Magic Boy: The Jimi Hendrix Experience Live at Berkeley (First Show)
Experience Hendrix/Sony Legacy
Jimi Hendrix was perhaps the most influential electric guitarist to walk the Earth – in my book, you can remove the qualifier “perhaps.” Certainly the history of the electric guitar can be divided into two distinct eras: Before Hendrix and After Hendrix. He took the potential of the electric guitar, in particular the Fender Stratocaster and it’s pitch-shifting vibrato arm, to then-unimaginable new heights. It’s hard to convey how otherworldly Hendrix sounded back then, using a Strat, extremely loud amplifiers, and effects like a Fuzz Face, Vox wah-wah pedal, Uni-Vibe phase shifter and others to create never-before-heard sounds.
Well, actually it’s not that hard to imagine when you have evidence like Magic Boy: The Jimi Hendrix Experience Live at Berkeley on hand. The album was recorded on May 30, 1970 at California’s 3,300-seat Berkeley Community Theater. The detailed liner notes by music writer Joel Selvin set the scene: a time of rioting, protests, Vietnam, and Hendrix as an artist in transition, having left his original Jimi Hendrix Experience, Monterey and Woodstock behind in the desire to create new sounds. For this album, Hendrix partially re-formed the Experience with drummer Mitch Mitchell, joined by Band of Gypsies bassist Billy Cox. Songs from this album have been previously heard on Hendrix in the West, the Jimi Plays Berkeley film, and elsewhere. But never like this.
The songs are a mix of newer material like “Message to Love” and “Ezy Ryder” with Band of Gypsies cuts, and Jimi Hendrix classics like “Purple Haze” and an extended “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” here taken at a faster tempo than on the Electric Ladyland album, though no less mind blowing.
Jimi Hendrix. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain.
I expected the sound to be rough, raw, and lo-fi, considering the recording technology of the time. Well, what do you know. This is an excellent live recording. It was remixed from the original master tapes by longtime Hendrix engineer Eddie Kramer – probably the most qualified person on Earth to handle it – and mastered by Bernie Grundman. (I listened to the CD and streaming versions.) The sound is clear and present, with plenty of bass and top-end extension. It may seem ironic to say that the massive fuzz and distortion of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar is captured with clarity, but it is. Hendrix may have often played at blistering volume – when he steps on his wah-wah pedal to the max, the amount of treble had to have been seriously painful for those in the audience – but he was also a nuanced player, working the controls of his guitar to get anything from beautiful clean tones to roaring sonic walls of fuzz. He and the band also tuned down to Eb rather than the usual E, giving the band added weight and depth. It’s all captured here.
The bass had plenty of power without being overbearing, and the drums are evenly spread across the stereo field and surprisingly detailed – you can easily hear Mitch Mitchell’s fast snare hits at the beginning of “Machine Gun.” The soundspace is wide, not deep, but really, would you expect to hear layered depth from a concert that had to have produced jet-engine-takeoff volume levels? There are times, especially when playing the album loud like it wants to be, that it really does sound like Hendrix is in the room. At one point Hendrix asks the audience, “Hey, is it too loud out there?” They respond with an emphatic, “No!” Those were different times.
Back then, his guitar sounded almost incomprehensible for us to wrap our heads around, and 56 years later, guitar magazines and forums – not to mention guitar players! – are still trying to figure it out just how he got those sounds. Sure, we know what gear Hendrix used, and we know that he played a right-handed Fender Stratocaster strung lefty, which meant that the pickups, tremolo arm, and string tension were all reversed from normal, giving the sound a subtle change. There's numerous concert footage, film and video to help us decode the Hendrix magic. And every guitarist has their individual touch.
But there's still a great deal of mystery about Jimi Hendrix's playing, and Magic Boy is well-recorded enough that it helps us gain more insight. OK, some guitar geekery here: he used a fuzz pedal called a Fuzz Face, and it and its numerous descendants are known to deliver massive distortion at maximum volume, but clean up when the guitar volume is turned down. As a result, many shades of guitar sound, from ripping distorted fuzz to glassy clean tones to everything in between can be achieved just by manipulating a guitar's volume control. Hendrix was a master at this, and you can distinctly hear what he's doing in many places on the album.
I know there are Hendrix aficionados out there who might criticize any live performance, especially when there are some less than stellar ones (there’s a Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison video out there that’s stupendously awful), but Magic Boy finds Hendrix and the band in fine form. Although he was recovering from the flu caught a week before, Hendrix just kills it here, whether blazing through songs like “Fire” and “Johnny B. Goode,” or proving that he was also a master of blues on cuts like “Hear My Train A Comin’” and a spellbinding version of “Red House.” Hendrix had roots in soul R&B, and blues, and it shows in his phrasing and beautiful, expressive vibrato. And yes, “The Star Spangled Banner” is here. Bassist Billy Cox sounds more animated than on the Band of Gypsys album, and drummer Mitch Mitchell is at his jazzy-rock best, the perfect complement to Hendrix’s otherworldly forays.
It goes without saying that this is a worthy addition to the Jimi Hendrix legacy, and an important historical document.
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