Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love

The Jimi Hendrix Experience

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In 45tunes.com’s all-time top five records. Here’s what David Stubbs has to say:

Jimi Hendrix’s second album doesn’t resonate through rock history the way its gate-crashing predecessor, Are You Experienced?, does. In places, it almost seems as if Hendrix is cruising, albeit sublimely. Yet it’s a vital album, containing some of rock’s molten milestones. There’s the fluid psychedelia of “Castles Made of Sand,” the viciously funky “Little Miss Lover,” and the so-beautiful-it-hurts “Little Wing.” Hendrix really hits altitude with “If 6 Was 9,” where he waves his “freak flag high” over a tidal wave of guitar and a cacophonous army of Moroccan flutes, and he ends with “Bold As Love,” based around Hendrix’s typically far-fetched hankering for the axis of the planet to be tilted, thereby transforming life on earth. It works up into a head-melting frenzy of distorted guitar, a precursor to the staggeringly expansive leap forward he would take with 1968’s Electric Ladyland. Hendrix dreamed the impossible and achieved it on his guitar. –David Stubbs

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