The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced
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Free Music Notes for Are You Experienced
Free Music Review: Five Stars, Duh
Hit: 5 Stars
When you look in the dictonary under the word, classic, you see a picture of this album. The songs on this recording always electrify my soul. Once in awhile a tear will come out of nowhere because my soul hears the soul of Jimi's and what he's really singin' about.
Some people leave too soon. Jimi was one of them. I look at old footage of him and he was just an amazingly beautiful person. People try and emulate him...let them try...it can't be done. I even went to hear a Jimi Hendrix tribute band once...I should've saved the twelve bucks and just sat home and listened to the real thing.
He may be gone physically, but he'll live forever through his recordings especially this particular one. The music is just mind blowing. Not a flaw in the bunch. Of course, that's debateable, but it's not up for debate. There are just some things I don't mess with and this is one of them.
If I ever became a multi-billionaire, I'd buy everyone a copy of this CD. I know that sounds stupid, but that's how passionate I am about this recording. It was love at first listen, it was love at the 1,832nd listen and I'm sure it'll be love at the millionth listen.
God let me live to be that old!
Free Music Review: 5 stars. of course.
Hit: 5 Stars
wanna hear what a great recording sounds like? get this. put it in your cd player. press start. then listen.Free Music Review: My (2d) Musical Epiphany
Hit: 5 Stars
"Music is not thought to indefinite to be put into words, but, on the contrary, too definite." (Felix Mendelssohn, 18 October 1842)
I've had two musical epiphanies in my lifetime, which is probably not many for someone who listens to music as avidly as I do.
The first was in 1958. (Sonny Rollins, Blue Note, vol. 2, was the album.)
The second, the one I want to write about, was in 1967.
Into the sixties, I poured scorn on rhythm and blues, although I enjoyed Fats Domino and Chuck Berry on the jukebox and my high school quartet had sung doowop songs like "Earth Angel," "Sh'boom," and "Gee."
My dislike of R&B transferred to rock in the early 60s. After I married Esther in 1964, I loosened up enough to enjoy the Beatles in the Richard Lester film "A Hard Day's Night." I even bought the sound track for the movie. By 1967, I was more catholic in my taste, listening to Procol Harum ("A Whiter Shade of Pale" was the most frequently played song on the juke box during my first term in grad school), Jefferson Airplane, the Credence Clearwater Revival, the Doors, the Byrds, the Cream.
I no longer resisted rock and roll but I was still not fond of harsh or ragged sounding groups like the Stones. I remember a conversation in the summer of '67 in which I told a friend -at great length-- that the Rolling Stones were just too primitive; they weren't sufficiently musically sophisticated.
In August, 1967, Life magazine ran an article on Hendrix, who had made his name in England with a power trio of guitar, electric bass and drums called the Jimi Hendrix Experience. I immediately bought their first album, "Are You Experienced." For a few weeks, I was the only one around who owned it, but not for long.
Listening to Hendrix extending and distorting the sounds and uses of the guitar was an epiphany for me. I bought Hendrix's next two albums right away and a few others as well. I didn't have much money but I still managed to acquire albums by Creedence Clearwater, Ike and Tina, Santana, the Chambers Brothers, Buddy Miles, Super Session with Steven Stills, Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, Bruce Springsteen, the Band (whom I ladore), the Talking Heads (ditto), Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, the Stones, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Dire Straits, the Commodores, Blondie, Nina Hagen, X, the Blasters. How different my record collection looked after a couple of years!
Nowadays, I listen to all kinds of music as though it came from a common source: jazz, blues, classical music, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, tangos, bossas novas, Afro-Cuban music, some country western music and some folk music, and music from around the world -Yvo Papasov, Yuri Yanakov, the Klezmatics, Luciana Souza, Cesaria Evoria, Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo, Leih Sebtah, Huun Huur Tu, Kila, Christie Moore, Lunasa, Sharon Shannon and the Woodchoppers, Hammy Hamilton and Con O'Drisceoll, Mary Black.... --all are grist for the mill.
In a way, I owe that to Hendrix for he opened up my ears to the possiblities of music, any kind of musdic when performed by virtuosos with their own vision of what to do.
In the summer and fall of 1969, I saw Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubenstein, and Mstislav Rostropovich perform live. What a year! But I also saw Janis Joplin perform with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Janis left the group shortly after to go out on her own.
