They’re simply a range of tones and textures arranged into a narrative that impossible to miss. But the noises Hendrix wrings out of his strat aren’t gimmicky or overly literal in an Adrien Belew “now-my-guitar-sounds-like-an-elephant” sort of way. It’s rock music as journalism, as Hendrix makes his guitar sound like everything from circling army choppers to falling bombs to automatic rifle fire slicing the jungle in half.
Band of Gypsys mostly exists as a showcase for its second track, “Machine Gun”-12 minutes and 38 seconds of expressionistic guitar playing, designed to conjure the experience of being a soldier on the ground in Vietnam. The drummer’s vocals are intrusive, sure. The most infamous part of the song are Miles’ backing vocals, including a prolonged scat breakdown that sounds like Tweety Bird ripping huge chunks of cotton off a didgeridoo-sized vaping device. One thing is immediately apparent: that the lockstep R&B grooves of the Miles/Cox rhythm section are a far cry from the paisley slop of the JHE’s Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell-way more James Brown than Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. The record begins with “Who Knows,” nine minutes of gangster bop strut anchored by Cox’s funky bass, which skips along like a hero pimp in no particular rush make his next bitch-slapping appointment. Rather, it’s an imperfect grab bag of improbable guitar pyrotechnics and off-the-cuff creative experimentation capturing one of the signature rockers of the 1960s making a productive-if ultimately doomed-pivot toward the 1970s. Needless to say, the salvaged results don’t exactly paint a complete portrait of a true circa-1969/70 Jimi Hendrix concert going experience. The album’s six tracks-“Who Knows,” “Machine Gun,” “Changes,” “Power of Love,” Message of Love,” and “We Gotta Live Together”-were actually culled from three separate Fillmore East shows across two days, selected from 24 total songs performed live arguably a pretty low yield. That the album was recorded at all was to fulfill a legal obligation, settling a dispute between Hendrix and his former manager. By the time of the Fillmore shows the group had realigned once again into a power trio, retaining Cox but adding future California Raisin Buddy Miles on drums and backing vocals. Some context: the legendary Jimi Hendrix Experience had broken up the previous year, leaving a solo-ish Hendrix to perform at 1969’s Woodstock with an ad hoc lineup consisting of Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Billy Cox, among others. Recorded at New York’s Fillmore East on New Year’s Day 1970 it would be just a scant eight months later-September 18-that the 27-year-old musician would embark on his ultimate, fatal misadventure. Not that he had to worry about it all that long. Hendrix himself was never a huge fan of Gypsys. But there are some clues, most prominently in Band of Gypsys-the 1970 live album whose troubled production vexed Hendrix in life but in death stands as final, fascinating document of an icon in transition. Would Hendrix have kept pace with the trends of the 1970s, ‘80s, or ‘90s? Could he have done disco? New wave? Punk? Could Jimi Hendrix rap? Thanks to a big pile of barbiturates and cold vomit we’ll never really know. Part of what makes the question such a rich thought experiment is that the Seattle-born, London-based guitar god is so inextricably tied to the flower-power psychedelia of the late 1960s that it’s hard to imagine him operating in any other era. It’s a quandary posed by THC-addled multiverse hypothesizers since time immemorial: What sort of music would Jimi Hendrix have made, had he lived? Band of Gypsys, Jimi Hendrix (1970, Capitol)
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