The Hendrix Tapes

What Mick Jagger and other doyens of the mid-1960s rock era had merely hinted at, Jimi Hendrix delivered right onstage. His hair frizzled as though by electricity, his scarves and sashes bobbing over sequined vests and velvet jackets in foppish disarray, he looked like a tripped-out savage impersonating a Carnaby Street dandy. His guitar was a throbbing phallic extension that he would caress, thrust at the audience, then set on fire at evening's end. The music was raw blues blasted out at maximum volume. Bursting on the rock scene in 1967 at the height of the acid-rock movement, Hendrix was a sensation: the first black superstar of mainstream rock. Three years later, he was dead at age 27 of an overdose of barbiturates.

Suicide or accident? It is impossible to know. What has only now been determined is that in the last year and a half of his life he was discontented. As Hendrix seemed to see it, he was a prisoner of his image, his managers and the very blast of sound that had catapulted him to fame. The commercial formula was so successful that his managers forbade any change in it. And so every night that he was not performing, Hendrix would retreat to a recording studio in Manhattan (which he partly owned and called Electric Lady) to play his own kind of music.

Visiting musicians always knew where to find him. Such rock luminaries as Eric Clapton (late of Cream), Stephen Stills (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) and John McLaughlin (soon to found the Mahavishnu Orchestra) would drop by. Hendrix would unwind, stretch and bend the notes as he never could onstage. He would make his guitar wail like a lost soul on the Delta. Sometimes it sounded like a horn, sometimes like a violin. Suddenly it would laugh its way to a final cadence. An old bottle-neck blues number might go on for a half-hour.

Tape machines were going all the while. But unrecognized for what they were after his death, some 600 to 800 hours' worth were shipped off to a warehouse and forgotten. Last spring, having issued three posthumous Hendrix LPs and run out of material, Warner Bros. Records asked a former Hendrix producer, Alan Douglas, if he knew of any other tapes. "I sure did," says Douglas, who had spent many an evening at the Electric Lady. "I thought everyone knew about the warehouse tapes." Douglas has listened to 250 hours' worth of reels and thinks he has enough stuff for several albums. For now, he is concentrating on five LPs, the first scheduled to be issued in October, so that all who still care can get to know Jimi's kind of music.

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