Cover Story: Jimi Hendrix: The Greatest Guitarist of All Time

The furor Hendrix created upon his arrival on the London pop scene was unprecedented. Here was a young American black man who did not conform to British fantasies of sharpdressing soul belters and grizzled old bluesmen, who played rock & roll guitar with a physically aggressive, avant-garde edge. Hendrix quickly became the darling of the music and tabloid presses; the leading lights of British pop — the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Eric Clapton — were among his most ardent fans. According to Clapton, Cream's biggest hit, "Sunshine of Your Love," was a de facto hymn to Hendrix, actually inspired by an Experience show at London's Saville Theater. (Hendrix returned the compliment by frequently making the song a feature of his own shows.)

For Hendrix, Redding and Mitchell, the last months of 1966 and the whole of 1967 were a crush of interviews, promotional activities, punishing concert tours and frenzied studio activity. Yet those hectic recording sessions, Hendrix's first as a leader, were arguably his most productive. In fourteen months, Hendrix and the Experience recorded not only the classic singles "Hey Joe," "Purple Haze" and "Burning of the Midnight Lamp," but all of Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold As Love. In addition, the band cut a knockout series of live-in-the-studio tracks for broadcast on BBC Radio (released in 1989 as Radio One).

Collectively, that wealth of material captures Hendrix's genius in its first full flowering. The early singles and Are You Experienced?, in particular, provide a striking summation of the lyric dreams and musical schemes that had boiled inside Hendrix during his journeyman years. In his trademark blues "Red House" (featured on the original U.K. edition of Experienced?), he reaffirmed his pride in his black roots with a celebratory vengeance. He also cooked up a volcanic freak beat with the propulsive riffing and head-spinning guitar effects of "Stone Free" (the flip side of "Hey Joe") and "Love or Confusion," reveling in the errant six-string behavior that earlier had made him the bane of conservative R&B bandleaders.

In enduring ballads like "The Wind Cries Mary" and "May This Be Love," Hendrix demonstrated a depth of feeling and ambition often eclipsed by the assaultive force of "Purple Haze" and "Foxey Lady." Combining pastoral melodicism and aqueous electronic effects, he created a music of otherworldly beauty and poignance, coding his deeper torment in introspective dream-speak. The result was a kind of blues in orbit, musically spacious ruminations on loneliness and loss. "The Wind Cries Mary," actually released in its original demo form (Mitchell later claimed subsequent studio versions sounded too sterile), has a lush, inviting quality, like a classic Curtis Mayfield ballad that belies its bittersweet premise: "The traffic lights they burn blue tomorrow/And shine their emptiness down on my bed."

"Burning of the Midnight Lamp" is also a song of startling melancholy, the confessions of a man long separated from his home and family and now left rootless and battered by the pressures of sudden transatlantic fame and the demands of salesmen. Hendrix wrote the song in midair, on a flight from Los Angeles to New York during his first flush of American success in the fall of 1967: "And soon enough the time will tell/About the circus in the wishing well/And someone who will buy and sell for me/Someone who will toll my bell/And I continue to burn the same old lamp, alone."

At its core, Hendrix's music was all about the blues. The true power of his genius lay in his musical and lyrical candor. For many of his British admirers, like Clapton, Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend, the blues was a religion, an object of worship and aspiration. For Hendrix it was the substance of life. When he immigrated to England, the career he left behind was distinguished mostly by misunderstanding and rejection. He had been exiled from the R&B mainstream, chastised for being too far out, and as a rocker he was so far underground — playing chump-change gigs in Greenwich Village coffeehouses — that he was unknown even in the evolving psychedelic community.

Stardom allowed Hendrix the freedom, onstage but more importantly in the studio, to give free rein to his troubled muse. The energy and sexual vigor in his music certainly spoke volumes about the joys of his new life. The confusion and desperation so often voiced in his lyrics and lacerating guitar work also testified not only to the lingering pains of his childhood and sideman years but to the wants and fears — physical emotional, musical — that would dog him for the rest of his life.

Hendrix often felt unequal to the task of getting onto tape everything he heard in his head and felt in his heart. "Most of the time I can get it on the guitar, you know?" he said with characteristic modesty in Rolling Stone in early 1970. "Most of the the time I'm just laying around daydreaming and hearing all this music.... If you go to the guitar and and try to play it, it spoils the whole thing.... I just can't play the guitar that well, to get all this music together."

Widely considered a minor masterpiece compared with Are You Experienced?, Axis: Bold As Love — released in the U.S. less than six months after its predecessor — suffered in the circumstances of the recording. It was done between May and October 1967, one of the busiest periods of Hendrix's entire career, and there was friction between Hendrix and Chas Chandler over the production. The original mix of the album was lost; because of release deadlines, Hendrix, Chandler and engineer Eddie Kramer were forced to remix the whole record in just eleven hours.