Last year I posted Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland—Exposing the ‘Blue Type’ Hype, about people’s mistaken notion that the UK version of Hendrix’s masterpiece with the blue type was the true first pressing. If you’re one of the 98% of collectors who couldn’t care less about this, I invite you to move on to something more interesting.
If you care about this arcane issue read on, because the answer has emerged. To recap, there are two major variations of the UK Electric Ladyland album cover. Most copies have white type and small photos of Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell inside the gatefold, but some have blue type and larger photos of Mitch and Noel. On the “blue” copies, the type is a mottled blue, which looks like a printing problem of some sort.
Since the advent of Ebay, some have maintained that the blue text copies are the true first pressings. In my previous post, I disputed this for a variety of reasons. The vast majority of copies have the white type. Hendrix was a superstar when Electric Ladyland was released, and it was a immediate best seller. If the blue copies were the first, there would be far more blue than white ones. As I wrote last year, I own Hendrix’s personal copy of Electric Ladyland–surely he would have had an original–and his is the white type version. And well known English illustrator Edwin Pouncey (aka Savage Pencil) still has the copy he had special ordered prior to the album’s release—and it too has white type.
In late October, I had the good fortune to visit David King, the art director who designed the UK Electric Ladyland cover, as well as the covers for the single disc versions, Electric Ladyland Part 1 and Part 2. David is a hero of mine, and also designed the covers for Axis:Bold As Love, The Who Sell Out and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown–in my opinion some of the greatest album covers ever created (I look forward to writing more about my visit with David at his London home.)
Obviously David was the man who could solve the blue/white mystery for once and for all. He told me that in the 60’s recording artists were rarely involved with their album covers. They were usually on the road or in the studio, and he typically had only a few days to come up with an idea and create the artwork. In the case of Electric Ladyland, the Hendrix Experience had been touring the US for three months prior to the album’s October 25, 1968 UK release, and didn’t return until after the album was out.
King, the Arts Editor at the Sunday Times Magazine was a friend of Track Records co-owner Chris Stamp (also co-manager of The Who.) Stamp liked King’s aesthetic and hired him to design various album covers for Track. For Electric Ladyland, King recalls having only three days from concept to turning in the finished art. Stamp was enthusiastic about King’s idea to picture nude girls on the cover, and happily anticipated the controversy it would undoubtedly cause. King told me Hendrix had no involvement with the cover, and even disavowed it after its release, saying “I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t know it was going to be used.”
King hired photographer David Montgomery to shoot the nineteen nude models, and on the inside used an existing photograph of Hendrix (he’d previously hired Montgomery to shoot the photo for a Sunday Times Magazine article that never ran.) King added the small photographs of Mitch and Noel as an afterthought. His original design had the white type and smaller photographs of Redding and Mitchell; in fact King showed me his white type printed samples, stored in his flat files since 1968.
So why was there a blue type/larger photos version ? It turns out the problem was the size of the photos. King told me that when Redding and Mitchell saw the finished cover, they were very upset that their photos were so much smaller than Hendrix’s. Consequently, Chris Stamp had the printer to enlarge their photos for the next run. The printer mistakenly used blue type instead of white—perhaps because the text on the Part 2 album cover was the same shade of blue—but in the process of “fixing it” created the blotchy blue type on the blue versions. King was not involved in the “fix” and would never have approved it the way it was printed; he told me “until you mentioned it a few weeks ago, I’d completely forgotten about the blue type, that it ever existed even for a moment.”
Chris Stamp died last year, so there is no way to definitively know what happened next, but we assume that since the printing job turned out badly, and the Experience broke up in mid 1969, Stamp made the decision to go back to the original version—which at least was printed properly. The white type version on Track was still in print in the early 1970’s, and was the version later reissued on Polydor. Last month, an ‘interm version’ was sold on Ebay, with white type but bits of blue, particularly in the slashes between songs.
So for those who share my obsession with things like this, we now know the pressings were-
- White type/smaller photos
- Blue type/larger photos
- White type/smaller photos (with a bit of blue)
- White type/smaller photos (Same as #1)
- Polydor reissue; White type/smaller photos.
And there you have it—case closed !
-Jeff Gold
Comments
Excellent work, Jeff! I’m not THAT much into collecting Jimi (I’m a Dylan collector), but I applaud your enthusiasm and accuracy in finding out details like these!
Thanks Hans-Peter, my wife thinks this is ridiculously obscure–and I know she’s right–but I still care and am glad to know others do too. All the best, Jeff
excellent work jeff! looking forward to an expanded profile on king and his artwork.
Great work Jeff! I too have been wary of believing ‘blue text-first press’ hype..though i must say i prefer the blue text design myself and do own a copy,along with a white one. Just as an aside, have you seen a recent sale on ebay of a version that has blue text cover but has the sides running A/B C/D instead of the usual ‘auto-changer’ A/D B/D and with uncorrected matrix numbers!! Just wondering what your thoughts were on this. Think it sold for just over a grand(£)!! Anyhow, great stuff. Regards Warren
Nice work Jeff–I’ve been a little obsessed by this bit of minutiae as well but you appear to have solved it.
One thing to note is that early pressings have different labels which only state “Side A” etc while later pressings have the notation “Side A Two Record Set”.
Early pressing additionally have upside down matrix numbers on the labels, later do not.
Matrix numbers in the dead wax would also of course indicate earlier or later pressings.
Thanks Bob–I’ve known you share my obsession with this one. Great to have some “closure” from my end. All the best, Jeff
In 1999, one of my regular record shop haunts in London purchased the collection of John Walters, who was of course producer of John Peel’s Radio One Show broadcast by the BBC. I snaffled as many things as I possibly could having been afforded the opportunity but was simply a question of limited resources. Many of his records, which presumably were obtained for the purposes of promotion, were unplayed and were invariably first presses. Included was a first press Electric Ladyland with white type and I always thought it was curious that blue type copies were purported to be the first. As a footnote, evidently either Mr Walters or a member of his family were offended my the infamous cover as it was folded inside out to hide the offending nudity! Suffice to say the spine laminate suffered as a result.
Just read this Jeff – Thanks for the explanation as I too believed initially that the blue type face was original – however this was based upon me buying the album in the first week of its release and it had blue type — my father a few months later decided to rip the album cover up in front of me during an argument over my music preferences ! As I still had the vinyl I never bothered to buy the album again to simply recover the cover. However years later I wondered as I saw that all current covers are in white type.
An even more important point is the use of the word ‘Voodoo Chile’ rather than Child on the US album covers — I really wonder just what Hendrix wrote as I recently purchased a limited addition (from the Hendrix Foundation) of Hendrix’s hand written lyrics and in these he uses the word Child and NOT Chile— is this another typing anomaly on the UK album cover ?? Can you shed light on this issue ? Thanks – Graham Everson
Hi Graham, and thanks for your note. I had Hendrix’s original notes to the Warner Bros. Art Department for the Electric Ladyland cover (which they somewhat ignored, but that’s another story). They were reproduced for the MCA Experience Hendrix reissue of some years ago, and on Jimi’s notes, he specified that the Side One track was “Voodoo Chile” and Side Four track was “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” (it looks like he changed it from Chile to Child). So those are the spellings Jimi specified. Best, Jeff
I agree with everything in this article. I think people value the blue cover not because it is the earliest pressing, but because of it’s rarity. Thanks for sharing.