Jimi Hendrix - Valleys Of Neptune
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CD Details
Artist: Jimi HendrixEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2010-03-09
Music Label: Sony Legacy
Product features:
- HENDRIX JIMI VALLEYS OF NEPTUNE
- Stone Free
- Valleys Of Neptune
- Bleeding Heart
- Hear My Train A Comin'
- Mr. Bad Luck
- Sunshine Of Your Love
- Lover Man
- Ships Passing In The Night
- Fire
- Red House
- Lullaby For The Summer
- Crying Blue Rain
Music reviews of Valleys Of Neptune
Music Review: Why Noel Had to Go
Rating: 1 Stars
Only reason to get this disk is to see why lead foot Noel had to go.
Here Hendrix is going places within the BB King idiom with Red house and all Noel can do is drag him down off tempo, like a bass player out of Black Sabbath or KISS (Eddie Kramer's next effort), no idea what Jimi was doing and how to support it underneath, but always acting like a brainless pedestrian stepping on to the tracks of a roaring freight train, holding it down, and stopping it in its tracks. No wonder Jimi just stops the recording altogether instead of getting into the final verse.
To see where Jimi wanted to go, hear the symphonic blues of Red House off In the West recorded live in San Diego. Even there he gets frightened in the quiet segment and whips into overdrive instead.
Here Noel's over dominant and mindless thumping with a few meaningless white bread fills to nowhere kill it. If Kramer is so great, how did he let this travesty of mismixing through? Couldn't he have put that bass in the background just a bit more?
One reason why alone Noel had to go, never mind all his racial slurs and challenged personality, thinking himself the star and not the backup, this former back up for british cocktail lounge crooners like Englebert Humperdink who had no idea at all what the blues, and Jimi Hendrix, were all about.
There is nothing here Hendrix approved for public release and with a reason. Most of the tracks, in particular the first two, have vocals that would have been redone entirely, off tune in the first with no echo (if Kramer is such a whizz bang button pusher, why couldn't he have mixed this better instead of just going around claiming to be the brains and guts of Hendrix?), just a flat reading of Stone Free (the album version is better no matter what the brochure sales material here claims), and mostly mumbling echoing behind the guitar in the second title track, which would have had lyrics rewritten, vocals redone, without all of the throat music, and the second guitar redone which here only explores the sound of the guitar effect without going anywhere. In fact one would think that is not Hendrix but a studio guy brought in to posthumously to beef up this remnant of a beginning demo outline, which would never have been released to the public.
Bleeding Heart would have had the vocals redone as well, simply not up to a finished product.
Hear my train almost gets a finish on it, but hear the Jimi Plays Berkeley instead. OR for a glimpse of what Jimi could actually play before the british burned him out, see the twelve string version. What we have here on this mis-disk is still more of a practice session to learn the parts, the movements, to teach Noel how to play, rather than anything for public release.
Anyway, Billy Cox got it infinitely better.
Sunshine has an interesting scratch guitar section which speaks with the percussionist and is reminiscent of Santana of the time breaking down into a long percussion celebration, but nervous Noel kills it with his lead foot stomping all around aimlessly, mindlessly after Noel thinks some actual bass needs to come in but has nowhere to go and no clue what to do.
Jimi needed that bass player from Santana seen in Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director's Cut (40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition with Amazon Exclusive Bonus Disc), not a clueless british cocktail lounge guitarist.
Hendrix needed Mingus Ah Um, or Stanley Clarke, or better, Bootzilla, even that weird guy from Weather Report, maybe any of James Brown's fired bass players, or of course Bass on Top, not this brainfree british bloke.
But he got Billy Cox, and that was a miracle.
Basically this Sunshine is just a jam and not ready for public release, but in the brief percussive section it shows Hendrix playing the guitar as a percussion instrument, wonderful, until Noel kills it.
Fire is okay. This is one of the tunes that Buddy Miles fell apart on during the Band of Gypsies New Year's concert, during the drum fills, he could not keep up and so Jimi swaps out to a Buddy Miles style choral vocal break to get him back on track, see the clip on you tube, and here it is just like a standard pulled out to warm up the frozen Noel. Didn't work.
Red House really needs Noel turned way down to the back all of the way. Friends who went to concerts at the time all say the bass was all they heard, and that early New York tape is all you hear. Here it is too loud and muddy and leaden foot, and kills where ever the guitar wants to go, with brainless white boy BS fills until Jimi has to call it quits instead of suffering through the final verse of his signature song, knowing Noel had already killed it. Another take was not done. Noel had again flunked his screen test.
