Supergroups make me itch. Whenever I attempt to think of a good one, I always go through a long list of Multiple Last Named Bands and, one by one, tick them off the list as being horribly overrated and about as 'Super' as a drunken Salvation Army band full of homeless Lebanese people. Cream? Had their moments, but I always found their records rife with stupid crap mixed in with their honkin' singles. Led Zeppelin? One star, a session dude, and two unknowns don't make no supergroup, man. Same with the Jeff Beck Group, who's big names (Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood) didn't become stars until after leaving the group. Blind Faith was a flame out, The Firm and the Power Station sucked ass, the Traveling Wilburys are cute but more fun for the participants than the audience, Bad Company is, well…Bad Company, and ummm….the Highwaymen? Is one of their albums any better than a Willie or Johnny Cash solo album? Man, supergroups are all about ego, and most of the time egos have a way of generating a whole bunch of forgettable crap. I'm not convinced at all that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young didn't follow the exact same road. After releasing two of the hugest-selling albums of 1969 and 1970, egos, like the plague, began to run the band. It took 7 years to finally complete a followup, and the next one took 5 more years after that. This, my friends and drinkin' buddies, is not the mark of a band that is worthy of the amount of respect they continue to receive. Now, 'cos I feel likes it, a full and comprehensive band history that may explain some of my later comments:

David Crosby and Stephen Stills had known each other since the mid-Sixties, sharing the LA club scene while David was a Byrd and Stephen was in the Buffalo Springfield. David played the star figure, had experienced popularity of near-Beatle proportions, and was generally seen as a guru of the hip culture developing in mid-60's Los Angeles, drug use (one of David's more successful 'transformation projects' had been Brian Wilson, who he introduced to weed, and later, LSD. Of course, it ended up completely destroying Brian's sanity and talent for the next 20-odd years, but that's just details.), lots of sex, and the tanned, long-haired 'golden-boy' look that colorful Bay Area hippies thought to be superficial. Crosby had recently been dropped on his ass by the Byrds in a spat involving a song about putting your peenie in two different girls' willies at the same time, and was looking for another band he could codepend with. Stills was a bit more rough-hewn, coming from redneck southern stock and the harder-rocking Springfield, who had recently blown apart when mercurial oddity Neil Young split for a solo career. They met up with little-dude nice guy Graham Nash, who was getting sick of the Hollies, his Brit-invasion pop group who seemed about 3 years behind everyone else (an album of Dylan covers! Who would've thought!?), and decided to enter the weird, party-people world that surrounded Stills and Crosby. They recorded an album of stripped down, high-harmony folk/country rock that had a tasty mix of all their personalities, and soon Crosby, Stills, and Nash was blasting from every girls' dorm in the country. The counterculture had found its first Tiger Beat pinup boys.

Stills, the sorta-kinda leader of the band, thirsted for a harder-rocking sound than what his easy-listening bandmates were able to deliver, and called up old friend and nemesis Neil Young about joining the band. Neil's solo career had started off slowly but steadily, and while he felt that he didn't 'need' CSN (and never would), and certainly wouldn't commit for longer than the project held his notoriously fickle interest (and never would), he joined up as much for wanting to play with Stills as just to see what would happen. After a massively overrated performance at Woodstock debuting both the group as a performing entity and Neil as the new member, the band recorded Déjà vu, which would sell every bit as well as the debut and further cement CSNY as superstars. Superstars of the stature that allowed them to exercise their most long-winded and indulgent natures during their live shows (as captured on the double live 4-Way Street), and create internal clashes that would plague the band for decades. Neil packed up his Legos and left the party in 1971, and the band went on solo-project hiatus until 1974, when a Neil-aborted attempt at a new solo album bit the dust and the band went on it's most massive (and massively overwrought) tour ever. Neil once again brought an end to the festivities and here leaves the picture (other than a short Stills-Young tour and album) until 1988.

