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Valleys of Neptune (Special Edition with 2 Bonus Tracks) Overviews
Special edition includes two bonus tracks!
Track listing:
1. Stone Free
2. Valleys of Neptune
3. Bleeding Heart
4. Hear My Train A Comin'
5. Mr. Bad Luck
6. Sunshine Of Your Love
7. Lover Man
8. Ships Passing Through The Night
9. Fire
10. Red House
11. Lullaby For The Summer
12. Crying Blue Rain
Bonus tracks
13. Trash Man
14. Slow Version
Customer Review
There are so many posthumous Hendrix recordings out there it borderlines on blasphemy. The novice Hendrix listener might not "experience" Jimi Hendrix for what he really was...one, if not the greatest, rock guitarists of all time. For those who are just getting into what Hendrix was about, this album is NOT for you. Grab "Are You Experienced", "Axis Bold As Love" and
Electric Ladyland". Trust me, those albums will BLOW YOUR MIND! "Valleys Of Neptune" however, is an album for the truly devoted Hendrix fan. What I like most about this album is it's rawness. It's like being in the studio with Hendrix while he's just having fun and jamming. And who wouldn't want to buy THAT ticket? The sound quality is superb, and the basic tracks haven't been ruined like some other posthumous releases, like on "Crash Landing" and "Midnight Lightning", where random studio musicians actually OVERDUBBED over the original tracks. (Alan Douglas...you should be ashamed of yourself.) On this album however, I'm glad this has been released, and I do not feel like it's a rip-off to make money. There is quality stuff here.
Track By Track:
1.) Stone Free - Basicly an alternate version of the original. I prefer the original, but this is a fun and interesting listen.
2.) Valleys Of Neptune - I'm not a fan of this song, and I doubt it would ever have been released on an actual Hendrix approved album. If so, it would have been MUCH more orchestrated, perhaps like 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be) from Electric Ladyland. Still, it's great hearing Hendrix' in his writing process.
3.) Bleeding Heart - I LOVE THIS VERSION. It's the best studio version I've heard. The version from "War Heroes" just didn't have the bite and rawness that this classic blues tune deserves. Hendrix kicks into this version hard and heavy from the start. Fantastic guitar work here, and a great variation on the original vocal approach.
4.) Hear My Train A Comin' - Most Hendrix fans will tell you Hendrix' 12 string acoustic version is the best, and they would be correct...but this electric version is really nice also. I have a version from a live LP called "The Jimi Hendrix Concerts" that I feel is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but this is a great listen as well, and once again the guitar playing is other-worldly.
5.) Mr. Bad Luck - There was another version of this song called "Look Over Yonder". I'm not a fan of this song or either version. This is not Hendrix' best song writing by a long shot, but still...it's Jimi Hendrix on guitar.
6.) Sunshine Of Your Love - Hendrix was a major Clapton fan and he did this song instrumentally with The Experience many times live, and it was a staple of his live shows. It's finally nice to hear a studio jam of this song. It has become my favorite version, and the guitar playing is VERY NICE!
7.) Lover Man - Again, a song Hendrix performed live many times. This studio take is nothing short of amazing, and is a fresh approach to the song. Again, it has become my favorite version.
8.) Ships Passing In The Night - This is actually a slowed down bluesy version of "Night Bird Flying", but only a true Hendrix head would hear that. Again...this has become my favorite version of "Night Bird Flying". Why it's called "Ships Passing In The Night" on the album is beyond me. I'm hoping they didn't change the name to make it seem like a new song. It isn't, but it IS a totally different approach to the way "Night Bird Flying" was eventually released.
9.) Fire - Nice alternate version, and GREAT drumming, but the original is much better.
10.) Red House - I have a plethora of "Red House" live versions, and they all bring something unique to the table. This alternate studio version is very nice also, with some great blues licks of course, but with no real new surprises. The major problem with this version is that the final verse is faded out, without any "I know her sister will!" lyric at all. Highly anti-climatic to say the least.
11.) Lullaby For Summer - Once again I am baffled why this song is named "Lullaby For Summer" on this album. It's basicly a jam based off the opening riff to "Ezy Rider", with some very cool hook riffs thrown in the middle section. The thing is...IT ABSOLUTELY ROCKS! "Ezy Rider" was never one of my favorite Hendrix songs, but I am BLOWN AWAY by this instrumental jam version! I can't praise it enough.
