Trumpets and violins I can, uh, hear in the distance

'Are You Experienced?' - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Are You Experienced - 1967)

Those words in the headline may seem familiar to subscribers who have been with The Run Out Grooves for a while; short of Jimi Hendrix’s “uh”, they are the words we used for the entry on Patti Smith’s ‘Elegie’ from her debut album Horses back in September.

Trumpets, violins, I hear them in the distance

That song, as you can read about in that entry¹, is an elegy to Hendrix and has that line as a knowing reference back to the final song, and title track, to his band’s debut album, Are You Experienced² which still to this day is an album that doesn’t just catch the proverbial lightning in the bottle but chucks in a volcano and a hurricane while it is at it.

Meanwhile, back in April 1967, The Jimi Hendrix Experience are in London’s Olympic Sound Studios finishing vocals and overdubs on ‘Fire’, ‘Love or Confusion’ and ‘May This Be Love’ and what would be the last day of recording.³ Even on an album so strikingly original as this one, ‘Are You Experienced?’ is a track that pushes the envelope with the backwards guitar track that was built on what The Beatles had explored in 1966’s Revolver.

Engineering assistant George Chkiantz has said in 1995’s Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy by Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek;

The original idea [for the guitar recording] was to do a loop, but that gave a problem ... we tried looping it and then we couldn't get it to loop ... in the end Jimi got so impatient doing this, he said “look, it's quite easy, we're just gonna play” and played it in.

Elsewhere in that book, the authors praise it as a statement of intent and a rock album.

Mitch [Mitchell]'s military snare raps out behind the startlingly contemporary hip-hop scratch sound-effects of tapes running backwards punctuating Jimi's condition for being your guide ('If you can get your mind together'). To what? S3xual ecstasy? Altered states of consciousness? Or just finding yourself, taking time out to view what you're doing from the outside, 'from the bottom of the sea', letting go of the daily grind of the 'measly world'. It is all there for the taking. The secret is being at peace with yourself – 'not necessarily stoned, but beautiful'.

The song also doesn’t have a bass guitar, or at least (another) Hendrix biographer, Keith Shadwick thinks that is the case⁴ - this does lend the song a droning quality, giving it an Indian feel. It is pretty remarkable to me that The Beatles could release an album in late 1966 with backward guitars, Indian drone songs and loops and by the spring of the following year, The Jimi Hendrix Experience recorded a debut album which closes on a piece which includes all of those elements, like a three-minute primer for Revolver. Except that there is a build on this, with whammy attacks and fuzz pedals deployed to push psychedelia forward, layering in the pastel colours of the first half of the decade with vibrant and vivid hues we associate with 1967 and Hendrix, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, were as responsible as anyone for starting to colour outside of the lines.

1. You can view any of the entries via the chronological index page.

2. Technically, pedants will love this; the song title is framed with a question mark which the album title does not.

3. I may have to have a count before the end of the year, but it feels like we have seen many albums with a familiar picture of the closing track, not just finished in the final recording session for the album but first tackled in it.

4. While there is some debate about whether the bassline is present, there is another instrumental version with a bass line more advanced in the mix. Some albums list Noel Redding as playing, and some don’t.