From Greenwich Village to Greenwich Mean Time
Though Chandler was only twenty-eight at the time, he had a decade of experience in one of the biggest rock bands in the world, and he knew a hit when he heard it. That summer he heard a version of Tim Rose’s “Hey Joe” and became convinced that if he found the right artist to cover this song in England, he’d have a smash . . .
As fate would have it, Jimi also had recently discovered Tim Rose’s “Hey Joe,” and when he played this song, Chandler became so excited he spilled a milkshake on himself. “I thought immediately he was the best guitarist I’d ever seen,” Chandler recalled in A Film About Jimi Hendrix.
Chandler asked if Jimi would consider coming to England, where Chandler was certain he’d succeed. In future tellings of the story, Jimi always stated that he immediately said yes, but many on the Village scene remember it differently: The idea of going to England scared Jimi at first. He knew so little about Britain that he asked whether his electric guitar would still work with their electricity . . .
As decision time loomed, Jimi still had doubts, but there was so little holding him in New York that the move wasn’t much of a risk. He later said his thoughts were, “Well, I’ll starve my way over there,” just as he had starved his way in America. Jimi and Chandler had one last meeting at which Jimi expressed his final reservations. “What’s the point in me coming to England as a guitar player?” he asked Chandler. “You’ve got Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck over there. You don’t need one more guitar player.” Then Jimi himself gave Chandler the answer to his question: “If you can guarantee that you’ll introduce me to Clapton, I’ll come to London.” That was one thing, Chandler replied, that could be promised; he would make sure Jimi got to meet Eric Clapton. With that, a departure date of September 23 was set.
Cross, Charles R.. Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix (p. 207 – 214). (Function). Kindle Edition.
After arriving at Heathrow, Jimi and Chas had three super-urgent priorities: get Jimi a work permit, assemble a band and secure a recording contract. Given how the band was assembled and the methodologies used during the recording process, it boggles the mind that Are You Experienced? is considered one of the greatest debut albums in rock history.
Jimi wanted a nine-piece combo (!) but Chad insisted on a three-piece to highlight Jimi’s guitar wizardry and keep costs down. Noel Redding answered an ad in Melody Maker, hoping to become the new guitarist for the Animals and wound up as the bassist for the Jimi Hendrix Experience despite never having played the bass. Mitch Mitchell was a jazz-R&B oriented drummer who had just left Georgie Fame’s band and won the competition through the flip of a coin. Depending on your perspective, Chas Chandler was either stoned, brimming with confidence, or out of his mind when he financed the recording of “Hey Joe” while the band members were still getting to know each other and before the band had signed with a label.
After the band warmed up with gigs in Europe and London, Chas managed to sign the Jimi Hendrix Experience to Track Records, an indie label founded by the managers of the Who. The “process” employed in the creation of Are You Experienced? involved short recording sessions squeezed in between gigs, driven by a palpable sense of urgency to get it done ASAP. “To speed up sessions, Chandler would trick the band into thinking they were rehearsing when he was actually recording” (ibid., Cross). Still unsure about his songwriting chops, Jimi placed his intuition on overdrive and let the songs pour out. “During January 1967, driven by a desperate need to finish an album quickly, Jimi was writing a song every other day. He felt that winter as if the songs simply came to him, almost unconsciously” (ibid., Cross). Are You Experienced? was a child of intuition, instinct, risk-taking and the bandleader’s clear vision of the sound he wanted to create. After going nowhere in the USA, the stars had aligned in Jimi’s favor:
Chandler had risked everything on making the record, including much of his own money and all of his personal reputation. Early reviews, like one written by Keith Altham in the N.M.E., proved it had been worth the effort: “The LP is a brave effort by Hendrix to produce a musical form which is original and exciting.”
