Espana

Y viva Espana! We're off to Spain today for a few days, going to Granada, Nerja and Malaga. There are lots of songs with Spain or Spanish in their names in my collection. Let's go with cuatro songs for today's post. 

Hinds are a Spanish, all girl group with four albums to their name- the most recent, Viva Hinds, was one of my favourites of 2024. They covered The Clash's Spanish Bombs in 2020 in fine style. Joe Strummer's lyric dealt with the Spanish Civil War, 70s separatist Basque terrorism and mass tourism. 'The hillsides ring with 'free the people'/ Can I hear the echo of the days of '39?', Joe asks, harking back to the civil war and the days of one of his heroes, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca (murdered by Franco's forces in 1936). In the chorus Joe declares his love for Spain, 'Yo te quiero, oh mi corazón' ('I love you/ Oh my heart'). 

Spanish Bombs

In 1967 Jimi Hendrix's second album with The Experience had a song called Spanish Castle Magic on it, a glorious slice of '67 blues/ psychedelia, Jimi's guitar raw and raucous, the bass locked into the crunching guitar chords and doubling the riff, Mitch battering the drums. I don't think Jimi ever sang better than on this song.

Spanish Castle Magic

The Spanish Castle wasn't actually in Spain, it was a roadhouse on the outskirts of Seattle where a young Hendrix was sometimes found jamming with local groups. 

In 1999 Gorky's Zygotic Munki released their sixth album, Spanish Dance Troupe. The title track is gorgeous, absurdist, lilting Welsh psychedelic folk. This is Gorky's first appearance at Bagging Area which seems a bit of an oversight. 

Spanish Dance Troupe

Last for today, Galaxie 500 and the B-side to their debut single Tugboat from 1988. In King Of Spain a man inures himself from pain and hurt by becoming the King of Spain, safely isolated as a powerful man but he ends up alone and lonely. Galaxie 500 may have refined their songs and sound over the three years they were active after they released Tugboat/ King Of Spain but almost everything that made them so special is present on this single. 

King Of Spain

I've set posts up for the time I'm away so there'll be no break in service. Bagging Area's commitment to blogging knows few bounds.  

Snubbed Again

Another dip back into the world of late 80s alternative culture as filtered through the lens of Snub TV, an early evening independent music show of the kind that seems inconceivable now. In December 1988 The House Of Love were filmed playing live at Top Rank in Brighton- the seven minute clip opens with a ferocious take on Destroy the Heart, Terry Bickers' guitar and Guy Chadwick's vocals in some kind of war to be the most ragged and fraught. Bickers was a really talented guitarist, capable of slow burning shimmer and understated pyrotechnics. The clip then has an interview with a fresh faced Chadwick. The rest of the band look like they'd rather be anywhere else. Snub then cut back to the gig with Man To Child. 

I loved The House Of Love, saw them live several times in the late 80s including one occasion at the Queen's Hall in Widnes just a few days before they kicked Terry out of the band, abandoning him at a service station as they were driving to Wales. Relations were fraught and Terry called Guy a breadhead and set fire to a £5 note and then drummer Pete Evans punched Terry in the face- I might be misremembering the details but it was along those lines. The first album, released on Creation in 1988, was possibly the last gasp of this kind of indie guitar music before acid house and indie dance came along the following year. 

Road

Throwing Muses were on Snub in 1988, filmed live at The Town And Country Club in Camden in May. There's a brief interview section at the start of this clip, step- sisters Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly, facing the questions and Kristin talking about feminism. The clip then goes to the gig, an intense performance of Downtown (a song from their 1988 album House Tornado). They were a powerful live band- they'd been going since 1981 so by '88 they were pretty seasoned performers. 

Manic Depression is a cover of The Jimi Hendrix Experience song. This is a live instrumental version, no vocals- I've no idea where or when it's from but a version of the song was on 1992's Firepile EP. 

Manic Depression

I Stand Up Next To A Mountain

Had he lived long enough Jimi Hendrix would have turned eighty last weekend. There were some documentaries on, one of which focussed on Jimi's involvement in a film called Rainbow Bridge. The film eventually came out in 1971, directed by Chuck Wein who had a vision of a new kind of film, scriptless and improvised with non- actors all drawn from Hawaii's countercultural youth community. Wein had produced three of Andy Warhol's films so was no stranger to films with no plot or script. As the money ran out and various investors got jittery someone talked Jimi into appearing, convinced that concert footage of Hendrix might rescue the project. Hendrix plays in a field on the side of a mountain on the island of Maui, on the edge of an active volcano- Haleakala- in front of a few hundred people. The cast had earlier on chanted 'Om' for a few minutes and there was something about the frequencies that the volcano was emitting. Hendrix, with his Cry Of Love band, play on a scaffold with wind blowing across the stage. The film ended up only using a few minutes of Hendrix and no songs in their entirety which when you watch the lost/ now re-found footage is absurd. This turned out to be the penultimate Hendrix live appearance- he died in September 1970. 

Jimi is clearly at the peak of his powers at Maui, a man moving fast and in total control. Looking at the set up- microphones wrapped in foam to dampen the sound of the wind, a small crowd, a flimsy looking stage- it's a wonder anything good came out of it. This though, Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), is the best thing you'll see today. One guitar, two pedals (a wah- wah and a fuzzbox), a Marshall stack and the accompaniment of Mitch Michell and Billy Cox (Mitch said in the documentary that musically they just followed Hendrix). Hendrix looks as cool as fuck too- headband, open necked black shirt with hippy trim down the sleeves, flared jeans and boots. A few groovy souls get up and dance but much of the crowd just sit and stare as Jimi works his way through the song, firing laser beams out from the fretboard, dive bombing runs, crunching riffs and spiralling solo parts. I'm not generally given to guitar heroism but this is worth every single bit. Cox's bass playing anchors it and Mitchell's drumming is superb too but it's all about Jimi.

