The album’s 87 minutes contain multitudes. OK, technically, bassist Noel Redding, who had formed his own band and was in the process of becoming estranged from Hendrix, contributed “Little Miss Strange.” But even more than the rest of Redding’s Experience tracks, that one has always felt like an odd interruption, a sudden return through the looking glass before stepping back into Jimi’s dimension. A month before the Beatles unveiled their own genre-hopping double-disc behemoth, Hendrix delivered one all his own - the difference being that only one creative visionary, not four, was responsible for all this disparate inspiration. Having mastered two distinct breeds of LP, Hendrix then spent most of 1968 letting his creativity explode in every direction.Įlectric Ladyland is the most adventurous album of Hendrix’s career, skipping from style to style while maintaining the same fantastical spirit.
Axis: Bold As Love, released less than seven months later, had more of a consistent aesthetic, as if many of the songs were cut from the same fabric. First came Are You Experienced, a pile of surefire hits that cohered into an album by sheer force of personality. It’s wild to consider that this band released its whole storied discography in under a year in a half. Any of the LPs Hendrix released during his brief moment in the spotlight could reasonably be called his best, but Electric Ladyland, with its pointed ambition and dizzying cross-genre sprawl, stands as his magnum opus.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s third and final album, released 50 years ago today in the US, is a vast realm to get lost in, the sound of the universe that big-banged into existence with Are You Experienced expanding in all directions faster than anyone can keep up. Have you ever been to Electric Ladyland? Chances are if you’ve ever fallen in love with classic rock guitar heroism, you’ve paid a visit to Jimi Hendrix’s personalized dream world some time in the past five decades.
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