12.) Crying Blue Rain - A VERY nice bluesy jam. I love the guitar tone. The only drawback with this track is that I believe it loses it's "blues mood" when the band speeds it up towards the end. But still...just wonderful guitar playing.
Bonus Tracks:
13.) Trash Man - This is actually the instrumental "Midnight" sped up just a bit. Great licks and a nice version...but the original has much more feel in my opinion.
14.) Slower Version - A nice instrumental jam. However, the sound quality doesn't seem to match the rest of the album, and the guitar tone seems very overdriven. Still, Hendrix' guitar playing shines brightly on this track.
There will probably be more posthumous releases to follow, but who knows if there will EVER be another Jimi Hendrix CD release of unreleased material as strong as this one. So to me, it's like Christmas came early. I hope this review helps in Classic Hendrix this CD you are listening to what I want and desire If you decide to buy, I recommend buying the album now!
Demos showing why Noel had to go - C. Scanlon - among us humans
Only reason to get this disk is to see why the no-talent, leaden footed, british lounge player Noel had to go. Far too late but better late than never.
If these were Noel's audition tapes, he would't have made it into Spinal Tap, let alone the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Sounds like Sid Barrett's band on a bad night (did they ever have a GOOD night or too weighted down by the drugs?). Sounds like the bass foot dragger from Black Sabbath failing on Iron Man, or that fake tongue guy from KISS.
Not someone supporting the greatest African-Cherokee-American guitar player ever.
Sounds like someone with no clue what Black American music sounds like.
Proof here Noel had to go, like these tapes, straight into the dumpster instead of reeking making money for the vultures now, again, and again, and rehashed again.
We used to buy this junk hopefully from the discount cut out bin in the early seventies, and now they fork this slop to us again?
Back away from this disk. Get the in-his-lifetime officially released stuff instead, not all this posthumous grave rakings.
Like, here Hendrix is going places within the BB King idiom with Red house and all Noel can do is drag him down off tempo, like a dopey bass player out of Black Sabbath or KISS (Eddie Kramer's next effort), no idea what Jimi was doing and how to support it underneath, but always acting like a brainless pedestrian stepping on to the tracks of a roaring freight train, holding it down, and stopping it in its tracks. No wonder Jimi just stops the recording altogether instead of getting into the final verse.
Noel cannot dance and so Jimi cannot fly. Jimi tries to start up a number of quiet passages of blues and a number of explorations, but Noel believes he is the dominant star, can't accept he is working for a black man, doesn't know where to go, gets scared, but takes over and kills it.
To see where Jimi wanted to go, hear the symphonic blues of Red House off In the West recorded live in San Diego. Even there he gets frightened in the quiet segment and whips into overdrive instead, cause he knew otherwise Noel would kill it, live.
Here Noel's over dominant and mindless thumping with a few meaningless white bread fills to nowhere kill it. If Kramer is so great, how did he let this travesty of mismixing through? Couldn't he have put that bass in the background just a bit more?
And if Chandler had them all back in the studio twenty years later to redo their parts, how come they still couldn't do any better than this?
And why is it on the market at all??
To make more money off the unobjecting corpse, whose spirit would burn these tapes.
Here alone is one more reason alone why Noel had to go, never mind all his racial slurs and challenged personality, thinking himself the star and not the backup, this former back up for british cocktail lounge crooners like Englebert Humperdink who had no idea at all what the blues, and Jimi Hendrix, were all about. This is Spinal Tap.
There is nothing here Hendrix approved for public release and with a reason. Most of the tracks, in particular the first two, have vocals that would have been redone entirely, off tune, off key, in the first with no echo (if Kramer is such a whizz bang button pusher, why couldn't he have mixed this better instead of just going around claiming to be the brains and guts of Hendrix? If Kramer was such a whiz bang button pusher believing himself the PRODUCER, why couldn't he have miked the percussion of Jerry Velez and Jorma at Woodstock who banged their hearts out for hours that morning?), just a flat reading of Stone Free, off key and behind the music, like for a demo tap being laid down to be redone, (the album version is better no matter what the brochure sales material here claims), and mostly mumbling echoing behind the guitar in the second title track, which would have had lyrics rewritten, vocals redone, without all of the throat music, and the second guitar redone which here only explores the sound of the guitar effect without going anywhere, trying t reliably reproduce what was then a new sound on new technology, an open wail. In fact one would think that is not Hendrix but a studio guy brought in to posthumously to beef up this remnant of a beginning demo outline, which would never have been released to the public.