During the rest of the 70's, CSN saw increasing marginalization caused by a freakish determination to stick by their folky-hippie guns, their inability to come to terms with their drug abuse, and Stills' arrogant belief that his solo career was more artistically worthy than his work with CSN. By 1977's CSN, they still had substantial marketing power as a trio, but their solo careers had faltered. They kept mostly quiet (drug-induced stupors?) until 1982's Daylight Again, for which Crosby was MIA with a crack habit, but which still generated a couple of strong hits. Throughout the mid-80's, Crosby's 'base habit and correspondingly wacky, didja-hear-what-Crosby-did-last-week-on-the-Santa-Monica-Freeway? high jinks continued until he finally got to check into the popular Sing Sing Hotel for a while. Prison cleaned his ass up, and it seemed that for the next several years CSN (and, once, Y, whose career had suffered some direct blasts in the 80's as well) were attempting another comeback every few years, but their audience was now too ossified and their music too uninspired to sell. CSN has remained in this state of oldies-circuit and PBS-special limbo ever since, with the only source of hope coming from 1999's Looking Forward, which was pretty much a Neil Young-sponsored bone thrown to his former bandmates.

CSN is nothing but a product of it's three members' personalities, a hint of macho rocker (Stills), some pointless, blurry-edged hippie idealism (Crosby), and the melodic, nice pop-guy (Nash), sometimes lent some well-needed direction and edge by Neil Young. It's often said that CSNY's massive popularity was partly based on the public's mourning of the Beatles' breakup; that they were seen as the closest thing to successors to the throne. I actually agree with this idea, but not in the way that you might expect. What the Beatles were to the Sixties teenagers, symbols of their own maturation and experimentation, CSNY were to 70's hippies - symbols of their speedy descent into self-absorbance, hedonistic lack of any form of self-control, and hypocritical ideological/financial dualism. Not to mention how the group abandoned rock music quicker than a pregnant mistress, converting their energetic folk-rock for simple adult-contemporary mush. Lite rock favorites! No shit! Unlike the Grateful Dead, who shared many of the same faults as CSN, they also seemed to lack a  sense of purpose. CSN and it's myriad solo configurations have coasted on the hazy nostalgia of its aging fanbase for nearly 30 years now.

The band, though, does have its positive points: they did sing well, got some great, timely, accessible songs out of Stills and Young (and Joni Mitchell), and were melodic as hell almost all the time. They rocked at times. They admirably kept preaching the gospel of personal freedom and hippie causes like respect for the environment long after that became passé, and generally eased the transition for a lot of aging people from Woodstock 'cool' to old-fogie status. Isn't that worth something? We love our clueless parents, don't we?

Crosby, Stills, and Nash - Atlantic 1969

You certainly can credit (bash) Crosby, Stills, and Nash for one thing: it created California rock. All that Eagles and Linda Ronstadt and Poco and whatnot all started right here. This is the In the Court Of the Crimson King of laid-back early 70's West Coast soft rock, it's very own Ramones, if you will. And 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes' is its 'Rapper's Delight', if you further will. It's that debut that defines the entire scope and range of a new genre (or, well, 'sub-subgenre', since 'Cali-rock' at that time was pretty much just a subset of Country Rock) and even represents some of its best work. I really don't think CSN as a group, Stephen Stills as a writer, or Cali-rock in general ever quite beat the transcendent, sweet harmonies, tough, angular chording, the groovy Eastern-sounding guitar lines flying all about and, dammit…ambition of this multi-part audio Valentine to Stills' then-sweetheart Judy Collins. It casts a shadow of influence over the entire group's career, but Stills wisely never even attempted another song like it. I wouldn't say it's a 'Hey Jude' (or a 'Hey Bulldog'…not a 'Hey Joe', or a 'Hey Ho Let's Go' either…it is better than 'Hey Porter' and 'Hey Pocky Way', though), but it's immediately recognizable and shows that Stephen Stills had the songwriting muscle to back up his new group's status...at least for now.

What's funny is that Graham Nash's work was just as influential as Stills', but just in a completely different way. His sweet, winking 'Marrakesh Express' is the sweet that buoys the rest of the album from otherwise dropping into doldrums. It's a travelogue about going on a train to Morocco (for those of you without smack habits, the 'Marrakesh Express' is code for pretty much any drug shipment from the Middle East) and is just stupid, just memorable enough to count as a 'major' song on this album, besides being a huge hit.

