Jimi Hendrix did not want to be onstage at the Hollywood Bowl. A month earlier, in late July 1967, he and arguably England’s hottest new band—The Jimi Hendrix Experience, a riotous power trio formed in London only 10 months earlier—had bailed on their first full American run after opening for the squeaky-clean heartthrobs of the Monkees for eight disastrous dates. Though they were, by many reports, the loudest and most aggressive band on earth—with Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums—they had not been able to compete with the hormonal pleas of American pubescence for the headliners.

Maybe, though, this silence was worse. Just before releasing their debut album in the States, the Experience had accepted the invitation to warm up the audience at the Bowl for The Mamas & The Papas, the sweet-singing “California Dreamin’” quartet so afraid to offend they’d cropped their first album cover to bowdlerize the toilet originally left in the frame. The Experience seemed to shock almost everyone into submission, the crowd so quiet Hendrix wondered if anyone was there at all.

“Right now, we’d like to continue on—drearily—with a song named ‘Foxey Lady,’” he said near the set’s middle, a moment that must have reminded him of trying to win over fans of Englebert Humperdinck’s saccharine numbers during one early European tour. Hendrix forgot the second verse to “The Wind Cries Mary” and barely bothered trying to recover. A bit later, he sighed: “Well, dig: We’ve got two more records to do, thank god.” The trio slashed into “Purple Haze.”

It was the Summer of Love, sure, but it was also the Long, Hot Summer, with ubiquitous race riots providing a warped mirror of the overseas escalation in Vietnam. The moment was charged. And so, this lilywhite crowd was having none of the Black man in his butter-yellow pants and bejeweled jacket, even if he was letting them off easy. The Experience had opened with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” maybe the biggest song in the world at the moment, then covered Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Bob Dylan. They’d omitted the murder ballad that became their first overseas smash, “Hey Joe,” and didn’t come close to the despondent candor of “Manic Depression” or the astral slink of “Third Stone From the Sun.”

Sure, he played the guitar with his teeth and between his legs, but he didn’t set the thing on fire, smash it to bits, or, as best as anyone remembers, even pretend to fuck it. The most aggressive Hendrix got was to tell whoever happened to be listening to put their hand over their heart for “the American and British anthem”—a feedback-flooded assault on “Wild Thing.” Folks had spent their $1.50, however, to sing along to “Monday, Monday” on a Friday night, not to be confronted with a coming revolution. Hendrix was happy to be done with them, too.

Only five days later, the revolution would arrive, anyway: As they tried to make Frank Sinatra’s label relevant and solvent again, Reprise would finally release the American edition of Are You Experienced, 11 tracks that grafted the possibilities of The Information Age and the psychedelic counterculture onto the primal oomph of rock’n’roll. (A housekeeping note: From here on, I’ll refer to the 1997 American edition of Are You Experienced, expanded to include that moment’s singles and B-sides, as the definitive version; its sequence is simply sharper than its British counterpart.) At the Hollywood Bowl in August 1967, The Mamas & The Papas had swayed pleasantly to a corroding image of the present. Hendrix had tried to confront the crowd with the future and failed. Regardless, it was here now.

The Experience, of course, were not absolute outliers. Though Bob Dylan sat in upstate exile, he’d flipped his own amplifier switch two years earlier and already issued three snarling electric albums. In England, the Who were coaxing chaos from guitars that Pete Townshend would soon smash, and Cream were beautifully mean. The Beatles and the Stones were becoming stranger studio creatures. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane had provided the soundtrack to Owsley Stanley’s potent acid at the Human Be-In that January in California, and, on the other American coast, the Velvet Underground were fusing noise and rock in real time. The Mothers of Invention, Sandy Bull, Albert Ayler, James Brown, the Fugs, Pink Floyd: They were all pushing into the unknown by that summer of 1967.

But no other album presented a map so full of new possibilities, opportunities for exploration that were rooted in the past but unafraid of the unknown quite like Are You Experienced. In an hour, Hendrix the songwriter moves from mental illness to sci-fi dreams, from sexual celebration to existential despair, from beatnik individualism to collective liberation. And then there’s Hendrix the guitarist and bandleader, moving between barroom blues and a more elegant update, between lysergic mischief and relentless rock singles, between guitar solos so heroic they feel godly and noise passages so harsh they feel drawn from the gutter. Sixty years later, Jimi Hendrix remains history’s only perfect rock star; in a career that was shorter than a single presidential term, he showed the rest of the world what they’d missed and suggested how to get there. Are You Experienced is his first and best explosion of brilliance, so mighty that we’re still sorting through its pieces and meanings and implications.

