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The Jimi Hendrix Experience, 'Purple Haze'

Writer:Hendrix

Producer: Chas Chandler

Released:March '67, Reprise

8 weeks; No. 65

It is one of the unforgettable opening riffs in rock: a ferocious, stomping guitar march, scarred with fuzz

and built around the dissonant "devil's interval" of the tritone. And it launched not one but two

revolutions: late-Sixties psychedelia and the unprecedented genius ofJimi Hendrix. For the first time,

Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell got to show off their acrobatic onstage

chemistry on record and they somehow managed to condense it to an under-three-minute blaze of

overdubbed guitar sorcery. (The first chord of its main riff has come to be known among guitarists as the

"Hendrix chord.") The song, which Hendrix wrote on December 26th, 1966, in the dressing room of aLondon club, also served as a showcase for his brilliant, often contradictory lyrical gifts (boiled down

from a much longer initial draft called "Purple Haze Jesus Saves"). He spiked the surging rhythmic

confidence of the Experience with intimate pictorial tension: "Actin' funny, but I don't know why/'Scuse

me while I kiss the sky." (Hendrix later said that he had written the lyrics after he'd had a dream in which

he could walk underwater.) The Experience recorded "Purple Haze" across a series of sessions in January

and February, 1967, experimenting with recording techniques such as the blitzed-out distortion on

Hendrix's guitar when the master tape was sent to their American record label, an enclosed note

diligently pointed out that the distorted sound of the song was deliberate. In the closing solo, Hendrix

echoed his screaming Strat with an additional shrieking guitar put through a new harmonic-manipulation

device called an Octavia and played back at double speed. "Purple Haze" the opening track on the U.S.

version of his debut LP,Are You Experienced? captured the liberating rush of Day-Glo culture just in

time for the Summer of Love.

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Appears on:Are You Experienced?(Experience Hendrix)

RELATED:

The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time: Jimi Hendrix

The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time: Jimi Hendrix

The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time:Are You Experienced?

Read more:http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/the-500-greatest-songs-of-

all-time-20110407/smokey-robinson-and-the-miracles-the-tracks-of-my-tears-20110526#ixzz3jk8dE5Kj

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