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The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Electric Ladyland

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What does it sound like?:

The cover’s just awful, for a start. I’m talking about the original UK release, with all the naked ladies. (I’ve used the alternative cover here, to spare your blushes). Hendrix himself famously hated it, publicly expressing his anger at the record company for going behind his back.

I wish I could find the full quote where he explains why he hates it, because it’s unwittingly hilarious, and it undermines any notion you might have that he was somehow a progressive feminist seeking to restore the dignity of these women. Turns out he LIKED the nudity… it was just that the lighting and wide angle made them all look distorted and ugly. (Shades of Spinal Tap: ‘What’s wrong with being sexy?’…. ‘No…. SexIST’…)

This kind of tragi-comic anecdote is indicative of the sloppiness that’s made Hendrix’s recorded output and subsequent legacy such a shambles. Never mind the endless bootlegs – even the official releases are a mess of half-baked packages and ill-timed reboots. In his lifetime, Jimi was a loose cannon with no real guiding hand, spewing out content with nary a game plan. So the chaos is understandable.

(Shame he never had a marketing team with the same focus as Dylan, a kindred spirit in the creativity stakes – both value feeling over rational thought, and have a tendency towards faux-intellectual gibberish, so both absolutely need outside guidance. Gibberish can be exhilarating when it’s packaged and polished).

Electric Ladyland, as a package, is a sprawling disaster of a thing. It’s the sound of someone at the top of his game, given all the drugs, girls and freedom he could ever want, firing off in all directions and deluding himself that he’s making great art. It’s a real shame, because the good bits are achingly, soul-shatteringly good (which I’ll get on to in a minute). At this point in his career he had the ability to hone his craft into a condensed, polished masterpiece. In short, he could have done a Jimmy Page and made a Led Zeppelin IV. But he didn’t.

Instead, we get a ragbag collection, trailing in the fag ash of psychedelia (a busted flush of a movement by ’68). A double album, naturally (because why not?), plastered with sloppy mixing and tacky effects. I can’t bear to listen to the thing all the way through.

We get worthy but endless blues jams (Voodoo Child), thin pop fluff (Little Miss Strange) and (save us) jazz funk (Still Raining, Still Dreaming).

He misfires right off the bat, with the pretentiously titled ‘… And the Gods Made Love’, a case study in how to waste time in an expensive studio by making funny noises. And he’s not Al Green, so track two, ‘Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)?’, is comically poor – a horny young man trying to sound sensitive by writing bad poetry.

But then Crosstown Traffic kicks in, and suddenly he soars. That’s premium grade Hendrix in a bottle right there. Sounding like a steroid induced re-make of ‘Season Of The Witch’ crossed with ‘Hey Bulldog’, the guitar is stripped back to choppy basics (even playing such primitive stuff, no-one ever quite sounded like Jimi hitting a guitar), twinned with a piano so tightly compressed it sounds like a wasp. It also has a break beat to die for and an addictive kazoo riff. (Yes, kazoo).

All of a sudden, the misogyny makes sense. Instead of being tacky, it makes you smile and pumps you up. His ego inflated by The knowledge he has a bigger ding a ling than Chuck Berry, Jimi is singing a breezy and confident ode to casual sex, with a succession of gloriously ridiculous car/libido metaphors (‘Ninety miles an hour is the speed I drive’, ‘Tyre tracks all across your back, baby’….).

He even resists the urge to lay down a solo, preferring to let the pop energy of the song speak for itself.

Skip to the end of side four and we get Crosstown Traffic’s equal, Voodoo Chile (Slight Return). Again, this is Hendrix at his absolute best. In a delicious, snakey little riff to start things off, he pretty much closes the book on wah wah guitar. (Twenty little seconds that no guitarist before or since has matched for sheer funkiness. He should really have started the album with that).

Mitch Mitchell’s drumming was uniformly superb throughout the career of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and on Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) he outdoes himself. With this kind of slow-paced, bluesy groove, so many drummers would be unable to avoid sounding lumpen, but Mitchell dances all over the place, a wash of airy cymbals and an insidious, chugging, rumba-inflected rhythm. This grounding gives Jimi the chance to go wild on top.

