Word: hendrix
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Indeed, the Jimi Hendrix on Band of Gypsys is definitely not the Hendrix that those most familiar with "Purple Haze" know and love. In his all too brief career (Hendrix was a solo act for the four years preceding his death in 1970, at age twenty-six), Hendrix assumed many guises. Perhaps the most serious and introspective version can be found on /Band of Gypsys. The band on this album features a rhythm section that consists of Hendrix's childhood pals, Billy Cox on bass and Buddy Miles at the drums and supplying many of the vocals. Although Miles...
...very last moments of the 1960s, and this accident of fate actually serves as powerful symbol for the whole album. The concert at New York's Fillmore East which comprises this album took place on New Year's Eve 1967-70. The first side consists of two of Hendrix's most powerful artistic statements, epic versions of "Who Knows" and "Machine Gun." These two tracks can be seen to represent an anguished re-evaluation of the end of an era of optimism marked by the late 1960s. The second side of the album consists of four extroverted funk tunes that...
...Knows," Hendrix solos with an absolute seriousness that would soon disappear from records in the face of the absurdity and high camp of Parliament-Funkadelic an other funkers. "Who Knows" is a song about confusion, with Hendrix' ever-changing guitar sound feverishly groping through chaotic fields of sound, as Miles and Cox groove along sympathetically. Hendrix opens his last solo of the ten-minute track with an eerie, apocalyptic, metal-on-metal sound-like a restless spirit trapped in a grotesquely funky prison. Twenty-five years after the fact, it is clear that Hendrix is still the master of pure...
...masterpiece of the album, and arguably of Hendrix' career, is "Machine Gun." With a gloomy sense of foreboding, Hendrix introduces the piece by wishing everyone in the audience a happy New Year, and many returns, bitterly adding, "I'd like to dedicate this, yeah, it's sort of a drag that scene that's going on, to all the soldiers that are fighting in Chicago and Milwaukee and New York, oh yeah, and all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam." What follows is a thirteen minute picture of broken lives and death, an unmitigated tragedy broken only by hints...
...second side of Band of Gypsys tries to put the agony and confusion of the first side out of mind. Hendrix is obviously just as comfortable riffing along to happy Sly Stone grooves as he is in his sonic explorations. The contrast to the first side is somewhat hard to take, especially on the two compositions written by Miles, "Changes" and "We Gotta Live Together," as the audience is encouraged to clap with silly shouts of "Yeah!" "Everything's gonna be alright!" The two remaining Hendrix compositions, "Power to Love" and "Message of Love" are more intriguing. These two tracks...