"Hey Joe" is one of the most storied songs in rock history, but its exact origins are difficult to trace, as it was seemingly written by Billy Roberts, although Dino Valenti also claimed the copyright, while others have credited it as a traditional.
A song like "Hey Joe" demands a close investigation, and that's exactly what author Jason Schneider (a former Exclaim! editor) has done with That Gun In Your Hand: The Strange Saga of "Hey Joe" and Popular Music's History of Violence. The deep dive drops tomorrow (May 30) via Anvil Press, so Exclaim! reached out to Schneider to pick the five essential versions of this oft-covered track.
The intensively researched book, with new information about Roberts's under-reported life, is available to pre-order from Indigo or directly from Anvil.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1966)
"Hey Joe" was impossible to ignore in 1965 and 1966, especially in L.A. where the Byrds, Love, the Leaves and countless others recorded frantic, proto-punk versions. But it was folk singer Tim Rose's completely unconnected arrangement that led "Hey Joe" to become Jimi Hendrix's debut single.
As the legend goes, Hendrix's future producer Chas Chandler — bassist in the Animals — was looking for an artist to record Rose's "Hey Joe," which he was convinced would be a hit in the UK. Through a mutual friend in New York, Chandler heard Jimi perform the song and immediately took him to England where they put together the Jimi Hendrix Experience and recorded "Hey Joe" within a matter of weeks during the fall of 1966. The single indeed set Hendrix on his path to stardom, and when he returned to the US in June 1967 to play the Monterey Pop Festival, "Hey Joe" became a showcase for his bag of tricks — although it couldn't top the guitar-torching climax of "Wild Thing."
Lee Moses (1970)
The great soul singer Wilson Pickett recorded "Hey Joe" in his trademark style in 1969, but, the following year, a more obscure soul artist from Atlanta named Lee Moses did a version that would eclipse it, although sadly not for several decades. Moses had earned some regional success with the single "Bad Girl," but his producer/manager Johnny Brantley was unable to break him nationwide. For the 1970 album Time and Place, Moses and Brantley decided to take on "Hey Joe," with Moses giving a stunning performance. It included a lengthy opening recitation that put him in the position of Joe's friend who fails to prevent the murder in the song from being committed.
Time and Place suffered from a lack of distribution, and remained a forgotten soul gem until Light in the Attic reissued the album in 2007. Moses had died in 1998, just as labels such as Daptone were spearheading a classic soul revival that could have easily brought him the recognition he'd always deserved.
Patti Smith (1974)
In the early Seventies, Patti Smith was a struggling writer in New York City, but her all-consuming passion for rock 'n' roll provided an entry into the city's music scene where she was able to rub shoulders with Hendrix, Lou Reed, Todd Rundgren and others. After meeting guitarist Lenny Kaye — who would become her lifelong musical collaborator — they began developing ways to turn Smith's poetry into songs.
As she prepared to record her debut single in 1974, Americans were obsessed with the abduction and conversion of heiress Patty Hearst by the self-styled revolutionary group the Symbionese Liberation Army. In a brilliant move, Smith used "Hey Joe" to put herself in Hearst's shoes — "You know what your daddy said Patty? / Well, 60 days ago she was such a lovely child / Now here she is with a gun in her hand." Hendrix's spirit infused Smith's "Hey Joe" as well, as it was recorded at Jimi's Electric Lady studio, with Tom Verlaine of the soon-to-be-formed Television adding a suitably raging guitar part.
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (1986)
As an artist whose finest moments have often derived from getting inside the minds of killers, it's no surprise that Nick Cave recorded "Hey Joe" for his 1986 album Kicking Against the Pricks. By then, he had become fully immersed in the dark side of Americana, studying books such as Olive Woolley Burt's American Murder Ballads and Their Stories, and the work of blues singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and John Lee Hooker.
This foundation, combined with the Bad Seeds' post-punk fury, gave Cave's interpretation of "Hey Joe" the doom-laden qualities that made him a goth pioneer, and also a stateliness that looked ahead to his future recordings. This last point was even more evident when Cave appeared on the short-lived television show Night Music in 1990, for which he turned in a riveting "Hey Joe," accompanied by the legendary jazz bassist Charlie Haden, harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans and saxophonist David Sanborn.
Charlotte Gainsbourg with Beck (2013)
When Charlotte Gainsbourg was cast to star in Lars von Trier's 2014 magnum opus Nymphomaniac, one of the conditions was that she record "Hey Joe" for the soundtrack. Gainsbourg's character was Joe, a woman coping with a lifetime of abuse that had pushed her into the criminal underworld. This eventually brought her back to the man who had taken her virginity — the catalyst for her sexual deviance — and presented an opportunity for her to exact revenge.
The film turned the underlying story of "Hey Joe" on its head by putting a woman in the role of the killer, but Gainsbourg's personal take on the song was even more surprising. Having already worked with Beck on her 2009 album IRM, they took a similar approach to "Hey Joe" by relying on Beck's neo-psychedelic production style that emphasized Gainsbourg's haunting vocals, which barely rose above a whisper. Jimi would have undoubtedly approved.