“Hey Joe” is an American song from the 1960s that has become a rock standard and has been performed in many musical styles by hundreds of different artists. The lyrics tell of a man who is on the run and planning to head to Mexico after shooting his unfaithful wife.
In late 1965, Los Angeles garage band The Leaves recorded the earliest known commercial version of “Hey Joe” which became a hit in the US. In October 1966, Jimi Hendrix recorded “Hey Joe” for his first single with The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
As was often the case in those days, Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” reached rock fans in Czechoslovakia through hundreds of bootleg cassette tapes all probably derived from a single vinyl copy that had somehow made it into the country. These unofficial tapes were sold and traded on black markets called burzy, which were the only way to get foreign recordings of underground and alternative music.
The markets were usually held on Sunday mornings and climaxed in the mid-70s in Letenské sady, a vast park in Prague, where it was possible to scatter quickly during the sudden police raids that were organized to confiscate illegal material.
The recordings and translations of lyrics from Pink Floyd, Genesis, Frank Zappa, Lou Reed, Jimmy Hendrix Experience, Janis Joplin, Captain Beefheart and other artists and bands had an enormous influence on the then Czech underground scene, and are grafted in the minds of many youngsters growing up in the oppressive atmosphere of the first years of post-1968 Prague where also Pavel Büchler got to hear “Hey Joe”.
In 1984, three years after his emigration to Britain, while listening to “Hey Joe” on the radio, Büchler noticed that it did not sound quite right. What was missing were the cracks and hisses of the worn vinyl single, copied and copied again on cassette tape hundreds of times, which belonged to the collective listening experience of Büchler’s generation in Prague at the time.
Now, forty years later, Büchler recovers the “Hey Joe” he knew, by removing all music from a copy of Hendrix’s original single, leaving only the sound of scratches and hisses on a new virgin vinyl pressing.