The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Electric Ladyland

One of the first double albums I listened to, at the apex of finding my own way, my own propulsion into the music universe. It was 1968 when this came out, one of the most influential years of the 20th century. I was just graduating from high school, it was the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Robert Kennedy’s assassination, and of the Democratic Convention riots in my hometown of Chicago. This had a profound effect on me. I can remember sitting in my dorm room in Coe College in Cedar Rapids in Iowa. I was on a basketball scholarship, so for four years, I put down my instrument, but when I went there, I had an epiphany. Me and my boys, and there were only 50 Black students on a campus of 2,000, we would sit around and light up pot and trip on LSD and listen to this revolutionary concept album. Jimi’s psychedelic compositions and guitar playing marked my ‘before life’ as a ball player, then my ‘after life’ for the next half century as an artistic being. That album was the divider. Quite frankly, when I was tripping on LSD, the few times I did, it was monumental how that album and situation changed my life. I left basketball and college, went back to Chicago, found Clifford King, and music, it marked my whole trajectory.