100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Foxy Lady

02 Manic Depression

03 Red House

04 Can You See Me

05 Love or Confusion

06 I Don’t Live Today

07 May This Be Love

08 Fire

09 Third Stone from the Sun

10 Remember

11 Are You Experienced?

According to the liner notes to the US edition of this LP, ‘Jimi Hendrix breaks the world into interesting fragments. Then reassembles it. You hear with new ears …’ Jimi Hendrix was a lefthanded guitar player who arrived in London via Seattle, the US Air Force, Little Richard’s band and the folk scene in Greenwich Village. Being a southpaw he played his guitar upside down. And as Pete Townshend of the Who noted, ‘He changed the whole sound of the electric guitar and turned the rock world upside down.’ There were plenty of virtuoso guitarists around but Jimi Hendrix reimagined the electric guitar as a whole new instrument. As Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones observed at one of Hendrix’s early club dates, the front rows were wet with ‘the tears of all the other guitar players’ watching in awe.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience was a hastily assembled trio of Jimi and two Englishmen – drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding. Almost from the moment Hendrix arrived in London in mid-1966 he was playing shows and winning converts. Pete Townshend and managers Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert were under his spell and he was soon signed to their label, Track. With Chandler as producer, the Experience knocked out three hit singles – ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ – and Are You Experienced in less than five months. ‘A lot of the early stuff was done in two or three takes,’ recalled Mitch Mitchell. ‘Chas Chandler never let us forget that “House Of The Rising Sun” was made for £4 and sold ultra million copies!’

Recorded in a four-track studio in London, Are You Experienced is the most conventional of Hendrix’s albums. He described it as ‘a collection of free feeling and imagination’. There are some straightforward pop songs such as ‘May This Be Love’ and ‘Remember’, but even here Hendrix won’t be tied down. He shades even a simple pop song with splashes of colour. Hendrix has the aim of drummer Mitch Mitchell who swings with a jazzy abandon but hits hard. Noel Redding keeps the bass interesting and his fluid playing nicely supports Hendrix’s flights of fancy.

Are You Experienced is both a challenge to the listener and a template for Hendrix’s explorations. The imagery in his lyrics touches on the pastoral esoterica of the flower power years but there are plenty of references to transcending space and time, which is in effect what Hendrix was trying to achieve with his guitar. The touchstones of straight blues: ‘Red House’ and soul: ‘Fire’ show where Hendrix was coming from, but in each of these cases he takes the music somewhere completely new. ‘Third Stone from the Sun’ starts out as a conventional space jazz track. Over the rolling modal foundation Hendrix drifts off into a storm of elegant, majestic feedback. ‘Manic Depression’ picks up on the driving rifferama of the Yardbirds and takes that back to Chicago’s Hubert Sumlin and rocks it into orbit.

The album closes with the title track all drenched in feedback and backwards guitar, relentless piano and Hendrix’s seductive vocal asking the question ‘have you ever been experienced?’. In one sense it’s a typically soul revue play, but in the context of 1966 and the youth revolution and also the revolutionary sound coming out of Hendrix’s Fender, this is a whole new demarcation line in the culture war. In May ’67, Hendrix crossed a line and the world followed.

‘He made the electric guitar beautiful. It had always been dangerous, it had always been able to evoke anger,’ Pete Townshend wrote. ‘Jimi made it beautiful.’