This page is not going to become some boomer's collection of favorite classic rock hits of the 60s and 70s, but as part of an introspective examination of who I am and what I listen to, I wanted to try and identify a few of the songs and music that probably shaped my tastes and who I am today.
Jimi Hendrix's debut Are You Experienced? came out in May 1967 when I was just 12 years old. Up to that point, I had been listening to the typical rock 'n' roll of the day - the Beatles and the Stones, the Monkees and the Young Rascals, and the other AM radio-friendly Top 40 rock of the day.
Then one day, my AM transistor radio died. I don't recall exactly what happened and my memory is now distorted by Elvis Costello's 1978 lyric, "the switch broke 'cause it's old," but I was suddenly cut off from Top 40 radio. I turned to and turned on my parents' FM receiver, which they had used to pipe classical music into the house and for all I knew FM radio only played the classics. But I searched up and down the dial and then one fine morning, as the Velvet Underground put it, I put on a New York station (WNEW-FM to be precise) and couldn't believe what I heard at all.
Sure they played the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but the "deep cuts" off the albums that I had and not just the hits. They also played songs by Jefferson Airplane and the Doors and other bands beyond the AM radio-friendly hits I had heard up to that point. They didn't yet play the Velvet Underground; that was a bridge too far for that time. The DJs also occasionally talked about, but didn't yet play, music by this new artist named Jimi Hendrix, whom they described as "about as far out as music can get."
The discovery of FM radio opened new worlds to me. The term "underground rock" was popular at the time, and I became aware that not only was there a whole realm of music just beyond or beneath what I had been hearing on AM Top 40 radio, but also that there were probably even further realms beyond that. My schoolboy friends were still content listening to Top 40 hits, but I started exploring deeper, not caring about so-called popular taste and finding new, mysterious, sexy, and adventurous music on my own. My friends started to think of me as "weird" and even teased me about my "different" music, but I didn't care as the satisfaction and enjoyment I got from the new music was greater than my desire for peer-group approval.
That same sense of exploration is still with me today - there's always something more "out there" beyond what I've already heard.
Anyway, out of curiosity and a sense of adventure, and to establish a sort of "street cred" as a musical pioneer, I saved up a few dollars and ventured deep into a record store one day and bought a copy of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced?
I couldn't believe what I heard. Not at all.
Many of the songs were somewhat conventional rock 'n' roll, although louder, faster, and more distorted than usual. But the one track that stood out to me, Third Stone From the Sun, was unlike anything I had heard before. An all-instrumental track and at an extraordinary length for the time (6:30), it was far more psychedelic than even The Beatle's Tomorrow Never Knows¹. Parts of it sounded familiar - surf music and some basic rock chords, but there were those layers of cloudlike sounds floating over it all, there was that whispering and grungy murmuring, and then the whole thing fell into a thick soup of noise, feedback, and effects with a throbbing bass carrying us along its current. The track finally explodes into truly climactic bursts of electric guitar pyrotechnics, unlike anything I'd heard before.
I couldn't listen to Third Stone enough. I mean, the whole rest of the album was great, too, but nothing else was like Third Stone. Years later, as I grew into my teens and discovered psychedelic drugs, Third Stone was required listening during a trip, as was Hendrix' later (1968) Electric Ladyland.
The aggressive, noisy guitar opened my mind to decades of subsequent aggressive, noisy guitar music. From the squealing feedback and sustained pedal effects it wasn't that far of a leap to the screeching saxophones of the free jazz I came to enjoy later, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Third Stone was the serotonin payback for the newfound musical curiosity that had arisen in me. It inspired me to dig even deeper and explore even further. That desire for new sounds eventually led me to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, to Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, and eventually to Miles Davis and Sun Ra.
To this day, even as I embark on the eighth decade of my life, the dopamine still kicks in when I discover new music, or find myself falling down some new rabbit hole of previously undiscovered new music. I became a sort of sonic explorer back then and I still am today.
¹I probably could have started this retrospective with The Beatles' Revolver (1966), but while discovery of Tomorrow Never Knows was a truly mind-blowing experience for a 11-year-old boy, The Beatles of course were well established mainstream artists and much of the rest of Revolver was more a part of the evolution of popular music than the revolutionary experience of first encountering Hendrix. TNK was a welcome discovery along a road I was already traveling with a great many others; Third Stone hit me alone and unprepared like some meteor from outer space.
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