Due to the wind, Mitchell had to re- record his drums in New York a year later as the film reached release but Hendrix's parts are as filmed on that day, 30th July 1970, on a hillside in Maui. 

The studio version from Electric Ladyland isn't too shabby either- one of those songs that was part of the soundtrack of 1989 as well as 1969. The final verse, 'If I don't meet you in this world/ Then I'll meet you in the next one/ Don't be late', nails things too. 

Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)

51

I'm fifty one years old today. Last year's birthday, the big five- oh, took place in lockdown and despite everything it was a good day- lockdown brought some freedoms with it in a way, do what you can under the circumstances. This year's birthday means we can actually go to a pub although our booking for tonight is for sitting outside, it still feels a bit soon to be going indoors. 

Songs about being fifty- one are understandably thin on the ground. There aren't too many songs celebrating moving another year into your fifties. On Heartland in 1986 The The sang about the UK being the 51st state of the USA but that's not especially cheery for a birthday song. Instead here's Jimi Hendrix and his Experience in 1967 with a song about 51st anniversaries, the B-side to Purple Haze. Hendrix's guitar sings and swings, fuzzy and warm, switching between rhythm and lead or playing both at the same time, Noel and Mitch thudding away behind him. Jimi sings about the flipsides of marriage, a tale about not wanting to settle down, not wanting to be tied down- very much a young man's point of view. Jimi never lived to see his 51st birthday- he died four months after I was born, 18th September 1970. 

51st Anniversary

The Midnight Lamp

I heard this song fade into earshot on the tv the other night, The Jimi Hendrix Experience's Burning Of The Midnight Lamp, the grungy fat guitar note followed by Jimi's instantly recognisable harpsichord notes. A proper ears pricking up moment. The riff circles round twice, there's a burst of wah wah and Mitch and Noel pile in before Jimi starts singing. The whole song sounds overloaded, the needle in the red, parts muffled and jostling with each other but it sounds alive, the backing vocals like a heavenly choir, a mess of controlled noise and confusion. The harpsichord- nothing says 1967 like a harpsichord- surfaces again to kick into the second half of the song and inevitably there's a stinging, dirty guitar solo. Hendrix sounds like he's singing in a dream, examining his mind in the aftermath of a messy trip, the band pounding away behind him. Noisy, psychedelic, melancholia. 

Hendrix wrote the lyrics on a flight between New York and Los Angeles in 1967. This was after a recording session in London that hadn't delivered the goods for the song (although the trio had laid down Axis: Bold As Love so it wasn't a total write off). They set off on a European tour, then to the States and then when back in New York at Mayfair Studio they nailed it, with the Sweet Inspirations coming in the next day to do the backing vocals (Whitney Houston's mum being one of the three Sweet Inspirations). In the UK it was a single, released in August '67 at the height of the summer of love, with The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam's Dice on the B-side. A year later in the USA it was the B-side to his cover of All Along The Watchtower and then as part of that year's Electric Ladyland album. Two years later he was gone. 

Burning Of The Midnight Lamp

Sunset On Mars

Just wow.

The first Jimi Hendrix Experience album is one of the few 60s albums that I still sometimes pull out and listen to from start to finish. As well as the heavy blues and riff rock Hendrix was able to do so much more, out there and otherworldly songs with backwards sounding guitar and drones and a haze that could only really have come from somewhere else entirely.

Love Or Confusion

Eventually

Every six months or so I feel the need for some Jimi Hendrix. People are making a lot out of various records from 1967 being fifty years old this year and some of them sound fifty years old in a way, but Jimi's stuff doesn't. In 1967 The Jimi Hendrix experience released two albums, the debut Are You Experienced and then a follow up Axis: Bold As Love. Axis is a step on from the burning hot debut, an exploration of sound and the studio, of Jimi's development as a writer and of psychedelia. Many of the songs on Axis have a confidence to unfold more slowly, to unwind a little. Castles Made Of Sand has long been a favourite of mine- a backwards guitar part, a lazy guitar riff, a laid back groove and Jimi's vocals about impermanence and all things being temporary.

'And so castles made of sand
Fall to the sea
Eventually'

Castles Made Of Sand

Move Over Rover

As a bonus extra to the earlier Hendrix post here's Billy Childish and The Buff Medways ripping through Fire (off Are You Experienced?). Garage style, no overdubs.

Fire

What a great hat. I believe it's known as a Gorblimey hat. Want one. Where did you get that hat Mr Childish?

I Stand Up Next To A Mountain

I heard this on the telly the other day and was struck by it's brilliance. Then I realised how long it was since I listened to any Jimi Hendrix other than inadvertently. I had a big Hendrix phase about, ooh, twenty three years ago. He was all the rage among the 60s heads in the late 80s, although now I suspect now he's just another dead rock star. I never ventured far beyond the records done by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and then mainly just the first two albums (Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold as Love and a compilation of singles and B-sides called Smash Hits) and to be fair Electric Lady land was never my favourite but this song is a stunner. I think it's because of the wah-wah.

Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)