(I don’t get the criticism of Mitch Mitchell. I’ve come to the conclusion that it all stems from a campaign of jealousy started by Ginger Baker. Well, Ginger was wrong. And John Lennon’s regrettably short-lived supergroup The Dirty Mac is a demonstration of how much better even Clapton sounded with Mitch. I love Cream, I really do, but I’m acutely aware of their limitations. Tin hat duly donned).

There are sporadic little masterpieces dotted throughout the four sides of the LP (All Along The Watchtower turns Dylan into cutting edge, apocalyptic pop; Burning Of The Midnight Lamp is gorgeous harpsichord balladry), but overall the excess is tiresome.

I’ll concede that 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be) deserves its thirteen minutes. It’s a strange science fiction opus that goes off into uncharted psychedelic oceans for what seems like an age, before climaxing in a truly thrilling massed guitar opera.

What does it all *mean*?

I think it’s proof that, in terms of studio output, Hendrix is best served by a single, well curated Best Of CD. Alternatively, if you want to experience the full effect of him wigging out live, go for the live footage like Monterey or Woodstock or (my favourite) The Lulu Show appearance.

Goes well with…

Browsing for records in a dusty second hand record shop. I can imagine the guy behind the counter playing this at earsplitting volume while you thumb through old Yes albums.

Release Date:

Might suit people who like…

Early Yes, early Floyd, Sly Stone, the Monkees’ weirder cuts, Zappa’s tamer cuts, Funkadelic, Jeff Beck, Led Zep. Plus I sense a certain affinity with the Stones’ On Their Satanic Majesties Request.

3

Comments

  3. But the sprawling indulgent double album seems so much of the times.

    Hendrix just wanted to play , play and play some more and a record seems to be documentation of what he happened to be playing at the time as opposed to “making a record”.

    Mitch Mitchell ? I’m not a drummer but I’ve always preferred Buddy Miles.

  5. Well I disagree that EL is anything but a masterpiece. In fact the only thing that I don’t like about it is the tawdry UK cover. Jimi’s preferred front cover was a photograph of the Experience and some children clustered around a monument in Central Park.

    I think that the three original Experience studio LPs are practically perfect, with the exception of the Noel Reading songs and vocals. There are no more than a handful of consecutive studio album trilogies that even come close to matching this run. Bowie: MWSTW, HD, TRAFOZS; Dylan: BIABH, H61R, BOB; Nick Drake studio canon and maybe the Stones trilogy centring on SF…

    You don’t like Voodoo Child (long version)? I am amazed. Try it on headphones – the entire history of the Blues condensed to one epic. Me, I love all the phasing and FX.

      • Winwood and Clapton wigged out on Voodoo Chile at their Madison Square Garden concert …rather outstays its welcome at over 16 mins. They also do Little Wing, which is much better!

        • Clapton/Winwood also do Them Changes from the Band Of Gypsys album.

          I must say I thought the version of Little Wing on the Layla was a little pedestrian and perhaps the only duff track on the album

          • I quite like it revisited on the Rainbow album tho. But then that was the first version I ever heard. It’s a pedestrian arrangement brought to life by Clapton and (I presume) Ronnie Wood’s duelling and interweaving lines. The harmonised vocals work quite well too. OOAA!

            • I’ve kind of erased the Rainbow Album from my consciousness. The original LP suffered from terrible, muddy sound, not helped by having about six guitarists on stage at the same time. Eric appeared to be doing less than the other five, it must be said.

              The CD has better sound and many bonus tracks, but it’s still not in my top 10 favourite Clapton albums.

              • I love it. That and EC Was Here my favourite EC live albums, notwithstanding individual tracks from Live Cream and Wheels of Fire. Possibly my single favourite EC album. As you say, the CD was even better. How he could have left that version of Bell Bottom Blues off the original is beyond me.

                • I must give it another spin today and see if I’m remembering it wrong. I have the feeling Eric wasn’t really ready for it when they dragged him out of his heroin haze for the Rainbow show. I seem to recall it took another year or two before he really came back to playing live.

                  • Maybe that aspect of things being a bit touch and go is what appealed to me. Certainly his concerts later that year were more polished, but with polish I personally felt something was lost.

                • What’s the one off EC Was Here when you can hear him calling the changes? That’s great. Almost gets me over my disappointment that the back cover doesn’t deliver what the front suggests.

