My wife and I have been going through boxes of stuff lately. You know, the kind of boxes that traveled from one residence to another but never got opened. It just keeps getting shoved aside for one reason or another, and gets forgotten until a cold day comes along and you begin to dig.

Within a shoebox filled with pictures and letters from my teens is a single of Hendrix covering “Gloria.” It is marked as first time available in United States with a release date of 1979. Weird that I should have no idea how I got it and where it came from. Side ‘A’ plays great with barely a hint of buzz or crackle, while the B-side (the unedited side) starts with a bunch of ‘pop and hiss’ before settling down and letting Jimi ‘take over’. (OK, that wasn’t funny)

I stare at it for a long time trying to…