The Bold As Love Box is Hendrix Heaven
Expand your understanding of the second Experience LP
Just about every element of the 66-track box Bold as Love constitutes a compelling piece of art and history all by itself; put them all together and you’ve got some serious mind-blowing potential.
The set’s available as either four CDs or five LPs, plus a bonus Blu-Ray in each version. And every bit of that sonic real estate is utilized to provide the fullest view ever offered of the magical microverse in which The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s second album, Axis: Bold as Love, was born.
It’s shocking to think that Axis was released less than seven months after Hendrix’s milestone 1967 debut. His psychedelic vision was exploding in so many directions at once that it seems like he couldn’t even find room for them all. In addition to accommodating such items as the blistering non-LP B-side “The Stars That Play with Laughing Sam’s Dice” and the hard-grooving “Mr. Bad Luck” (a tune unreleased during Jimi’s lifetime), the collection contains untitled instrumentals that there probably just wasn’t enough time in the day to bring to fruition. And there could be precious few titles on a Hendrix box more tantalizing than “Untitled Guitar Experiment,” a brief track that turns out to be exactly as deliciously dizzying as you’d hope.
But before you even get beyond the official territory of the original album, Bold as Love is already a knockout. Just hearing the stereo and mono mixes of Axis’s 13 tunes side by side and appreciating the finesse of the former and the muscle of the latter is a rarefied treat all by itself. And a disc’s worth of live material, including a September ‘67 Stockholm set that occurred in between Axis sessions, would still be hailed as historical bounty even if it was released as an a la carte offering. From the smoldering sensuality of “Foxey Lady” to the feral bite of “Fire” and the sheer psychedelic exultation of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (still a new tune at the time), the Stockholm show lets you experience the Experience, if you will, not just as some remote, iconic presence but as a fully visceral, flesh-and-blood force.
A U.K. TV performance from Top of the Pops highlights the hilarious twists an artist could encounter in those days. Hendrix was prepared to deliver a live vocal while he, Mitch Mitchell, and Noel Redding mimed to the prerecorded instrumental backing track, but a song by The Alan Price Set starts to play instead. Jimi good-naturedly says, “I don’t know the words to this one” as the host nervously stalls for time till the opening strains of “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp” begin.
VIDEO: The Jimi Hendrix Experience “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp”
But the inarguable meat of the set is the ample array of alternate takes, demos, and instrumental versions of Axis tracks. The “official” versions of songs like “Spanish Castle Magic,” “Little Wing,” and “Castles Made of Sand” have become so indelibly ingrained in our brains that it’s a revelation hear Hendrix, Redding and Mitchell’s altered inflections on the additional takes offered here. Like much of the material, it somehow simultaneously serves to humanize the larger-than-life rock hero and expand his legend even further.
Even within just a few years of Hendrix’s 1970 passing, he quickly amassed the heftiest posthumous catalog of any rocker, and that only increased as the decades dashed along. So, you might not expect that there’d be anything new to absorb at this late date.
Fortunately, Bold as Love definitively puts the lie to that notion.
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