The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time : Rolling Stone

2 "Purple Haze"
The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967)

The riff is pure blues — the same kind of guitar figure Hendrix played nightly back on the R&B-club grind, as a sideman for Little Richard and the Isley Brothers. But in "Purple Haze," Hendrix's second British single and the first track on the U.S. version of his debut album, he declared himself a free man — "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" — and unveiled a new guitar language charged with spiritual hunger and the poetry possible in electricity and studio technology. "Guitar — you can play it or transcend it," said Neil Young when he inducted Hendrix into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. "Jimi showed me that. I heard it, felt it and wanted to do it." Hendrix wrote "Purple Haze" backstage at a London nightclub in December 1966 and recorded basic tracks with his band, the Experience, two weeks later. But the galactic travel came in overdubs recorded on February 3rd, 1967: Hendrix's solos, swimming in echo and sparkling with harmonics, were put through an octave-boosting effect and played back at twice the speed. In less than three minutes, Hendrix opened a new age of expression on his instrument.