Cross, Charles R.. Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix (p. 250). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Most of my readers know that Jimi Hendrix was immediately embraced by the Brits when he arrived on the Swinging London scene in 1966. Everyone who was anyone came to see him play and most were completely knocked out by Jimi’s music. The British music rags hailed his arrival (sometimes describing him with racist labels like “The Wild Man from Borneo”) and record buyers gobbled up copies of the three singles released between December 1966 and May 1967 then flocked to the record stores to purchase Are You Experienced? when it hit the shelves on May 12. Here’s a look at the U.K. chart performance:
- “Hey Joe”: #6
- “Purple Haze”: #3
- “The Wind Cries Mary”: #6
- Are You Experienced: #2
Per U.K. norms, none of the singles appeared on the album, so one would conclude that the Brits simply couldn’t get enough of Jimi Hendrix. One might also attribute Jimi’s success to his rejection by Decca Records; after all, it worked wonders for the Fab Four.
Big Daddy to the Rescue
Meanwhile, back in Jimi’s country of origin, it took a while for Chas Chandler to find an American label, but eventually Jimi signed with Reprise, recently purchased by Warner Brothers from ‘Ol Blue Eyes. While it’s beyond unlikely that Sinatra would have had the slightest interest in Jimi Hendrix, the suits at Warner were committed to shoring up the label’s rock lineup. They released “Hey Joe” as a single in May 1967, followed by what in retrospect would be labeled a surefire hit with (“Purple Haze”/”The Wind Cries Mary”) on June 19, 1967—the day after Jimi’s iconic performance at the Monterey Pop Festival. Later that year, they released another can’t-miss single pairing “Foxey Lady” with “Hey Joe.” Let’s see how their strategy played out!
- “Hey Joe”: failed to chart
- “Purple Haze”/”The Wind Cries Mary”: #65
- “Foxey Lady”/”Hey Joe”: #67
Pa-fucking-thetic. Not even a brief tour with the overwhelmingly popular Monkees could transform Jimi into a pop star. I’ve seen some retrospective comments that Jimi failed to connect with the American public because the film of his performance at Monterey wasn’t released until much later. That is 100%, no-doubt-about-it absolute bullshit. The documentary had zero impact on Jimi’s fortunes because it was released on December 26, 1968, long after Jimi’s fortunes had changed for the better.
The truth is that Jimi did indeed connect with the American public, but the American public had relocated and moved elsewhere, thanks to Big Daddy Tom Donahue. From Joel Selvin’s obituary featured in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Few disc jockeys have ever affected the actual development of radio, but Tom Donahue was no mere disc jockey.
In a field where a person with just one good idea can look like an intellectual giant, Tom Donahue, who died Monday of a heart attack at age 46, was a true visionary. The whole country noticed San Francisco radio when Donahue created what quickly came to be called “underground radio” on KMPX-FM here in 1967, opening the FM airwaves to rock for the first time . . .
“The disc jockeys have become robots,” he wrote for Rolling Stone in 1967, lambasting AM radio in an article titled “AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves.” They are “performing their inanities at the direction of programmers who have succeeded in totally squeezing the human element out of their sound, and reducing it to a series of blips and bleeps and happy, oh yes, always happy, sounding cretins who are poured from bottles every three hours. They have succeeded in making everyone on the station staff sound the same—asinine. This is the much coveted ‘station sound,’” he said.
AM radio was sufficient in the early days of rock when the music was simple and people bought singles instead of LPs because most rock albums consisted of one or two hits supported by a whole lot of filler. With Rubber Soul, Revolver and most emphatically with Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles not only made musicians aware that the album had potential as an art form, but they also experimented with new sounds and recording techniques that demanded greater fidelity. FM radio was better suited to handle more complex recordings because it broadcast in high-fidelity stereo; listening to Sgt. Pepper or Are You Experienced? in mono on a tinny transistor radio just wouldn’t cut it. FM stations also played deep cuts that you would never hear on AM radio, tracks from musical explorers with little interest in making the pop charts and music from a wide variety of genres.
As Sean Egan noted in lthough the single (“Purple Haze”) performed poorly in the US charts, its presence on underground FM radio stations, which were transitioning from easy listening and classical music formats to album cuts, significantly aided sales of the LP.” From Wikipedia: “The album was issued in the US on August 23 by Reprise Records, where it reached number five on the US Billboard Top LPs chart, remaining on the chart for 106 weeks, 76 of those in the Top 40. The album also spent 70 weeks on the US Billboard Hot R&B LPs chart, where it peaked at number 10.”
