Sparked by a conversation with @seanjonesqc, and having nothing better to do, I’m going to attempt live-tweet Jimi’s masterpiece, Electric Ladyland from start to finish.

I’m wearing headphones.

I’ve pressed play.

1. ...And the Gods Made Love.

Imagine having the balls to open one of the most widely anticipated albums ever with a minute and a half of swirling, tape flanged feedback, tape manipulations and feedback. Imagine it.

Apparently they found that they could create feedback to manipulate using headphones, mics and the studio speakers. Just immense.

Then, 2. Have you Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland). Two minutes, of minutes of swirling mellow beauty after the foreboding dark feedback. The tape flanging and moving panning from left to right and back pulls you into the centre of it as if it’s happening around you.

3. Crosstown Traffic, in which Jimi invents the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (they even covered it, and their version of Fire is my favourite). The distortion on the bass! The doubled guitars and vocals.

Funky pop at its best!

4. Voodoo Chile. A change of pace. Those bends doubling the voice in the intro. Steve Winwood on Hammond here, doing call and response with Jimi’s guitar and vocals.

Jack Casady on bass. The bass tone and feel is different to every other track. Mich closer to Billy Cox’s sound in Band of Gypsies than Noel Redding’s sound, or Jimi’s own when he played bass.

You can pass this off as just a blues Jam, but that VI, Minor VII turnaround is very unusual in Blues.

Now the first solo, and the guitar goes right and the organ left.

Like Jimi’s own playing, the division between backing or rhythm playing and lead totally blurred.

Can here people encouraging each other distant in the mics. They must have been having the time of their lives.

Winwood and Jimi bouncing off each other. Jimi stabs funk rhythms as Winwood opens up the Hammond. Applause from the hangers on as they bring it back down.

Studio echoes shooting the remnants of Jimi’s riffs from right to left. They’ve been jamming on a single chord for a few minutes here. You’ve got to be good to do that. So good.

Woah!!! Jimi’s trill and trem bar dive. Gets me every time.

Drum solo. Mitch Mitchell was an unbelievably good drummer. The others keep little riffs going in the background. Then help him build it. Aaaand, it breaks, trumpet riffs on the organ.

“Turn that down, Turn that down. Hahaha” heard in the background.

Jimi said he hated his voice. I love it. It’s just raw and naked. Just him coming through unedited.

The turnaround. Finally, a chord change. The release of the tension. Steve and Jimi off again. Shit, I could live a hundred years and never learn to play like that. He gets into a loop, and instantly the whole band follows him. Thank god someone recorded this.

What’s next? oh, 5. Little Miss Strange. I think Noel Redding is massively underrated. His bass playing in the experience was the perfect foil for the other two.

He wasn’t a great songwriter or singer though.

Pretty standard ‘60s psychedelia, not rescued by Jimi’s fuzz part. Sorry Noel.

I usually skip this to be honest.

6. Long Hot Summer Night.

Oh yeah! You can feel the swampy humidity of it. Soul backing vocals are great. Jimi’s little Steve Cropper style sliding 6ths in the second verse are brilliant. Nice bit of wah.

“And the Telephone keeps on screaming.”

I’m never sure about the middle 8 to be honest, but it’s worth it to get to that line, and the little solo after it.

The endless little riffs under the vocals in the 3rd verse.

Pure soul licks in the chorus again. That blend of blues, heavy soul and funk and psychedelia is amazing.

7. Come On (let the Good Times Roll)

I adore this version. It’s one of the few Jimi songs I can do some justice to on guitar. Again, you think it’s just Jimi doing some blues, but he never ‘just’ did blues.

Noel doing a great job on bass here. Always doing something interesting.

That chromatic run up, the way the solo breaks down into chordal funky bits. That guitar run down on the IV chord is just so fast. Like a descending trill. I take a deep breath every time I try to play it.

I love it!

8. Gypsy Eyes. Shit. What an intro. So heavy. Jimi’s playing the bass here. It’s brilliant.

You can hear that verse riff in tons of John Fruisiante’s playing again.

The swirling phasey guitar in unison with the Vox is tremendous. Flanging on the vocals as well now.

What sounds like bit-crushed delays at the end (but couldn’t have been). All the time Mitch’s kick thumping. Brilliant.

9. Burning of the Midnight Lamp.

Can you imagine sitting down in your bedroom with the disc in 1968 and hearing this for the first time. Wah guitar and harpsichord in unison FFS. Then playing it Stevie Wonder played his Clavinet a few years later.

The breakdown into the solo is classic Hendrix. Most people just do a solo over the verse or chorus part, but Jimi would use the middle 8, or write a new part. The solos aren’t just an alternative to singing for a while. They’re integral parts.

Little details like the backing vocals towards the end of the solo really get me. You could listen to it a hundred times and not notice them. But you always felt them. The genius of Jimi as a producer and arranger, not just a guitarist and songwriter.

9. Rainy Day, Dream away.

Slow grooving jam feel here. Bit of sax from Freddie Smith. 3-way call and responses from him, Mike Finnegan on Organ and Jimi. 2minutes and 10 into it, it turns from a jam into a song.

Then a minute later, it turns into another song, which we’ll hear more of later in the album, then fades out.

11. 1983... (A Merman I should turn to be). When I was a kid obsessed with Jimi and learning guitar, I couldn’t get with stuff like this. I wanted more Purple Haze.

I was so wrong.

This is magnificent.

“Well it’s too bad that our friends can’t be with us today.”

This line gets me every fucking time. It’s got me again.

This is the musician using the studio not just to tape what’s happening, but as part of the instrumentation. Most all modern music does this. One-shot glittery noises, processed bells, reverse parts with the tape flipped.

