2023-04-23 07:00:13
Ne are in May 1970 on the Berkeley (California) campus, a bastion of student protest, just across from San Francisco. Tickets for the Jimi Hendrix concert were sold out within hours, so irresistible is the aura of the African-American prodigy. In just three discs, recorded in three years, the “magnificent left-hander” has indeed imposed himself on the firmament of the psychedelic counter-culture.
He delights his Californian audience with his classics Hey Joe et Voodoo Child, without forgetting the devastating version of the American anthem which had already electrified the Woodstock festival, a few months earlier. But Hendrix also performs on stage Hey Babywhose anonymous heroine, who came from “land of the new rising sun”hope “spreading peace of mind and full of love”. The singer, fascinated by this sylph, gets her to “accompany him in his world”. The melody, as simple as it is bewitching, carries the peace and love of those years to a form of apogee.
The avatars of a posthumous piece
Hendrix is convinced that this Hey Babysubtitle New Rising Sun (Nouveau Soleil Levant), can form the basis of a more peaceful fourth album, where he would explore new musical territories. He works there for hours, days and nights, in New York, in the mythical Electric Studio, now his property.
In July 1970, he launched to all the winds of Hawaii a Hey Baby offered to a smoky colony of hand-picked hippies. The following month, the atmosphere is much less relaxed on the British Isle of Wight, where the piece is part of the anthology presented in the middle of the night to hundreds of thousands of festival-goers. In September, Hendrix performs Hey Baby on the German island of Fehmarn, for a concert peppered with incidents, which ends in a muddy stampede. A few days later, in London, the magnificent left-hander died in his sleep, dazed on barbiturates and suffocated by his vomit. He is 27 years old.
The battles for Jimi Hendrix’s legacy, tearing his parents and loved ones apart, will follow one another as posthumous records of random quality are released. It was not until 1995 that his family recovered all the rights to his work, establishing the company Experience Hendrix to manage them.
A final round of proceedings opposes, on the death of Jimi’s father, in 2002, his brother Leon Hendrix to his adoptive half-sister, Jamie, who ends up winning. Over the course of these legal disputes, Hey Baby has known no less than half a dozen different versions, derived from recordings made at the Electric Studio in the summer of 1970. But, unlike other Hendrix standards, Hey Baby has given rise to very few covers, as if this melody continued to intimidate the most intrepid of guitar heroes.
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