  6. Nice work Arthur. I’ve always maintained the first two Hendrix albums (AYE and Axis) are virtually perfect, while Electric Ladyland is a sprawling, flawed masterpiece. This album was when the drugs really kicked in and Jimi thought he could do anything he pleased.

    The fact that Jimi gifted Noel Redding a song on the album (Little Miss Strange) was evidence of late 60s misguided democracy. He’d also allowed a Redding-penned song (She’s So Fine) on Axis: Bold As Love. Generic rock pot boilers both.

    Oh and thanks for the obligatory DONOVAN reference with Season Of The Witch.

    Here are a few of my copies of EL. Yes, like Tommy, Wee Tam and The Big Huge and a few other late 60s doubles, it was also issued as two single LPs for those who couldn’t afford to buy the full thing in one hit (double LPs really were twice the price of a single LP back then).

    http://i.imgur.com/MmWW78Y.jpg

      • Double LPs released as two single LPs seems to have been a Polydor innovation from around 1968/69. Tommy and EL were both on the Track label, while the ISB’s Wee Tam was on Elektra and both were part of the Polydor empire at that time.

        Cream’s Wheels Of Fire (also on Polydor) is another example.

        I’m trying to think of others, but it’s too early in the morning here.

    • Both single halves of EL currently for sale in my local Wantage vinly store. Having bought a wafer thin remelted No Parlez copy in the 80s with the mucky sleeve, I’m not tempted. Why so many copies JC?

      • In my view there are some albums one cant have too many copies of. Original pressings of important records are like first editions of books to me.

        I have a few more copies of EL including the original Aussie pressing which was a reversed version of the US version, with the group photo on the front.

  7. Here’s a better picture of that naughty UK pressing of Electric Ladyland. Note one of the girls is holding a copy of Axis: Bold As Love.

    From Wiki: Hendrix had written to Reprise describing what he wanted for the cover art, but was mostly ignored. He expressly asked for a color photo by Linda Eastman of the group sitting with children on a sculpture from Alice in Wonderland in Central Park, and drew a picture of it for reference. The company instead used a blurred red and yellow photo of his head, taken by Karl Ferris.
    Track Records used its art department, which produced a cover image by photographer David Montgomery, who also shot the inside cover portrait of Hendrix, depicting nineteen nude women lounging in front of a black background. Hendrix expressed displeasure and embarrassment with this “naked lady” cover, much as he was displeased with the Axis: Bold as Love cover which he found disrespectful.
    The cover was banned by several record dealers as “pornographic”, while others sold it with the gatefold cover turned inside out.

    http://i.imgur.com/wQfM34a.jpg

    • As I said in my review, I’m certain I once read a Hendrix quote where he talked more about his ’embarrassment’ over this cover. I wish I could find it, because otherwise it sounds like I’m making this up.

      It was along the lines of… ‘Man I hated that cover, those poor girls…’ (good so far)… ‘I mean, they were really pretty chicks, and it would have been fine, but the photo was all dark and distorted so it made them look ugly… ‘ (Spinal Tap).

  8. I consider it his masterwork (not to denigrate the first two albums in any way) and, like all the best double albums, it’s the sprawling and varied material that makes it so.

    Jimi had the goods and, allowed the freedom to express himself fully, did his talent justice on EL.

    As for Mitch, he never played better than on this album, especially on the longer tracks.

  9. Yes I knew you were in Honkers. Good to have you back – lest there be any confusion Mojo is now Johnny Concheroo and Burt Kocain is HP Saucecraft well was but seems to have taken extended sabbatical.

  10. I’ve been saying this for years to anyone who will listen! My favourite was always AYE, but agree about the single vinyl version above – what a record that would have been…I’m going to playlist that.

    I always thought the best posthumous releases came before the current lot got their mitts on the archive – Cry Of Love, Rainbow Bridge, and, later, Voodoo Soup, are all great listens.

    • In the summer I inherited a Barclays vinly of Cry of Love – a hugely satisfying album, if clearly not in the same league as the JHE material. I knew all the songs from The First Rays… but they sounded better constituted like that.

      I loved the Blues CD that came out in 1994. Not just very good to listen to, but a laudable attempt to tutor younger Jimi heads in the ways of blues righteousness.

