The debut album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience is many things. As contemporary blues guitarist Samantha Fish said: “Are You Experienced is historically important, innovative, and just such a creative album. Hendrix took us to different places that I don’t think music had been.”
But if anything, Fish slightly understated it. Beginning with this album, Hendrix reinvented guitar.
It’s easy to miss the extent of his genius because many of his innovations are now taken-for-granted guitar techniques, but guitar playing pre-Hendrix was a markedly less interesting world. And no one could sound like him.
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We don’t just mean this in the boring sense that every player is unique. Literally no one could sound like Jimi, because Hendrix’s playing required impractical volume levels.
In 1967, that type of amp distortion and feedback couldn’t happen any other way. The Jimi Hendrix Experience were kicked out of recording sessions because of noise complaints, or else producers didn’t know how to record such intense sound pressure levels.
An engineer for John Mayall’s Blues Breakers had described Eric Clapton as “unrecordable”, and that was only a 30 watt combo. Hendrix used a 100 watt stack.
It was only when they moved to Olympic Studios that they found Eddie Kramer, a collaborator with the talent and will to capture Jimi’s full sonic fury.
As Samantha Fish explained in an interview with Total Guitar: “I can’t make a Strat sound like Jimi Hendrix. When I think of Stratocasters in general I think of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and that’s the kind of twang that I get out of it when I when I pick it up.
“Jimi’s tone was so aggressive. It screams in a way that I can’t make a Stratocaster scream, and I think a lot of guitar players might agree with me.”
There were precursors to Hendrix. Buddy Guy had been performing live with distortion and feedback for years, but his label chief Leonard Chess refused to record that way. Hendrix, a veteran of ‘chitlin circuit’ blues clubs, would have seen the likes of Guy at their unfiltered best.
In his session days, Jimi worked as a sideman to Curtis Mayfield, who particularly influenced Jimi with his clean playing and his signature take on chord-melody playing. But none of this detracts from Jimi’s status as a visionary.
Growing up in Kansas City, Samantha Fish was a fan of Hendrix’s songs before she even knew who he was.
She recalled: “Like most kids in the ’90s, I heard Jimi Hendrix on the radio. We didn’t really have a big record collection, but I had heard all the hits. As I got older I realised, ‘Holy hell, all these songs are from the same album!’
“I can’t imagine being 25 and putting out something so prolific. I just think about myself at 25 and the tone he has, the presence he has, the command he has over the guitar – the songs are just so well thought-out.”
Fish’s career began at blues jams, and when she performed Red House, a cornerstone track from Are You Experienced, audiences groaned because the song had been covered so often.
“I would hope that he’d be tickled by that,” she laughed.
Like Hendrix, Fish is rooted in the blues but crosses genres.
“I just write songs and the blues the blues part of it comes through my playing and singing,” she said. “It comes from my foundation and how I learned how to play guitar. If I write a progression that’s kind of poppy I’m going to try and bring this other element to make it something else. I can only imagine Jimi was just writing good songs and putting them out there.”
As to whether Are You Experienced is a blues album, she stated: “It’s blues and beyond. Jimi was paving his own way and creating his own sound. I don’t think genre can really can really confine him or describe him.
“He has some blues licks, some blues phrasing and feeling the way he sings, but he was writing the book on rock’ n’ roll. There have been so many prolific guitar players in the blues historically and I think I think he fits into that too just by way of being so damn beastly on the guitar.”
Are You Experienced was notable for the number of new sounds Hendrix pulled from his guitar. The title track has a noise that sounds like record scratching, a full decade before hip-hop DJs were around, and Third Stone From The Sun has a solo that barely sounds like conventional music, with Hendrix manipulating and controlling feedback using his Strat’s tremolo.
This is an inspiration for Fish’s approach: “He was so innovative with the guitar,” she said. “Even today people aren’t doing the things that he was doing, even via recording and how he was utilising the instrument as a pure effect. Like on the title track [Are You Experienced], it sounds like a remix. Using the guitar not in the traditional sense. He’s putting a texture and a tone on there that gives the song a certain vibe that you can’t get from a solo or riff or guitar chords. He was using it in different ways and making it talk.
“I think every guitar player spends a fair amount of time trying to figure out how the hell he did that. That’s something that I really like to do, and Jimi Hendrix is kind of like the godfather of doing stuff like that.”
Another example was Hendrix’s pioneering backwards guitar.
“He wasn’t the first to record backwards guitar solos,” Fish said, “but he did it in a pretty iconic way.”
George Harrison had beaten Hendrix by a year with I’m Only Sleeping from The Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver, but it had been a painful process. In his memoir, Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick says of the nine-hour session: “We all wished we had never come up with the concept of backwards sounds.”
Hendrix, by contrast, had spent time listening to his guitar recorded backwards to learn how it would sound, and put the Are You Experienced solo together with apparent ease.
Samantha Fish grew up with the US release of Are You Experienced, which added three classic singles – Purple Haze, The Wind Cries Mary and Hey Joe – which were omitted from the UK release. She admired Hendrix’s way of weaving lead lines around chords.
“I think The Wind Cries Mary is one of the most beautiful songs ever written,” she said. “It’s just so delicate and well put together. He’s not just throwing licks out there. He’s playing really melodically and delicately through different chord structures and building memorable melodies. That’s definitely something I strive to do with my solos.”
As a singer-guitarist, Fish recognises that much of Hendrix’s genius was in the interplay between his voice and guitar.
“It’s the way that he arpeggiates chords, like in The Wind Cries Mary,” she said. “He’s sliding up to different chords and his voice is this kind of counterpart to these really intricate guitar patterns.
“On some of his rougher songs there’s so much call and response between his singing and his playing, it’s like two voices talking to each other. BB King is the king of that, but Jimi did it in such a bombastic way that I think goes over a lot of people’s heads. The amount of work he’s doing and the amount of energy he’s putting out by singing and playing in that fashion together – it’s kind of mind-boggling how he was able to do that.”
