“Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix

"Purple Haze" hit British shops on March 17, 1967, the Jimi Hendrix Experience's second single, and it still sounds like a guitar being pushed somewhere new. Hendrix wrote it and Chas Chandler produced, with Eddie Kramer and Dave Siddle among the engineers, and it opened the North American edition of the Experience's debut album, Are You Experienced.

Everything turns on Hendrix's guitar: that signature chord, a blend of blues and Eastern modes, and sounds pushed through processing nobody had heard before, all of it howling over Mitch Mitchell's rolling, restless drums and Noel Redding's bass, with Redding chipping in on backing vocals. The lyrics are cloudy enough that listeners have long heard a psychedelic trip in them, though Hendrix himself called it a love song.

It became one of his best-known songs, a concert fixture that every lineup he led recorded live, and it has turned up on compilation after compilation, including the 1988 Gloria EP. It's in the Grammy Hall of Fame; Rolling Stone ranked it number two among the greatest guitar songs and Q put it at number one, and Rolling Stone's list of the greatest songs of all time had it at 17 in 2004 and 2010.

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