Anyone who cares about rock music, classic or otherwise, is already familiar with Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. As Rolling Stone’s David Fricke writes in the booklet of the album’s latest reissue, it was Hendrix’s “most ambitious and confessional album of his supernova lifetime.”
Marking 50 years since Electric Ladyland’s release, the Deluxe Edition’s four-CD box set includes the glorious contents of the original LP with such stone-laying, storm the mountain top tracks as “Crosstown Traffic,” “Voodoo Chile” and his reimagining of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” Interesting for fans is the bonus CD, At Last… The Beginning, songs caught on reel-to-reel at New York’s Drake Hotel in 1968. Those recordings were the sketchbook from which much of Electric Ladyland was drawn. Hendrix played quietly, brooding over “Angel,” tinkering with “Cherokee Mist” and sounding, on “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be),” for all the world like David Bowie in his The Man Who Sold the World phase.
The set also includes a 1968 Hollywood Bowl concert and a documentary. Fricke’s prose in the profusely illustrated book puts it all in context. And it would be over soon. Two years after Electric Ladyland, Hendrix was dead.
