Jimi Hendrix

The year is 1967. After a string of unfortunate misadventures in his home country, Jimi Hendrix, under the guidance of ex-Animal Chas Chandler, flies to the United Kingdom, where he's teamed up with two musicians: bassist Noel Redding (who recently passed away, and whose actual instrument was guitar, the bass being something of a fallback) and drummer Mitch Mitchell. The Jimi Hendrix Experience is born, one of the most important bands in the history of rock. Today there's perhaps a tendency in the air to reassess the importance Jimi Hendrix had for the evolution of music, but it's a thesis this writer doesn't share.

The Seattle guitarist completely and irreversibly changed the approach to the electric guitar, for a long time rock's principal and undisputed instrument (at least until the advent of the synthesizer), and in any case the one that, more than any other, gave the genre right from the start that adrenalized, slightly wild stamp, that certain something that sets it apart from every other musical expression. More than Jerry Lee Lewis's piano or Richard Pennyman's, aka Little Richard (with whom Jimi Hendrix, incidentally, played as a session man for a brief period), more than the ghostly icon of Elvis Presley. Chuck Berry docet. Can you imagine rock without guitar? Yes, sure, krautrock (not always), Elp, the Nice, Cop Shoot Cop... but these are all evolutions of a genre born and raised with the guitar reigning supreme, they're the "exceptions" that prove the rule.

With his instrument, Hendrix carried out a Copernican revolution comparable, perhaps, only to the innovations brought to guitar playing by Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Chuck Berry and, at a stretch, Robert Johnson. With Jimi Hendrix, feedback becomes an art form rather than an annoying flaw (something Sonic Youth and co. probably know a thing or two about), distortion, pushed to its absolute limits, is power and delicacy at once (the "hard" sound that today has infiltrated almost everywhere, especially in certain indie-scene bands, is born here), and the melodic and harmonic lines of the electric guitar intertwine and merge with a naturalness and perfection never seen before. The cathartic value of the musical act takes on a new and overwhelming meaning with the Seattle guitarist.

1967 is precisely the year of the Monterey Festival, where a still largely unknown Hendrix burns and smashes his guitar for the first time, leaving everyone stunned, starting with the other guitarists present at the gathering (among them, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton, considered the top dogs at the time). Hendrix is a cyclone sweeping through the rock scene, precisely because rock is the musical genre where, more than in any other, sound and image count as much as form, and thus content, as would become increasingly clear over the years with the advent of electronics and the evolution of rock iconography.

Hendrix is at once an excellent rhythm guitarist and a great soloist — a forerunner of countless "guitar heroes" in the history of rock — but this latter aspect, paradoxically, is the most sterile side of his art (even if the most conspicuous). Or rather: his followers misread the message Jimi Hendrix left behind, pushing electric guitar playing to the point of circus spectacle and almost entirely neglecting the substance of his music, which goes well beyond piling up solos.

Setting aside his complete discography and focusing on his debut album, it's worth pointing out how complete his songs are even when listened to through different lenses, from the purely technical to the more strictly artistic or compositional. "Are You Experienced?" had a historical importance matched by few other albums, and left us a handful of gems that today can be filed away as rock classics, "standards" to borrow a term from jazz.

It's enough to mention a few titles (with a necessary caveat: some of them were originally released as singles, also in 1967, but we consider them an integral part of the album under review, especially since they're included on current reissues of "Are you experienced?"): "Hey Joe", or how to turn a run-of-the-mill cover into rock history, with that guitar intro on the E pentatonic scale (E flat, actually, since Hendrix almost always played with his guitar tuned down a semitone, both to bring the songs within reach of his limited vocal range and to make the guitar easier to handle, especially for bending) that left an indelible mark; "Purple Haze", which opens with a phrase built on an augmented fourth interval (regarded in medieval times as nothing less than the devil's interval), continues with one of the most famous riffs of all time backed by a martial drumbeat, and explodes into a typically bluesy progression enriched harmonically by the chords Hendrix used, going well beyond simple minor sevenths - in particular the minor seventh chord with a diminished third, which, not by chance, became famous in rock as the Hendrix chord; "Stone free", another lesson in grit and power, in which the origins of rock and roll are barely recognisable anymore, nor is there any hint of the pop path taken by other bands, the Beatles above all; "Fire", a track running at a thousand miles an hour, decidedly ahead of many developments to come in rock music, with the drums almost duetting with the opening guitar riff - another milestone, and rightly so.

But it's not all fire and brimstone on this album: "The wind cries Mary" is a sweet, melancholy electric ballad, the kind of which we'd see many more in the future; "May be this love" and, above all, "Third stone from the sun", bring Hendrix's psychedelic side to the fore without much ceremony (the latter also hints at a nod to jazz), a facet that would go on to have a considerable influence on Jimi's art in later records too; "Red House" shows how to play electric blues without losing the genre's typical pathos. And then there's "Manic depression", opening with a chromatic scale broken up by a pause (almost the calm before the storm) in 9/8 time, a kind of diabolical waltz, featuring a solo that reveals the full explosive rage of Jimi Hendrix - one of the most devastating on the whole album; the hugely famous "Foxy Lady", with a structure (harmonic too) all too similar to "Purple Haze", one of Hendrix's most overrated tracks, redeemed only by that opening feedback, which by now is familiar to everyone's ears; "Are you experienced?" showcases another Hendrix trademark, the use of reverse guitar, a studio technique that would later be used extensively and of which our man was one of the first, and in any case one of the best, experimenters.

There are no filler tracks or B-sides on this album - even the songs not mentioned so far have something to say, from "I don't live today" to "Can you see me", from "Highway Chile" to "Love or Confusion" and "51st Anniversary", with the sole exception of "Remember", one of the lesser tracks in Hendrix's entire body of work. But that doesn't change the substance: "Are you experienced?" is, as already mentioned, a seminal album, a record that laid the groundwork for a good deal of rock music up to the present day (from classic hard rock to punk all the way to grunge, if that's not enough...), an album whose impact was seismic, comparable in this respect to works of the calibre of "The Piper At Gates Of Dawn", "The Doors", "The Velvet Underground & Nico" or "Freak out!", to name - without any claim to completeness - works from the same era (or thereabouts) as the one under review. Essential.

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30/10/2006