The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Bold As Love boxset reviewed

The popular caricature of Jimi Hendrix is that of the sensual hedonist, heroically stoned as he reclines on scatter cushions in some swinging West End apartment, being attended to by a bevy of supermodels. The truth is that he was one of the hardest-working men in showbusiness.

Throughout 1967, the Jimi Hendrix Experience played an astonishing 265 concerts, and if the band weren’t playing haphazardly scheduled dates across Europe and North America at the behest of their manager Mike Jeffery, they appeared to be in a recording studio. In a fertile and febrile year filled with landmark albums – from Sgt Pepper to The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn; from The Doors to The Who Sell Out; from Forever Changes to Disraeli Gears – Hendrix managed to release not one but two stone-cold classics: May’s Are You Experienced and December’s Axis: Bold As Love. Hendrix was not just responding to every other rock, soul and jazz legend of the era; he was in furious competition with himself.

Axis is now seen as a transitional LP – a waystation between the rambunctious, hit-packed debut and 1968’s looser, more experimental Electric Ladyland – and it comes across as something of a rushed job. Hendrix famously lost the masters for the first side, which had to be hurriedly recreated from older sources, and he was unhappy with the production. The album certainly makes things hard for itself: it kicks off with a dismal comedy skit and you have to wait until the third track, “Spanish Castle Magic”, until you get that reassuringly Hendrix-y mix of machine-gun grooves and crunchy sharpened ninths (those wonderfully dissonant Hendrix chords that manage to be both major and minor at the same time).

But what’s immediately apparent is that Hendrix’s writing had come on leaps and bounds from the first album. The tone is set by “Up From The Skies”, possibly the only piece of lounge jazz about the perils of anthropogenic global warming, in which a million- year-old alien returns to Earth to inform mankind that it is destroying its habitat. Instead of the nihilistic blues of Are You Experienced (“loud and brash and frustrated”, as Jimi put it), the songs on Axis are much more personal, romantic and spiritual, and Hendrix is expanding his tonal palette, not just with new electronic effects for his guitar (courtesy of Roger Mayer) but also by trying out random instruments in Olympic Studios in Barnes (glockenspiel, recorder, harpsichord, Steinway grand).

The all-too-brief “Little Wing” is a masterpiece, one of the album’s many hymns to womanhood, that sounds like Dark Side Of The Moon-era Floyd with jazz chops; “Castles Made Of Sand” sees Jimi baring his soul about his troubled family upbringing; “If Six Was Nine” is a magnificent sludge rock opera which sees Hendrix planting his freak flag at psychedelic rock’s peak. Even Noel Redding’s oft-derided “She’s So Fine” has a unique appeal: a piece of London-accented freakbeat that sounds like Syd Barrett fronting a particularly brutal Who.

Hendrix has already been the subject of countless posthumous releases, so it’s somewhat remarkable that this package contains some previously unheard material, including a ton of alternate instrumental takes from the Axis sessions. Guitarists will be reassured to hear evidence that Hendrix is fallible – a fine take of “Wait Until Tomorrow”, for instance, is felled by a couple of bum riffs around the three-minute mark – and there are several unfinished guitar sketches which could be taken in multiple directions.

It’s also interesting to hear how the songs evolved in the studio. Early versions of “Up From The Skies” show the band slowly transforming it from a ham-fisted, Status Quo-like shuffle into a piece of featherweight swing, with Mitch Mitchell switching from sticks to brushes and Hendrix turning down the distortion and going into Freddie Green-style rhythm playing.

An early take of “You Got Me Floating” starts off as a Motown pastiche and ends up as a monstrous, Led Zep-sized freakout. There’s also an early take of the contemporaneous single “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp” without the baroque harpsichord, with Hendrix carrying the entire riff on guitar (amazingly, the first time he’d used a wah-wah pedal).

This is also a chance to hear Hendrix in conversation with Swinging London. “The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice”, a single recorded during the Axis sessions, appears in several mixes here, each wonderfully insane, like every track on Sgt Pepper being played at once, with Jimi sounding like Gil Scott-Heron as he narrates a voyage through the solar system.

There is also a concert from Sweden from September 1967, which starts with a faintly shambolic version of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and then – dutifully – runs through most of the tracks from Are You Experienced. You can almost hear the frustration from a trio who had already recorded a whole other album and started on a third, and it’s fun to hear them going wilfully off-piste during versions of “Purple Haze” and “Foxey Lady”. But that’s the thrill of this package – it’s the chance to hear three of rock’s greatest musicians audibly straining at the leash as they play some of their most disciplined and cohesive songs.