Produced by Jimi Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell, Eddie Kramer & John Jansen
Engineered by Eddie Kramer, John Jansen, Dave Palmer, Kim King & Abe Jacobs
Source: (Side 1: MS 2040 A 31260 - 1A / Side 2: MS 2040 B 31261 - 1A
Sterling RL on both sides)
Vinyl Transfer & Restoration by Prof. Stoned
Prof. sez:
This is another breathtaking 'RL cut', done by vinyl cutting/mastering genius Robert Ludwig, who has done no less than five original US Hendrix pressings. For some reason, this album never got an official CD reissue but in 1997 'Experience Hendrix' finally did release 6 of the 8 tracks in their original mixes on the CD's "First rays of the new rising sun" and "South saturn delta". The remaining two tracks appeared respectively on the 4CD boxset from 2000 and Voodoo chile: The Jimi Hendrix Collection from 2001.
This was transferred from an EX+ copy.
The Making of..
(written by PS)
The story behind this album starts in late 1969 when Michael Jeffrey -Hendrix manager- had a vision about a road movie which would equal the success & cult-status of 'Easy Rider'. Jeffrey had been impressed by both the scenario and commercial success of said film, and was determined to come up with something even better.
Michael Jeffery was a man with many faces. Legend holds him as the bold & untrustworthy manager who had made Hendrix a star but who -in the end- relentlessly milked his artist's fame. But there are two sides to every story. Jeffrey was a very sly businessman, who had mastered the art of manipulation like no one else. But there was also a deeply insecure side to his personality. Jeffrey was scared of getting older and was very sensitive for the current hippie trends of the times.
In 1969 the relationship between Jeffrey and Hendrix had severely deteriorated. During the first years, Hendrix had been deeply grateful for everything that Michael & Chas Chandler had achieved for him. But Jimi had started to get more and more frustrated with the relentless tour schedule, the pressure to record new albums, and the lack of privacy that comes with being a superstar. He blamed Michael for all this but failed to acknowledge that this was the life that he had always wanted and that his own excessive lifestyle was taking its toll on his mental and physical health.
It was in this period that Jeffery realized that his contract with Hendrix wasn't going to last forever and that he needed to bet on more than one horse. Jeffrey -who always had always been fascinated by the film industry- met Chuck Wein and together they envisioned 'Rainbow bridge'; a movie that would throw the world of conventional filmmaking upside down and which would become a blistering artistic and commercial success. Wein (a former Yale student and former Warhol protégé) would be the director, Jeffrey would take care of the business side. 'Rainbow bridge' was a vain-project for both men and was destined to become a failure but Wein had considerably less to lose than Jeffrey.
Jeffrey managed to convince Warner Brothers to finance the project. Back in 1967, when Jeffrey had set up a record deal with Warner Brothers for the American market, he had also managed to include a special clause into the contract. If Hendrix was to record a soundtrack album, Warner would not have the rights to release it, but they would be given the first option to buy the rights. It didn't seem important at the time, but when Jeffrey told the Warner executives (who were already desperate for new Hendrix product) in early 1970 that the next Hendrix album was going to be the soundtrack to the film and asked if they wanted to buy it, they exploded with rage. Needless to say, they were forced to come to an agreement with him. Meanwhile, Hendrix had no idea what his manager was up to and wished to steer clear from the whole 'Rainbow bridge' project.
With a budget for the film secured, Chuck Wein started filming the movie on Hawaii in the spring of 1970, without a script. To him and his crew, the vibrations of the environment he was filming were far more important than an actual story or plot. After a while, Jeffrey started to realize that the film was flushing thousands and thousands of his dollars through the drain, and left him without a satisfying result. So in an attempt to save the project, he managed to convince Hendrix to do open-air concert on the Maui crater which would be filmed.
After Hendrix' sudden death in September 1970, Jeffrey and Wein decided to change the accent of their film from a 'documentary about a spiritual journey' to 'a tribute to Jimi hendrix'. Jeffrey could no longer deny that the project had become a failure and by upgrading it with all the film footage of Hendrix that he owned, he hoped to make the most out of it. At the end of 1970, the film had been more or less completed and was previewed at a small cinema in New York. However, the full 123 minute version was edited down to 75 minutes on instigation of the Warner executives, to great frustration of Chuck Wein, who blamed the flopping of the film on the fact that the edit "lacked any coherence".
Meanwhile, engineer Eddie Kramer & drummer Mitch Mitchell (with help from assistant-engineer John Jansen) had completed the first posthumous Hendrix album. It had been quite a struggle to complete Cry of love, but Jeffrey was quick to send them off to work again on the second posthumous studio album, which would be the soundtrack to Rainbow bridge. However, Kramer & Mitchell soon found they didn't have enough quality material to work with and told Jeffrey to convince Warner to send them the many multitrack reels that they still held in their archives. These included the sessions that Experience had done at the TTG studio's in Oct. 1968 and many of the Record Plant sessions from the spring and autumn of 1969 with the Band of Gypsys. Both Mitchell or Kramer had little idea what to expect from these recordings, but when Warner executive Mo' Ostin finally ordered the tapes to be sent to the Electric lady studio's in February 1971, they turned out to offer surprisingly little useable material. Only 'Look over yonder' and 'Star Sprangled banner' were selected for inclusion.
After being released in October 1971, the album proved to be far less successful than its predecessor. The reason for that lies clearly in the content itself, despite the smooth presentation and good sound. The album sounds unfinished and some of the material is just plain weak. Hendrix would never have approved this album in a million years. That being said, there is enough to enjoy here and it is still better than the next studio album 'War heroes', although the difference in quality between those two and the first two is less big.
Together with 'War Heroes' & "In the West, 'Rainbow bridge' was deleted from Warner's catalogue in 1975, after WB's chief Mo' Ostin decided that Alan Douglas was far more capable of maintaining the quality of Hendrix's posthumous discography than Jeffrey and Kramer had been. History has proven him wrong but the fact that nearly all Warner executives at the time hated Michael Jeffery (who died in a plane crash in 1973) probably played a role in this decision. As the 'Rainbow bridge' album had been exclusively licensed to WB, it has stayed out-of-print in the states ever since, although the German division of Reprise started re-pressing the album on vinyl during the 80's. 'Rainbow bridge' never got a re-issue on CD, although at some stage pre-productions for a CD release were done and it even got a catalogue number.