The Jimi Hendrix Experience, left to right, Noel Redding (1945 – 2003), Jimi Hendrix (1942 – 1970) and Mitch Mitchell. I believe he set the guitar on a new course with his effects, with the sounds he made and his ability to thrust the guitar into the present as the first instrument in rock. He was not only an amazing guitar player, but a tremendous lyricist in his own right. And Are You Experienced, it was an amazing collection of songs. And Jimi, being a blues-based guitarist, I could figure out where he came from. I had originally started as an all-blues guitar player, and then I heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time and it absolutely changed my life. But when Are You Experienced by The Jimi Hendrix Experience came around, I heard guitar playing like I never heard in my life. It was insane all sorts of music going down. That summer, music just exploded with Cream, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead. And I found myself up in New Hampshire at a sleepaway camp. I was 13 years old and had just started playing guitar for about a year. Ross Friedman, The Dictators/ Manowar/Ross the Boss Five decades later, there are still Easter eggs to be found between its blasts of soulful reverb. Hearing such tunes as “Purple Haze,” “Fire,” Foxy Lady,” “Hey Joe,” “The Wind Cries Mary” and “Third Stone from the Sun” for the very first time felt like breathing in a new molecule of air, enhancing one’s perception of what blues-based rock music could sound like without a net. Together, what these five men created inside London’s Olympic Studios in late 1966 to early 1967 was a new language of the rock ‘n’ roll idiom-a dialect that gave the electric guitar a renewed sense of importance, urgency and danger within the construct of the classic pop song.

Not to mention a hotshot engineer from South Africa named Eddie Kramer, who went on to work on all of Hendrix’s albums and continues to help oversee his catalog to this day. Are You Experienced was the Seattle-born guitarist’s first statement on the sonic mysticism he learned overseas with his powerhouse English rhythm section in Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums, and the inventive production of former Animals bassist Chas Chandler, who had managed Hendrix and was responsible for his excursion into the belly of the British Invasion.

Are you experienced jimi hendrix