FREMONT'S GROUP '71 psych LP CHICO MAGNETIC BAND LISTEN

$

220

With only three studio albums to his credit during his brief but influential life, Jimi Hendrix has always been the single most plundered dead artist of all time.  I can understand why – three albums is hardly enough to build a legacy on, despite their overwhelming dominance over every other guitar psych album of their time, not to mention every marketing rep worth his Newhouse degree knows just how rabid Jimi fans can be.  And so we got “Cry of Love” and “ Rainbow Bridge,” “First Rays” and “Voodoo Soup”, and eventually shameless bottom-scraping jetsam like “Crash Landing” and “Midnight Lightning.”  It wasn’t long before there were more outtakes and leftovers than songs Jimi actually released.  Of course, if you don’t have access to the vaults (and by the number of posthumous albums that came out, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t have a key), there’s also the opportunity to pretend you’re the Jimi Hendrix Experience.  Just ask Robin Trower.  And so, in the years following Jimi’ s death, not only the US and UK but the entire world was flooded with bands whose only reason for existing seemed to be to fill the vacancy left by the Jimi Hendrix Experience.  You got the Purple Fox, T. Swift and the Electric Bag, the Live Experience Band out of Germany and even Stop out of Yugoslavia (those Slavs were always big Hendrix supporters), to name just a few.  But no one – and I mean no one – worships a man like the French.  And I don’t even need to bring up the name Jerry Lewis to make my point, do I?  So when the boys in the Chico Magnetic Band – a heavy Hendrix-inspired French band whose sole album is a guitar lovers dream – got together under the nom de plume of “The Fremont’s Group” to release this slab of electric hellfire, you just knew this was going to be a worship service on par with the Burning Man celebrations.  And it’s all that and a bag of frites.  Deceptively titled “The Best of Jimi Hendrix” – deceptive because the real performer’s name only appears on the back cover – the Fremont’s Group album was actually one of the first such Jimi tributes – released in 1971, less than a year after his fateful wine and Vesperax cocktail.  And yet, despite the hundreds of Hendrix ripoffs that followed, the Fremont’s album is still the best of the lot.  One listen to the Chico Magnetic Band album will tell you just how talented these guys are – what makes their Jimi tribute so incendiary is that, instead of simply trying to copy the master, they use Jimi’s songs and solos as a springboard to get even further out.  The mistake that most of the tribute bands make – Purple Fox, T. Swift, etc. – is that they’re simply happy when they get close to sounding like Jimi.  On the other hand, the Fremont’s want to show you that they can improve on Jimi’s originals – make the songs longer, make the guitar solos wilder, even change the lyrics, although that’s probably more of a language barrier issue than an actual deliberate decision.  So they slash and burn their way through “Purple Haze”, “Foxy Lady”, “Hey Joe” and “Fire,” revving up the sonics to white hot Blue Cheer levels, pummeling the s&*t out of the drums and wringing every possible wounded woodland creature cry out of the electric guitar.  Best of all, they only momentarily hit on the original song’s melody – and almost never hit on the right lyrics (“Scuse me while I give this guy”???) – that’s because Jimi’s label was still looking for hits, while Musidisc, the French equivalent of Alshire or Crown, could care less.  So the fact that lead Fremont just keeps repeating “I’m a voodoo chile” and little else is precisely the point – theirs is a total reinvention of “Voodoo Chile” with just an occasional nod to the original.  It’s almost as if they heard the song once, then tried to replicate it three weeks later in the studio. 

Even better, this so-called “Best of Jimi Hendrix” really shines when it starts to lose respect even for the deceptive title.   Most of Jimi’s “best” are here, but would you really include “Up From the Skies” among the elite?  Or how about “Can You See Me,” a song so obscure it got left off the US pressing of Jimi’s first album.  No matter to the Fremont’s, they tackle each song like it really was one of his best – “Up From the Skies” lazy jazz shuffle gets bathed in plaster-caster-thick layers of mean, funky psychedelic wah wah guitar, while “Can You See Me” is smothered in fuzz and trippy speaker-to-speaker pans.  So yeah, after the Fremont’s are done with ‘em, maybe they really are among Jimi’s best.  And that’s the French for ya.  Forcing you to see things in a completely new light.  Taking Jimi’s genius and expanding on the foundation – creating something wilder, rawer and crazier, with lyrics cribbed from some bad translation on the insert of a Japanese pressing of “Electric Ladyland.”  They’ve come up with the single greatest Jimi Hendrix tribute album of all time, I’ll give ‘em that.  But I still don’t see the genius in “The Nutty Professor.”

Original 1971 pressing on the French Musidisc label.  Cover's in EXCELLENT shape, vinyl looks great with only a few superficial scuffs/marks, plays EXCELLENT.

Click on the link above to hear the ACTUAL RECORD you're bidding on! 

 Winning bidder pays $4.50 for media mail shipping plus tracking in the US, $10 air mail to Canada, $16 everywhere else.   Bidpay, checks and money orders accepted.  Paypal accepted with 5% surcharge.  And please be sure to check out my other auctions for more vinyl obscurities, and I will combine shipping costs on multiple wins.