      • The thing about Cry Of Love is that it contains songs Jimi had been working on for an album before his death. After he died it was cobbled together as Cry Of Love in an assumption that this is what Jimi would have wanted.

        Since 1971 there have been several attempts to re-constitute Jimi’s final album under different titles. None of which compare with the three studio albums released while he was alive. I bought Cry Of Love on release in 1971 and have a nostalgic fondness for it, but in reality the entire concept has always been a compromise based on assumption.

  11. I’ve wasted time and money on non Experience Jimi Hendrix albums….. My introduction was a cassette of “Smash Hits” which I played to death and to be honest was probably enough for me but I went for AYE, ABAL and EL and loved those too, even the funny little pop songs and the elongated blues songs because they were still great songs to my ears, I love all 3 equally. Unfortunately I got carried away and started buying blues collections and others that I played once and never went back to.

    Great review by the way………

  12. Last heard my ‘nude’ copy a year ago, I’ll dig it out again.

    Jimi Hendrix….1968….Track Records….erm, it’s pretty much perfect (isn’t it?).
    Can’t think of too much better since. Like finding fault with the Brazilian 1970 team!

    Long Hot Summer Night, Gypsy Eyes and Crosstown Traffic are my faves, and I might be alone here, but I always really liked She’s So Fine (from Axis) and Little Miss Strange.
    Noel’s songs just sound like mid-60s pop songs by The Who, The Kinks or The Move….that’ll do me all day.

    • I was always amazed by Hendrix’s output from September ’66, when he arrived in the UK to November ’67, when I think Axis was released. An amazing amount of songs, mostly brilliant, the production of which was pretty radical at the time.

  13. The only Jimi Hendrix LP I like as an album after the first three is the masterful live compilation Hendrix In The West. The vinyl version of HITW is just about all the live Jimi that most people will ever need. Beware: the CD has 2 hugely inferior tracks swapped in, presumably for legal reasons.

    I have never liked the Band Of Gypsies record (Machine Gun excepted) – it isn’t a good band and the music lacks discipline. If Jimi had a weakness it was the inclination to “jam”.

    • Why isn’t it a good band? It’s a black band and feels a lot funkier than Experience. A black funky band make far more sense with his musical history and where he was headed > Miles etc.

      The Second concert from the Filmore East recently available is a corker too.

      Buddy Miles’ Changes is rather good and he can sing too.

      • Band Of Gypsies is a great album and IMO together with AYE, Axis and EL, it completes the quartet of truly essential Hendrix records.

        There is a Classic Albums TV programme covering Band Of Gypsies. I found it fascinating, but also also disappointing in many ways, mainly because of the reverse racism it contains. The thrust of the programme is that the albums Jimi made with those white dudes the Experience are OK, but when he finally got together with the brothers to make Band Of Gypsies, well that’s when we really saw how good he was.

        I thought those first three Experience albums were so great precisely because they married the white psychedelic music which had exploded in London in 1966/67 with the black American funk and blues that Jimi had grown up playing.

        To suggest that Jimi was only a black music artist is missing the point, I feel.

    • Just one more thing @Artery and I’m not picking a fight – but the observation that Jimi had a weakness in his propensity to jam. To me that is like saying Indian food would be so much better without all that spice. Jamming is the very essence of what he does. The songs are really platforms for him to go where he wants. He was really a soul/funk/blues/ jazzer. Taken to England by Chas Chandler, teamed up with some whiteys and embraced by a white rock audience.

      But surely that is not really what the man was about.

      • It seems to me that after those 3 Experience albums Jimi floundered. Maybe because Chas bailed out during EL. Jimi was not a good self editor; he needed someone to make him work harder and hone those jams to the point where they were finished, polished songs. He had a tendency to get an idea and abandon it. Then do another jam, itself to be jettisoned unfinished. I think much of Cry Of Love etc consists of half finished songs.

        I’m not putting down his guitar playing, far from it. It was self doubt that was the problem. You can hear him verbalise it during the shows where he thinks it just isn’t happening. It’s pretty unprofessional at times tbh.

        • The story is that Jimi had never written a song until instructed to do so by Chas. The first was Stone Free the B-side of Hey Joe. This was followed by the entire AYE album which he knocked out in short order. It’s possibly the best debut album this side of Please Please Me. The boy done good.

