Jimi Hendrix: Band Of Gypsys (A Tribute To Buddy Miles)

"The Fillmore is proud to welcome back some old friends with a brand new name....A Band Of Gypsys!"

The LP pictured here was released by Capitol Records in 1970 under Jimi Hendrix's name, but the title of the LP suggests a different, collective authorship: this LP belongs not just to Hendrix, but to the Band Of Gypsys, a three piece, all-black psyche-funk band comprising of Jimi Hendrix on mind distorting guitar, ex-army pal Billy Cox on floor quaking bass, and be-afro'd ex-Electric Flag soul brother Buddy Miles on fat-back drums. Together they produced what is by far and away my favourite LP in the Hendrix canon, a live LP recorded before an awed audience at New York's Fillmore East on New Years Day 1970. This album has been underrated and even maligned for decades now. With Buddy Miles sadly gone, I think it's about time we bring Band Of Gypsys back in from the cold.

The reputation of this funk-infused, experimental, soul-powered LP has suffered because (a) major-league old-skool Hendrix fans tend generally to be heavy rock fans, and consequently do not care for this more GROOVE orientated material, (b) the noodling and occasionally aimless jamming supposedly represents a careless attitude towards 'quality control' ("quality control" - like we're menna demand the same standards from our pop artists as we do from our car manufacturers...), (c) peeps are sorta down on Buddy Miles for a variety of reasons and I've read a buncha times that the LP features 'too much Buddy' - he sings alot on it, plus two numbers are Buddy songs, not Hendrix songs - and (d) the LP was to some extent conceived by Hendrix as a quick way of providing Capitol with the last LP he owed them before he could sever ties with the label, and was thus considered by Jimi himself as more of a 'means to an end' than an LP proper. Of the three, this last reason has been the most damaging - the suggestion that Hendrix's 'heart wasn't in it' is truly damning, 'cos if Jimi didn't care 'bout this, then why should we, and as real Jimi fans shouldn't we respect the great man enough to ignore the material he produced which he himself wasn't committed to? (This whole issue is similar to the poor reputation of the PPX Recordings, which I discussed here.) For what it's worth, it's clear to anybody with a full brain + ears package that Hendrix is absolutely not 'phoning his performance in', and there are moments where his guitar playing - specifically during the incendiary Machine Gun - is flat-out better than on any other LP in his entire back cat. Band Of Gypsys is not the poor cousin of Hendrix's other albums, it stands very much as their equal.

Q. So if Band Of Gypsys ain't the Hendrix LP everybody would like it be, what is it?

A. Band Of Gypsys is a top-flight Super Heavy Psychedelic Funk LP, and almost certainly the best live LP of the entire genre period.

For anybody with an interest in the politics and social history of the era, Band Of Gypsys is a significant text. Check Hendrix's rap before 'Machine Gun':

"I'd like to dedicate this one to, um, to the draggy scene that's going on, all the soldiers fighting in Chicago and Milwaukee and New York...oh yes, and all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam."

The music which follows is indeed soldier music; revolutionary music, the music of war abroad and at home, Hendrix's guitar screams and wails like falling bombs and the men they fall on, while Cox & Miles wade through a heavy-bottomed, low-slung groove like GIs wading through the swamps of Vietnam. It is a terrifying sound, and they moment they drop into the groove after Hendrix's solo wah-wah'd intro is simply stunning, it's just this shimmering, thick fog of sound, like a river of molten lava. Increasingly under pressure from various radical groups to adopt a more vocal, proactive anti-war stance, Hendrix,as ever, lets his music do the talking, refusing to simplify the issues by spouting soundbites or empty slogans -Jimi's 'Star Spangled Banner' may get the plaudits as his definitive late 60s State Of The Nation Address, but Band Of Gypsy's 'Machine Gun' is the more brutal, more violent, more delirious statement, lacking perhaps the pop-art eloquence of the Woodstock performance, but more than making up for that in sheer bloody-minded brute force and crazed horror, starring into the abyss, the insane void at the heart of the Vietnam War and it's after-shocks back home. This is January 1st, 1970. The 60s dream is over. The peace 'n' love experiment is dead. It's a whole new decade, and the same shit ain't just happenin', it's gettin' worse, and it's gonna keep on gettin' worse.

Of course, the other radical group Hendrix was gettin' heat offa of was the Black Panthers, who were buggin' the guitarist to get with the whole Black Power bit. Hendrix was uncomfortable with labels period, and certainly never wished to be beholden to any particular party line, but it's fair to say that he made moves around this time to embrace his blackness, and to shrug off some of the Uncle Tom, electric negro-in-psychedelic clothing caricature which characterised his early big-time career. Band Of Gypsys, whether by design or happenstance, was an all-black group, and soulful in a way that his previous music had not been, though their is funk enough in all his work, regardless of the colour of his band member's skin. Buddy Miles, a grizzly bear in an afro, was central to this new all-out dedication to The Funk. As an ex-member of Wilson Pickett's Wicked Pickett group and co-founder of highly influential jazz-rockers The Electric Flag, plus a general background in chitlin circuit soul revues, Miles brought a whole new sensibility to Hendrix's sound, a locked-in, no-frills THUMP, he was simply a powerhouse drummer, thudding away at the kit with Stax / Bonham intensity and heaviosity. Mitch Mitchell was a jazz drummer, and there was a skipping, dancing quality to his playing; Miles just laid down the fattest on-the-one beat he could muster and stuck with it for as long as was necessary. The rhythm section on this LP is just so damn solid, and so damn together, that Hendrix can happily use it as a launch pad for his outer-space explorations and know it'll be in exactly the same place he left it when it's finally time for him to return to earth. Plus, when they want to, the three musicians can blast off together, as they do at the beginning of 'Power Of Love'. The way they explode into this rampaging funk-rock monster is just ridiculous, mondo-psyche-out from the get-go, Buddy's drum beats hammering relentlessly away under the roar of Jimi's firestorm guitar, and always that hypnotic groove...

Band Of Gypsys has always sorta felt like my album, 'cos nobody I've met has ever seemed to like it quite as much as me. That's fine. It's nice to have something to defend. The first time I heard Band Of Gypsys on CD through a little Aiwa mini-system it pretty much floored me, and then some months later when a guy in some Vancouver record store played me a mint original vinyl copy of it at full blast through his instore super-quad-3D-surround speaker system I just about lost my mind. I'm really no musician. In my life I've probably learnt about a a dozen bass-lines. Two of those are from this LP, and I learnt 'em 'cos they're pretty simple, and I thought just maybe one day I'll run into Buddy someplace and we could have ourselves a little jam together. I guess I won't get that chance. I hope he's sat on some cloud with Jimi now, kicking out the jams and making the afterlife experience just that little bit funkier. Do me a favour and play this LP loud. Maybe if you play it loud enough, he'll hear it way up there, and know how much we miss him.

RIP Buddy Miles, 1947-2008, gone too soon. (Paul Fuzz)