Are You Experienced by Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967), № 21 in The Lead-In’s 100 greatest albums. Eight days of recording in London for £1,200. Hendrix lands a stranger and leaves a god. The loudest first side ever pressed.
Jimi Hendrix had been in London for seven months. He had a Stratocaster, a Marshall stack he played louder than anyone had played one before, and a band of two Englishmen he had assembled in a week. The debut album they made in five months redefined what the electric guitar could do.
Recorded in five months at three London studios on an eight-track tape machine for a budget of £1,500, with a band that had been together for less than a year. The album that gave the electric guitar an entire vocabulary it had not previously possessed.
Jimi Hendrix arrived at Heathrow Airport on September 24, 1966, carrying a Fender Stratocaster, a small bag of clothes, and a contract with Chas Chandler, the former Animals bassist who had seen Hendrix playing in a Greenwich Village club two months earlier and had convinced him to come to London. Hendrix was twenty-three. He had spent the previous four years as a backing guitarist for Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, Curtis Knight, and a half-dozen other R&B acts on the chitlin circuit; he had been fired by most of them for upstaging the headliners. Chandler had recognized that the qualities that got Hendrix fired in Harlem were the qualities that would make him a star in London. Within a week, Chandler had auditioned drummers and bassists for what he called 'the Jimi Hendrix Experience'; he hired Noel Redding (a guitarist whom he convinced to play bass) and Mitch Mitchell (a jazz-trained drummer who had been Georgie Fame's drummer). The first Experience rehearsal was on October 12, 1966.
The band's first single, 'Hey Joe,' was recorded at De Lane Lea Studios in central London on October 23, eleven days after the band's first rehearsal. It reached number six on the UK singles chart by December. The second single, 'Purple Haze,' was recorded in January 1967; it reached number three. By February, when the band began recording the full-length debut, they had become the most-talked-about live act in London. They played the Marquee Club, the Saville Theatre, and the Bag O'Nails on weekends; the audiences at those shows included Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Brian Jones, and Roger Daltrey. Lennon and McCartney both attended the album-launch listening sessions. Clapton has said in print that he 'cried in his bath' the first time he heard 'Purple Haze.'
What Hendrix did to the electric guitar in five months at De Lane Lea, Olympic, and CBS studios cannot really be overstated. He used feedback as a melodic element rather than as an accident. He played the guitar with his teeth (literally, in live performance) and with his hands behind his back. He used the wah-wah pedal as a vocal instrument. He bent strings further than anyone before him. He routed his Marshall Plexi 100-watt stack through the studio in ways nobody had previously dared. Eddie Kramer, the engineer (then 24 years old, with a year of recording experience), has said in print that the album's distinctive sound came from running Hendrix's amplifier signal through the studio's outboard equipment, Fairchild compressors, Pultec EQs, sometimes a tape-delay rig, in ways that were not in any manual. The album is the first major studio document of an electric guitar treated as a fully voiced solo instrument.
The songs on the UK album are a survey of what Hendrix could do in three minutes. 'Foxy Lady' opens with a single dissonant guitar chord, Hendrix's signature E7#9 voicing, sustained for nearly fifteen seconds before the band enters. 'Manic Depression' is in 6/8 with Mitchell playing a jazz-style hi-hat pattern that no rock drummer had previously attempted on a debut. 'Red House' is a slow Texas-style blues that Hendrix tracks live with the rhythm section. 'Can You See Me' is straight R&B; 'Love or Confusion' is a fuzz-tone freakout; 'I Don't Live Today' is a Hendrix-as-poet meditation; 'May This Be Love' is the album's quietest moment; 'Fire' is the album's funkiest; 'Third Stone from the Sun' is a 6:44 instrumental science-fiction reverie. The album closes with the title track, 'Are You Experienced', a backwards-tape piece that uses reverse drums and reverse guitar across two minutes of psychedelic strangeness.
Released May 12, 1967 in the UK, the album peaked at number two, kept from number one only by Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was finishing its run. The US release, on Reprise Records four months later, used a different sleeve (a Karl Ferris fisheye photograph instead of the UK's white-background portrait), a different track sequence, and three new tracks (the band's UK singles 'Hey Joe,' 'Purple Haze,' and 'The Wind Cries Mary' were added; 'Red House,' 'Can You See Me,' and 'Remember' were dropped). The US version reached number five on the Billboard 200; it has since outsold the UK version by a factor of three.
Are You Experienced belongs at number twenty-one because it is the debut album on which a single musician, supported by a band of two Englishmen and an engineer half his age, invented an entire vocabulary for the electric guitar. The album's influence on subsequent rock music is so pervasive that it is now difficult to remember what rock guitar sounded like before 1967. Every solo on Led Zeppelin's first three albums is in conversation with Hendrix; the entire metal genre is downstream of his fuzz-and-feedback approach; the funk-rock of Sly Stone and Funkadelic is unimaginable without him; the guitar-as-orchestra ambition of subsequent prog and stadium rock is his invention. He died on September 18, 1970 at age twenty-seven, having released only three full studio albums in his lifetime. The first remains the most consequential.
Original 1967 UK pressing, Track Record 612 001, mono only (the stereo 613 001 came later and is not a 1967 first press). The first-press disc carries the matt black-and-silver Track label and was pressed through Polydor; the sleeve is a single (non-gatefold) jacket, laminated front and matte back, with Bruce Fleming's group portrait of Hendrix and the band under his cape. Note this is a different record from the US Reprise issue (R 6261 mono / RS 6261 stereo), which has Karl Ferris's fisheye cover and a revised tracklist adding the early singles. Top-grade copies fetch into four figures, though clean playing copies sit closer to £150.
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