When I was in high school, I had a cassette copy of The Jimi Hendrix Concerts. I borrowed it from a friend of mine and never returned it (if you’re out there somewhere, sorry Pat), and it soon became one of my most listened-to tapes. The 10-minute version of “Stone Free” in particular kind of blew my mind.
It moved from car to car over the years, until I finally dumped my whole milk crate of cassettes into the trash in the mid-2000s. While I don’t generally regret that decision—despite hipster-driven attempts to bring them back, audio cassettes remain an objectively terrible medium—I do occasionally miss having that album.
The reason I bring it up is that we watched a bunch of WandaVision last night, and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” playing over the closing credits of the fourth episode got me in a Hendrix mood. While I do have the CD version of that old tape somewhere, I didn’t feel like digging it out, and the album is not on any of the streaming services. I ended up listening to Winterland (Live). It’s pretty good and mostly fit the bill, but sadly, it doesn’t have “Stone Free.”