Well, at least you knew the guy when he was still paying his dues, so that's cool. Were you around Austin when Roky Erikson
and the 13th Floor Elevators were at their height? It seems as if Austin has always contributed some really strange but good music to the underground rock and roll scene for over 40 years.
On another note, I really dislike the way the Hendrix family has had Jimi's work remastered. --It's like they cleaned all of the magic in his music, they sound really clean, but also really sterile as well.
I'm not quite that old, although I've seen Erikson play, once. I really liked the Uranium Savages, too, and some of the trippy-trippy Eric Johnson stuff, but the Sixth Street scene was nothing like what it would become after the TV cameras got there.
I was a punk kid running around the Texas rock scene with a "bad ass sound system" in my early twenties, working anywhere I could.
Hendrix stuff, to me, is hot and cold, sound-wise, but I'm such a
rabid fan, that I NEED to have all of it, no matter what it sounds like. It is truly about the music for me, although I love good sound, too. The funny thing is that Eddie Kramer did the mastering on some of the Hendrix Dagger releases, but I guess he's lost his ears or something or maybe he's lost his nerve. The fucker has got to be in his mid-sixties, at least.
I do know a bit about the old ways of recording and most of the special effects, added in the studio, were tape effects, some of which are not possible with digital mastering, at least not yet. True "flanging" is uniquely analog, as you probably know. Of course, they still try to do tape effects, digitally, but it always sounds tinny and hollow.