Bleeding Heart would have had the vocals redone as well, simply not up to a finished product.
Hear my train almost gets a finish on it, but hear the Jimi Plays Berkeley instead. OR for a glimpse of what Jimi could actually play before the british burned him out, see the twelve string version. What we have here on this mis-disk is still more of a practice session to learn the parts, the movements, to teach Noel how to play, rather than anything for public release.
But Noel could not play. Most of the studio stuff is Jimi playing the bass, anyway.
Anyway, Billy Cox got it infinitely better.
Sunshine has a real interesting scratch guitar section which speaks with the percussionist and is reminiscent of Santana of the time breaking down into a long percussion celebration, but nervous Noel kills it with his lead foot stomping all around aimlessly, mindlessly after Noel thinks some actual bass needs to come in but has nowhere to go and no clue what to do.
Something tribal that Mickey Hart or Peter Gabriel would have died for, Spinal Tap Noel kills.
Jimi needed that bass player from Santana seen in Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director's Cut (40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition with Amazon Exclusive Bonus Disc), not a clueless british cocktail lounge guitarist.
Hendrix needed Mingus Ah Um, or Stanley Clarke, or better, Bootzilla, even that weird guy from Weather Report, maybe any of James Brown's fired bass players, or of course Bass on Top, not this brainfree british bloke.
But he got Billy Cox, and that was a miracle.
Basically this Sunshine is just a jam and not ready for public release, but in the brief beautiful percussive section it shows Hendrix playing the guitar as a percussion instrument, wonderful, until Noel kills it. It hints at what the extended dance versions at an Isley Bothers concert with Jimi Hendrix might have been all about. Too bad no one recorded them.
Fire is okay. This is one of the tunes that Buddy Miles fell apart on during the Band of Gypsies New Year's concert, during the drum fills, he could not keep up and so Jimi swaps out to a Buddy Miles style choral vocal break to get him back on track, see the clip on you tube, and here it is just like a standard pulled out to warm up the frozen Noel. Didn't work. Noel froze, and kills it.
Red House really needs Noel turned way down to the back all of the way. Friends who went to concerts at the time all say the bass was all they heard, and that early New York stadium tape it is all you hear. Here it is too loud and muddy and leaden foot, and kills where ever the guitar wants to go, with brainless white boy BS fills until Jimi has to call it quits instead of suffering through the final verse of his beloved signature song, knowing Noel had already killed it. Another take was not done. Noel had again flunked his screen test. And killing it we never heard it again. Worked to death by his gangster British management (damagement), a week without sleep, he was too tired for it on the Isle of Wright.
The weird thing is that bassist Chas Chandler had the rhythm section return to re-record their parts twenty years later, and Noel still has no clue.
If only Bootsy had been on tap then, Hendrix could have roared, and flown free, like The Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix wanted to set up for him, as he had done for Miles Davis. If only George Clinton - Greatest Hits had been producing instead of Kramer's believing he was the producer instead of just the guy pushing the buttons at the board.
If only John Hammond Jr. had brought his dad along to record those Greenwich Village shows, Jimi never would have had to go to London to get his ill clown show together and get worked to death, with no time to really record, except those few immortal albums he did manage to release more or less to his satisfaction. Get them instead of this dog: Are You Experienced? [Vinyl], Axis Bold As Love (Vinyl) and Electric Ladyland (2 Vinyl) and hear them again.
If only Les Paul had stuck around that New Jersey nightclub and discovered Jimi Hendrix before the british colonialized him, worked him to death, exploited him and left him out on the trash heap to die like all of their colonial acquisitions.
And we are left with only this, not the new rising sun he foresaw, if he were free.
The only book worth reading about his life was called Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child of the Aquarian Age retitled 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child.
Get that, not these warmed over discarded tapes profitting the leeches and the vulture, who put out two versions of this in order to double their profits from the truly obsessed. I mean, here we are "blessed" with trashman and a Slow Version?
Hear House Burnin' Down instead . . .
Only 3 Truly *New* Songs On This *New* Album Chips Away 3 Stars... - Christopher Elliott -
Let me first say that I really enjoy listening to this CD. It IS good stuff but the major problem I found was the major false advertising on the part of Experience Hendrix and Sony Legacy. They put a big sticker right on the front of the packaging that says "Over 60 Minutes Of Unheard Jimi Hendrix" when that's far from the truth.
