Quite a few people could claim to have invented rock music. But there was only one inventor of rock sensibility, and that was Jimi Hendrix.
This was the man who turned the Fender Stratocaster guitar into a sex symbol, and its life was never the same again. It’s now the most famous and popular guitar on the planet by a humungous margin. But in fact, before Hendrix achieved fame, the Stratocaster was far from a world-beater. Its fortunes had been significantly waning, and its makers, Fender, had been focusing on other models.
Through Hendrix, the Stratocaster didn’t just find itself sonically – it found itself as a visual prop, as the greatest stagecraft innovator ever made it a fashion icon, setting the template for rock stage shows in the process.
The collossal respect for Hendrix as an innovator and artist was illustrated not only in the money people were prepared to pay for his guitars after his death, but in the money people were prepared to refuse in order to keep them. Jimi’s girlfriend, Monika Dannemann, kept his favourite guitar all her life, declining to part with it even when offered six digits in the 1990s. A truly life-changing sum of money, but still not as important as the symbol of Hendrix’s world-changing contribution to music and art.
The cassette – The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Radio One – compiles multiple 1967 sessions for the BBC’s newly born Radio One, recorded by the three-piece Experience at the height of their powers. It’s bursting with energy and exudes the unmistakable sound that redefined guitar music, and that would have been totally at home in the thick of punk ten years later, and which is still the template for credible rock today.
Between some numbers, you hear a sort of hippie entourage in the background, which perfectly sums up the period. Yeah you cats, come in, everybody’s welcome…
And it sounds like Hendrix is using a fuzzbox effect throughout on some numbers – probably because of the difficulty in getting adequate sustain out of a Fender Strat in a volume-controlled BBC studio environment. He’s definitely got the kind of overdrive that came from ear-splitting amp volume on other tracks though, so doesn’t need the fuzzbox to filth up the Strat’s output. The permitted volume probably depended on the exact recording setup and the producer.
There are some belting tracks in the programme, including wicked versions of Wait Until Tomorrow and Burning of the Midnight Lamp, plus standards of the time like Purple Haze, Stone Free, Fire, Spanish Castle Magic, Hey Joe and Foxy Lady. Covers include Day Tripper and Hound Dog, along with blues classics like Catfish Blues and Hoochie Coochie man. And the band perform a Radio One Theme track, paying homage to this bright thing of the future – a non-pirate, young-listener-focused, UK radio station.
The uptempo blues guitar in Love or Confusion is something that would create a sensation even today – especially accompanied by Noel Redding’s pounding bass and Mitch Mitchell’s typically explosive drumming. Mitchell never got due credit for his immense talent, but that was the price of being in a band fronted by a guitar genius. Mitchell would have been the star of any other band.
If you have this cassette, I sincerely hope you have a good hi-fi. If you can hear the full programme at volume, and making complete use of a pair of quality speakers, Experience, is very definitely the right word. Fantastic stuff.
Tape Tardis 