"A broom is drearily sweeping up the broken pieces of yesterday's life."
+ bootlegs and collectors discs
An unofficial live
compilation
If Eddie Kramer once said that
"War Heroes" was scraping the bottom of the barrel,
then with what follows here, the barrel has been completely taken
apart, ground down and rebuilt.
Some very interesting things to be found however..
1. HIGH PROFILE UNNOFICIAL RELEASES
Some independant
labels managed to get recordings into record shops,
unofficially. All this really began back in 1978 with the
Nutmeg label which put the 1968 Scene Club jam into the
shops (see Various Labels
below). Then,
after a very long gap, the CD era brought a proliferation of
unofficial releases on the market. So, parrallel to the
carefully prepared and steadily dosed output from the
Hendrix estate came a flood of recordings, mainly from ex
members of the Yameta oganisation. All these releases
were good news for the maniacs among us who wish to sit
through the various stages of completion of studio tracks,
jam sessions and live performances of varying quality. Some
live albums enable many fans to get their hands on live
material that has been deleted officially for some time
(Winterland 68, LA Forum 69, San Diego 69, Atlanta 70 ...).
Unofficial recordings do often allow us to hear unedited
concert performances (Band Of Gypsys, Woodstock,…) or
songs rarely performed live. The studio material is also
fascinating, with tracks that never made it to Jimi's albums
and all the work-in-progress jams and mixes. Here are reviews of
the unofficial albums that craftily found their way into
regular distribution outlets. For that very reason, they
deserve attention on this site. Many of the albums can still
be found on purchase sites around the planet. Pretty well
all the source materiel had already appeared on other
bootleg labels in the past.
The Albert Hall Joker/Sagapan (Mike Jeffrey Estate Radioactive,
Alchemy, (Mike Jeffrey Estate
recordings
Nutmeg
Red Lightning
Depaja
Part One)
Burning Airlines, Reclamation,…
Part Two)
