“If 6 Was 9” by Jimi Hendrix

"If 6 Was 9" is Jimi Hendrix planting his flag on Axis: Bold as Love, the Experience's second album, from 1967: a song he wrote himself, with Chas Chandler producing. It sets off on a blues riff and then drifts out into a spacey free-form jam, acid-drenched blues that seems to melt as it goes, and the guitar solo shows off what the studio could do at the time, the sound swinging from one speaker to the other with slap echo, fuzzbox grit and reverb piled on.

Lyrically it's an individualist's rallying cry, setting the hippie counterculture against the buttoned-down, white-collar establishment, with Hendrix speaking up for a youth movement that wanted to live on its own terms. It found a second life on film, on the Easy Rider soundtrack in 1969 and on Point Break's in 1991.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.