Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced - New LP

While I had mistakenly thought that I didn't need to revisit this classic, I was so wrong.  While with bands that explored progressive rock and hard rock, I typically have much more interest in the straight-forward rockers.  Like if I want to listen to Led Zeppelin, I want "Rock n' Roll," "Communication Breakdown" and "Good Times Bad Times," but with this album, probably because I've heard the rockers countless times, I really enjoy the other cuts such as "Third Stone from the Sun" and "May This Be Love."  If I can hear any influences on the songs that extends or ventures beyond the blues, they might include various R&B and garage outfits, perhaps The Who, Love and Link Wray, and if I were to list all the bands this influenced, we'd be here all week. Clearly this defined acid rock of the last years of the 1960s, and heavily influenced all the heavy rock outfits of the late 1960s, bands like Blue Cheer.  And this probably had as much influence on the hard rock of the 1970s as everything else combined.  While it's easy to miss it if you just listen to the hits, by the time you get deep into it, it becomes so clear how heavily this influenced Detroit.  And where would we be with that.  Of course, this also had a huge influence on the launch of the head rock of the late 1960s, the music that created the head rock that dominated the 1970s.  It also instantly and permanently changed jazz, influencing early rock-jazz fusion.  While in the 1970s, fusion would often forget the abandonment present here and become clogged with intentions and show-off nonsense (or thankfully move to funk), the fusion in the 4-5 years that followed this album gave us some amazing and more importantly enjoyable music.  And let's not forget funk, this clearly having an impact on Funkadelic and Sly Stone, and those two outfits had an impact on all the funk bands of the 1970s.  It would be easy to make a pyramid graph with Jimi standing on top and the influence spreading out under him.  When it comes to artist from the 1960s until now, I'd be so bold to say no musician came close to Jimi when it comes to influencing so many genres, or even so many artists.  (While clearly Jimi proved himself beyond this trio, we shouldn't ignore the contributions of Redding and Mitchell.). Of course, this was just the beginning, but in many ways, it was all just a beginning, with Jimi releasing all his 8 studio sides in about 1.5 years.  People say, it's a shame, he could have done so much more, but that really doesn't make sense to me.  He burned like a bonfire.  -- winch