2/5
Valley of Neptune
Has any act’s back catalogue been abused, misused and mistreated quite as badly as Jimi Hendrix’s? Almost anything that can be done to squeeze more money from this particular stone has been done. Just when you think the bottom of the barrel has been scraped – surprise – archivists reach down deeper.
Valleys of Neptune arrives 40 years after Hendrix’s death, and the disc, with its ugly cover reminiscent of the psychedelic vomit that’s adorned countless bootlegs over the years, reportedly marks the tip of an as-yet-unreleased iceberg. Jimi’s estate boasts this cache can extend his legacy/earnings for another 10 years, at least.
Yet, officially, ‘unreleased’ isn’t the same as ‘unheard’, and about half of this collection’s 12 tracks have popped up in other renditions on other collections, posthumous or otherwise. Few will prefer these versions of ‘Fire,’ ‘Stone Free’ or ‘Red House’ to the familiar ones. At least one song, the soggy title track, is a Frankensteinian fusion of two tapes, one from ’69 and the other from ’70, made slightly less dubious with the fingerprints of original producer Eddie Kramer all over it. A superior new track, ‘Bleeding Heart,’ offers a studio take of an Elmore James cover that, like a few other songs here, the Seattle native frequently tore up live.
Really, the set contains not lost but merely long-litigated material. Neptune does nothing to expand Hendrix’s legacy, just prolong it.
Joshua Klein. In stores now