Crosby's compositions continue his mushy tendencies he first introduced as a Byrd ('Guinneveeeeerrreee…she had green eeeyyyyeeeesssss......' and a cammmmmeeellllll tooooooooooooe) his songs are all but unhummable, all shifting time signatures and amazing harmonies that end up doing nothing more than (possibly) setting a mood to smooch to, or fall asleep to, or whatever seems like the most applicable thing to do along to this fuzz. 'Guinnevere' is pretty, but it hardly seems to have any substance compared to Still's stuff, and sounds like it could use Nash's pop editing to bring it into shape.

This album is pretty much relegated to acoustic folk-rock, even when the songs almost sound like they'd be better served electrically (Stills' 'You Don't Have To Cry' sounds very much like a Buffalo Springfield leftover served up back-porch style. Only 'Pre Road Downs' and 'Wooden Ships' rock at all, and Nash's 'Downs' is too lightweight to impress any of these guys heavier fans.

Lyrically, we're more or less on the same goony, hippie page with each other, which means that the topics are Hey, Baby, Let's Get Mellow ('Lady of the Island', 'Guinnevere', Let's Get High and Smiley ('Pre Road Downs, 'Marrakesh Express') and Hey, Square! Doncha Wish You Were Me? ('You Don't Have To Cry', 'Long Time Gone'). It seems that only 'Wooden Ships', written by the entire band, bucks the trend. It's a pretty groovy sci-fi story about post-apocalyptic survival (eating berries, hanging out on wooden ships to escape the nasty 'silver people' on the shore) set to the only overtly 'psychedelic' music and fluid Stills' guitar soloing on the album. 'Long Time Gone', regarding Robert Kennedy's assassination, is sorta muscular, I suppose, but 'muscular' is just not what's in store on this album. It's an album of craft and vocals, not of power and madness, which strikes me as funny because it seems like Stills and Crosby, at least, have pretty good rock pedigrees. But this is the CSN sound, exactly as first mapped out here, and you really shouldn't ask for a lot more. What? They're not the Beatles, fer chrissakes. No prickly barbs underneath the plush melodic handiwork…no John Lennon, just three variations on Paul McCartney and maybe a little bit of George Harrison, that's all.

Capn's Final Word: Exactly what CSN is, though not exactly why it should be that way.

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One of the most gooily-anticipated follow-ups in rock history, Déjà vu seemed to have everything going for it: the debut had been huge, and the band's well-documented set at Woodstock cemented both their counterculture certifications (they'd wouldn't give that stuff out to just anybody, you know! You had to be able to recite all the lyrics from Bob Dylan's pre-1966 output, 'pull a bird' from 20 paces, roll a joint one handed, and personally kick Dick Nixon in the balls) and their popularity, and the addition of Neil Young seemed to be the perfect contribution of some well-needed 'grit'. Now all they needed to do was whip out the perfect, earth-shattering record, hit the Top 10 twelve times in a row, make piles of money, make Hard Days Night II and make an off-handedly offensive comment about Jesus.  And though Déjà vu was, in fact, massively popular and yielded a couple of hits (both Nash's, which tells you more about what intrigued the record-buying public 1970 than all the record guides in the world), it was a false sort of glory. The record really satisfied only the fans - the individual band members all felt they'd been cheated out of a larger portion of the songwriting, the critics thought it was inconsistent, hard rockers wished they'd die in horrifyingly painful shark-bite incidents, you know how it goes. Sometimes you win and you lose, dig?

 Sorry, y'all…I happen to dig this record. I much prefer it to the softy soundalikes on the debut, and of course everything after this album pretty much stank, but Déjà vu is about all the CSNY I need. First thing is that everything here, with the exception of Neil Young's two throwaways on side B, is a strong example of each members' songwriting strengths and few of their weaknesses. Each song almost begs to be looked at in a separate light, away from the other tracks on the record. Probably this is the result of the advanced splintering that had already occurred in the band (tracks were recorded Abbey Road style, with band members rarely even sharing the same room at the same time). Nash's featherweight composing style has matured from the winking dorkiness of 'Marrakesh Express' to something that at least approaches substance - his well constructed odes to domesticity ('Our House' and 'Teach Your Children') may make you think that Nash lives in some sort of innocent, uncynical, Andy Griffith Show parallel universe, but they're real sweet. Idealism, you know…it wasn't uncool yet in 1970, and moreover they're as melodic and succinct as Crosby's songs are amorphous and confusing. Quite a trick, and if Nash is branded as a dork, at least he's branded as the melodic dork.

