond his continuing commercial significance, Hendrix is a particularly potent figure for our time, perhaps even more intriguing in symbolic terms now than at the time of his death. Only 27 when he died from misadventure after drinking heavily and consuming a girlfriend’s sleeping pills, Hendrix at first seemed just another casualty of a tumultuous period littered with the corpses of consequential figures, both artistic and political. Janis Joplin would die less than a month after Hendrix; Jim Morrison within a year. Protesters had been killed at campus demonstrations at Kent State and Jackson State only a few months earlier.
Amid the rancors of that era Hendrix, like President Obama, was viewed as a figure who transcended race — an achievement for which he was both admired and reviled. Despite a personal and aesthetic style that reveled in his blackness, Hendrix never spoke out on the pressing civil rights issues of the day either in his lyrics or in interviews. His audience was overwhelmingly white. He came of age backing up the likes of Little Richard and the Isley Brothers on the so-called chitlin circuit, but some African-Americans saw him as pandering to white stereotypes of black superstuds and resented his reverence for white artists like Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Eric Clapton. Some white critics and fans, meanwhile, sneered at his showmanship, inherited from likes of Chuck Berry and T-Bone Walker, as silly and unhip. What seemed subversive and provocative coming from someone like Mick Jagger was seen as unacceptable, a little embarrassing really, coming from a black man.
So much, then, for transcendence. The English musician Robert Wyatt, whose former band the Soft Machine toured America with Hendrix in 1968, recalled the tension at Southern concerts when visiting dignitaries would see young white women lingering backstage with Hendrix. “You don’t have to go round making political statements on top of that,” Mr. Wyatt said. “He was living a political life of great importance.” Vernon Reid, the guitarist of Living Colour, who will be participating in the Experience Hendrix tribute tour set to start on Thursday in Santa Barbara, Calif., agrees.
“He was the Movement, his very existence, without his having to put his fist in the air,” Mr. Reid said. “When you hear ‘Machine Gun’ or ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ there was much more said in those tunes than if he was a speechifying dude. In the world of great guitar solos, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ just stands in this weird other place. He created, he was, the soundtrack of the nation at that time.”
That time was 1969, the year principally documented by “Valleys of Neptune.” Uproarious in many ways, 1969 was a period of intense transition for Hendrix. “Electric Ladyland,” the third and last studio album that would be released in his lifetime, had come out the previous year and made him one of the biggest rock stars in the world, the obvious choice, for example, to headline the Woodstock festival that August.
But Hendrix felt constrained by the limits of the Experience, the power trio he fronted that also featured the bassist Noel Redding and the drummer Mitch Mitchell. As he had on “Electric Ladyland,” he wanted to play with other musicians and explore different sounds and styles. Like the Beatles he had grown increasingly intrigued by the possibilities studio technology afforded and bored by performing onstage for fans who only wanted to hear his hits. “Recording was really important to him,” said John McDermott, the director of catalog development at Experience Hendrix, who helped to assemble “Valleys of Nepture.” “He didn’t own a Graceland. When he made real money, he went out and bought a recording studio.”
Electric Ladyland, the studio Hendrix built for himself, would not be completed until 1970, so “Valleys of Neptune” consists, with a couple of exceptions, of recordings he did at the Record Plant in New York and at Olympic Studios in London in 1969. A number of the tracks showcase the original Experience, but three feature the bassist Billy Cox, an Army buddy whom Hendrix called to New York when his relationship with Redding reached a breaking point. Two of the tracks (“Crying Blue Rain,” essentially an instrumental with a wordless vocal by Hendrix, and “Mr. Bad Luck,” which the Experience originally recorded in 1967) include parts added by Mitchell and Redding in 1987, long after Hendrix’s death.
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