Tape flanging and delays. Speed and pitch manipulation. It’s stuff that’s a free plugin away for anyone with a laptop now. They just had a couple of 4 or 8-track tape machines, tape echos, a desk and whatever boxes Roger Mayer could make them.

The ambient noises, and patience to abandon a song structure for large parts of it and just create a soundscape, then bring it back round to a song.

And having other musicians who got what he was doing is so lucky.

Those trills dipped with the whammy again. The riffs high up one the bass taking over from the guitar, then bouncing off them, then drifting back again. Flute noises, reverse echos.

You could argue that the bass is what happens when guitarists play bass, but it works here.

Then a build into a victory march. Huge, 3 semi-tone string bends. Mitch going wild.

Falling shattered back into a verse. And back to the original sliding ascending and decending minor riff. Military drums as Jimi lets loose. That syncopated turnaround in with guitar and drums locked in.

You can pass it off as self indulgent, or just jams shoved together, but the balls to do this. The vision. Incredible.

12. Moon turn the Tides...Gently, Gently.

This is just a minute or so. Of swooshy, moving ambient sounds. It’d be a doddle to do now with a hundred quid analogue delay pedal. Just turn up the repeats until it self oscillates, and move the time knob.

At the time it’ll have involved manipulating tape machines, and probably took days to even figure out how to do it.

Actually, I bet they found how to make the sound first and decided it deserved a track of its own.

It’s a nice calming inter-mezzo.

Mrs Moog’s just brough me an egg sandwich, so I’m taking a break as well.

Right, I’m back. That was delicious. Thanks to the Uber Eats delivery person who brought us fresh rolls and to Mrs Moog who discovered a pack of eggs when we thought we were out of them.

Unbelievably for such an incredible album, we’re now getting to the good bit.

13. Still Raining, Still Dreaming.

We heard the into to this at the end of track 10. This is truly an album. A work in its own right, not just a collection of songs.

Let’s face it. He’s made the bloody guitar talk.

He’s made the guitar talk. Talk. Like a person.

Organ back and forth again. The soul and gospel influence, and stretching right back to pre-blues field hollers.

First chord change at 2:11.

John Lee Hooker on being asked by a pick-up backing musician when the chord change came: “I’ll change chords when I’m good and ready.”

The wah pedal had only been available for 2 years, and he does this with it. Shit.

I’ve had one for 25 years and can’t even get close.

14. House burning down.

Smash! Dah.... Dah... Daaaaaaah.

1,2,3,4, and in.

Jimi on Bass here, channeling the juke joints he spent the early and mid sixties touring. Low, almost sub octave. Rumbling, pushing them tempo.

Then I always think there’s a hint of the solo from Purple Haze in there.

The echoes at the end, warbling, speed changing, tape saturating. Amazing.

15. All Along the Watchtower.

I’ve pauseded for a sec. You think you know this track. Everyone does, right. And if you;’re a guitarist, you can play it. It’s just C#m, B, A. Right.

Wrong.

Nobody plays it right. Me and my covers band set out to learn a faithful version. It was soooo hard. We spent over an hour just working out when the first chord came in. Eventually our drummer had to notate it for us. And explain. Carefully. Repeatedly.

The Solos were always my party piece. I can do enough to make a drunk audience in a pub think I can play it, but its not even close.

Jimi’s part in the verses is very hard to make sound and feel right. It seems random at times.

Dave Mason’s 12-string part is just those three chords, but getting the feel and timing right is really hard. And he’s not just chugging away at it. It’s dynamic and changing all the time.

The bassline is phenomenal, especially in the main solo, where it pulls and pushed the feel around as the different ‘movements’ happen.

This is so good. I’ve been listening to it for nearly 30 years and I’m still discovering things. Perfection itself.

The middle solo is a piece in itself, with 4 clear movements.
- melodic intro
- Echoey slide part
- “talking” wah part
- Aggressive chordal part and outro bends.

It’s magnificent, compositionally and performance-wise. The best guitar solo ever.

Right, I’m going to close my eyes and listen to it. Back in a few minutes.

Right, I’d never noticed that for the 3rd verse (maybe before, but I noticed it there) the drums overheads are panned hard one way, with a very slightly delayed version of them panned hard the other way. 30 years, and now I notice.

Wacka wack wack wacka wacka wack wack.

16 Vodoo Child (Slight Return)

Legend has it that this was an improv after they’d recorded Voodo Chile, because a TV crew wanted something to film.

It’s sooooo heavy. A guitar tour de force. Jimi the guitarist at his wildest best. Every bit of his amazing technique on show. Whammy tricks, trills, unison bends, 3 semitones bends rhythm and lead playing at the same time. Chordal double stops and fragmented inversions.

Playing ahead of, then behind the beat. Mangled psycho blues licks, wah wah, pickup switching tricks, pick slides, sustained vibratoed notes mixed with machine-gun fast spitting runs.

If all you ever learned about playing guitar came from this, you’d still be pretty good.

That first intro solo after he turns the wah off is perhaps the best guitar tone I’ve ever heard. You can go and plug a Strat into a fuzz face and Marshall, but I bet it doesn’t sound like that. It doesn’t when i do, anyway.

And then, just like that, after only a bit over 5 minutes, it’s just over. Too soon. We wanted more. But Jimi had stuff to do. He’d said what he needed to say.

I wish he hadn’t died so young. I wish we’d heard what he could do with more time, more collaborations, more technology, more life. This sweet, slightly awkward genius that someone sent from another planet for us.

I’ve had my white Strat beside me this whole time. To ook this while lying on my isolation bed in All along The Watchtower. Looked up, and it was just there.

“A musician, if he's a messenger, is like a child who hasn't been handled too many times by man, hasn't had too many fingerprints across his brain.”

Hope this massively self-indulgent thread was fun. Stay well and safe and look after each other.