Jimi Hendrix revolutionized rock guitar with Are You Experienced, but Todd Rundgren believes he didn’t truly become the artist we remember until Axis: Bold as Love.
Much has been written about the sea change Hendrix’s arrival in Britain sparked. Eric Clapton, already hailed as an electric-guitar god, suddenly had another deity to contend with, while Jeff Beck very nearly hung up his guitar for good.
Released in 1967, Are You Experienced was an immediate success. Rundgren, however, believes the leap from that record to Axis: Bold as Love, released just seven months later, was astonishing.
“At first I didn’t know what to think about him,” Rundgren says in a video posted to Hendrix’s official YouTube channel. “Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Peter Green all played Gibson guitars, which had a certain sound. And they were all very heavily influenced by the original blues masters, so they tended to play a lot of the same licks. I wanted to be like them.
“Jimi was playing a Fender Stratocaster and the sound was very different,” he adds. “He wasn’t as precise as everyone else seemed to be; it was a little bit wild and noisy. At first, he depended a little bit on the blues, R&B, and a new thing he was working on. But he hadn’t fully ripened.”
For Rundgren — who recalled nearly jamming with Jimi in Greenwich Village — Hendrix’s second album marked a dramatic shift. The guitarist had found not only a more distinctive musical voice, but a richer imagination as a songwriter.
“That was just a whole new thing,” he says of Axis: Bold as Love. “Not just simply in terms of the guitar playing, but Jimi had evolved as a songwriter. He was creating this whole fantastic universe of dragonflies, castles; things that were fun to imagine and [you could] think of the songs as a soundtrack.
“You could tell that he was really maturing as a songwriter because some of the songs got covered to death by other artists like ‘Little Wing’. This, to me, was the first real Jimi Hendrix album. It still stands the test of time for what you can do with a guitar, and for a lyrical style that very few black artists were using at the time. He had an imagination that was unexpected from somebody who had worked his way up as an R&B guitar player.”
Hendrix’s evolution was remarkably swift. Are You Experienced? announced one of rock’s most exciting new talents, but Axis: Bold as Love revealed an artist who had already begun moving beyond the blues vocabulary that shaped his years as an R&B sideman with artists including the Isley Brothers and Little Richard.
Rundgren’s point goes beyond Hendrix’s technical brilliance. For him, the guitarist’s greatest breakthrough was not simply the revolutionary sound he created with the Stratocaster, but the way he transformed his influences into an entirely new musical world.
