Musical Mystery Tour

“You know the feeling you get after you hear your favorite song for the first time? All you wanna do is play it again and again so it stays stuck in your head forever. But what if you could only hear it once? What would you do?”

— Pete, The Adventures of Pete & Pete

But this story isn’t about those songs.

This story is about musical mysteries that can be solved — about songs we might hear someday.

Just a few months before his death, Hendrix recorded Black Gold, a collection of 16 autobiographical acoustic songs. He gave the tapes to his drummer Mitch Mitchell, but Mitchell forgot about the tapes after Hendrix’s death. 22 years later, Hendrix collector and biographer Tony Brown interviewed Mitchell and learned that Mitchell had the mythical Black Gold tapes. Brown was allowed to listen to the tapes, and he took extensive notes: “Black Gold has words unlike anything else he wrote […] a slice-of-life story about the character Black Gold as he experienced personal highs and lows.” After Mitchell’s death in 2008, the Hendrix Estate took possession of the tapes. In a March 2010 interview, Janie Hendrix promised to release the tapes “this decade”. Seven months later, “Suddenly November Morning” was released with the 5-disc anthology West Coast Seattle Boy in November 2010 — but nearly seven years later, it’s the only released Black Gold song.

This mystery isn’t like the others: We’re not looking for lost music. We have the music — but that’s all we have.

Back in the 1960s, novelty dance songs—no, no, that’s not right.
Webster’s defines “quack” as the sound a duck—goddamn it.

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