The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
The Jimi Hendrix Experience · produced by Chas Chandler · Track Records · the British edition of May 1967 · about 40 minutes
Mode
Electric blues and rhythm and blues turned into a music of guitar sound, with excursions into tape and space
Mythos
An initiation into another way of seeing; the visitor from the stars who looks on Earth; the man who comes home to find his woman gone
Phase
Eleven tracks on two sides of near-equal length: the sound declared at the start, a slow blues, a long instrumental near the close, and an initiation to end
Presentation
Album, in its British edition; eleven tracks, about forty minutes, recorded in London by a trio
Register
Electric guitar shaped as sound, in feedback, sustain and distortion; jazz-phrased drums; plain bass; a voice that serves; guitar and drums recorded backwards
Scale
One consciousness, widened and disordered, through the body’s desire, the blues it comes from and a view of Earth from outside
Governing Proposition
An American guitarist unknown in London builds a trio around a sound no one had sold and makes the electric guitar a source of sound rather than an instrument of notes, so that feedback, sustain and tape carry a consciousness widened past its habits, ecstatic and disordered at once, from a slow blues out into space and to an initiation played backwards: a reorganisation of an instrument that the field followed, on a disclosure more sensed than stated.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins with a single note, sustained and swelling, before any word is sung. It is the sound declared: the electric guitar heard not as an instrument playing a line through an amplifier but as a source of sound in its own right, shaped as it grows. Foxy Lady follows it into a song of desire, and the song is the lesser part. Everything the record goes on to do, the blues made huge, a waltz driven to frenzy, a theme thrown into space, a threshold played backwards, is announced in that first swelling note.
Track Records released the album in Britain in May 1967, produced by Chas Chandler and made in London. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was a trio: Jimi Hendrix on guitar and voice, Noel Redding on bass, Mitch Mitchell on drums, the guitars overdubbed. The edition scored is the British one, the album as first released, in the sequence the band and its producer made: eleven tracks, about forty minutes. The American edition is a different object. It drops Red House, Can You See Me and Remember, adds the three British singles, Purple Haze, Hey Joe and The Wind Cries Mary, and reorders the rest. Those singles are not part of this record and are credited nowhere on this page.
Side one runs Foxy Lady, Manic Depression, Red House, Can You See Me, Love or Confusion and I Don’t Live Today; side two runs May This Be Love, Fire, Third Stone from the Sun, Remember and Are You Experienced? The sides are of near-equal length. Only one track runs past five minutes, the largely instrumental Third Stone, and the record’s shape is in its poles: a slow blues on the first side, a passage into space near the end of the second, and between and around them songs of two or three minutes that the guitar keeps breaking open.
Movement II
Manic Depression is in triple time, a waltz, and the trio drives it into a frenzy. Mitch Mitchell plays it like a jazz drummer, with fills and phrasing that keep three players from sounding thin, and the guitar pushes against him until the dance tips over. The song names a condition and plays it. What the record brings into the open is a state: consciousness widened past its habits, by eros, by drugs, by noise, and found to be ecstasy and disorder at once. Here the disorder is heard in the meter itself.
The first side ends in I Don’t Live Today, a song of a self that has no place in the world it is in, and it closes in feedback, a scream with no voice in it. That is the record’s method at its plainest: what a statement could not carry, the noise carries, and the form is the instrument of the knowledge. Change the form of these songs, play them clean, and they stop knowing what they know. Love or Confusion, between them, swirls in the same way with less force, and restates the condition rather than deepening it.
The disclosure is real and it is a sensorium. The record shows a state intensely and newly, and credits sound as fully as words; but it states little that could be held as true of a life or a society, and the words, where they state, state little. A waltz driven into frenzy and a song that ends in a scream render a condition from inside. They do not articulate it, and that is the record’s plainest limit.
Movement III
The third track is a slow twelve-bar blues, and it is the root the record grows from. Red House carries the oldest pattern of the form, the man who comes home to find his woman gone, and its solo raises a slow lament to the blues sublime. Its phrasing has been transcribed and studied by guitarists ever since, as have the tones of Foxy Lady and of Third Stone, the control of the feedback and the chords Hendrix voiced with his thumb. Each generation of players returns to these performances and finds technique in them the last had not seen.
