“Are You Experienced?” by Jimi Hendrix

"Are You Experienced?" closes the book on the sessions for the Jimi Hendrix Experience's 1967 debut and gives the album its name, and it's the freakiest thing on it. Cut at Olympic Sound Studios in London on April 3, 1967, the last day of work on the record, it hangs on more or less one chord and hums like an Indian drone, with guitar and drums played backwards and a single piano octave hammering away underneath. Hendrix wrote it alone.

That backwards guitar took four passes before they kept the last one, and engineering assistant George Chkiantz later recalled that the plan had been a tape loop that simply refused to work. Biographer Keith Shadwick counted it among the most original songs Hendrix put on the album, and live takes from 1968 later turned up on The Jimi Hendrix Concerts and the Winterland box.

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