I’m going to try to assume you know your Jimi (but I’m wont to dissertate, so bear with me).

I’m going to assume that you either haven’t picked up Valleys Of Neptune yet because, understandably, you have your doubts… Or that you HAVE picked it up and you aren’t sure how good you feel about it. I’m going to do my best to help you.

Valleys Of Neptune is not a “lost album” in the sense that First Rays Of The New Rising Sun might be called a “lost album” … Of course, no one knows quite how First Rays would really have come together in Jimi’s hands, but I think Eddie Kramer and company did a close-to-perfect job with it, and any musician who isn’t familiar with First Rays should go out right now and get themselves a copy. Don’t download it, it won’t sound as good. If you can do the vinyl, do the vinyl. It’s the record that explains, to anyone who is wondering, just why it is that Jimi Hendrix and The Meters and Funkadelic, Sun-Ra, James “Blood” Ulmer and John Coltrane and Bob Marley should all be considered separate arms of one cosmic octopus.

And just about anything important that was left out of First Rays (like the sublime and lovely “Pali-Gap”) made it onto South Saturn Delta – which is also not a lost album, but a truly astonishing and revelatory collection of outtakes and leftovers. There are tracks I would have rather heard on South Saturn than the “original mix” of “All Along The Watchtower” … like maybe that amazing synth-sounding studio overdub onslaught version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that was on the original Rainbow Bridge soundtrack record.

But South Saturn did immeasurable good for the musical universe with the release of luminous studio versions of “Power Of Soul” and “South Saturn Delta”, studio jams on “Message To Love” and “Drifter’s Escape” (which alone satisfies the Dylan quota nicely), and otherwise homeless tracks like “Midnight,” “Bleeding Heart,” “The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice” and “Lover Man” … The picture felt very complete, and I wasn’t expecting anything more.

Though, to be fair, in the meanwhile, I have encountered lo-fi live tapes, home recordings and so forth, many of which would make wonderful releases if cleaned up a bit, though clearly only me and a few other freaks would get much out of them. I guess that’s what Dagger Records is for, but they’ve only put out a couple of things that really made me jump. There is an art to the outtake-compilation, and Dagger has not got it quite sussed.

OK, so, Valleys Of Neptune. I heard the title track on a box set of a radio show called Lifelines maybe fifteen years ago and it was life-changing. I was really excited that it was finally getting a real release, sonic spiffing and all, no radio-show banter talking over it. And the other tracks, didn’t look like I’d heard any of those, so, worth the $$.

And I am not disappointed. But I had to think about it some.

The first three tracks on Valleys include Billy Cox on bass. Billy is one of my favorite bass players, period. Anything with him on it is a joy. And he’s also the only one of the Hendrix musician crew who’s still walking around and playing music above the ground, which makes him a treasure.

Those three tracks include a cosmic-groove rendition of “Stone Free” that is really exciting and different. It felt a little weird when it passed through the air, though, and that turns out to be because the vocal and lead guitar come from a session that took place one month earlier than the session that produced the rhythm track.

Likewise, the title track, “Valleys Of Neptune”, attempts to blesh a vocal and percussion track from 1969 with a band track from 1970. The results are not bad, but…

I’m sure Jimi would have used the technology if he’d had access to it, but I also think he would have finished the damn recordings if he’d had the opportunity, and although I trust Eddie Kramer, it feels a little strange the way these tracks cut through time. I’m not ready to complain…

But I can feel it and it’s odd. I find it hard to believe that there wasn’t a single complete usable take otherwise, especially when there are vocal errors and similar tiny flubs or even premature fades in many of the other tracks (all 10 of which are taken complete from single recording sessions … no more digital flummery).

Anyway, the sound is great and the final product is a solid listen so I’ll leave it at ambiguous.

Track 3 is a very cool arrangement of “Bleeding Heart,” again with Billy Cox. Very nice. On to side two.

Back to the original Experience with Noel Redding on the drums. This “Hear My Train” is nice but probably not an essential listen… As opposed to either the live version on the original Rainbow Bridge album or the studio take on the Jimi Hendrix Experience box set. (There is a studio version of “Stone Free” on the box as well, but that one and this one are actually BOTH really worth hearing, as is the one on Fillmore Concerts… and all for different reasons). “Mr. Bad Luck” is mainly interesting as a preamble to the later, more fully-realized version called “Look Over Yonder” which can be found on South Saturn Delta. So, probably for obsessive collectors only. And “Sunshine Of Your Love” is mainly odd. I mean, it’s a fine performance, and they have a guest conga player which is neat, and the tones are great … it’s just odd. I’ve heard a bunch of great live versions of this and it works really well there, the crowd knows the tune but isn’t expecting to hear it from this band, it’s done as an instrumental and often as a long jam, and in some ways this tracks is more completely together than some other parts of Valleys. But it’s a weird thing to hear in the middle of a studio album home listening experience.

