Latest Release
- 10 NOV 2023
- 10 Songs
- Experience Hendrix: The Best of Jimi Hendrix · 1967
- Are You Experienced (Deluxe Version) · 1967
- Are You Experienced (Deluxe Version) · 1966
- Experience Hendrix: The Best of Jimi Hendrix · 1968
- Electric Ladyland · 1968
- Experience Hendrix: The Best of Jimi Hendrix · 1967
- Axis: Bold As Love · 1967
- Are You Experienced (Deluxe Version) · 1967
- Electric Ladyland · 1968
- Are You Experienced (Deluxe Version) · 1967
Essential Albums
- Halfway through the recording of Jimi Hendrix’s last studio album, 1968’s Electric Ladyland</I>, producer Chas Chandler quit. The sessions had gotten too sloppy, the atmosphere too social. Hendrix seemed increasingly fixated on closing the gap between reality and his imagination—which, for an artist with ever-expanding resources, produced more friction than anything else: One track, “Gypsy Eyes”, took nearly 50 takes. In a way, it’s a classic story of creative overindulgence: An artist with too much money and time convinces himself that more is better, and perfection is just around the corner. Compound that with a chorus of people singing your genius, and you see how Hendrix could feel inspired, albeit in a warped, highly pressured way. As bassist Noel Redding put it in a diary entry, the public seemed to want the band to keep doing what they were doing—while also getting better all the time. On Electric Ladyland, Hendrix’s musical view had never been so vast: There’s blues (“Voodoo Chile”, “Gypsy Eyes”); psychedelic soul (“Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)”); short pop songs (“Crosstown Traffic”); and long, digressive tracks, most notably “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”. He’d always had a distant relationship with Black audiences—at a neighbourhood fundraiser in Harlem in 1969, he reportedly went unnoticed until white people started pointing him out—but Electric Ladyland is nothing if not Afrofuturistic: an assertion that for all our culturally held stereotypes about Black music as bodily, social and down-to-earth, it could just as well be visionary and ethereal—as purely art as anything else. Part of what makes the album’s quest for perfection touching is that its real legacy lies in its messiness: An expansive, self-produced exploration of every corner of an artist’s mind that privileges range over concision, vision over execution, and the concept of pop more as a set of possibilities than a fixed product. It’s a creative ethos that lives on in mixtape culture, as well as albums like Frank Ocean’s Blonde or Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo—records that feel almost deliberately inconclusive, as though they’re living documents of a process. Had Hendrix lived, you imagine he would’ve ended up making it twice as long.
- On January 11, 1967, Jimi Hendrix left a productive studio session to play a show at a London club called the Bag O’Nails. The crowd was intimidating: Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton. (On the way back from the bathroom, the singer Terry Reid ran into Brian Jones from The Rolling Stones, who said the front of the club was totally wet. When Reid said he didn’t see any water, Jones said it was from all the guitarists, weeping.) But the most important person in the audience was a man named Roger Mayer. Mayer was a scientist for the Royal Navy who conducted acoustical analyses on how to make ships quieter for underwater warfare, but in his free time, he made pedals and sound effects—the strangely doubled guitar at the beginning of “Purple Haze”, for example, was a Mayer invention called the Octavia. Hendrix later called Mayer the secret to his sound, and, for reasons unclear, referred to him as The Valve. Of Hendrix’s three studio albums, what stands out about Axis: Bold as Love is how much it opened up his music as sound: the swirling effects of “EXP” and “Bold as Love”, the watery textures of “Little Wing”, the screaming feedback on “If 6 Was 9”. Hendrix called it the “sky effect”: music that sounded like it was coming down from heaven. Of course, what ultimately made Hendrix’s music vital is how preoccupied it remained with Earth: the heavy blues of “Spanish Castle Magic”, the lust of “Wait Until Tomorrow”, the way “Bold as Love” takes colours and feelings and personifies them—a late-’60s conceit if there ever was one (“My yellow in this case is not so mellow”), but one that captures the dualities of his art. It’s funny to think of someone celebrated so completely for his raw performing abilities as being a technophile, but, in a way, that’s Hendrix’s legacy: Not just an architect of hard rock or a steward of the blues, but someone searching the horizon of sound for new ways to convey old, elemental feelings.
