Axis: Bold As Love

...Jimi Hendrix story. While everything connected to Hendrix’s time can be viewed through the lens of history as a wild rush, it’s not an overstatement to say that what he accomplished in the four years he was most active as a prototypical guitar god and international pop star were nothing short of staggering. His second studio album Axis lands between his initial breakthrough to fame in mid-1967, and the artistic and commercial master stroke of double album Electric Ladyland, which materialized a matter of months later. These songs aren’t entirely psychedelic mindblowers like “Purple Haze,” or the realtime blues-rock evolution of Electric Ladyland, but a transitional middleground where Hendrix explored the various facets of his identity while hovering on his strengths as a songwriter. The Experience’s patented fuzzy psychedelic blues rock makes a strong showing on the fantastically bold “Spanish Castle Magic” or “You Got Me Floatin’,” and the slithering groove of “If 6 Was 9” teeters on the edge of a bad trip for its duration while foreshadowing Black Sabbath’s future heavy metal paranoia. It’s the thoughtfulness and ache that Hendrix taps into here that makes Axis: Bold as Love such a special chapter of his work. He reprises the melancholic beauty he’d already exhibited on “The Wind Cries Mary” with “Little Wing,” arguably a more sincere and lasting example of its particular kind of longing. There’s some Curtis Mayfield-esque soulfulness on “One Rainy Wish,” but it's not just the ballads that carry a pronounced bittersweetness. The narrative scenes of “Castles Made of Sand” and the rainbow of feelings that make up the epic closer "Bold as Love" are also emblematic of the emotional headspace Hendrix captures throughout Axis: Bold as Love. While this album can hold a wildly different ranking in the Hendrix catalog depending on which fan or critic you’re asking, it’s valuable for how specific it is from the rest of his work. The album digs deeper into studio sleight-of-hand and production experiments than earlier work, while at the same time widening the musical range of the songs. At this point, Hendrix had just made a name for himself as one of the most exciting, larger-than-life performers the world had ever seen. Without ever losing a grip on that excitement, he somehow translated it into a wider range of expressions here, allowing heart-on-the-sleeve tenderness to co-exist with the pyrotechnical guitar skills that made him one of a kind. ~ Fred Thomas