Fifty-eight years ago, a double album arrived that would change how rock records were made. Electric Ladyland, the third and final studio album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, came out in the United States on 16 October 1968 on Reprise Records. It was the band's only release produced solely by Jimi Hendrix, the guitarist from Seattle who had already rewritten the rules of electric guitar. By mid-November the record sat at the top of the Billboard Top LPs chart, where it stayed for two weeks. No other Hendrix album ever reached number one.
Endless takes and a producer's patience
The path to that chart position was anything but smooth. Recording had begun in several studios across the US and Britain between July 1967 and January 1968, then restarted in April 1968 at the newly opened Record Plant in New York. Hendrix was a notorious perfectionist in the studio: with drummer Mitch Mitchell he recorded more than 50 takes of the song 'Gypsy Eyes' across three sessions. For producer Chas Chandler, who had guided the band's first two albums, the endless retakes became a source of real frustration.
Tension grew over more than just takes. Hendrix invited friends and guests into the studio, turning the control room into a crowded, noisy party. That atmosphere broke the working relationship with Chandler, who walked away from the sessions. Bassist Noel Redding was also drifting: he had formed his own band, Fat Mattress, in mid-1968 and struggled to meet his commitments to the Experience. As a result, Hendrix played many of the bass parts himself, alongside his guitar work and vocals.
Guest players and studio experiments
Hendrix also opened the sessions to other musicians. On the 15-minute slow blues jam 'Voodoo Chile', Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane played bass and Steve Winwood of Traffic played organ. The album was the only double LP by the Experience mixed entirely in stereo, and engineer Eddie Kramer experimented with reverse recording, chorus, echo and flanging. The cover credit read 'produced and directed by Jimi Hendrix', a line that stung Chandler, who had produced some of the songs.
The music sprawled across genres: psychedelic rock, hard rock, blues, funk. It included an electric reworking of Bob Dylan's 'All Along the Watchtower', which became the group's best-selling single and their only US top-40 hit, reaching number 20. The song also climbed to number five in Britain. Hendrix had turned Dylan's sparse folk song into something urgent and stormy, and Dylan himself praised the version.
The cover Reprise ignored
The cover was its own battle. Hendrix wrote to Reprise with a clear idea for the artwork: a colour photograph by Linda Eastman, later Linda McCartney, showing the group sitting with children on the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park. He even drew a sketch. The label ignored him. Instead, Reprise chose a hazy image of his head in red and yellow, shot by photographer Karl Ferris while Hendrix was on stage at the Saville Theatre.
The British cover caused even more of a stir. Photographer David Montgomery shot a gatefold image of Hendrix surrounded by nineteen naked women on a black background. Some record dealers refused to stock the album, calling the cover pornographic; others sold it with the sleeve turned inside out or wrapped in brown paper. Hendrix was initially surprised and unhappy with the 'naked lady' cover, though he later told Rolling Stone he appreciated it anyway.
For all the chaos, the result was the most commercially successful release the Experience ever had. Electric Ladyland remains the only Hendrix album to top the chart. It was a record born from control taken, friendships strained and a label that ignored its artist's wishes, yet the music inside still sounds like a man pushing the studio as far as it would go.