white knight! I... uh... I have to type, I can't recommend buying Hendrix on C.D.
I'm still using cassettes, double cassette decks, to tape off the radio and make set lists and copies.
When everyone else went disc and couldn't get the tech to burn their own,
maybe almost six years, I was still happy "downloading" with my tape deck.
But this last one I got from a friend, who said he didn't use the cassettes at all,
of course, came with a C.D. player, a three disc rotater.
So I bought Jimi's three albums on C.D. and waited to listen one night,
laying there in the dark, with my new Sony studio headphones.
I wasn't expecting to be disappointed like I was going to Toronto with a friend to buy the first Robert Johnson C.D.,
all his tunes from the two albums I owned. This was mastered from wax cylinders to albums to disc,
and you couldn't hear the bottom E string at all. It bummed out my friend so much, this $82 disc,
that I had to grab his guitar and start playing the part that wasn't there. And Robert Johnson liked his open, bass E string.
Jimi sounds different on disc, not just transferred, but remixed a little.
You can hear the dubs starting and stopping, something I never caught before.
And his singing, some of his words have been altered, changed and removed.
It's just not the same.
And the tone, what massaged your brain on headphones, is now thin, almost shrill at times.
And the bass is coming on strong like a bass line, not like Jimi's overdub use of bass.
I still hear Jimi Hendrix as having the most extensive and artistic use of stereo,
the most overdubs, the most stereo movement, quadraphonic at times,
and the most variety of tones from a single instrument.
May I become as self-effacing and humble as Jimi Hendrix,
someone who saw himself living in a world that's alive, the ocean as alive,
writing his songs to talk about the totality of the human condition,
risking a long career by experimenting with electronics and guitar effects,
while sticking with a reverse-strung, right-handed Stratocaster upside-down.
He must have liked the challenge.
