Red House (song)
Music critic Charles Shaar Murray describes a song he calls "California Night", which Hendrix performed with Curtis Knight and the Squires, as "a dead ringer, both in structure and mood, for his 1967 perennial 'Red House'".
[5][6][a] Elmore James's 1960 song "The Sky Is Crying" contains "I got a bad feeling my baby don't love me no more" and has been suggested as inspiring the similar line used by Hendrix.
[12] Music writer Keith Shadwick describes Hendrix's performance as "a staggering display of blues guitar playing that is worthy of mention in the same breath as his later efforts with the Experience".
[5] Although Shadwick compares his guitar tone and phraseology to that of Buddy Guy, he adds that his techniques "simply transcend any previous models, and breaks new ground" and shows that "his ability to spin out long and consistently surprising lines across the standard blues changes is already full grown".
[13] "Red House" is a moderately slow blues, which music writers Tom Wheeler and Joe Gore describe as having "the twelve-bar structure, the lyrics, the accompaniment, and the arrangement [that] are more or less conventional".
[19] Author Jeffrey Carroll describes his solo as "concise and packed solid with vocalisms, the bending and glissandos, jumps, drops and whoops of his guitar kept within a traditional structure of a break".
[20] Shadwick also compares it to a vocal, calling it a "close approximation of the human voice ... scooping and bending his phrases to maximum expressive effect".
[22] In his biography Room Full of Mirrors, biographer Charles R. Cross comments that the song's theme is "as old as the blues itself; the singer's woman doesn't love him any more and has moved".
[23] Author Kay Norton describes the broader blues influence as "balancing a celebration of love and sex with dark humor and wry commentary on loss, mistreatment, corruption, and poverty".
[28] In London in 1970, Hendrix met up with Keith and when he performed "Red House" at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, he dedicated the song to her and added "I got to get out of here, because my Linda don't live here no more" to the lyrics.
[29] However, Billy Cox, longtime friend and bassist for Hendrix' post-Experience groups, explained, "As far as I know, 'Red House' didn't have any significance in reference to a particular person, place, or thing.
The group first attempted it at the CBS Studios in London on Tuesday, December 13, 1966, following their performance of "Hey Joe" for the Ready Steady Go!
[32] Redding added, "I had borrowed a terrible old hollow-body electric guitar from someone at the studio ... because I liked to play along on rhythm to familiarise myself with a sequence, not being quite at home on the bass yet".
[38] So when the album was released in the US, "Purple Haze", "Hey Joe" and "The Wind Cries Mary" were included at the expense of "Red House" and two other songs.
[46] Variations on a Theme: Red House (1992), a music reference with analyses, transcriptions, and accompanying compact disc, explores several live versions.
In an AllMusic review, critic Sean Westergaard comments: "Prince reinterprets 'Red House' with great gospel-esque backing vocals and a monstrous guitar solo.
