Jimi Hendrix keepers turn back clock

The keepers of Jimi Hendrix’s flame are calling the new album of long-buried recordings by the proto-rock guitar hero “Valleys of Neptune.”

The obvious explanation is that it’s the title of one of the cornerstone songs that emerged during a fertile, albeit transitional, period in Hendrix’s career: the early months of 1969, when the original Jimi Hendrix Experience was dissolving and its namesake was figuring out what to do next.

But spend a little time talking with those keepers and you quickly sense that “Valleys of Neptune” also describes just how far they’ve been willing to go to put his memory in order.

“I keep saying that this is the most fun, archaeological dig you could possibly go on,” says engineer Eddie Kramer, one of the handful of people still alive who spent significant time with Hendrix in a recording studio.

“You unearth these little gems, and you go, ‘Wow, I don’t remember him doing that.’ But then all these little pieces start to fit together.”

Kramer has been working with 41-year-old, 14-inch reels turning on vintage Ampex tape machines hooked up to banks of the latest digital equipment to read the album for release March 9 on CD and audiophile vinyl pressings.

Hendrix released just three official studio albums during his lifetime: the watershed 1967 debut of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Are You Experienced,” followed in relatively short order by “Axis: Bold as Love” and his only No. 1 collection, “Electric Ladyland.”

A live set from Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys surfaced shortly before his drug-related death at age 27 on Sept. 18, 1970.

In succeeding years, various labels have issued more than 30 albums of live performances and assorted studio recordings he left behind.

Since stepsister Janie Hendrix emerged as the victor in the legal wrangling over who would control the estate after the 2002 death of her father, she, Kramer and Hendrix devotee John McDermott have busied themselves trying to redress what McDermott terms “a short-sighted approach that was just to try to grind (his catalog) for what it was worth at the time. There was no long-term thought or care, and this was a guy who wanted all of that.”

Their first step has been to prep the three original albums for deluxe reissues, also due March 9. Those will include bonus tracks, extensive liner notes and a DVD on the making of each album featuring interviews with original Experience members Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, producer Chas Chandler, Cox and Kramer.

They’ll be giving a similar treatment to remastered editions of “First Rays of the New Rising Sun” (the double album Hendrix was working on when he died that was the initial release from the Seattle-based Experience Hendrix in 1997), the “Smash Hits” compilation and “Live at Woodstock.”

They’ll be issued under a long-term contract that Janie Hendrix signed last year with Sony Music. At the time, Sony vowed to make Hendrix’s music “available through every type of media” – including a new edition of Rock Band that Janie Hendrix says should appear before the end of this year.

Several tracks on “Valleys of Neptune” show Hendrix reconnecting with his roots in “the deep blues,” she says.

“It’s a completely different direction, and I think it shows as a musician where he was evolving to,” says Janie, who remembers the stepbrother who was 19 years her senior as someone with “a great sense of humor … he loved to tickle me and chase me around the house.”

McDermott, a pop music historian, says “this period was very important from a developmental point of view. In the aftermath of ‘Electric Ladyland,’ he was approaching a new level of success. For us, this represents the best approximation of what his next album would have been.”

He and Kramer single out the blues foundations of “Lover Man,” a song Hendrix performed regularly live, and a reworked rendition of his classic blues rocker “Red House.”

Hendrix originals surfacing officially for the first time include the pounding, polyrhythmic instrumental “Lullaby for the Summer” and the hard-charging rocker “Ships Passing Through the Night.”

There also are reconfigured versions of two other Hendrix canon staples, “Stone Free” and “Fire,” plus an instrumental treatment of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” – proving he could out-scorch Eric Clapton on his own musical turf.