The inheritance is the electric blues and rhythm and blues of the American circuit, where Hendrix had played as a sideman, and the London guitar of 1966, where Clapton, Beck and Townshend had begun to use volume and feedback. The turn is large. The guitar stops being an instrument of notes and becomes a source of sound, feedback, sustain, distortion and tape, shaped as deliberately as a melody. Feedback and fuzz had been heard on records by the Who and the Yardbirds, and the blues frame keeps most of these songs near home. The departure is in what the sound is made to carry.
The stake was real. An American unknown in London built a trio around a sound no record company had sold, and put it on a debut with no singles on it. The making answers the wager at its height: the guitar is commanded at a level few recordings in any idiom reach, rhythm, chords and fills in one hand under every song. Elsewhere it does not. Can You See Me and Remember are short rhythm and blues songs that a lesser band could have made, routine as making, and Redding’s bass is plain and sometimes buried beneath a quick production with cramped mixes.
Movement IV
Near the end of the second side the record leaves the song. Third Stone from the Sun opens on a jazz-inflected theme, then throws the guitar into space, feedback and treated speech, the voices of a ship and its scout, an ascent with no song to hold it. It is the record’s grandest height. The figure evoked is the visitor from the stars who looks on Earth and finds it wanting, and the music makes the look literal: a planet seen from outside, in sound that has left the ground.
Before it the second side has risen twice in other temperatures. May This Be Love is the warm height, a quiet guitar like falling water; Fire is a sprint, slight but driving. Elevation on this record is frequent and of several kinds, fury, dread, lament, warmth and vertigo, and it comes on six or seven of eleven tracks. The three plain songs stay level, and the height of the rest is the height of a sound more than of a statement.
One law governs the whole: the guitar’s sound as an extension of the body and of consciousness, through the blues into whatever lies past it. Red House and Third Stone from the Sun, the two most distant tracks, obey it. One is the blues voiced through the guitar, the other the guitar leaving the blues, and the same tone carries both. Manic Depression’s waltz and Fire’s sprint obey it too. Can You See Me and Remember obey only as songs by the same band, and the record’s halves of song and space meet in the guitar more than in an argument.
Movement V
The record ends with a question. Are You Experienced? is built on guitar and drums recorded backwards against a forward voice, and the backward sounds pull against the singing until the ground seems to move. The song asks whether the listener has crossed into another way of seeing, “not necessarily stoned”, and plays the crossing in sound that runs against time. It is an initiation: a threshold, a question put to the novice, a passage, staged as initiation stages it, by reversing the order of the world. The whole sequence has been preparing it, and it is the compelled end.
The reach of what the record began is as wide as that of any record of its decade within its field. The guitar of heavy rock, of funk and soul after 1967, of jazz fusion and of metal descends in great part from the playing documented here, and guitarists of every later generation have measured themselves against it. Part of that reach belongs to the player’s later records and concerts, and part to the American edition, which carried the singles. But this is the record on which the reorganisation was first set down, and from which players learned it.
Fifty-nine years have tested it. It has stayed in print, its songs are heard on broadcast and in film, and the guitar tones, made in small London studios, still sound like a discovery, though some mixes are thin. The British sequence has been less present than the American one, and three of its tracks are heard far less than the singles it left off. What it holds is one consciousness widened and disordered, the body’s desire, the blues it comes from and a view of Earth from outside; the family, the city, the state and history as event are absent. Within that, it changed what an instrument could be.