          • I’ve got lots of the post-EL stuff, packaged, repackaged, tarted up, tweaked etc. Nothing disguises the paucity of the underlying material. Bang on the money Artery. But then, when your whole schtik is so groundbreaking, and you get bored of it, what the hell do you do nezt? Who else was breaking musical boundaries 68-70? The only new thing on the block was rehashed blues, space/psych/stoner rock (which EL had touched on) and a bloke with a Stylophone – the latter far less incendiary and radical than Hendrix’s own breakthrough material. Arguably, glam and hard rock a few years later were merely retreads of elements of Jimi’s earlier flamboyance. The guy ran out of road, having changed everything.

    • Perhaps we should agree on the spelling before we go any further. It’s Band of Gypsys, not Gypsies, as I’ve been spelling it throughout this thread.

      But that review is fair enough. Not sure about the list of effects Jimi used on stage though. I saw him use most of those listed in 1967/68

  15. I struggle most with the long jam/proto heavy metal/black T-shirt wearing stuff.

    Lauded elsewhere, the 15 minute Voodoo Child could be gently removed from Electric Ladyland and you’d get few complaints from me.
    Much like The Doors, I appear to prefer all the shorter/lighter/filler tracks in between the bombast.

    One Rainy Wish, Remember, Gypsy Eyes, Little Wing, The Wind Cries Mary, Drifting, Angel, Night Bird Flying, Crosstown Traffic, Highway Chile…..the lighter, almost more feminine, songs.

    But, hey, now it looks as though Donald Trump is going to be President, I’ll take ANY Jimi!

  16. A bit more about the British cover: Art director was David King (also art director at The Sunday Times), the photographer was David Montgomery. Both had done “The Who Sell Out” the year before, and they only had two days to get it to the printers. They obviously didn’t get the chance to check any proofs, because the printing went horribly wrong – the picture turned out dark and greenish. There are outtakes from the session in several books on cover design, and they all look marvelous, almost like a Playboy spread: nice skin colors and perfect lighting.
    The Hendrix quote about the cover was, “I think it’s sad the way the photographer made the girls look ugly. Some of them are nice-looking chicks, but the photographer distorted the photo with a fish-eye lens or something. They messed about and, although the girls were pretty, they came out disfigured. That’s mean.”
    In Melody Maker, November 9, 1968 he said, “People have been asking me about the English cover and I don’t know anything about it. I don’t decide which pictures will be used on my records. It’s not my fault. I don’t even know what’s the B-side to “All Along The Watchtower”…”
    In the “Raver” column of the same issue, one of the girls from the cover, Reina Sutcliffe, commented, “It makes us look like a load of old prostitutes. It’s rotten. Everyone looked great, but the picture makes us look old and tired. We were trying to look sexy, but it hasn’t worked out.”

    http://chickswithdisks.wordpress.com/2016/11/10/ladyland-slight-retouch/

    • Great research Fatima.

      As you seem to work in the “biz” do you know any more about the splitting of famous double LPs such as EL and issuing them as two-part individual albums. As I said, It seemed to be a Polydor innovation.

      • It was one of those short-lived fads that Polydor in Germany came up with (another was issuing albums as budget-priced editions with empty, blue-coloured covers that only had the album title and artist in neutral type). I have Cream’s “Wheels Of Fire” as two separate LPs…

        Polydor was making lots of money then (late-sixties/early seventies) from their monthly James Last-number-1-album, so apparently some marketing departments could do what they wanted.

          • Are we talking about the Backtrack series? They were late 60s reissues of albums on the Track label (thru Polydor) and sold for a quid. The early versions had sleeves featured a big picture of a kid puffing on a huge joint, but later pressings reduced the image to one corner of the sleeve only. Here are the Backtrack version of The Who Sell Out and Jimi’s Axis

            http://i.imgur.com/0kRfPvE.jpg

            http://i.imgur.com/UF8sLoS.jpg

            http://i.imgur.com/OlXGyXZ.jpg

                    • There were 14 albums in the Backtrack series all released within seven months of each other in 1970. The first 5 or 6 had the big picture of the doobie smoking kid on the cover and the rest had the austere sleeves shown above.

                      Here’s the complete list.