Which makes this, the halfway point, the point at which I started to understand the true character of this record.

One of my favorite Jimi recordings is the 1969 L.A. Forum concert which came with Lifelines. I’d love for that to get a full-on remaster in the manner in which Woodstock (correctly) and Isle Of Wight (maybe not so much) and lately even Monterey have been re-released and re-released, again and again. Each of those three is a milestone, and historic in some sense. Woodstock and Monterey are even really great concerts (though I understand there’s a bunch of stuff from Woodstock that I haven’t heard that maybe isn’t as good … whatever, that’s fine). But Isle Of Wight, for my money, just isn’t that good a show. Jimi is distracted and the energy is very weird. The music makes me see colors I don’t like. There are a few great tracks, “In From The Storm” being one I think I recall, but on the whole I don’t see that show deserving the treatment it gets.

Whereas L.A. Forum 1969 is a brilliant show by a band that is as good as it ever got. I want to say they play about seven tunes in an hour. Long, stretched-out versions of “Spanish Castle Magic” and “Tax Free,” and some great solo guitar pieces between tunes. “Sunshine Of Your Love” is there, and it really works. That “Spanish Castle” is by the way similar in feel to the studio take on the Jimi Hendrix Experience box set, but both are worth a listen as the group’s improvs flow differently.

Anyway, the band that recorded much of Valleys was mostly the band that played that L.A. Forum show. These are sessions from around that same time, right before Noel Redding left and right after Billy Cox came in, so a lot of the new material is half-formed (they’d been touring a lot, no time to write new stuff properly) and a lot of the other recordings are just whatever they’d been playing out, with whatever degree of inspiration they could pull together that day in the studio.

As a result, Valleys Of Neptune is closer in feel to, maybe, BBC Sessions than it is to First Rays. The revelation lies in the getting-to-hear-a-great-working-band-at-work, rather than in the development of new ideas about electric music and about how it relates to the recording studio and to human culture. Those themes are just beginning to be touched on in these sessions. But it is very nice to get a close and sonically awesome look at the 1969 Experience.

Bearing all of that in mind…

Side 3 includes an early version of “Lover Man” which is not presently coming to mind but which certainly does not offend; “Ships Passing Through The Night” which became the lush and groundbreaking “Nightbird Flying” on First Rays but makes for beautiful music in this early version with Noel on bass; and, strangely, a live-in-the-studio version of “Fire” which, although it is from the same session as “Train” and “Castle” on the box set, adds nothing that I can see to this collection (other than that they were doubtless playing it live nearly every night at the time … so it was probably a studio warmup?) and might be there as a draw to people who know Jimi only from the radio. Why a release like this would be catering to them is beyond me … same objection as to “Watchtower” on South Saturn.

Side 4 has a take of “Red House,” again not a tune that requires more exposure but it’s a fine, slow version which unfortunately fades before the end (in that sense not unlike the amazing “Electric Church Red House” on the Blues collection) and is representative of live versions from that time (L.A. Forum is a fine example, there are others) … and then two tracks which are among the real wonders of this collection: “Lullaby For The Summer” which definitely predates the mode of studio composition and approach to overdubs and guitar orchestration that we hear on First Rays, and “Crying Blue Rain” which is a warm breeze of a chill groove of a closer. Neither one is a definitive anything, but it’s nice to hear Jimi’s brain ticking, which it isn’t always doing much of on some of the other tracks. (Z says side 4 is her favorite.)

Along the lines of those two closing tracks, there are some jams on the box set and also a large number of bootlegs which consist of the grooves that made it into various songs on First Rays and South Saturn but in vestigial form and combined in different ways with bits that became parts of other songs. For those of you who haven’t heard those other jams and outtakes, these last two tracks (and “Ships Passing Through The Night”) will be actually, yes, a revelation, an inspiration, a conflagration of cosmic information.

Although the groove on Valleys is solid enough to dance around the house to, and the tones are crisp and thick and wonderful, the sequencing is too odd and disjointed for a smooth and flowing complete listen. So Valleys Of Neptune might best be thought of as mainly a reference material, a survey of a particular phenomenon, something like The Jimi Hendrix Concerts, whereas First Rays Of The New Rising Sun and South Saturn Delta are two of the most played discs in my collection (not just my collection of Jimi, but of MUSIC), even more so than the albums he completed during his lifetime.