A cardboard box marked “do not play” sat forgotten in a Queens storage locker for over five decades.
Inside, according to two audio engineers who went public this week, are fourteen reels of unreleased Jimi Hendrix sessions from the summer of 1969 — the same months he was woodshedding ideas that would later surface on *Band of Brothers* and *First Rays of the New Rising Sun*.
The reels came with a hand-scrawled track list taped to the lid: “Machine Gun (alt), Izabella (take 6), untitled jam — maybe call it ‘Drifting’?” The handwriting matches Hendrix’s known script, according to a forensic document examiner hired by the storage facility’s estate sale liquidator.
If authenticated, the tapes could represent the most significant Hendrix find since the 2010 discovery of a 1968 Olympic Studios reel in a London dumpster.
But authentication is a long, expensive road — and the Hendrix estate has already lawyered up. “We are aware of the claim and are reviewing the materials,” a spokesperson for Experience Hendrix told me.
Translation: don’t hold your breath for a box set by Christmas.
Next month marks 55 years since Hendrix closed Woodstock with his searing “Star-Spangled Banner,” a performance that turned a guitar solo into a political statement and made the Fender Stratocaster an American icon.
A new documentary, *Purple Haze: The Lost Year*, premieres on HBO Max on August 18 — and its director, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, has been quietly lobbying the estate for access to any newly surfaced material. “If these tapes are real, they change the last chapter of his story,” Questlove told me at a Brooklyn listening party last week. “People think Jimi was just a showman.
He was hearing orchestras in his head that nobody else could play.” The storage unit belonged to a former sound engineer named Dale Kessler, who died in 2021 at 83.
His daughter, Marla, found the box while clearing out a locker she’d been paying $180 a month to keep.
She nearly tossed the reels in a dumpster. “I thought they were old home movies,” she said. “Then I saw ‘Jimi’ written on one of the labels.” Marla has since retained a lawyer and is fielding offers from three auction houses.
One insider told me a private collector in Tokyo has already floated a seven-figure number — contingent on authentication, which could take a year or more.
Meanwhile, the internet is doing what the internet does.
A TikTok user with 2.3 million followers posted a 47-second clip claiming to have “decoded” a reversed snippet of the alleged “Machine Gun” take, insisting it contains a hidden message about the Manson family.
What’s real: Hendrix’s cultural footprint keeps expanding even as his official catalog stays frozen by estate battles.
He released only three studio albums in his lifetime.
And yet every few years, a new fragment surfaces — a demo, a diary, a storage unit — and the mythology grows another inch.
The tapes, if genuine, won’t be streaming anytime soon.
But they’re a reminder that Hendrix never really finished anything.
He was always mid-sentence, mid-riff, mid-revolution. **Our take:** The Hendrix estate has a long history of stonewalling releases, which means fans may be waiting years for a proper listen — if ever.
But the bigger story here isn’t the tapes themselves.
Final Thoughts
It’s that America still can’t let go of a guitarist who died before most of us were born.