 Crosby's contributions are still about as indistinct as can be imagined, but he sounds engaged (and on 'Almost Cut My Hair', where he lets his 'freak flag fly' and rants about his hair and having the flu, he sounds frantic) and put a good deal of effort into the title track. Hell, every track on here took like 6 weeks to record, so maybe the whole thing could be claimed to have taken 'a good deal of effort'. Or maybe they just couldn't get their shit together, whatever. If it took this long for Crispy Crosby to sound coherent on 'Déjà vu', that's allright with me, mama…the song is vertigo-inducing in the best possible way, a perfection of the Crosby 'thing' that still lacks memorable melodies and strong vocal touchstones. Too much acid melting all the edges off, I'd say. Too much acid, indeed.

 Neil's compositions as a whole should be considered disappointing, considering the whole 'Country Girl' suite is vanilla crap and the Buffalo Springfield leftover 'Everybody I Love You' a mess that should've stayed in the vaults until the 800-CD Decade II Boxed Set (I heard it'd actually get airlifted into your backyard by cargo helicopter) gets released in 2058. But 'Helpless' is exactly what we want Neil around for…a quietly strong, regretful, sincere ballad based on a maximum of three chords (one of them, under penalty of death, being D major). Neil takes us on a nostalgic and bittersweet journey through his past without the need of a goofy film or a double album soundtrack length. It’s a gorgeous winner in the long history of gorgeous winners Neil's written in his time.

 Still's crazy-ass, multi-part opener 'Carry On' (especially it's dropped-D acoustic guitars on the intro…'I knew, you'd soon be gone.' What, is this 'Judy' after she's dumped Stephen? hrm…) draws immediate comparisons to 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes', but this is a different animal altogether. For one thing, it sorta rocks with an edge (for these guys, a minor chord is an edge) and relies on the massive harmonies this band can generate for it's hooks, as it should. The near-funk second-half jam/choral section is as tight as a Goodyear Blimp, indicating that maybe Stills has been listening to more Family Stone than Carter Family, and the whole song is very impressive as a groovy, rockin' yang to the debut's yin. I also enjoy the folky cautionary tale '4+20' just as much, warning of spiritual exhaustion and self-loathing in the wake of Nash's smiley-face idealism.  It's not as subtle as 'Helpless', but the more I hear it, the more respect I have for Stills' willingness to share a little bit of honest darkness on what could otherwise be seen as an emotionally limited record.  The whole band gets wicked on a contrived-ragged cover of Joni Mitchell's 'Woodstock', which is the only time you'll actually get to hear Neil's and Stills' guitars wrangle with each other like in '67, pretty disappointing for guitar fans, I guess. I personally never figured out what all of the Buffalo Springfield guitar fuss was all about.

 Déjà vu is a blowout album full of great songs by inspired people who were blowing their wad on an album for pretty much the final time (excepting Neil). None of the three principles was ever in higher form musically, varying their musical palatte to include all sorts of groovy shit, yet without leaving their bread-n-banana close harmony folk-rock strengths far behind. Is must've seemed at the time that CSNY could've gone anywhere from here, but it turns out they decided to drop dead, spending the next seven years in insular solo projects and attempting to pull Neil back into the fold. They were trying to duplicate Déjà vu, and I invite you to find out why. 

Capn's Final Word: Everyone peaks at the same time except for Neil, so it sounds like everyone's on an equal footing. A Cali-country-hard-folk-rock masterpiece.

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4-Way Street - Atlantic 1971

Jimi's grand personal statement, made in the studio that he helped create and under his total artistic control, and home to some of his most flat-out astonishing work. This double expands on everything that he'd tried on his first two records, from the hard rock and wiggy psychedelia of Experienced? ('Crosstown Traffic', 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return') to the more melodic work he introduced on Axis ('Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)', 'The Burning Of The Midnight Lamp'), and points much further beyond. Jimi gave us all he had on Electric Ladyland, and unfortunately means he gave us everything he had as well…there's about four or five songs on here that simply bore, and I sincerely don't mean the incendiary blues meltdown 'Voodoo Chile' or the jazzy, mind expanding trip down 20,000 tabs under the sea '1983/Moon Turn The Tides'. Sorry to be shocking…should I put my pants back on again? 