- 100 Best Albums: No. 63 Around the time he started working on Are You Experienced, Jimi Hendrix met the songwriter-producer Kim Fowley. This was London, 1966. Fowley thought Hendrix was weird and unfashionable, but people had been talking, so Fowley asked: What’s your thing? “Science-fiction rock ’n’ roll,” Hendrix said. It’s not a bad self-assessment. Like science fiction, Hendrix’s futuristic qualities—his use of feedback and noise, the extraterrestrial imagery of “Purple Haze” and “Third Stone From the Sun”—are offset by a groundedness that makes them feel tied to older forms of human expression; a blues for the computer age. He wasn’t experimenting with modern classical music (like The Beatles) or high-minded pop orchestration (like The Beach Boys); he wasn’t even tapping into the more explicitly far-reaching journeys of psychedelia, like Pink Floyd. Instead, he took the simple, gut-level sounds of the Muddy Waters and Little Richard he grew up on and transfigured them into something new, an innovation that made him a precursor both to Black psychedelia like Prince and Outkast, and the radical ordinariness of punk, not to mention almost everything blues-related that came in his wake. In the consolidation of the cultural narratives of classic rock, it’s easy to let his innovations wash over you: Hear how great and revolutionary something is often enough, and you stop hearing it at all. But of all the endlessly sanctified albums that came out of the late 1960s, Are You Experienced is one of the few that still feels like a dynamic, living thing—at the very least, the concept of hummable, three-and-a-half-minute songs tricked out with sound effects is as good a definition of 21st-century pop as it was of Hendrix’s music 50 years earlier. And that’s the real magic of good science fiction: No matter how foreign it seems, it’s always talking about now.
Albums
Singles & EPs
Live Albums
- 2020
Compilations
More To Hear
- The best-ever rock guitarist emerges, fully formed.
- Classics and rare gems from the late guitar hero, Jimi Hendrix.
- The singer-songwriter picks the 5 Best Songs on Apple Music.
- Courtney Barnett picks the 5 Best Songs on Apple Music.
- Behind the scenes at the iconic festival with founder Lou Adler.
About The Jimi Hendrix Experience
About a week before Jimi Hendrix’s death in September 1970, an interviewer asked about his role in the invention of psychedelic music. Hendrix, who was as soft-spoken offstage as he was incendiary on it, laughed. Sure, you could call it psychedelic if you wanted: the trippy imagery; the wild, loud performances. But more than psychedelic, he explained, he was trying to get across what he called “a clash between fantasy and reality”. From the beginning, his music captured the outer reaches of a counterculture turning on to new chemicals, sounds, feelings and social possibilities (“Purple Haze”, “Are You Experienced?”). But it also remained grounded in traditions of Black music carried over from his days as a guitarist on the chitlin circuit—blues, yes, but also smooth, Chicago-style R&B (“Have You Ever Been [To Electric Ladyland]”), the syncopations of funk (“Fire”, “Freedom”) and the naked expressivity of Southern soul (“The Wind Cries Mary”). No matter how adventurous he got (and how unprecedented he sounded), Jimi Hendrix came from—and spoke to—Earth. Born John Allen Hendrix in Seattle in 1942 (and later renamed James Marshall Hendrix by his parents), he started his career as a sideman for artists like The Isley Brothers and Little Richard before moving to England in 1966, where he became an instant legend. (Everyone—Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, everyone—has a story about the first time they saw Hendrix; Keith Richards later joked that in creating a style that nobody could copy but that inspired everyone to try, Hendrix nearly ruined the guitar.) In two years, he recorded three albums that set new standards for what blues-based rock could be. He made druggy, mind-bending music that came across like pop (1967’s Are You Experienced) and helped redefine the rock album as a kind of stylistic playground where artists could contrast moods, explore curiosities and stretch their creative visions (1968’s Electric Ladyland). At the heart of even his fieriest music was a gentleness that registered, above all, as spiritual curiosity. A poem he wrote a few hours before his death in 1970 featured the lines “the story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye/The story of love is hello and goodbye.”
- FROM
- The Jimi Hendrix Experience
- FORMED
- 1966
- GENRE
- Rock