                      BACKTRACK 1 – VARIOUS ARTISTS (May 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 2 – VARIOUS ARTISTS (May 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 3 – THE WHO and JIMI HENDRIX (May 1970) (Contained Previously Unreleased STEREO Mixes of WHO Songs)
                      BACKTRACK 4 – THE WHO and JIMI HENDRIX (May 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 5 – THE WHO and JIMI HENDRIX (May 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 6 – VARIOUS ARTISTS (Soul) (May 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 7 – VARIOUS ARTISTS (Rock & Soul) (November 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 8 – THE WHO (Mono Version of “A Quick One”) (November 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 9 – THE WHO (Stereo Version of “Who Sell Out”) (November 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 10 – JIMI HENDRIX (Stereo Version of “Are You Experienced”) (November 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 11 – JIMI HENDRIX (Stereo Version of “Axis: Bold As Love”) (November 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 12 – ARTHUR BROWN (Stereo Version of “The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown”) (Nov 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 13 – MURRAY ROMAN (Stereo “You Can’t Beat People Up And Have Them Say I Love You”) (November 1970)
                      BACKTRACK 14 – THE WHO – THE OX (John Entwistle songs) (November 1970)

                      http://i.imgur.com/mOvAW5Z.jpg

                    • I’ve seen the Backtrack albums in VG+ condition selling for about £15 in London. The one that intrigues me is Backtrack 10, credited as mono on the cover but which as Johnny points out, is the stereo AYE. And since BT10 is the first time the stereo was made available in the UK, that would make it arguably more collectible than the others.

                      Actually, from what I can gather it’s a mish-mash of different mixes. Most of the record is the US stereo mix, but Can You See Me and Remember are in mono and others (Love or Confusion) sound like that old chestnut ‘mono reprocessed for stereo’

                      As usual with Jimi, nothing was ever straighforward.

                    • The odd one out there is the Murray Roman comedy album BT 13.

                      It was a straight reissue of one of the two albums by the US comedian released on Track. I listened to it recently and was surprised to remember that between the jokes it contains mash-ups of actual rock tracks of the era.

    • That’s exactly the quote I was thinking of, Fatima – thanks!

      If I remember rightly, it was included in the booklet notes for that 1993 release that’s mentioned on this thread. I think the 1993 releases (with the Blues compilation and the six extra tracks on the Are You Experienced? album) are still the best, most “definitive” Hendrix releases yet.

      The later BBC compilation was good though. (I think there was an earlier BBC compilation with far fewer tracks).

    • The bottom left is the best one, but that’s not saying much (is the bottom right one meant to be 3D? what a dreadful thought…) Anything is preferable to that bloody Yewtree sleeve.

      One of the advantages of iTunes etc is that you aren’t stuck with the original artwork if you don’t like it. I replaced An Old Raincoat….’s awful cover image with a full-frontal of the original Vertigo label. Lovely.

      • Yewtree sleeve. I like that. There was loads of that kind of stuff around in the late 60s/early 70s and no one seemed overly bothered by it. Someone should start a thread…. etc

        I was listening to Zappa’s Brown Shoes Don’t Make It only yesterday and was reminded that there are some very suspect lyrics in there, even by Frank’s standards.

  20. Didn’t Alan Douglas (hmm….) put out AYE, Axis and Electric Ladyland in updated (i.e. horrible) CD sleeves, that had no link with any of the 60s releases, in about 1995?

    • They were released in 1993 and were replaced by the Experience Hendrix versions in 1997.

      The 1993 CD of AYE had the 6 tracks from the first three singles at the start of the CD then, when the Experience Hendrix version appeared those tracks were moved to the end of the CD.

  22. As a footnote to Jimi’s “I don’t decide which pictures will be used on my records. It’s not my fault…”, I came across this story about the “Axis” sleeve. Apparently Jimi suggested a painting, “something with Indian gods” for the cover. Business being what it was in the sixties, he next saw the printed and already released long player at his record company. His reply? “Err, I meant American NATIVE INDIANS…!”
    No wonder he sent them detailed sketches for the next one. Which were ignored, of course.

  23. All this criticism of the EL cover! When I was a curious teenager, there was only one Jimi studio album that was getting my hard earned pocket money. And it was definitely the one I could listen to and strengthen my right arm with…

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