I mean 'Come On' (come on and finish this generic fucking soul cover), 'House Burning Down' ('House Falling Asleep' is more like it), 'Gypsy Eyes' (get in your caravan and move the fuck right on out of town). There's a few more that I probably ought to list, but come on…I've never found these songs to be anything more but as forgettable as Axis and a whole lot less accessible to repeated listenings. There's really a tendency among Jimi's work that seems to indicated that if he can come up with some impossibly difficult riff over a soul groove (or even a dull, plodding riff over a soul groove…see Band of Gypsies) he can come up with a song, but I feel like sometimes Jimi is engaged and sometimes he's not. On the 'Voodoo Children', he's engaged. On Noel's tunes, no way. On 'Watchtower', sure…'Come On' is autopilot. So, Electric Ladyland is far from flawless…as spotty as Michael Jackson's dong and about 100 times as long, that's for sure. But I still love it to death…quite often I'm moved by Electric Ladyland as I am few other rock albums.

I enjoy this album (70% or so, anyway) so much because Jimi is free of the time restrictions that must've stifled him before. The demon rundown dark-blues 'Voodoo Child' (the first one, starring the Jefferson Airplane's Jack Casady and organist Stevie Winwood of Michelob-shilling fame) leads somewhere new each and every one of it's 15 minutes, which is exactly what a blues jam ought to do, and so few people were able to get right when this stuff was in vogue. Even the sidemen play like possessed Haitians, shocking this blues Frankenstein's Monster to life and marching it right on down into the village to slaughter a few merchants. I really cannot conceive of this song losing even one bar (which is precisely what makes the version on the Blues CD so weird as it contains a very different approach to the same jam). '1983 (A Merman I should Turn To Be)/Moon Turn The Tides…Gently, Gently Away' is even more accomplished…a science fiction tale (Jimi and girlfriend build a machine to turn them into mermaids to escape war on the surface) that not only has an intriguing and evocative set of lyrics, but actually has musical passages that - lo and behold!- actually resemble what it might be like to travel through the beauty of the undersea world like a natural inhabitant! Rock music, prog especially, constantly attempts to evoke certain unearthly worlds via musical experimentation, but most of them fail to sound like anything but a bunch of longhair Brits in a studio smoking pot and figuring out new ways to wear ruffled shirts. From the stately melody-line and march-step drumbeats to the echo effects on Jimi's voice, straight through to the 'space' section complete with bass solo (Jimi) and various watery squiggles and moans, and onto the hard-charging roar that accompanies the flute solo, this suite is fantastic. Is it any coincidence it's placed between the jazz-groove bookends 'Rainy Day, Dream Away', and 'Still Raining, Still Dreaming'? I hate to mention what may be obvious to everyone else, (it certainly wasn't to me, not for a long time), but our narrator is hanging out, smoking weed on a rainy day and falls asleep, dreams the whole '1983' mermaid thing (cool dream), and then completes the sequence with 'Still Raining, Still Dreaming'. I mean, that's nearly as cool as thinking up the three Star Wars trilogies all at once, or maybe inventing cigarettes. It's just that cool. Just get over the fact that it's long, that's all you gotta do.

Forget that the dull likes of 'House Burning Down' totally ruin the mood and launch into Jimi's version of 'All Along The Watchtower', which Dylan had released just weeks before Jimi recorded this totally transformed and immeasurably improved version of the John Wesley Harding mood-piece. They're two completely different songs, sharing nothing but a chord sequence, a lyric sheet, and an oppressive foreboding, and I feel that Jimi's peculiar blend of accidental genius and master of technique come together perfectly on this song. Given the right seed, he made it work.

