Jimi Hendrix - Message to Love - Non-Album Tracks (1969)

I want to get back to posting more Jimi Hendrix. As I've been working my way chronologically through his career, I've reached late 1969, which means his time as part of the Band of Gypsys.

The Band of Gypsys actually was together only for a short time, a couple of months. They had some studio and rehearsal sessions in December 1969 in preparation for their first concerts, on December 31, 1979 and January 1, 1970. Then they had some more studio sessions in January 1970. They started a third concert on January 28, 1970, but Hendrix apparently was having a bad acid trip at the time and the concert quickly came to an end. The band collapsed immediately thereafter, in controversial circumstances. (Some think Hendrix's manager Michael Jeffery gave Hendrix the bad acid in hopes of ruining the band, to pressure him to reunite with the more lucrative Experience band.)

As a result, there's a limited amount of material for me to choose from to make Band of Gypsys studios albums. (There's no point in touching the material from their two New Year's live shows, since that is so well known.)  Luckily, it turns out I was able to find about one album's worth from the December 1969 material, and another album from the January 1970 material. This is the first one.

There are all sorts of ways to organize Hendrix's material. This album starts to get into the songs that would show up on posthumous releases like "The Cry of Love" and "First Rays of the New Rising Sun." I'm not going to worry about any such overlap, because the idea here is to imagine what a Band of Gypsys studio album (or two studio albums) could have looked like, and obviously if that kind of thing would have come out in Hendrix's lifetime then the posthumous releases would have looked different.

I had a challenge of limiting myself to a maximum of 50 minutes or so of music with each album. To do that, I edited the instrumental version of "Born under a Bad Sign." The song comes to a complete stop after five minutes and then resumes for a couple more minutes, but I edited it to end at the stop.

Also, I really wanted a studio version of "We Gotta Live Together," since that was a key Band of Gypsys song. However, the only studio version I could find, on bootleg, lasts less than a minute! So I used that, but I added four more minutes from a soundboard concert recording from Newport, California, in June 1969. The Band of Gypsys didn't exist yet then, but Buddy Miles was playing with Hendrix on that day, and they were the two key figures in that song (which is mostly a song by Miles). So this is the closest I could come to a studio sounding version without using anything from the two Band of Gypsys New Year's shows.

Aside from the two above mentioned songs, everything else here was recorded on December 18 or 19, 1969, but they've come out on a variety of different archival albums, since the people putting those albums together make little to no effort to organize his music chronologically. The songs come from "Voodoo Soup," "People, Hell and Angels," "The Baggy's Rehearsal Sessions," "The Jimi Hendrix Experience" (box set), and one song, "Who Knows" comes from a bootleg. "Born under a Bad Sign," mentioned above, was recorded slightly earlier, on December 15, and was released on the album "Blues."

01 Message to Love (Jimi Hendrix)
02 Born Under a Bad Sign [Instrumental] [Edit] (Jimi Hendrix)
03 Earth Blues (Jimi Hendrix)
04 Hoochie Coochie Man (Jimi Hendrix)
05 Who Knows (Jimi Hendrix)
06 Them Changes (Jimi Hendrix)
07 Burning Desire (Jimi Hendrix)
08 Ezy Ryder (Jimi Hendrix)
09 We Gotta Live Together [Edit] (Jimi Hendrix)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15120758/JimiH_1969f_MessagetoLve_atse.zip.html

By the way, I suppose I should list the artist as "Band of Gypsys" instead of "Jimi Hendrix," but I like having Hendrix's name on all of his songs for all of his albums, so I'm doing it this way for simplicity's sake.

The cover art comes from a 1968 concert poster by the great poster artist Rick Griffin. The headliner was for the band Iron Butterfly, and Hendrix wasn't on the bill. I changed the text. I picked this particular cover art because Griffin did another poster for a Hendrix show that's very similar artistically, and I'm using that for the other Band of Gypsys album.