Two weeks later, Hendrix came to town with his original recording group: Noel Redding on bass, Mitch Mitchell on drums. We sat in the center, second row of the second balcony, far away from the stage but with clear sight lines and speakers facing toward us.
Two backup groups performed first. Neither got much applause. If I remember right, the first was Cat Stevens, the wrong performer to put before Jimi Hendrix. The second was a Herman's Hermits clone -skinny suits, bowl-shaped haircuts, trendy little English accents and anemic sound. (English was big in rock and roll then.)
Hendrix was everything I'd expected. For all the wildness, and the wall of sound his group pumped out non-stop, the group and the playing were tight and right. This is something I like in groups: it`s the reason that the Band and the Talking Heads are among my favorite rock groups (along with Hendrix). They all played tight.
What I hadn't expected was how loud it would be. When Hendrix started playing, my chest and tailbone literally throbbed. I put my fingers in my ears to reduce the noise to a bearable level. I loved the music but unmediated by my fingers in my ears, it would have been painful to hear. He performed most of the songs I wanted to hear -"Purple Haze," "Fire," "Spanish Castle Magic," "All Across the Watchtower," "Crosstown Traffic"-- and he performed his signature stunts: charging the speaker with his guitar and destroying it, setting his guitar on fire with lighter fluid. It was fun. Theater.
Hendrix changed the way guitar players played their instruments, not just rock but jazz guitarists too. He was masterful in the way he used distortion, feedback and the wah wah pedal to make an integrated musical statement. He used the whole insturment --electrified.
A while ago, I listened to an album of Hendrix covers performed by accomplished musicians like Eric Clapton, Chrissie Hynds, Buddy Guy. Only the songs from Hendrix's Band of Gypsies worked in translation --perhaps because Hendrix played bluesier, looser music in that group than he did with the Experience.
The music of the Experience was generally tightly put together and the instrumental background essential to the melody. On the cover album, even a musician as talented as Chrissie Hynds sounded like a clone. Dull! The players seemed to find it difficult to forge an alternative musical background to the original ones provided by Hendrix, Redding and Mitchell.
Free Music Review: This is for Mr. MTV
Hit: 5 Stars
Listen kid, what they play on MTV probably is MUZIK. But Jimi
Hendrix played MUSIC, REAL MUSIC. And if it wasn't for him
there would'nt be any sorry ass limp bizkit you moron. Why don't
you go and watch some more MTV so you can see how it's NOT done.
Signed,
A real guitar player.
Free Music Review: ...Not Necessarily Stoned...But...Beautiful...
Hit: 5 Stars
It is amazing if a debut album contains just one hit. ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? contains not just hits but standards, and an incredible number of them. Fully eight of the original twelve songs are considered core to Jimi Hendrix's body of work.
Born in the Counterculture's high-water-mark year of 1967 (which also brought us SGT. PEPPER'S, PET SOUNDS, THE DOORS and DISRAELI GEARS), ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? takes us ten steps beyond. Hendrix rightfully deserves his reputation as a musical magus on the level of Django Reinhardt. In short, Jimi makes his guitar do things that no other performer has ever acheived, and it is the mark of his brilliance that ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? does so consistently.
The fact is that ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? is just as great or even better than some of its contemporary releases. Had this album appeared in any other year it's full effect would have been musically shattering.
An objective listening provides all the evidence one needs to hear that this album is musically evolved as far beyond The Beatles as the Beatles were beyond Elvis Presley. Where The Beatles and The Beach Boys embraced complex orchestrations to aurally capture the essence of mind expansion, Hendrix remains largely true to his rock roots. At times it seems like Hendrix, Shiva-like, is playing with nine hands.
From the opening barbaric yawp of "Purple Haze" through the perfectly realized portrait of "Manic Depression," the self-deluding "Hey Joe," the plaintive "The Wind Cries Mary," the frenetic "Fire," the frankly sexual "Foxy Lady," the anthematic "Stone Free," the lesser-known compositions "Love or Confusion," "May This Be Love," "I Don't Live Today," "Third Stone From the Sun" and the demanding title track, Hendrix tears at our everyday illusions and brings us into a symbolic reality. "Acid rock" indeed.
In a sense, Jimi's death was a blessing as he never lived to decline artistically, but left us a firebrand trail to follow in this singular recording.