Four weeks after that show, the Experience would release Electric Ladyland, its third and final album, three days after the second anniversary of their first gig. I simply cannot overstate the insanity of that timeline: Between the start of 1967 and the fall of 1968, the Jimi Hendrix Experience recorded and released three unimpeachable studio albums while touring at every available opportunity.
Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland were progressively more experimental, from the sci-fi radio drama and noise quake on the former to the 14-minute odyssey of exotic percussion and tones and experimental panning that anchored the latter. They were absolutely following the map of Are You Experienced and opening new avenues with each attempt. For my money and time, there is no other triptych of rock records—not Dylan goes electric, not Led Zeppelin begins, not the Berlin trilogy, not the Beatles arriving at Revolver—more compact, imaginative, and consequential in rock’n’roll history. In less than two years, The Jimi Hendrix Experience opened up the future of music and vanished.
“Is that the stars in the sky, or is it rain falling down?” Hendrix sang at the start of “Love or Confusion,” a song that jangled in spite of the drone squealing beneath it. “Will it burn me if I touch the sun? Yeah, so big, so round.” Fame did, indeed, burn Hendrix badly. He struggled with the gauntlet of fame, sex, and drugs, the exhaustion of his schedule, and the financial pressures of building the sound palace of his dreams, Electric Lady Studiosin Greenwich Village. Sessions for The Experience’s second and third albums were gauntlets of endless takes, that lack of expectation curdling into work and tedium. Chandler bailed before Electric Ladyland was done.
After Redding left in 1969, Hendrix began to pursue an even grander vision of the Experience’s experiments with Band of Gypsys. It ended, though, with a public meltdown on stage at Madison Square Garden before the first album could even be released. “That’s what happens when Earth fucks with space,” Hendrix told the crowd as the short set limped to an end. “Never forget that.” He was dead nine months later, almost four years after first landing in London.
It is easy to wallow in that timeline, to imagine the possibilities of what might have been had Hendrix’s safety been prioritized more than his financial solvency, had he been given better guardrails to, for, and from fame. But it is more inspiring to look out over the nearly 60 years since he made Are You Experienced and treasure him as the rarest rock’n’roll anomaly that has ever existed—the person who gave brilliantly and completely and then, for whatever reason, disappeared.
So many of his former peers, champions, and biters remain, still squeezing the lifeblood from rock’s desiccated body for at least a few more years. But as a permanent idea sprung from an ephemeral form, Hendrix remains more powerful and captivating than the lot. “We’ll get outdated,” Stella Benabou, who owned the record store where Hendrix shopped, said near the end of 1973’s A Film About Jimi Hendrix. “He won’t.” Half a century later, he still hasn’t.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings