Axis: Bold as Love (1967)

The second album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience came out less than seven months after the debut, and only about 10 months before Electric Ladyland, which may explain some things about it. Most of the songs feel to me like they needed a little more time in the oven, which suggests it may have been a bit of a rush job after the commercial success of the stunning Are You Experienced. Give principal wunderkid Hendrix a little more time and his own head in the studio with the space of a double-LP and watch what he does. Still, if Axis suffers from a type of sophomore slump, it is not really to be missed even for casual Hendrix fans. It features possibly my single favorite song by him, the loopy and playful “If 6 Was 9,” which is obvious and murky all at once. Axis also contains what might be single favorite songs of others, such as “Spanish Castle Magic” or “Little Wing.” The latter, a tender guitar-picker’s ballad, has been covered early and often by Eric Clapton—it’s on Layla and remains a staple of Clapton’s live act. Just because Eric Clapton is a fool is no reason to hold anything against “Little Wing”—Gil Evans, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and the Corrs are other acts that have taken it on. With the LP as such coming into its own circa 1967, the EP format was largely out of favor. But in retrospect it’s probably what Axis should have been. Take all the time and effort used on these 13 songs and apply it to only five or six of them and you might have had a much better product overall. It’s a thought experiment anyway. Breaking it down, the opening shorty, “EXP,” starts as a radio theater skit that isn’t very funny, but then turns into 80 seconds of a feedback exercise, one of the earliest of its kind, raw and ferocious. Then “Up From the Skies” works a slick bluesy groove—Hendrix seemed to toss these off effortlessly. It’s fair of course to class him as a psychedelic artist but he was always an innovating natural when he played blues. “Spanish Castle Magic” is where I start to notice the general underdevelopment of most of these songs and most of the second side is lost to me as a mush. All (or most of) these songs have their points—great guitar play always. But often something about them, the lyrics maybe or the song structure, bridge or chorus, feels like they need another look, a little more time to think about them, paring away potential musical darlings to get them into sharper focus. I’m not really complaining—after Are You Experienced and Electric Ladyland, everything in Hendrix’s career would have been gravy, even if he were still alive. But let’s not drift into thinking about what might have been.