Not bad for a guy who grew up in a family broken beyond imagination, a frequent truant who failed to complete high school, a kid who had to join the army because it was either that or jail time, a southpaw who played a right-handed guitar turned upside down and restrung to suit his left-handed playing style.
Side One
Note: This review covers the original American release, which included all the singles.
During his too brief musical career, Jimi Hendrix received tons of accolades for his innovative guitar work that opened the eyes of many of his contemporaries to new possibilities in sound and music. If you’re interested in learning more about his guitar stylings, you can find approximately one gazillion analyses of his chops in the many biographies, articles, blogs, magazines, e-magazines and films devoted to that aspect of his artistry.
Having no desire to regurgitate what’s already been said and said and said again, this review will focus on Jimi’s songwriting abilities, vocal style, approach to composition and his massive impact on the music scene in the late ’60s. When relevant, I will make my assessments of his guitar work in the context of the particular song without delving deeply into technique.
“Purple Haze”: Gosh, it’s nice to have a father who grew up in Haight-Ashbury and was in his teens during the Summer of Love. “People who think this song is about acid don’t know what they’re talking about. The song came out long before the dealers started branding the latest variation of acid as ‘purple haze.’ I think they’re using the name now for a new strain of marijuana.” The backstory confirms my aging father is not suffering from memory loss, and that the lyrics are more Sci-Fi than psychedelic:
Jimi had drafted the lyrics to “Purple Haze” backstage at a concert two weeks before. Though the song would forever be linked in the popular imagination with LSD, Jimi said it was inspired by a dream he had that mirrored the novel Night of Light: Day of Dreams by Philip José Farmer, of which he had read an excerpt. In an early lyric draft, Jimi wrote “Jesus saves” underneath the title, a line not from the Farmer novel, and perhaps something he was considering as a chorus. He later complained that the version of the song that was released—and became the Experience’s second successful single—had been shortened. “The [original] song had about a thousand words,” he told an interviewer. “It just gets me so mad, because that isn’t even ‘Purple Haze.’ ”
Cross, Charles R.. Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix (p. 245). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Another version opines that Jimi was concerned that a girl used voodoo on him during his time in the Village, an event cited in the lyrics (“Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me”). That take also explains why Jimi was leaning toward calling Jesus to help break the spell. Given Jimi’s use of LSD, his status as a novice songwriter, and the line “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky,” the lyrical confusion is understandable. We can label the LSD theory as “serendiptious.”
If there were a Satan, he would have been delighted by the sinful intro with its use of diabolus in musica (“Devil in music”) where Jimi plays the Bb octaves while Noel Redding throws in simultaneous E octaves, combining to create the naughty flatted fifth. After three go-arounds, Mitch Mitchell lays down a strong, steady beat that provides a platform for Jimi’s bluesy opening solo, then shifts to a chord pattern that begins with what would become known as “the Hendrix Chord,” a dominant seventh sharp ninth, in this case E7#9. I’ve always thought of the chord as “Blues +” due to the added dissonance of the sharp ninth that doubles the tension. Jimi certainly wasn’t the first guy to tinker with that chord; it’s fairly common in bebop (and what weird chords aren’t common in bebop?). To cite a more familiar example, the Beatles used D7#9 as the punctuating chord after each verse line in “Taxman.” The difference is that instead of using the chord as a transitional moment, Jimi used it as the root chord for the song, thereby ensuring constant tension and making resolution a near impossibility.
I would describe the tension as fucking hot sexual tension, but I would, wouldn’t I?
