On October 16, 1968, The Jimi Hendrix Experience released their final album, Electric Ladyland. The sprawling double-LP opus proved to be the last studio album Hendrix would release before his death in 1970. The album has been lauded as one of the greatest of all time, largely because of the famously inspired, experimental state of mind that Hendrix maintained while working on the record. Now, fans can revisit Electric Ladyland and that creatively fruitful period in Jimi’s brief life from every angle with an upcoming 50th-anniversary deluxe edition package. The Electric Ladyland deluxe addition will feature outtakes, live concert recordings, a documentary on the making of the album, photo inserts, a book, and more, and is set to be released on November 9th.
As one of Electric Ladyland‘s engineers, Eddie Kramer, explained to Rolling Stone,
Jimi was very much in the realm of experimentation. When I first started working with him, [Hendrix manager] Chas Chandler told me, “The rules are, ‘There are no rules.'” We could just kick down the doors to convention and experiment with wild things and Jimi’s sound.
The Electric Ladyland 50th-anniversary deluxe edition will be available as both a 3-CD/1-Blu-ray set and as a 6 vinyl LP/1 Blu-ray set. As Rolling Stone notes, “Famed engineer Bernie Grundman remastered the album from the original analog tapes and carried out an all-analog, direct-to-disc transfer for the vinyl edition. In addition to the documentary, titled At Last … the Beginning: The Making of Electric Ladyland, the Blu-rays contain the 5.1 surround sound mix and the original stereo mixes in 24-bit, 96 kHz sound. A pared-down version will be available on streaming services.” The accompanying 48-page book includes essays by Rolling Stone’s David Fricke and producer John McDermott along with photos Eddie Kramer captured during that time, Hendrix’s handwritten lyrics and notes to his record label, and more.
The set will also include a volume of outtakes from the sessions, Electric Ladyland: The Early Takes, originally captured by Hendrix himself in a New York hotel room in 1968. In addition, it will feature a live selection, Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live at the Hollywood Bowl 9/14/68, culled from a recently discovered two-track soundboard recording of the Experience’s gig and the famous band shell that included material from each of their albums as well as a cover of Cream‘s “Sunshine of Your Love”. The streaming version of the release will not feature either The Early Takes or Live at the Hollywood Bowl. Instead, it will feature the original album with tracks recorded during the sessions that appeared on Hendrix’s posthumous albums.
The accompanying 48-page book includes essays by Rolling Stone’s David Fricke and producer John McDermott along with photos Eddie Kramer captured during that time, Hendrix’s handwritten lyrics and notes to his record label, and more.
You can watch a video of Kramer explaining the background of the monumental album in the video below, via Rolling Stone:
Engineer Eddie Kramer Talks The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland
[Video: Jimi Hendrix]
