Masterpiece: Electric Ladyland

[Today: The guitar master at work...]

Wildman, virtuoso, flower child, radical, inventor, freak. Jimi Hendrix was a man of many contradictions. The fact that he lived up to all those titles, yet was encapsulated by none of them, is testament to his otherworldly musical abilities and childlike enthusiasm for making music anywhere with anyone. Hendrix seemed to exist in a universe of his own that was populated with guitars, spaceships, mermaids, LSD, bonfires, and lovers, yet he never completely broke free of the grim realities of everyday life, which are reflected across the spectrum of his music.

Like the finest comic books, Electric Ladyland is escapism as art. The songs present a number of real world problems before ducking away to Saturn or diving deep beneath the sea. ’1983 (…A Merman I Should Turn To Be)’ is a love song set within a war-ravaged landscape that builds toward Jimi and his love escaping to live under the ocean. ‘House Burning Down’ questions the logic of the riots that burned many inner-cities in the late-60′s, then concludes with a “giant boat from space” landing and “taking all the dead away.”

Throughout the album, Hendrix delights in moving from the concrete to the abstract and back again (“I’m a million miles away and at the same time I’m right here in your picture frame”). The song sequencing consistently pits the real world against a variety of fantasy-scapes – witness the urban poetry of ‘Crosstown Traffic’ bleeding into the supernatural freakout of ‘Voodoo Chile’. Even a relatively straightforward uptempo rocker like ‘Gypsy Eyes’ slips into an abstract burble of fuzz in its dying seconds before leading into the wah-wah heavy bummer of ‘Burning Of The Midnight Lamp’. Juxtapositions – such as earth/space, reality/imagination, everyday/fantastic, fire/water, and man/woman – are scattered everywhere across the album.

Hendrix was a master at creating moods within his songs, and on Electric Ladyland he demands that you hop in the spaceship and join him on a trip to faraway worlds. But even when he wails away on his guitar to conjure interstellar travel, every note feels natural and logical. It’s no wonder that Jimi had the Claptons, Townshends, and Becks of the world considering other lines of work. He was a guitar prodigy unlike any other, and with this album he created a canvas of sound that was nearly large enough to contain the immense breadth of his talent.

Listen: Voodoo Chile

Tags: Electric Ladyland, Jimi Hendrix