Ultimate Hendrix:
An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Live Concerts & Sessions
Backbeat Books
(2009)

It makes me feel good to learn that Jimi Hendrix wasn’t just born with all his raw talent. He would wake up in the morning, reach for his guitar, and never put it down until he went to sleep. In John McDermott’s book, Ultimate Hendrix, he takes you day by day through Hendrix’s recording sessions and concerts. 

McDermott along with bassist, Billy Cox and sound engineer and photographer, Eddie Kramer had culled together all the surviving recordings (released and unreleased) that Hendrix laid down over his short, prolific life.   The three of them had complete access and encyclopedic details of his touring life  — from Hendrix’s early hand-to-mouth days while touring in the South, to the freewheeling 1968 Hollywood sessions, to the celebrated recordings at his own Electric Lady Studios.

When Chas Chandler (the bassist from the Animals) first witnessed Hendix play “Hey Joe” at a small club in New York, he knew he was seeing someone with great potential. Chandler approached Hendrix to see if he was interested in letting him produce his music in London. Hendrix asked if his band in NY could come too but Chandler told him that his drummer sucked and nobody else was worth bringing. When they got to London they held auditions and wound up picking Noel Redding on bass, and from the flip of a coin Mitch Mitchell on drums.

The idea was to have less band members, but each member being a strong powerful element.  The book offers intimate details of recording sessions and studio dynamics.  Chandler would sometimes have the Experience run through a song twenty five times before settling on the basic track to build the song on, he also had a keen ear for knowing when Jimi got the part right.

One of my favorite stories tells of how Jimi met an electronics genius named Roger Mayer, that would build him custom pedals to effect his sound, like the “Octavia” which adds the octave double of the note you’re playing. You can hear the Octavia predominantly used on “Purple Haze”, and “Fire.”

Hendrix was always searching for sounds that would come to him in his dreams. He would try to describe these sounds to the engineers at the studio, and sometimes they would be realized. One of the dream sounds Jimi described as his guitar tone sounding like water. The engineers started playing around with things until they created a cross phasing that warbled like liquid. Jimi screamed “that’s it, that’s the sound!”

Eventually Chas Chandler became frustrated with the constant party going on at the recording studio, and leaves Jimi to produce himself.  Ultimate Hendix is chock full of untold stories like this, that transport you back to the studio when all this innovative music was first being created. So take a seat behind the console and witness the raw accounts of the Experience first-hand.

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Published by Backbeat Books, an imprint of Hal Leonard
256 pages

To purchase the book at Backbeat: CLICK HERE

via Zac Holtzman, 17 May 2009 9:00pm | |