Nah! [Laughs] It's usually the leader of the band that has the best ideas and is the smartest…

And then the others are resentful of him…

Yeah, absolutely. There's always the next guy who maybe thinks he's as good, and that's where the battles start. But you know what? If the battle is over creativity, hopefully what comes out is a fine product. Because I think if there's no resistance and there's no spark, what the hell do you have? A piece of wet, soggy paper. When you think about Robert and Jimmy of Led Zeppelin, they were knocking heads all the time. Same with John and Paul in The Beatles.

Well, there was always a tremendous undercurrent of mutual respect in those cases.
Undoubtedly. The point is, without that spark, that creative tension, you don't have as much.

What have you done the past few years that excites you, other than the reissues?

What I love right now is the fact that I've been able to go in and do 5.1 surround mixes. What a marvelous thing 5.1 is, particularly for me, because I'm a big fan of movies and I love the fact that I can get in there with a live recording with a good picture and really work with the sound. It's a great challenge and the results can be amazing. I've just finished this film, The Festival Express [a documentary about a 1970 trans-Canada train trip by Janis Joplin, The Band, the Grateful Dead and others] and it was so much fun. The tapes were very old; they sat untouched in a vault in Canada for 25 years. I did Monterey Pop and that was quite a challenge. I just finished doing a 5.1 of Jimi Plays Berkeley and it's stunning! The “Johnny B. Goode” is just hair-raising!

How much Hendrix stuff is left at this point?

We still have enough material in the library to come out with something completely new for many years to come. That's not including film things we're working on. It's a massive library and it's well-taken care of.

A lot of it is really good, and there are some things that aren't that great, of course. We grade it by the quality of the recording and the performance. There are some things that only the really hardcore fans will like; things that sonically might not be that great, but are great performances. So I'll do the best I can with it, but the buyer has to know that there are limitations. We have some audience tapes like that and also some less-than-great 2-tracks from the board. But the idea is to make it available to the fans on Dagger label at a reduced price. It's not junk; it's EQ'd and mastered properly.

Do you have to bake the tapes?

No. Most of the stuff was pre-'70s, which is when the tapes started going to hell. The saddest thing right now is that BASF/Emtec is no longer; that really hurts because it's been my favorite tape forever. All of the early tapes I did with Jimi in '67 and part of '68 were on BASF LR56, that horrible, sickly green tape that sounded so great! To this day, I've played tapes from those sessions and they track perfectly; no shedding. They sound absolutely wonderful, and I've never had to bake them.

It's still a thrill for me to go back to the master tapes and pull up the faders and listen to Jimi talking to me, or Chas saying something, or Jimi making jokes about Mitch and Noel. And, of course, much of the music is just wonderful. I never get tired of working on Hendrix.

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