The arrangement also qualifies as dramatic, thanks in large part to the use of stop-time in the closing lines of the verses. Jimi had always suffered from a lack of confidence in his singing; Noel Redding felt that part of the reason the Experience failed to charm the French in an early gig in Evreux was “Jimi was still getting comfortable singing.” (ibid) Of course, that was a live performance and Jimi hated to have people watch him sing. In the studio, he recorded his vocals behind a partition, which is why he doesn’t sound the least bit timid when he delivers those stop-time lines. “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky” (and its twin “Scuse me while I kiss this guy”) is one of the most memorable lines in rock ‘n’ roll because of his spot-on delivery. Though I could have done without some of the background chatter and have some mild objections concerning the panning in the soundscape, those stylistic touches were common during that era and welcomed by fans searching for hidden meanings and unconventional variations from the tried-and-true. When all is said and done, none of those distractions fail to shake my belief that “Purple Haze” was a game-changing masterpiece on multiple levels, especially in the guitar world. Below you will find a live performance of “Purple Haze” that I’ve watched a hundred times and still can’t figure out how Jimi can appear to be so nonchalant as he uses fingers, thumbs, glides, pull-offs and the whammy bar seemingly all at once while moving around the stage and shifting his body English.
If I’d been in one of those London clubs in 1966 I would have responded in the parlance of the times, “HOLY FUCK, BATMAN!”
“Manic Depression”: Jimi’s songwriting approach during this period bears many similarities to the essential tenet of improv theatre, “Yes and . . .” This song’s origins followed a lackluster performance by the rather shy Mr. Hendrix at a press conference. After the torturous experience finally reached the end, Chas Chandler told Jimi that he sounded like a manic depressive. Jimi wrote “Manic Depressive” the following day.
“Manic Depression” was written in triple meter (3/4), though I doubt that Jimi gave a hoot about time signatures—he wrote what he felt. The first thing that comes to mind when you see 3/4 on the sheet music is “stately waltz,” but needless to say, “Manic Depression” is anything but. Much of the credit goes to Mitch Mitchell, who somehow manages to keep the 3/4 rhythm intact while engaging in a beat-filled rolling counter-rhythm that any bebop drummer would have been proud to call his own.
The odd representation of the rhythm is in perfect sync with the lyrical mood, where Jimi sings of his frustration with the opposite sex. Though he bedded more than his fair share of broads during his brief appearance on the planet, he had some difficulty in finding “the one.” However, he did have a solid relationship with an entity often depicted as feminine: the muse (in this case, Erato). In “Manic Depression,” he describes his struggle between earthly pleasures and spiritual connection:
Woman so willing, the sweet cause in vain
You make love
You break love
It’s all the same
When it’s, it’s overMusic sweet music
I wish I could caress, caress, caress
Manic depression is a frustrating mess
According to Songfacts, Jimi introduced the song in concerts thusly: “We’d like to do a frustrating kind of song for you. It’s called ‘Manic Depression’— it’s a story ’bout a cat wishin’ he could make love to music, instead of the same old everyday woman.” While I think his many part-time lovers might have bristled at being classified as the “same old everyday women,” I would hope that some of them would have realized that connecting sexually may not be as important as connecting spiritually. That’s when you know you’ve found “the one.”
“Hey Joe”: I will fully admit that I prefer The Leaves’ version with its manic garage energy, but really, we’re talking about two completely disparate approaches and I have plenty of room in my heart for Jimi’s take.
Though Billy Roberts copyrighted the song in 1962, there were plenty of others who staked a claim. The liner notes on the original U.S. release describe the song as “A blues arrangement of an old cowboy song that’s about 100 years old.” It certainly sounds like a traditional number but no one has been able to track down its origins. The slow tempo of Jimi’s version mirrors the Tim Rose acoustic version, and both guys felt free to riff on the lyrics, which involve playing two different parts: the “friend” and Joe himself. While the friend in the Leaves’ version (once they got it right on the third try) expresses panic when he hears that Joe could even think of doing something as stupid as murdering his old lady, Jimi comes across as the older brother gently trying to get Joe to think things through before he takes another life (and ruins his in the bargain). When Jimi flips to Joe mode, he does a superb job of expressing the outrage of a man who found out that his woman had crossed the big red line.
Jimi’s guitar work is comparatively understated and suited to the mood. Kudos to Chas Chandler for bringing in the all-girl Breakaways to add a touch of mourning through their delicate background vocals.
To be perfectly honest, I’d really like to hear a version where Joe says, “Fuck that bitch” and searches for a new honeypot.
