Jimi Hendrix – ‘Are You Experienced’
In the mid-1960s, American guitar virtuoso Jimi Hendrix emerged as a towering presence in the volatile world of rock ‘n’ roll. The astute performer backed eminent acts, including The Isley Brothers and Little Richard, in the US before being discovered by The Animals’ entrepreneurial bassist Chas Chandler as a spectacle in his own right. Hendrix’s career break would finally manifest following a move to the UK in 1966, where he formed The Jimi Hendrix Experience under Chandler’s management.
Alongside his Experience bandmates Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, Hendrix seized the opportunity to record material for a debut album. After laying down a series of promising singles, Are You Experienced began to take shape. Though omitted from the original UK edition, the Experience’s first three singles, ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Purple Haze’, and ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, appeared on US pressings and were unquestionably three of Hendrix’s greatest career offerings.
For his first single, Hendrix recorded a psychedelic cover of Billy Roberts’ rock standard ‘Hey Joe’. While covers can sometimes connote a lack of ideas and give an album a sense of incoherence, Hendrix’s cover was well placed and marks one of the true Are You Experienced highlights. As he did with Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ a year later, Hendrix makes ‘Hey Joe’ a beast of his own, adorning the mid-section with a towering blues solo.
The Experience’s first single with Hendrix credited as the songwriter was ‘Purple Haze’. Arriving in March 1967, the song introduces the full creative scope of Hendrix’s progressive approach to the electric guitar. Compared with ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Purple Haze’ is notably heavy and employs feedback effects to give an appropriately psychedelic tone to the subject matter.
‘The Wind Cries Mary’ offers the final piece to the album’s puzzle in terms of energy scope in the form of a rock ballad. Maintaining the same misleadingly laid-back demeanour, Hendrix brings breezy lyrics to Redding and Mitchell’s notably sedate rhythm.
The placating nature of the track perhaps hints towards its inception: Hendrix allegedly wrote the track in romantic reconciliation following an argument he had had with his then-girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham, over lumpy mashed potatoes. The three-note walk down that punctuates the song serves to suppress the flow at regular intervals – a windbreak, if you will.
If we have Kathy Etchingham’s lumpy mash to thank for ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, we have a couple of pets to thank for ‘Foxy Lady’. Beyond the charging hit’s sexually charged lyrics, according to The Los Angeles Times, the track was named after Foxy, a kitten Hendrix gifted to a former girlfriend Lithofayne “Faye” Pridgon. Hendrix later gave Pridgon a poodle, also named Foxy.
Most of the songs on the album hold ostensible drug references, many of which Hendrix denied, claiming they were songs of love and/or peace. Alas, this was the 1960s and the phrase “double entendre” screams loud and clear.
‘Are You Experienced?’, posing the titular question, is the album’s dark horse and possibly its most progressive and psychedelic moment. Hendrix’s question is widely believed to translate to, “Have you experienced LSD or similar psychedelic chemicals?” Although this has never been verified, the reverse tape effects that blossom in the middle of the track certainly bolster this postulation.
‘Manic Depression’ serves up another surefire highlight and continues a ubiquitous theme of romantic befuddlement and dissatisfaction. The track is undoubtedly one of the album’s more chaotic chapters, thanks to Mitchell’s high-tempo jazz-influenced beat, after which Hendrix and Redding dutifully bound toward a guitar-shredding crescendo.
These jazz affections of Mitchell’s scale new heights still in ‘Third Stone From The Sun’. The track is stylistically mercurial with the pulsing impetus of a jazzy rhythm section seasoned with fittingly cosmic sound effects, Hendrix’s overdriven guitar phrasings and intermittent spoken-word transmissions. The lyrics feature an exchange between Chandler and Hendrix, inspired by Earth Abides, a sci-fi book the former lent the latter in the mid-’60s.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut album is a celestial marvel teeming with exemplary creative practice in every facet. The trio channelled unbridled virtuosity to the forefront of rock innovation to weave jazz and contemporary psychedelic styles into a unique and accessible product. Not only was Hendrix a wizard on the fretboard, but this album proved he could write compelling lyrics inspired by his life experiences and literary diet.