Hendrix’s American reintroduction had, at least, started strong. In the early months of 1967, a consortium of well-connected and well-heeled industry types began to plot the Monterey International Pop Festival, hoping to elevate rock’s cultural cachet by mirroring the decade-old jazz fest along California’s coastline. Both Paul McCartney and the Stones’ manager and producer, Andrew Loog Oldham, insisted that the organizers bring the Experience over for their stateside debut, though their first single, “Hey Joe,” had flatlined in the country. Brian Jones flew to California to introduce Hendrix as “the most exciting guitarist I have ever heard.”

In England, Hendrix had become such a sensation that his verve even forced the Who’s Townshend and Cream’s Eric Clapton into a short-lived friendship, inspired by an admixture of admiration, jealousy, and fear. Backstage at Monterey, Hendrix, knowing that he was going on after the Who, taunted Townshend, since this was his chance to upstage his rival forever. (He also jammed with the Dead backstage, playing bass alongside Phil Lesh.) It became one of rock’n’roll’s epiphanic performances, less for its mauling take on “Like a Rolling Stone” and italicized “Purple Haze” and solos played with his teeth than for its destructive finale—Hendrix hovering above his guitar with a bottle of lighter fluid, setting it on fire until he broke it to bits. He sanctified and sacrificed rock’n’roll in a single frame.

Hendrix had won the battle with Townshend, but everyone wasn’t sure it was worth the war. Mo Ostin, who had signed Hendrix to Reprise, hated the stunt, as did Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas. “Practically everybody at the festival came out of folk music,” she later remembered, admitting she didn’t want Hendrix at that Hollywood Bowl show, either. “You wouldn’t dream of abusing your instrument to get a reaction from the audience, like setting your guitar on fire and pretending to ejaculate off of your guitar.”

The States had always been an uneasy fit for Hendrix; that’s why, after all, he had needed to come back to play Monterey. Born in Seattle as World War II raged in Europe, he was Black and Cherokee, descended from two of this country’s most persecuted groups. His parents were quarreling alcoholics who split when he was 9. His father, a veteran named Al, took custody; his mom, Lucille, died when he was 15. After learning a few Elvis songs on a ukulele he salvaged in a trash heap, Hendrix got his first electric guitar at 16 and played alongside Al, who worked a cheap saxophone that eventually got repossessed.

After run-ins with the law, Hendrix enlisted in the Army at 19, shipping off to Fort Campbell on the Tennessee-Kentucky border. He loved training as a paratrooper, the adrenaline and solitude of ripping through the sky. “When you first jump it’s really outta sight,” he later said. “Physically it was a falling-over-backwards feeling, like in your dreams.”

But Hendrix despised the rules and how little music he could play in the service. Discharged in 1962 after reportedly breaking his ankle, he formed a band, moved to Nashville, and toured the South relentlessly, picking up gigs with the likes of Ike & Tina Turner and Wilson Pickett before joining the Isley Brothers. (“I got tired of playing in the key of F all the time,” he joked of that last gig, “so I turned in my white mohair silk suit.”) Speaking of suits, Hendrix and the rest of Little Richard’s band stole the Byrds’ suits and ties backstage in Los Angeles in 1965, Roger McGuinn once told me, smartly forcing the band to look cool in street clothes on the cover of their 1965 debut. After quarreling over money and Hendrix’s uncanny ability to rival the bandleader, he left Little Richard, too, and headed for Harlem.

Hendrix was there for only a year, toggling between bands of his own and stints as a sideman, when his break materialized. Linda Keith, a model and the girlfriend of Keith Richards, had become his fan and booster, bringing her famous friends to Hendrix’s tiny shows and even pilfering Keef’s pearly white Stratocaster as a gift for the upstart. Keith convinced Chas Chandler, a bassist in town to play one of his last shows with the Animals, to see Hendrix on a Wednesday afternoon.

