1. The Jimi Hendrix ExperienceElectric Ladyland
My older brother passed down quite a few things to me, mostly on cassette. The three that stick out most notably are Zeppelin, Hendrix, and Sabbath but Hendrix probably had the biggest impact. It’s almost hard for me to pick out a single Hendrix record because I took him in as a whole. I got these tapes from my brother that weren’t necessarily just one album. Sometimes there were two albums on the same tape or collections with studio outtakes and live recordings and I was experiencing it all together. Electric Ladyland is probably more significant because it’s a studio record and there’s a wider range of material on that one. It’s interesting to think about Hendrix as an artist now because I feel like what he was doing was hard to capture in the studio environment. There’s a restlessness to what he does. Between the studio version of the song and the live presentation of it they can be so radically different. Tempos are different, duration is different, sometimes even arrangement is different. The solos are also radically different. His songs and his music were an ever-changing thing and that’s part of what’s fascinating to me.
When I heard this for the first time, I didn’t understand the difference between carefully composed songs and what were just loose jams. To me it was all just this world of Hendrix. All these different worlds that he was creating contained a lot of mystery. That was so compelling to me. And he is just himself so thoroughly that no one else, including those who have tried their hardest to imitate him, sounds like him.