Act III · The Twelve
Eleven tracks in about forty minutes, and the frame and the core are required. Foxy Lady must open, the sound announced in its first sustained, swelling note; Are You Experienced? must close, the invitation the whole record has prepared, its backward tapes the threshold. Third Stone from the Sun is required as the one long passage where the guitar leaves song behind, Red House as the blues the record grows from, and Manic Depression and I Don’t Live Today as the two places where the sound carries a condition. Fire is slight but drives. The test bites at Can You See Me and Remember, two short rhythm and blues songs a lesser band could have made, and at Love or Confusion, whose swirl restates Manic Depression with less force: three short tracks of eleven.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The record discloses chiefly through sound, and that is credited as fully as words. What it brings into the open is a state: consciousness widened past its habits, by eros, by drugs, by noise, and found to be ecstasy and disorder at once. Manic Depression names a condition and plays it, a waltz driven into a frenzy. I Don’t Live Today sets a self that has no place in the world it is in, the feedback at its close the sound of that dislocation. Are You Experienced? asks whether the listener has crossed into another perception (“not necessarily stoned”) and plays the crossing backwards; Third Stone from the Sun looks at Earth from outside. Held below the bar: this is a sensorium more than an articulated condition, and the words, where they state, state little.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. Third Stone from the Sun is the grandest: a jazz-inflected theme, then the guitar thrown into space, feedback and treated speech, an ascent with no song to hold it. Are You Experienced? is a vertigo, the backward drums and guitar pulling against the voice until the ground moves. Red House reaches the blues sublime in its solo, a slow lament made huge. Manic Depression is height as fury; I Don’t Live Today is dread, the closing feedback a scream without a voice; May This Be Love is the warm height, a quiet guitar like falling water. Foxy Lady and Fire have force and lift, while Can You See Me, Love or Confusion and Remember stay level. Six or seven of eleven rise, the highest very high.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth is built in one rite, and the rite is load-bearing. Are You Experienced? is an initiation: a threshold, a question asked of the novice, a passage into another way of seeing, staged in sound that runs backward, as initiation reverses the order of the world; and the sequence is built to arrive at it, so that the whole record becomes its preparation. Around it the patterns are evoked with force. Third Stone from the Sun evokes the visitor from the stars who looks on Earth and finds it wanting, with the treated voices of a ship and its scout; Red House carries the oldest pattern of the blues, the man who comes home to find his woman gone; Foxy Lady and Fire evoke the trickster of desire. Held below the bar because the other figures are poses or a single conceit.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the electric blues and rhythm and blues of the American circuit Hendrix had played as a sideman, and the London guitar of 1966, Clapton, Beck and Townshend, which had begun to use volume and feedback. The turn is large: the electric guitar ceases to be an instrument that plays notes through an amplifier and becomes a source of sound, feedback, sustain, distortion and tape, shaped as deliberately as a melody. Third Stone and the title track leave song form; Manic Depression puts a jazz-phrased drummer under a rock waltz. The stake was real: an unknown American in London built a trio around a sound no record company had sold, on a debut with no singles on it. Held below the top by the Who’s and the Yardbirds’ feedback, and by the blues frame that keeps most songs near home.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. Where the sound is the content, form is the instrument: Are You Experienced? knows what it knows only through backward tape, and I Don’t Live Today ends in feedback because a statement could not carry what the noise carries. The trio is a form too, leaving room in which one guitar can be rhythm, lead and noise at once, with drums phrased like jazz to fill the space a band would. The sequence is counted here, once: the British record opens with the sound declared, lifts near its close from songs into space in the long instrumental, and ends with an initiation. Held where it is because many of the songs are pop and rhythm and blues frames with a solo in the middle, and the middle of each side could be reordered without loss.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over fifty-nine years, and almost all of it formal. Guitarists have transcribed and studied these performances continuously: how the tones of Foxy Lady and Third Stone were made, how the feedback is controlled, how the Red House solo is phrased, how the chords Hendrix voiced with his thumb sit under the songs. Each generation of players returns to the record and finds technique in it the last had not seen. That depth is real and long sustained, and it is formal depth, which the axis credits as fully as meaning. The semantic return is thin: the words yield little on return, and what listeners find in the title track and in Third Stone is largely projection the music invites.