“Love or Confusion”: Other than a few interesting sound effects, this isn’t much of a song; the lyrics are meh and it doesn’t feel like the boys put a whole lot of energy into this one. I have no idea why the decision-makers at Reprise didn’t replace it with “Stone Free,” a far superior tune featuring a fabulous performance by Mitch Mitchell and much more suited to the zeitgeist of the era. Oh, well.
“May This Be Love”: I love sixty-six and two-thirds of this piece, namely the guitar effects in the opening passage mimicking the sound of a waterfall in sync with the dominant lyrical metaphor and the first and last verse, supported by Mitchell’s well-executed drum pattern. The problem lies in the bridge, which destroys the serenity with an ill-fitting key change accompanied by a mood shift to street jive. George Harrison might have considered the bridge “ego-driven,” as Jimi shifts to a defensive stance reminiscent of Sonny Bono (“So let them laugh, laugh at me”).
“I Don’t Live Today”: According to Songfacts, “In a 1968 interview, Hendrix said the song ‘was dedicated to the American-Indian and all minority depression groups.'” Jimi took pride in his part-Cherokee ancestry and was very upset when the record company geeks misinterpreted his request for an “Indian-themed” cover on Axis: Bold As Love and came up with a cover celebrating Hinduism. The moron who reviewed the song on AllMusic noted the “American Indian, tribal drum pattern,” but interpreted the song as “. . . a take on the psychedelic state of mind, and the feeling of acid-magnified depression.”
And he gets paid to write such bullshit. Sean Egan got it right when he described Jimi’s lyrical and vocal achievement: “superbly, and with great economy of words, he evoked despair, whether that despair be an individual’s or the despair of a devastated and brutalized race.” As a black man with Native American blood, Jimi Hendrix was more than qualified to play the role of a man of color suffering from the drudgery of race-based oppression:
No sun comin’ through my windows
Feel like I’m livin’ at the bottom of a grave
No sun comin’ through my windows
Feel like I’m livin’ at the bottom of a grave
I wish you’d hurry up and execute me
So I can be on my miserable wayI don’t live today
Maybe tomorrow, I just can’t say, but, uh
I don’t live today
It’s such a shame to waste your time away like this . . .There ain’t no life nowhere
The music is a perfect fit for this dramatic monologue, combining sharp chords after the verse lines in the chorus to punctuate the narrator’s anger and frustration and “structured cacophony” during the instrumental sections, where Jimi employs a manual wah-wah and other effects to reflect the constant uncertainty felt by the oppressed. Jimi paints a grim picture of what it feels like to live in constant fear in an environment where “you do not belong,” where hope quickly turns into illusion. The song is sadly timeless, as the lyrics apply to the many “minority depression groups” under attack in our increasingly ugly world: transsexuals, gays, immigrants, people of color, Jews, Muslims . . . No one should have to live in fear simply because they’re different.
Side Two
“The Wind Cries Mary”: Like “Manic Depression,” Jimi wrote this song immediately after an interaction with another human being. Unlike “Manic Depression,” the interaction involved one of the most prevalent scourges of all time: lumpy mashed potatoes.
Jimi wrote this in 1967 for Are You Experienced?; it was inspired by his girlfriend at the time, Kathy Mary Etchingham. He’d gotten into an argument with her about her cooking. She got very angry and started throwing pots and pans and finally stormed out to stay at a friend’s home for a day or so. When she came back, Jimi had written “The Wind Cries Mary” for her. (Songfacts)
Kathy Mary recalled, “We’d had a row over food. Jimi didn’t like lumpy mashed potato. There were thrown plates and I ran off. When I came back the next day, he’d written that song about me. It’s incredibly flattering.” (Source: Q magazine February 2013)
That silly spat may seem to be an odd source of inspiration unless you consider the writer’s personal history. Jimi’s life was marked by constant experiences of separation. Mother was here, then she was gone. Dad was here, then he was gone. He lived with relatives, then the relatives shoved him off to another relative. His younger siblings wound up in foster homes. At the time he wrote the song, he had abandoned his homeland to live in a strange new country. When Kathy Mary split that night, all those experiences must have come back to haunt him and he turned to the one friend he could always depend on: his guitar.
