Monday, September 24, 2018

Jimi Hendrix - Send My Love to Linda (Edited Song) (1970)

Here's something a little different, because this is just a single song, instead of an album.

I'm posting this because I've made some drastic edits that I think turned out well. I plan to include this on an album of all acoustic Jimi Hendrix songs from 1970, but I probably won't get around to post that for a good while, since I want to go through the rest of his stray track albums in chronological order as well as some other stuff before I get to his acoustic stuff. In the meantime, the world needs a decent version of this excellent Hendrix song! ;)

Hendrix recorded two very different versions of "Send My Love to Linda." One was just part of the song, about a minute and a half, with him singing and playing an acoustic guitar by himself. The other was an instrumental version done with a full band. In early 2018, a "new" official Hendrix album "Both Sides of the Sky" was released. In my opinion, it was a severe disappointment. If you listen to it, it seems as if they're scraping the bottom of the barrel, when in fact I know from bootlegs there's a lot of great material that has yet to see official release. But just as bad as the poor inclusion choices are the clumsy and strange edits they've made. "Send My Love to Linda" is probably the worst case. They took the short acoustic version and merged it with the full band instrumental version, sticking them together with a very obvious edit in the middle of the song. Anyone with a music editing problem could have done better. It's a shame that Hendrix's musical legacy is being treated so shabbily.

I also have drastically edited the song, but I've tried a very different approach. In my opinion, the acoustic and full band versions are too different to be joined together. However, I discovered from a bootleg that Hendrix actually played the song acoustically three times on January 16, 1970, the one day he recorded the song that way. Sadly, each of the three takes are incomplete, with the minute and a half version being the longest. But each take is different, with slightly different lyrics and guitar work. So I carefully edited different parts of all three takes to make one version that's three minutes and 14 seconds long. I took various pieces from here and there to give the song an intro and outro, so it sounds like a full version of the song, even though it actually isn't.

Is it right to tinker with the work of a genius like Hendrix? Probably not. But his record company already did a hack edit job on his latest official archival release. This shows that if you're going to do that, it can be done in a better way.

https://www.upload.ee/files/15239498/JimiH_SendMyLoveLindaSongEdit.zip.html

5 comments:

  1. Sounds good and captures Hendrix's concept for the song.
    As a suggestion for an album, take a look at:
    - Jam Back at the House (lot's of edits and different mixes of it)
    - Machine Gun (studio versions)
    - Belly Button Window (there's a band backing version + voice & guitar version)

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    1. Thanks. Isn't "Jam Back at the House" just a nickname for the song "Beginning"? (I guess it's also known as "Beginnings") If so, I've got that covered. I also am going to do something with the studio version of "Machine Gun."

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  2. Could you please re-upload the file? It's no longer available.

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