Rainbow Bridge by Jimi Hendrix

Rainbow Bridge came out on Reprise in October 1971, a year after Jimi Hendrix died, and it's the second posthumous album built mostly from studio tapes nobody had heard, much of it meant for the fourth studio album he never got to finish. Don't let the "Original Motion Picture Sound Track" tag fool you: the music only drifts through the film in the background, none of it comes from the Maui performance the movie shows, and what you're really holding is a compilation, pieced together by Mitch Mitchell, Eddie Kramer and John Jansen, with Hendrix credited too.

And what a salvage job. Billy Cox on bass and Mitchell on drums hold down most of it while Hendrix goes for broke on the slinky strut of "Dolly Dagger", "Earth Blues", "Room Full of Mirrors" and a burning "Hear My Train A Comin'", plus his "Star Spangled Banner". Critics dug it, it went to number 15 on the Billboard 200, and "Dolly Dagger", the only single, became his last to chart.

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