I can envision Jimi picking up that guitar and immediately stumbling on the rising half-step chord progression (Eb/E/F), the first set missing the fifth, the second an inversion rooted in the fifth. The pattern and the pauses in between feel like he’s asking a question along the lines of “What just happened here?” As he continues to explore the possibilities, he lands on the basic C/Bb/F verse chords while taking notice of the sounds of the street late at night:
After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in redAnd the wind whispers Mary
Of course it does. Now he puts down the guitar and muses over Mary’s departure while mindlessly cleaning up the mess:
A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wifeAnd the wind, it cries Mary
At this point, he has no words to describe his emotions, so he returns to his guitar, building the reflective and restrained guitar solo that will reach full completion when he adds counterpoint overdubs in the studio. After repeating the musical question, he finds his voice and ponders the possibility that separation may be permanent. Referring to the metaphor “no man is an island,” he fears that his relationship is a lost cause:
The traffic lights they turn a blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags downstream
‘Cause the life that lived is, is deadAnd the wind screams Mary
In the end, he realizes (at least for now) that Mary is the one he must have—the one who could be “the one.”
Will the wind ever remember?
The names it has blown in the past
And with its crutch, its old age and its wisdom
It whispers “No, this will be the last”And the wind cries Mary
In constrast to “May This Be Love,” Jimi avoids all unnecessary distractions, intensifying the emotional impact by maintaining a consistent, tension-filled mood. Mitch Mitchell’s subtle work on the cymbals is undeniably marvelous and Noel Redding’s stick-to-the-basics bass part maintains the song’s essential simplicity. Amazingly, “The Wind Cries Mary” was recorded in twenty minutes because they had twenty minutes of recording time left in that session. Later on, they tried a few more takes but finally realized that the first take was by far the best.
Rule #1: Never fuck with perfection.
“Fire”: Speaking of fucking . . . I’m beginning to think that it was never far from Jimi’s mind:
The main lyrics in this song (“let me stand next to your fire”) came from a time when the band had just finished a gig in the cold around Christmas, 1966. They went to bass player Noel Redding’s mother’s house in Folkestone, England, and when they got there, Jimi asked Redding’s mother Margaret if he could “stand next to her fire” to warm up. The family dog, a German Shepherd, lay by the fire, which inspired the line, “Move over Rover, and let Jimi take over.”
This lyrical lightning bolt was a breakthrough for Hendrix, who had just started writing songs at the request of his manager Chas Chandler. Writing riffs was easy for him, and it turned out he had a talent for crafting lyrics as well, as he was able to turn a simple line into a fiery tale of lustful passion. (This story is verified in Mat Snow’s Mojo story on Hendrix that ran in the October 2006 issue.) (Songfacts)
Well, it’s never far from my mind either, and “Fire” is a perennial presence on my fuck playlists. That nasty Ab-G-F-G-DD riff immediately puts me in the mood and the frequent use of stop time forces the listener to focus on Jimi’s jiving on the wonders of cut-through-the-bullshit, steamy desire to get down and dirty. I envision his solo as his fuck pattern with long sweet thrusts and twists that would send any girl’s diddle into seventh heaven.
Yeah! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!
“Third Stone from the Sun”: Ah! I suppose the obligatory long-form psychedelic number had to show up sooner or later. It might work if you’re on acid, though I think the garbled deep voices might lead to a bad trip. According to Songfacts, Chas and Jimi were Trekkies and wanted to create something based on the show. I must have missed that episode . . . and I’m glad I did. What we have here is the musical equivalent of “Spock’s Brain.” Hard pass.
“Foxey Lady”: You’ll never convince me that the opening single-finger vibrato isn’t Jimi pretending to tickle his lady’s clit and you’ll never convince me that the ba-ba-BA, F#m-F#m-A7#9 opening chord sequence isn’t a musical version of Jimi’s fuck thrusts, where he is determined to ignite an orgasm on the Hendrix Chord. As is often the case in the great Hendrix sex songs, “Foxey Lady” flows with testosterone expressed through rough bluesy guitar, wordless vocalizations common to the act, several stop-time passages to amp up the tension and unbridled excitement in his vocals. There is no question in my mind that Jimi’s innate sexiness had a lot to do with his success, and what made his sex songs so endlessly compelling is his absolute shamelessness. He loved to fuck and was proud of it! And so am I!