The weird thing is that bassist Chas Chandler had the rhythm section return to re-record their parts twenty years later, and Noel still stinks.
If only Bootsy had been on tap then, Hendrix could have roared, and flown free, like The Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix wanted to set up, as he had doen for Miles Davis. If only George Clinton - Greatest Hits had been producing instead of Kramer's believing he was the producer instead of just the guy pushing the buttons on the board.
If only John Hammond Jr. had brought his dad along to record those Greenwich Village shows, Jimi never would have had to go to London to get his clown show together and get worked to death, with no time to really record, except those few immortal albums he did manage to release more or less to his satisfaction. Get them instead of this dog: Are You Experienced? [Vinyl], Axis Bold As Love (Vinyl) and Electric Ladyland (2 Vinyl) and hear them again.
Not this.
Description of Valleys Of Neptune
This brand-new, completely unreleased studio album features 12 previously unreleased studio recordings totalling over 60 minutes of unheard Jimi Hendrix. Ten of these recordings were made between February and May, 1969, as the Jimi Hendrix Experience set out to create the sequel to their groundbreaking 1968 double-album Electric Ladyland. The album features ?Valleys Of Neptune,? one of the most sought after of all of Hendrix?s commercially unavailable recordings, and includes exciting 1969 arrangements of the classic signature songs ?Red House,? ?Fire,? and ?Stone Free.? Also includes unheard studio versions of Hendrix?s inspired interpretations of ?Bleeding Heart? (Elmore James) and Cream?s ?Sunshine Of Your Love.? Mixed by Eddie Kramer, the engineer for all of Hendrix?s albums throughout the guitarist?s lifetime. Produced by Janie Hendrix, Eddie Kramer, and John McDermott, the team behind all of the acclaimed Jimi Hendrix CD and DVD releases since 1996.VALLEYS OF NEPTUNE: Track by Track
All of the 12 recordings featured on the album have never before been released on a CD/LP. The songs document the pivotal time period after Electric Ladyland and before Electric Lady Studios and the recordings made there that would later take form as Cry of Love and First Rays.
Valleys of Neptune documents both the final studio recordings Jimi made in 1969 with the original Jimi Hendrix Experience and the first efforts with new bassist Billy Cox. As a number of the song titles will be familiar to fans and buyers alike, the following details the key characteristics of each of the tracks on Valleys of Neptune.
"Stone Free": The original 1966 recording by the original Jimi Hendrix Experience is best known as one of Jimi?s signature songs. The Jimi Hendrix Experience box set (2000) featured a new remake by the original group. Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell, and Billy Cox recorded this version in May 1969. It is a different recording entirely.
"Valleys of Neptune": This track was recorded in September, 1969, and May, 1970. This full-band version has never been released. An extract of a demo Hendrix made of this song -- featuring just Mitchell on drums and percussionist Juma Sultan -- was part of the short-lived Reprise/Polydor album Lifelines, which was in the marketplace between 1990 to 1992.
"Bleeding Heart": This cover of the classic blues song by Elmore James is different entirely from the versions featured on South Saturn Delta and (originally) on War Heroes. This recording has never been issued and features Jimi, Billy Cox, and drummer Rocky Isaac. It was recorded in April, 1969.
"Hear My Train A Comin?": This electric, full-band version is different from the famous 12-string acoustic version that was featured in the 1973 documentary Jimi Hendrix and subsequently on the album Jimi Hendrix: Blues.
"Mr. Bad Luck": Like ?Valleys of Neptune?, a different version of this song was part of Lifelines in (1990). Jimi would later develop this song as ?Look Over Yonder,? issued as part of South Saturn Delta.
"Sunshine of Your Love": A stage favorite for the group during the 1969 period which has never been released.
"Lover Man": Jimi recorded many different arrangements of this song, including the versions on both the Jimi Hendrix Experience box set (2000) and South Saturn Delta. This is an entirely different recording made in February, 1969.
"Ships Passing Through the Night": A never-before-released track taken from the last recording session by the original Jimi Hendrix Experience on 4/14/69.
"Fire/Red House": Both of these songs by the original Jimi Hendrix Experience were recorded at the same February, 1969, session. They feature the expanded stage arrangements Jimi had developed and are not alternate takes of the original 1967 recordings.
"Lullaby for the Summer/Crying Blue Rain": These April, 1969, recordings by the original Jimi Hendrix Experience have never been released.
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