Jimi didn't need a seed for 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return)', which has nothing to do with the other song of the same name other than the supernatural lyrical subject matter, live-in-the-studio recording, and the fact that it KICKS FUCKING ASS. Why more people don't hold this tune up as a simple classic of pure, genuine rock 'n' roll mastery is beyond me. To me, it's the perfection of all things attempted by Hendrix so far. The riff itself is mesmerizing, and Jimi never plays it the same way twice. The Experience latch onto a metallic, funky, heaving bastard of a groove that moves mountains (and makes sand) all by itself. Is it unjustly forgotten because Jimi solos most of the way through? I believe these are some of his most brilliantly off-the-cuff lines ever, and I love it when he makes his Strat sound like a train by flicking the pickup selecter like that. Whenever I try it, I just go *click! click!* as the note dies away entirely too quickly and I look and sound like a retard on his way home from camp. Little things…it's the little things that make Jimi Hendrix a legend. Oh, and the big things, too. Fuck it…it’s everything. You gotta buy this record.

Capn's Final Word: Never mind the bullocks...here's Jimi Hendrix

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CSN - Atlantic 1977.

Yup, Jimi Hendrix did pretty darn well at those big festivals, at least what is evident from his Monterey performance (I've seen the movie, but don't own the disc) and here at the Grandpappy Of Them All, Woodstock. Of course, most of the morons who were there had already decided to go home and Jimi was playing in front of a bleary, early morning crowd (he makes reference to them leaving during his set).

 I hate to say it right in the middle of a Jimi Hendrix review and all, but I have to get my little Woodstock speech off my chest right now. At the same time this was happening, there were a quarter of a million Americans sitting in the mud over in Vietnam for a helluva lot longer than 3 measly days, and they didn't get to go back home to Daddy's tudor in the Hamptons after it was all over with. The fucking Woodstock Generation was a bunch of assholes, everything I see and hear and read reinforces that idea. A bunch of bandwagon-jumpers who were too late for the Summer of Love (itself mostly a sham) and who would later turn from a bunch of brain-dead CSNY fans into a bunch of brain-dead James Taylor fans. Frank Zappa had the right idea about these people…it was simply the cool thing to do at that point, and for every sincere revolutionary and free-thinker, there were probably a dozen good, ol-fashioned conformists who just wanted to get high and get some 'free love' off an Earth Mother with unshaven pits.

 Anyway, whoo! Did you get the license number of that grandstand? Was that John Ashcroft, or what? Whee….Jimi Hendrix rules!

 Or at least, he starts ruling about halfway through this performance, when he finally overcomes his unresponsive backing band (Mitch Mitchell, Billy Cox, a percussionist, Mama Cass howling uncontrollably for 'Just ONE more Veggie Burrito', some guys taking down the stage, and Max Yasgur weeping for the loss of his land to a bunch of idiot unemployed college dropouts) and takes control of his guitar and the set as a whole. Jimi's band, with the exception of Mitch, is inaudible (they were supposed to really suck), so this really is Jimi's show only. The opening sequence attempts to play the human-jukebox thing, and fails due to sloppy backup and general disregard for doing anything interesting with 'Fire', 'Foxey Lady', 'Isabella' and others. It's just not working, and it's clearer to nobody but Jimi himself.

 Starting with 'Jam Back At The House' on through 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return)', Jimi's tattooed noise-rock version of 'The Star-Speckled Banana' that can still get kids banned from performing at the high school talent show, and on into 'Purple Haze' and especially the 'Woodstock Improvisation', Hendrix finally warms up, grabs the reins, gathers everything he's ever shown us and adds more to it by playing one of the great rock music instrumental sequences in memory. He simply throws everything off the edge of the ship, especially on 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return)', where it seems like maybe Jimi is attempting to top all of the performances that took place that week (he succeeds) by simple use of six strings and a series of amplification devices. But, for me, the real kick is the 'Woodstock Improvisation', wherein Jimi simply begins to write an encyclopedia about the universe. This is one of the most impressive pieces of art I've ever experienced at any time…it's violent, angry, sad, and symphonic, and it's not even rock music. 'Improvisation' moves into the cool-down 'Villanova Junction', and everything goes out beautiful. No exactly stoned, but…beautiful.

Capn's Final Word: Once the engine turns over, it's off to the races. Side 2 is like a rush headlong into a hurricaine.