“Are You Experienced?”: It is somewhat unusual to find the title track at the end of the album, but “Are You Experienced?” happened to be the perfect album closer for the era with its backward guitars, raga-like drone in Ab, and most importantly, lyrics that pose a question pondered by many Baby Boomers during a period where self-discovery was a persistent theme.
As things began to loosen up after a long period where conformity ruled, new voices began to question the Happy Days status quo. One of those voices was Timothy Leary, a man blessed with some insight mingled with utter lunacy and extraordinarily weak marketing skills. His message of “Turn on, tune in, drop out” was massively misunderstood as a license to build a generation of layabouts, thereby threatening the puritan work ethic most Americans had been taught to embrace. When explaining his message in his 1983 autobiography, he came close to admitting (but not quite) how he blew it:
Turn on meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end.
Tune in meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives.
Drop out suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. Drop Out meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.
In public statements I stressed that the Turn On-Tune In-Drop Out process must be continually repeated if one wished to live a life of growth.
Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development are often misinterpreted to mean “get stoned and abandon all constructive activity”
Well, Dr. Leary, you unhappily wrote the explanations, so the onus was on you. Fuck-up #1: “Drugs were one way to acccomplish this end.” Most “drugs” were illegal, and the LSD he hawked became illegal in 1966. Most Americans believed Leary was encouraging lawlessness. Fuck-up#2: “Drop out” held a negative connotation long before Leary entered the scene. High school dropouts = failures. Bums were social dropouts who drank a lot, and soon all “hippies” were considered dropouts because they chose to defy the tired old norms.
Leary would have been much more effective had he simply relied on a few noted philosophers. Turn on = Know Thyself. Tune in = Read the Tao Te Ching. Drop out = Read Walden.
Jimi had taken acid as early as 1966, but claimed that “Are You Experienced” was not necessarily about drugs, but about being at peace with yourself (Songfacts). His claim is backed up by the line “Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful.” His most effective explanation of what it takes to achieve inner harmony appears in the second verse:
I know, I know, you’ll probably scream and cry
That your little world won’t let you go
But who in your measly little world
Are you tryin’ to prove to that you’re
Made out of gold and can’t be soldSo, are you experienced?
Have you ever been experienced?
Well, I have
The little world is the world of expectations—the expectations heaped upon us by others that we mistakenly believe we have to live up to. The chorus poses two essential questions. I interpret “Are you experienced?” as “Do you know the way the world works and how to handle it?” and “Have you ever been experienced” as “Have you opened yourself up to others and let them know the real you?” Jimi claims to have answered both questions in the affirmative, but he still had a lot to work through to deal with the traumas of his upbringing, and given his sometimes violent temper, it’s likely he only found inner harmony when immersed in his music.
When I was thinking of moving to Seattle in the mid-2000s, one of the experiences that confirmed my decision to trade fog for rain was stumbling across Daryl Smith’s sculpture of Jimi Hendrix (“The Electric Lady Studio Guitar”) while strolling down Broadway after checking out the nearby BDSM boutiques. What I love about the statue is that it depicts Hendrix in ecstasy, doing what he loved to do most of all. And though he was a comparative novice when he recorded Are You Experienced?, his remarkable intuitive gifts and complete command of rock ‘n’ roll’s iconic instrument would lead one to believe that Jimi was born to play guitar and had a long, fruitful career ahead of him.
If only . . .
Artist: Daryl Smith
P.S.: I’ll be in the process of moving to Ireland over the next few weeks, so I’m not entirely sure when my next review will appear. I will let y’all know how it’s going so we don’t lose touch.
P.S.S: Thank you all for the many requests, but I failed to note one other criterion: I do not review contemporary releases. I only consider albums for review once they have been on the market for at least three years. I do this to avoid the “shiny new thing” bias in music criticism. Sorry!
