Rating: 9
Best Song – “(1983) A Merman I Should Turn to Be”
I’ve no doubt listened to Electric Ladyland
more than any other Hendrix record, yet I still find myself unsure of how to rate
it. Back when I was in high school, I had an album review site for about a
year, partly as a project for my Creative Writing class. At the time, I
reviewed Ladyland and gave it a rating of i, representing an imaginary
number. This was basically my 11th grade way of saying that I had no
idea how to rate it properly. Ten years later, that hasn’t entirely changed.
The reason is that it’s a quintessential sprawling double album, and a
particularly sprawling one at that. There’s a 15 minute live blues jam which I
find tedious, a 20 minute near-progressive suite about escaping into the sea in
a dystopian future which I find brilliant, and then another 45 minutes or so of
more typical Hendrix songs that nonetheless range all over the map in terms of
quality.
Ultimately, I went for a 9 rating because I am inclined to reward albums that reach high peaks, and at its
peak, it’s as good or better than the Experience's debut. Of course, Ladyland rates lower because
it’s inconsistent as hell, but I’m willing to take the bad with the good in
this case. It starts out well enough, with the title track being almost a soul
song, but you’ve never heard a soul song with such a stirring, otherworldly
guitar solo. “Crosstown Traffic” is an addictive short rocker that compares
well to the better songs on Axis like “Spanish Castle Magic.” And then
we get a 15 minute blues jam (“Voodoo Chile”), and whatever momentum there was
comes to a halt. “Voodoo Chile” seems to be a fairly divisive track, but I
definitely count myself among its detractors. There is some great soloing by
Hendrix to be sure, but that still only takes up about 25% of its length. The
verses move at a crawling pace and I inevitably find myself totally bored
waiting for the next eruptive solo. Worst, it feels very out of place to me, not
really fitting into the fantasy world that the rest of the album conjures.
And although there is yet another Noel Redding tune
I find inexplicably charming (“Little Miss Strange”), there’s a fairly
pedestrian sequence of pop-rockers that follow it up. I do like the weird
guitar intro to “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” (good thing, because the rest of
the song is only so-so), and “Come On, Pt. 1” is generic, but has some energy,
but I can’t help but feeling that “Long Hot Summer Night” and especially “Gypsy
Eyes” are ultimate examples of how you can only do so much with a song that is
mediocre to begin with. I’m probably being a bit harsh, but while I have to
admit the production on “Gypsy Eyes” is really cool, with Jimi’s guitar moving
from speaker to speaker, the song itself is a total bore.
And so nearly halfway through the album, Electric
Ladyland would
definitely rate as his weakest release to date. Fortunately, Jimi saved all his
tricks for sides three and four. The
aforementioned “Rainy Day, Dream Away” suite is where all his mysticism and
sonic exploration really comes together for me. I always got a weird
undercurrent from his other albums where he seemed to be positioning himself as
this benevolent alien come to grace the world with his guitar playing (I
suppose it’s not really an undercurrent since the opening “EXP” on Axis
outright states as much). And this is where I finally feel the vibe I think he was
always aiming for. “Rainy Day, Dream Away” sets the mood with Jimi falling into
a dream, which then leads into the epic “1983… A Merman I Should Turn to Be,”
which plot is described in the opening paragraph. Then we get nine minutes or
so of ambient noise (“Moon… Turn the Tides Gently, Gently Away”) before the
climactic “Still Raining, Still Dreaming,” which reprises the opener, but with
furious guitar solos that slowly build in intensity.
I often think that the concept of how well an album
flows together is somewhat overrated and that the individual song quality is
ultimately the primary driver in how much I like an album. But this suite is
definitely an example of where the songs work much better together in unison
than they would apart. Most notably, I can get behind the more ambient “Moon”
because it slowly builds to the climax of “Still Raining, Still Dreaming” while
utilizing some of the themes introduced earlier in the suite. It also helps
that “1983” is just an awesome song, a rare plaintive rocker for Jimi, and a
strangely touching one at that.
After what would seem to be the ultimate
demonstration of his talents, Hendrix again slightly deflates the mood, with
another fairly generic rocker (“House Burning Down”) but then again totally
redeems himself with the closing duo of “All Along the Watchtower” and “Voodoo
Chile (Slight Return).” I’m an unabashed Dylan fanatic, but if you put a gun to
my head, I’d probably choose the Hendrix version. As well-trod as it is by
radio, it just has a totally natural flow to it, with seemingly effortless
guitar solos that never diminish in their greatness. And “Voodoo Chile” has one
of most Hendrix’s iconic riffs, and is also probably the single greatest
demonstration of his guitar technique, with its monstrous walls of sound that
famously, were played only by one guitar.
So yeah, the highs are really high, and if
the lows are kind of low, so be it. There’s enough great material here to keep
any classic rock aficionado satiated for a long time.
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