The Albums That Matter: Are You Experienced

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE.

Are You Experienced

The Jimi Hendrix Experience

1967

A lot has been written about Are You Experienced, and rightly so. It's one of the all-time greats in classic rock. In fact, it's part of the foundation of classic rock itself. There are about ten albums that you can point to and say, "This is where it all began," and Are You Experienced is one of them.

The irony, though, is that because of all this, I actually tend to underrate Are You Experienced a little bit. I first heard this album when it was turning 40 years old. It was absolutely a revolutionary album in 1967, but in 2007, it didn't quite reach that level, because I was already inundated with all the music in the subsequent decades that had been influenced by Hendrix. Had I been born in the '50s, and listened to this in the summer of '67, this shit would've blown my fucking mind, and it actually did do that for plenty of people that summer. It makes me jealous, that I won't ever be able to hear the classics with fresh ears.

So whenever I listen to Jimi Hendrix, I try to put myself in that headspace, because the music here is worth the effort. I spent a lot of hours in my youth, laying supine on the bed, eyes closed, headphones on, Hendrix in the Discman (okay, a few hours at least). And I found that I was almost able to reach back into a previous life. Are You Experienced (and even more so, the other two albums in his discography) takes you on a trip. I've never done psychedelic drugs (and this is probably so fucking lame to say), but I see colors and shapes when I listen to this stuff. Jimi Hendrix paints pictures with his guitar. It's pretty neat.

Jimi Hendrix unfortunately will remain to me some guy who died almost a half century ago. But his Marshall twin stacks scream at us through the generations.

Good album.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If this album sounds interesting, try this song: "Manic Depression"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stray Observations

• Shout out to possibly the greatest rhythm section of all time (no small claim), with Noel Redding on bass and the wonderfully named Mitch Mitchell on drums. These two guys were, unfortunately, glorified session musicians at the time of this album's recording; producer Chas Chandler purposefully kept the songwriting spotlight solely on Hendrix, and Redding and Mitchell had little to do besides just playing their instruments as instructed. As a former drummer, I feel slightly insulted, but, like, I listen to the album and I wouldn't change a thing, so what the fuck do I know. I just know that when it came time to buy the requisite Jim Hendrix college dorm poster, I bought one that featured the whole band, not just Hendrix.
• Are You Experienced peaked at #5 on the Billboard 200. Since Sgt. Pepper's came out a month later, it doesn't surprise me that they couldn't get to #1. Except, the album that actually stopped their rise to the peak wasn't Sgt. Pepper's, but the Monkees' More of the Monkees. I knew the Monkees were popular, but I didn't realize they were THAT popular. Look at this. The Monkees were #1 on the charts for 29 of 52 weeks in 1967. I guess what's considered "popular music" will always be strange and grotesque in retrospect.
• Wikipedia also indicates that this album rose to #10 on the Billboard R&B charts, which to me speaks more about the discrepancy of what we consider R&B now vs. then.
• Axis: Bold as Love was released the same year, and Electric Ladyland in 1968. Jimi Hendrix's output was insane, and it makes me (and millions of others, sure) wonder if his career would've continued to follow that upward trajectory or eventually flamed out, had he not died in 1970.
• There's a certain type of person who always has to bring up the song "Hey Joe" when they greet me. I'm not sure what type of person it is, but there's plenty of them out there. My acquaintance Rudi from high school was one of these people. Our friendship relationship existed solely because our last names dictated adjacent locker assignments all four years, as well as the fact that we both like Are You Experienced, and I had the same name as one of those songs. Our mutual appreciation for music ended there (he did not like "Rudie Can't Fail" by the Clash). Anyways, where was I?
• As noted above, I've never done drugs, so I cannot speak to the veracity that "Purple Haze" et al perfectly describe the feeling of an acid trip. Jimi Hendrix denied that the song had anything to do with drugs, but rather was about a "dream" that he had about walking on the bottom of the sea. This explanation sounds equally plausible to John Lennon's daughter's coloring book inspiring "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
• ALBUM COVER: The U.K. version and the U.S. version had different album covers, and I greatly prefer the U.S. one. They both feature the three members of the band staring at the camera like they have a secret. The U.S. version, though, utilizes a convex lens and purple/yellow color scheme, really underlining the fact that this album is psychedelic, man.
• Punctuation note: The album does not have a question mark in the title, but the song does. This is the second album in a row we've covered that lacks a question mark for nebulous reasons.
• Yeah, I have more concrete to say in the Strays than I did in the article proper. I considered doing the whole post as Stray Observations only, but figured that an album with "Purple Haze" deserved at least some purple prose.

NEXT TIME: Are You Serious by Andrew Bird (and possibly Armchair Apocrypha as well, as a sort of double post about Bird)