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

In spite of all this, Axis makes up in adventuresome songwriting what it lacks in sonic theater. The anger, angst and raw sex that charged Experienced? give way to flashes of humor in the droll Mose Allison-style swing of "Up From the Skies" and the trippy nostalgia in the driving "Spanish Castle Magic," which partly salutes the Spanish Castle in Seattle, a black music club that was one of Hendrix's teenage haunts. Axis also features Hendrix's finest ballad, "Little Wing," a compact beauty (less than two and a half minutes) with a fatherly lullaby vocal and a gorgeous, spidery guitar solo in the fade-out.

"I wanted to make it a double LP," Hendrix once said of Axis, "which would be almost impossible.... The record producers and companies don't want to do that. I'm willing to spend every single penny on it, if I thought it was good enough."

With Electric Ladyland, issued in the U.S. in the fall of 1968, Hendrix finally had the time, money and opportunity to indulge himself in the studio. The only album released in his lifetime over which he had complete artistic and conceptual control, it is a sprawling but compelling self-portrait of the young artist as a seeker. The deep-space soul suite — "Rainy Day, Dream Away," "1983...(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)," "Moon, Turn the Tides...gently gently away" — which took up all of side three, reflected his obsessions with symphonic guitar effects and underwater dreams (the whoosing sound known as phasing is drenched over almost everything on the record). He also framed his roots in radical new contexts, taking the blues to Mars with the dark, elastic jamming on "Voodoo Chile" and the psychedelic romp through "Come On (Part 1)," an R&B nugget by New Orleans guitarist Earl King.

There was plenty of vintage Experience fire on tap — "Crosstown Traffic," "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" — but Hendrix made no secret of his growing desire to play with other kindred souls, expanding the group to include guest musicians like Steve Winwood, Al Kooper and Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Casady. Hendrix also paid homage to one of his favorite songwriters, Bob Dylan, with a howling, locomotive interpretation of "All Along the Watchtower" that jacked up the steely irony of Dylan's original reading into feverish desperation.

"The first two albums are tremendous landmarks, but Electric Ladyland is more of a complete statement," said engineer Eddie Kramer, who was Hendrix's studio soul mate from Axis on. Actually, taken together, Are You Experienced?, Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland are a comprehensive expression of the sounds and feelings that Hendrix fought to express not only during his R&B road-warrior days but even amid his success. Weighed down by the stage image of Cock-Rock Guitar God, Hendrix liberated himself on record, while blazing new trails of possibility for the guitar and for the recording studio as an instrument.

But the Experience was growing frayed at the edges, exhausted after two years of nonstop work. Redding and Mitchell were also dissatisfied with the financial sleight of hand of co-manager Mike Jeffrey. The band broke up in mid-1969, and Hendrix embarked on his next recording venture, a projected double album entitled First Rays of the New Rising Sun. Beset by his own difficulties with Jeffrey, over contractual tangles and continuing demands by his audience for nightly reprises of his old wild-man stunts, Hendrix spent most of 1969 and 1970 looking for new collaborators and testing new musical directions.

There were spectacular high points — the guitar fireworks treatment of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock, a vivid blast of rage and pain for a nation torn asunder by the Vietnam War; the fiery Fillmore East shows by his short-lived Band of Gypsys, a hard-funk trio featuring Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles. One of the last songs he recorded in 1970 was the haunting ballad "Angel," written two years earlier after he had a dream about his late mother.

Hendrix also pursued his longtime interest in jazz, jamming with guitarist John McLaughlin and multi-reed maestro Roland Kirk. Portions of 1969 sessions featuring organist Larry Young and bassist Dave Holland were issued in 1980 on Nine to the Universe. Over the years, Hendrix had formed a mutual-admiration society with Miles Davis, with occasional talk of collaboration. But that never came to fruition, nor did a planned big-band project featuring Hendrix with legendary jazz arranger and Davis cohort Gil Evans.