What you *actually* get is 1 new track and 2 new instrumental tracks for a total of 3 tracks that are truly *new.* The other 11 tracks are songs that have appeared on another main Hendrix release in the form of another version. Technically you could say that "Crying Blue Rain" is a new song because Jimi says "Yeah" a handful of times on the song but besides that one word, there are no lyrics.
Astonishingly, Experience Hendrix and Sony Legacy took the liberty of actually re-titling some of the songs just to make them appear *new* but anyone who knows many Hendrix tunes will pick up on these.
Below I've listed the track list with two sets of parentheses. The first set of parentheses tells if the song is an alternate version of a released song as well as clarifies if it was re-tilted and which song it actually is. The second set of parentheses tells which Hendrix album the song appeared on.
1 - Stone Free (Alternate Version Of Song)(Are You Experienced?)
2 - Valleys Of Neptune (New Song)
3 - Bleeding Heart (Alternate Version)(South Saturn Delta)&(Blues)
4 - Hear My Train A Comin' (Alternate Version)(Blues)
5 - Mr. Bad Luck (Alternate Version Of Look Over Yonder Just Re-titled)(South Saturn Delta)
6 - Sunshine Of Your Love (New Instrumental)
7 - Lover Man (Alternate Version)(South Saturn Delta)
8 - Ships Passing In The Night (Alternate Version Of Night Bird Flying Just Re-titled)(First Rays Of The New Rising Sun)
9 - Fire (Alternate Version)(Are You Experienced?)
10 - Red House (Alternate Version)(Blues)
11 - Lullaby For Summer (Alternate Instrumental Version Of Ezy Ryder Just Re-titled)(First Rays Of The New Rising Sun)
12 - Crying Blue Rain (New Instrumental)
13 - Slow Version (Available On Hear My Music From Experience Hendrix/Dagger Records)
14 - Trash Man (Available On Hear My Music From Experience Hendrix/Dagger Records)
Now, I can hear the die hards already saying "This is new Hendrix man, these are studio recordings." I agree with that to an extent. However, regardless if this is "Jimi" stuff or not, false advertising is false advertising.
When you buy "Over 60 Minutes Of Unheard Jimi Hendrix" music, and you've *heard* 11 of the 14 songs on various other Hendrix albums, that's an issue. Experience Hendrix knows much better than doing what they've done with this "new" album, which is demonstrated by their release of the albums South Saturn Delta and First Rays Of The New Rising Sun which really DID include new tracks.
It appeared when they released South Saturn Delta and First Rays Of The New Rising Sun that they were attempting to clean up the scattering of releases that chopped up all of Jimi's work after his passing which I applaud.
Instead of being billed as a new *album*, Valleys Of Neptune should have been accurately billed as *studio sessions & alternate takes* with a couple of bonus tracks to account for the 2-3 new songs. Another accurate way to think of this disc is as if it were one of the discs from the 4 disc, Jimi Hendrix Experience Boxed set which had alternate versions of songs with a couple of new tracks sprinkled on each disc.
Again, I do love this CD. If properly advertised, I would have had no problem giving this release 4 solid stars, possibly 5. I am keeping it and playing the heck out of it...this is great music and is a great disc.
Hopefully Experience Hendrix has a quality control team that reads market reactions such as these reviews on Amazon and will take This is the heart and the right of the data is to facilitate the release of, I do it because it is not a material fact, we hope the new album.
Not Essential, But a Nice Bonus - Steve Vrana - Aurora, NE
This is a Target exclusive. Get 'em while they last! Here's the info on the two bonus tracks:
"Slow Version" (instrumental) 4:59, Recorded at Olympic Studios, London, February 14, 1969; Jimi Hendrix, guitar; Noel Redding, bass; Mitch Mitchell, drums; produced by Jimi Hendrix, engineered by George Chkiantz
"Trash Man" (instrumental) 7:24, Recorded at Olmstead Studios, New York, April 3, 1969; Jimi Hendrix, guitar; Noel Redding, 8-string bass; Mitch Mitchell, drums; 埃迪克拉默 the work produced by Jimi Hendrix.
Bonus, but not required (James goal) and 25 won a Hendrix album is a good buy me a gift.
Related Products
- "Valleys Of Neptune" Vinyl 45 (Limited Edition)
- Valleys Of Neptune (2 LP Vinyl)
- Are You Experienced CD/DVD
- Electric Ladyland CD/DVD
- First Rays of the New Rising Sun CD/DVD
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