October was set aside to record the Experience’s second album. Axis Bold as Love is usually dismissed by critics as the Experience’s “sophomore album.” Yet even after they had recorded what is widely considered their finest album, Electric Ladyland, Roger, Noel, and Jimi himself still judged Axis to be the Experience’s best work in the studio.
“Axis Bold as Love, that was the album for me, because it really encapsulated the period and it sounds like a proper album,” Roger says now.
I think because we had more time to set aside to record it and it wasn’t recorded on the fly in between gigs like the first album.
Are You Experienced? was a bit cobbled together, shall we say? It’s not as cohesive as that one. And Electric Ladyland . . . shows [Jimi’s] frustration at not having the right people around him. Although it’s got a few blinding tracks on it, it didn’t come together in the same way.
By modern standards Axis was recorded very swiftly, in about sixteen days of studio time. This was still a fortnight too long as far as Noel was concerned. A barnstormer by instinct as well as by background, he was impatient with the constant finessing the studio required. He spent much of the studio time in the pub across the road, waiting to be called to put down his bass part. The more time he spent in the pub the more suspicious he became that Jimi was putting down the bass lines behind his back.
Chas and Jimi quarreled over Jimi’s acid use. “I told him he had to be straight some of the time,” Chas was to recall. “I thought it would give him a new slant to his lyrics but he’d lose his temper.” The overall mood in the studio was highly positive, however, as Roger recalls:
When we came out the studio, we had a good feeling about it. I don’t think there was much doubt in our mind, we felt good about it. Jimi understood, much like many other artists I’ve worked with, who are very in tune, what you’re struggling for is a couple hundred of seconds of magic or [even] less than twenty seconds, and it takes many, many things to do that. It takes the right food, the right sandwiches, the right environment—you have to gear in the whole day to get it right, thirty seconds of solo. It’s an art form, isn’t it?
One of Noel’s songs, “She’s So Fine,” was included on the album. This was a financial bonus as well as a career boost, because Noel would receive a small royalty from each pressing. The initiative to include Noel and Mitch in the publishing credits came solely from Jimi. Mitch chose not exercise the option.
When it was time for Jimi and Mitch to record the backing vocals for “She’s So Fine,” Jimi became helpless with laughter. Such laughing fits took hold of him from time to time, and they were bewildering and embarrassing for onlookers. The fits were so strong that Jimi could not talk through them. If they began with a secret joke which had flickered across his mind, they became a great outburst of joie de vivre.
There was more time for experimentation in the studio than there had been during the recording of Are You Experienced? and Jimi’s writing technique changed accordingly: songs began to grow out of jamming sessions and sound effects devised by Roger. The songs for Are You Experienced? were tried out and improved in front of live audiences. The all new material for Axis Bold as Love, already expected by the record label within four months of the release of the first album, grew out of play.
Olympic Studios now had eight-track recording machines, and Jimi and Mitch enjoyed recording comedy routines on them, including the playful short track that opens Axis.
Roger’s experiments fed into the creative process. “Put it this way,” Roger says,
which comes first? If you don’t have the device to change the sound you can’t write the song because Jimi would take the sound into his own mind and make it his, he’d own it. You don’t just come along and add the effects afterwards. You can’t do it. The song has got to be written with the sound.
The techniques we were using in the studio were very cutting edge. We were getting as much movement and change in texture of the sound as we could. Painting a very nice soundscape for the people.
If the music was to some extent a collaboration, the lyrics were very much Jimi’s. Traces of Bob Dylan’s imagist writing linger on Axis, but Dylan was by now an inescapable influence for any songwriter. The images Jimi paints are his own. There are flourishes of traditional blues lyrics—the protests to Dolly Mae in “Wait Until Tomorrow,” for example. Yet there is an almost mediaeval visionary quality that is very much Jimi’s own. It is drawn, so the words themselves declare, from dream and dreams of color, just as the original inspiration for “Purple Haze” had been.
Some of the ideas expressed are obviously autobiographical. The Spanish Castle in “Spanish Castle Magic” was the name of a dance hall just outside of Seattle. The Indian boy playing in the woods in “Castles Made of Sand” is a fragment of Jimi’s childhood and not necessarily an idealized fragment either. The couple who argue in the street in the first verse of the same song are an echo of Jimi and Kathy’s explosive public quarrels.
Many listeners have assumed that the woman in “Little Wing,” the album’s best-known song, is Jimi’s mother. Vague as the hints are either way, she seems to be more an idealized vision of the feminine, which includes unconditional mother love. There is nothing particularly maternal in the picture the first verse presents of a woman lost in happy abstraction. The unhappy girl who watches the golden ship of opportunity pass her by from her wheelchair in “Castles Made of Sand” seems closer to the unfortunate Norah Hendrix.
Chas played the final mix to Jimi, Noel, and Mitch on October 30. The following night Jimi borrowed both master reels to take to a party and left one behind in his taxi home. Chas and Eddie Kramer returned to Olympic Studios and reconstructed the missing side overnight.
The cover art was commissioned by Kit Lambert and came as a disappointment to Jimi. The project was given to Roger Law, who was to be one of the two artists who established the political puppet show Spitting Image in the 1980s. The design took on a Hindu theme, on the back of the Maharishi’s influence. Jimi, Noel, and Mitch appeared as three faces of a mock Hindu deity, with Jimi as the center. The idea behind the design did at least recognize the Experience as an entity rather than as Jimi and his sidemen. Jimi hated it on first sight. “I ain’t that kind of Indian,” he said. His management were blunter still. “There was a big row over the cover,” Chas recalled. “Mike thought it was crap.” Nevertheless, the design went ahead.