Are You Experienced / Axis: Bold As Love

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On January 11, 1967, Jimi Hendrix left a productive studio session to play a show at a London club called the Bag O’Nail. The crowd was intimidating: Keith Richard, Pete Townshend, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton. (On the way back from the bathroom, the singer Terry Reid ran into Brian Jones from The Rolling Stone, who said the front of the club was totally wet. When Reid said he didn’t see any water, Jones said it was from all the guitarist, weeping.) But the most important person in the audience was a man named Roger Mayer. Mayer was a scientist for the Royal Navy who conducted acoustical analyses on how to make ships quieter for underwater warfare, but in his free time, he made pedals and sound effects—the strangely doubled guitar at the beginning of “Purple Haze,” for example, was a Mayer invention called the Octavia. Hendrix later called Mayer the secret to his sound, and, for reasons unclear, referred to him as The Valve. Of Hendrix’s three studio album, what stands out about <i>Axis: Bold as Love</i> is how much it opened up his music as <i>sound</i>: the swirling effects of “EXP” and “Bold as Love,” the watery textures of “Little Wing,” the screaming feedback on “If 6 Was 9.” Hendrix called it the “sky effect”: music that sounded like it was coming down from heaven. .

via Apple Music

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