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is the rock and blues of the later 1960s, and the electric guitar as its instrument. The intrinsic force is very large: the record reorganised what the electric guitar could be, from an instrument of notes into one of sound, and showed that noise, sustain and tape could carry expression inside songs a public would buy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is as wide as any record of its decade within its field, for the guitar of heavy rock, of funk and soul after 1967, of jazz fusion and of metal descends in great part from the playing documented here, and guitarists of every later generation have measured themselves against it. Level with The Velvet Underground & Nico at 9.5; held from the top because part of the reach belongs to the player’s later records and concerts.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty-nine years. The form is whole: the recordings survive as issued. Presence is wide and continuous: in print throughout, the songs heard on broadcast and in film, the album ranked high whenever its decade is counted. But the unit scored is the British edition, and its sequence has been less present than the American one and than the later issues that combine both; three of its tracks are heard far less than the singles it left off. That holds it at the foot of its span. The fabric is of its year and has held: the guitar tones, made in small London studios, still sound like a discovery, though some mixes are thin and the bass is low. Little is topical. A survival of decades, far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with invention weighed elsewhere. The guitar is commanded at a level few recordings in any idiom reach: the control of feedback and sustain in Third Stone and I Don’t Live Today, the phrasing of the Red House solo, and rhythm playing, chords and fills in one hand, under every song. Mitch Mitchell’s drumming is load-bearing, jazz phrasing that keeps the trio from sounding thin, above all in Manic Depression. The backward tapes of the title track are made exactly. Against that, Noel Redding’s bass is plain and sometimes buried, Chas Chandler’s production is quick and some mixes cramped, the singing serves more than it commands, and Can You See Me and Remember are routine. A peak above Low and The Dark Side of the Moon at 9.0, a whole a little below them.
Score: 8.7 / 10
One law governs the record: the electric guitar’s sound as an extension of the body and of consciousness, through the blues into whatever lies past it. The two most distant elements are Red House, a slow twelve-bar blues, and Third Stone from the Sun, a theme thrown into space with treated voices, and they obey the same law: one is the blues voiced through the guitar, the other the guitar leaving the blues, and the same tone carries both. Manic Depression’s waltz and Fire’s sprint obey it. The range is wide, blues, pop, rhythm and blues, jazz rhythm, tape collage, and one sound holds it. What holds the figure: Can You See Me and Remember obey only as songs by the same band, and the record’s halves of song and space meet in the guitar more than in an argument.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as altered perception and as disorder in Manic Depression and the title track. Desire and the body are held in Foxy Lady, Fire and May This Be Love. The blues tradition is carried in Red House, and with it, unstated, the history of the music it comes from. The cosmos is evoked in Third Stone, Earth seen from outside, and displacement is set in I Don’t Live Today. What holds the figure lowest: the family, labour, the state, the city, the sacred and history as event are absent or glimpsed, and the orders that are present are carried by one sound more than held together by any person or argument. A forty-minute record of sensation holds what it holds.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, then The Swerve at 9.3, The Bottomless Well at 8.9, The Sublime and The Imperishable at 8.8. A record that made the electric guitar a source of sound and from which the guitar of heavy rock, funk, fusion and metal descends; a turn wagered by an unknown in London on a sound no one had sold; performances that guitarists have studied for fifty-nine years without exhausting; elevation on six or seven of eleven tracks, highest in a passage into space; and a presence continuous since 1967.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: one consciousness, the body’s desire, the blues and a view of Earth are carried by one sound, while the family, labour, the state, the city and history as event are absent or glimpsed. Below the rest, The Unconcealment and The Inevitable at 8.3, a state rendered from inside more than a condition articulated, and three short songs the record could lose; then The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, one rite built and the other figures poses.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, The Swerve at 9.3 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 and The Unconcealment at 8.3 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.7, stands below it as well.
Basis · the British edition as released by Track Records in May 1967, eleven tracks in their original order on two sides, about forty minutes, produced by Chas Chandler; judged from knowledge of the recording, its words and its reception. No recording or lyric sheet was in hand, and running times are approximate. The British edition is scored because it is the album as first released, in the sequence made in London. The American edition, which drops Red House, Can You See Me and Remember and adds Purple Haze, Hey Joe and The Wind Cries Mary, and later issues that combine the two, are evidence for reach and survival, not the object; the three singles are credited nowhere. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact day of release, the studios, engineers and dates of recording, the American label and date of release, whether the British issue was heard chiefly in mono, the particular accounts of the making, and readings of I Don’t Live Today that its words leave unstated, are not given.