Stephen Stills has been through the tapes he made with Jimi Hendrix, but believes almost none of the material they jammed together is usable.
He’s paid tribute to his friend for teaching him a lot about guitar playing.He spent many happy nights playing and talking with guitar icon Hendrix, and recently trawled through their recordings in a hunt for songs which could be made public.
He tells Music Radar: “A lot of it us waiting for somebody to start something. It isn’t really usable. It deteriorates into giggles and then the tape stops.
“There’s a couple of things in there – now the family has worked their business out I’ve done some of the things I did at Electric Lady with him. I’ve finished a couple of those. There’s one song that’s sitting there in want of a lyric. There’s babbling but no good lyric.”
He remembers Hendrix as “astonishing – a very dear, dear soul” and remains grateful for the lead guitar lessons he learned.
“I remember he was showing me something,” says the Buffalo Springfield man, “And I said, ‘Jimi, put your hand up.’ So he held his hand up and I put mine next to his and I said, ‘Your thumb is longer than mine! I can’t do what you’re doing!’ So he went, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and figured out a way to show me the same thing.”
Stills is working on a four-disc box set encompassing his entire career, which started out as a three-disc package. But he says: “I don’t want to have to do it again, so I said, ‘Just do four.’ There isn’t much left off that I care about.”
And while a new CSN live album and DVD is on the cards, he says there’s no chance of new recordings with David Crosby and Graham Nash. “We won’t make another album – we won’t finish one,” he insists.
That prediction appears to include the planned covers record the trio had started with producer Rick Rubin. Stills explains: “You should ask David what happened. I’m not inferring anything, but I was getting along fine. I had an idea for 20 years of making the album we wished we’d written. We started picking songs and stuff. Some of the choices Rick made were pretty off the wall, but we tried them.”
source: classicrockmagazine.com