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Daylight Again - Atlantic 1982

Jimi Hendrix had remained listless and unsure of his musical direction ever since the breakup of the Experience following the release of Electric Ladyland. Generally looking for inspiration anywhere he could find it, one of the ways he attempted to resurrect himself from drug-induced depression was to make a return to his R&B roots. He decided that the best move to make was to reaffirm his 'blackness' after spending two years in the spotlight surrounded by two white guys. He formed the Band Of Gypsies with bassist Billy Cox from the Woodstock band (and one of Jimi's friends from his Army days) and star drummer Buddy Miles. The BOG played only three shows, right around New Year's 1970, taking their setlists from Jimi's as-yet-unfinished fourth studio record, and adding in a few old hits and Buddy Miles tunes. The disc I'm reviewing is not the expanded, two-CD set Live At Fillmore East, which contains a more complete picture of the shows, but rather the original, single disc contractual obligation that Hendrix released in early 1970. Apparently the Fillmore discs are astonishing in the same way as Woodstock, but there's little hint of that going on here. Jimi may have been trying to get back to his roots, but I seriously doubt his roots were this unreservedly boring.

 Since these are all-new songs, I really should go through and make some reviews of the actual songs, but it's a seriously rough go as there is really very little difference between them, which means they all attempt to ring the Suck bell on numerous occasions. As it is, only 'Machine Gun' is worthwhile, and it's mostly just a more intense 'House Burning Down' with lots of heavy jams and little or no melody. But it is intense, a cry from a deep, dark nightmare, and unrelentingly depressing. Probably pretty close to Jimi's mood at the time, so I've heard. 'Power Of Soul' is similarly without riff - its just a bassline over which Jimi noodles (yup, just sorta playing around the edges…quite a bit different than the masterful lead guitar of the Experience era) for inordinate lengths of time before the sing-songy chorus (rhymes with 'anything is possi-bowl'). 'Message Of Love' is even weaker, it sounds unfinished and raw. Miles' two compositions are even worse, two rejects that Jimi can't even solo over convincingly. Vocal-wise, compared to Buddy, Jimi's Roy Orbison. It's a sad, dull, endless listen. Never before has Jimi's guitar sounded so flat and lifeless, but he keeps trying to grind the thing further and further into the ground with each gratuitous solo.  

 It's amazing that people have the gall to call this stuff 'funk'. What, pray tell, is funky about Buddy 'fathead' Miles playing the same four-floor sock-sock drumbeat song after song (besides 'Machine Gun', where he gets to do some rolls at least). Cox is just about incompetent whenever he tries anything but the root of the chord, so it's not like we're getting much help from that side, either. It all, once again, falls on Jimi's shoulders, but sadly, this time it doesn't work. There was more funk on the first side of Are You Experienced? (shit, there's more funk on the first side of Abba's Arrival album, fer chrissakes), so anyone who claims this is the birthplace of funk-rock simply has it dead wrong. Just because these guys have black skin don't mean they ought to be playing together.

 A little explanation may be necessary as to why this was released at all. Hendrix's Capitol recording contract was about to run out, and he wanted to release an album that a) didn't include any Experience songs, b) didn't include anything that might make it onto his unfinished First Rays Of The New Rising Sun record, and c) could be completed quickly and easily so as not to take time away from the arduous recording of Rays. Bingo…Band Of Gypsies. It had the commercial drawback of being live and not including any of the hits, but I guess people underestimate the drawing power of Billy Cox. Anyway, don't buy this. I'll reserve judgment on Fillmore East until I hear it, but if this heap is any indication, you better just stick with Woodstock.

Capn's Final Word: Either a malicious editing job of a great concert or a really awful performance. Which one remains to be seen.

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The first of producer Alan Douglas's corpse-chomping post-mortem albums released only in the purest respect for what Jimi Himself might've wanted (right), The Cry Of Love was a collection of the studio tracks Jimi was most close to completing at the time of his death. Of course, all of this has now been supplanted in it's entirety by the comprehensive CD-age First Rays of the New Rising Sun so let's move on there for more info on the tracks themselves.

I actually own this CD from way back, and from a pure point of view, it's quite listenable. I wouldn't describe the tracks as sounding unfinished, just not really well-written. Who knows what might've happened between the point at which the recording stopped and the hypothetical release date (who's to say what may have been in Hendrix's mind, eh?), but it's my hunch that this is probably pretty close to the mark.

Capn's Final Word: Let the shameless captialization of a defenseless dead guy get underway! Got your cutout bins ready?

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Live It Up - Reprise 1990