The Jimi Hendrix Experience
"Axis: Bold As Love"
(Reprise, 1968)

By GARY KAMIYA It's a no-brainer. There's only one church in rock: the First Congregational Church of the Guitar. And Jimi Hendrix owns that turf. There are a lot of ways you can become a rock legend, but the best way is the simplest: play the guitar better than anyone else. And Jimi didn't just shut everybody else down, he burned them alive, toasted them, left a whole Gibson nation gaping with this dumbfounded look on their faces and the axes falling from their lifeless fingers. He Michael Jordaned their hapless asses, and they thanked him for the honor. We're not just talking about technique here, although virtuosity doesn't get nearly enough respect in the authenticity-obsessed world of rock. Hendrix played the guitar like no one else ever has, but what set him apart was the boiling, ecstatic, dangerous way the guitar played him.Hendrix's art is a high-wire act between control and chaos. Maybe that's why it whispered to me in 1970 and 1971, those strange years now out of all memory when the world was all broken edges and dreams of holiness, and the monsters he stared down with just his Stratocaster and his angel were the same ones that stared at me. I didn't win my fight, and in the end maybe Jimi didn't either, but art isn't about what happens to you in the end. When I'm sad, or just feeling too damn ordinary, I like to put on "Axis" or "Are You Experienced" or "Electric Ladyland" and listen to him harnessing those dragons and going for a ride. Inside Hendrix's music you can feel tectonic plates shifting, worlds breaking up. He was a wild innocent who had been given a power so vast it was almost monstrous, so intimate it was almost ineffable, and he knew it, knew he was riding something that would take him far ahead of the rest, even ahead of himself. There's an incredulous, I-didn't-know-this-thing-went-this-fast, why-me quality you can hear sometimes in his voice, this sweet black manchild from Seattle who just a few years before had been playing fat R&B chords in little clubs in the South and now found himself in Swinging London with two skinny white Brits, still touching the hot earth of those sweet deep-dish blues licks (he never lost them, he couldn't) but now heading straight OUT, taking his music to places even Ornette or Trane or Stravinsky couldn't go, mind wrapped around the impossible most every day, ascending so high, so fast in so many different directions (a Zen koan for the '60s: Can you ascend DOWN?) that nobody could have blamed him if he mistook the Earth for a marble. He died very much on Earth, choking in his sleep on his own vomit after taking too many downs, and we'll never know whether his death was a bad cosmic joke ("But something went wrong: surprise attack killed him in his sleep that night," he sang of a young Indian brave in "Castles Made of Sand") or an ending as preordained as Icarus' fall, the little wings that had carried him so close to the sun scorched now and useless. It doesn't matter, because he got the whole trip down for us: that's what a hero is supposed to do. And by keeping that record, he protected the past, our past, from vandals and graffiti. The whole concept of the "psychedelic era" has become a joke, or the subject of know-nothing moralizing, and even those of us who burned ourselves a little, or a lot, in that big fire repress the memories: it's hard to do much with them because they're too big, they don't go with the couch. Hendrix reminds us of what was really at stake in those strange spiritual battles we fought so long ago; his great art restores the tragic dimension to our youth. And its grandeur. One of many monuments: At the triumphant end of "If 6 was 9," right after the boys sing a wordless harmony and he runs an ascending slide glissando, Jimi comes in with the craziest note ever heard, an otherworldly electric dissonant scream that circles and shrieks like a wild bird, a call to liberation, a freak flag in the sky. I don't pray, but I can't listen to Jimi without whispering something inside that feels like a prayer:Wave on, brother.

Download a clip (1MB) of "If 6 Was 9"
from "Axis: Bold As Love"

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