The lore has it that, during the making of the record, Hendrix cherished a sort of erupting spontaneity. And on “Hey Joe,” or on “I Don’t Live Today,” you can hear all those lessons efflorescing in one brilliant plume. It was his debut album with drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, but it came after a run of rigorous schooling in blues and rock’n’roll: Hendrix had played behind the likes of Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and B.B. This was the fundamental and most thrilling promise of psychedelia, and this album still delivers it without a hint of dated goofiness. Here, too, there is something fundamental to Hendrix, the sense that he was here to dissolve upon contact.Īre You Experienced is the sound of a brilliant, humming engine of a mind allowing itself to overheat and melt down on purpose. When Jimi’s voice arrives soon after, he sounds a thousand miles away, swathed in so much reverb that he seems to be in danger of slipping away. The bleary riff that opens “Purple Haze” is the sound of psychedelia distilled-built on the most ear-troubling and unnatural-sounding interval in all of Western music, the introductory tritone contains all of the era’s unstable energy in a few notes.
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