Midnight Lightning by Jimi Hendrix

Midnight Lightning, a posthumous Jimi Hendrix compilation, came out in November 1975 on Reprise in America and Polydor in Britain, and it's a record that should make any Hendrix fan a little uneasy. Alan Douglas and Tony Bongiovi produced it, their second go at this, taking demo-grade tapes and overdubbing them with musicians who'd never played a note with the man.

There's still fire in the grooves, because nothing could entirely smother that guitar: the overdriven roar, the feedback bent into shape, the wah-wah and fuzz talking in tongues. The reworkings of "Hear My Train" and "Machine Gun", two songs he'd made his own on stage, are the reason to listen. But this is Hendrix filtered through somebody else's idea of him, and the public noticed: it did worse than its predecessor, stalling at 43 in the US and 46 in the UK.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.