Keith had tipped Hendrix that Chandler loved “Hey Joe,” a murder ballad that had been floating through the folk and rock scenes on both American coasts for five years. (Jason Schneider’s new book, That Gun in Your Hand, offers a fascinating play-by-play of the song’s saga, using it as a window on the history of popular music for the last 60 years.) “Wow, I’m gonna find an act and record that song in England,” Chandler had vowed. “That’s going to be a hit.” It was the first song Hendrix and his Blue Flames played that day at Café Wha? Chandler asked Hendrix to come to England and make that hit.

Three weeks after Hendrix landed at Heathrow, he was off to France for four shows supporting Johnny Hallyday, a national hero and a coiffed crooner with a slight edge. This time, he had the Experience. Noel Redding had responded to an audition ad for the Animals, but Chandler hoodwinked the guitarist into playing bass for the first time. Hendrix liked his hair, which matched his own, and he liked how he played bass like a lead guitar, meaning he could fly right alongside Hendrix. Chandler had asked Mitch Mitchell only to do the forthcoming shows in France, but he had the hair, too, and Hendrix liked what he heard. He was in, too. “He played me a record by Elvin Jones once,” Hendrix later said, “and I went, ‘Damn, that’s you!’”

By the time the France run was done, they were ready to make good on Chandler’s wish to turn “Hey Joe” into a hit. At their fourth show, in Paris, the song was a prime mix of doom and equivocation. Hendrix wrestled with the anger and cowardice of a friend who’d killed his lover and was preparing to flee. Redding’s bassline felt oversized, like a tell-tale heart threatening to burst through a rib cage, while Mitchell kept pushing and pulling the meter, as if nervous about the narrative. They cut it later that month, sorting through assorted sets of background vocalists until they found the Breakaways. They intone the melody like they’re whistling from the grave, the dead woman haunting Joe’s gusto. It sounded simple but felt complicated. “Hey Joe” was out by the end of 1966, a British hit in early 1967.

The success emboldened Chandler and the band, who cut “Purple Haze” early that year. Chandler had turned Hendrix on to science fiction. Hendrix long insisted that the song wasn’t about drugs but instead mirrored a dream about walking beneath the sea, likely prompted by a Philip José Farmer tale about life in space he’d recently read.

The song’s permanent association with an acid trip, though, didn’t just stem from that distorted lyrical reality. In early 1967, Hendrix met an electrical engineer named Roger Mayer, who soon stopped by with a guitar pedal he’d been perfecting, the Octavia. (Back in New York, the Fugs had hipped Hendrix to his first fuzz pedal.) When Hendrix played the Octavia on the “Purple Haze” solos, it sounded as if the world had splintered into crystal fragments, the expected sound of his guitar split into a million prismatic pieces. Where the Who soon co-opted Terry Riley’s kaleidoscopic sounds with a heap of pretense, Hendrix casually predicted them with the coda of his second single.

The British version of Are You Experienced, released three months ahead of its American counterpart, omitted Hendrix’s first three singles, including “The Wind Cries Mary,” a plaintive ballad inspired by a fight with the girlfriend he met the night he arrived in London, miraculously recorded in 20 minutes. The choice to favor new material allowed for a slightly conservative introduction to Hendrix. Opener “Foxey Lady” let him bend the blues inside a sexy and simple groove, each of his whispers, screams, and guitar squeals as flirtatious as the words themselves. He sauntered straight through the electric blues during “Red House,” as if he’d stopped in some roadhouse en route to Chicago, then strutted his way through “Can You See Me,” his brisk contribution to that moment’s British garage-rock explosion.

But those singles had done little in the States, meaning that Reprise was free to frontload its edition of Are You Experienced. Those opening chords of “Purple Haze,” then, sounded like the brittle fanfare of a revolution, while the second track, “Manic Depression,” delved into mental illness with a candor and vulnerability that didn’t comport with a generation that had endured World War II. It is a paean, too, for art, for channeling the unease in one’s mind into creation, particularly a frenetic guitar solo. “Music, sweet music,” Hendrix sings to himself as the notes whinny, his self-soothing suggesting chaos that’s just barely controlled.

And then there’s “Hey Joe,” that murder ballad Hendrix brought back to the States, chased by “Love or Confusion,” a dissonant and droning tune that slingshots into an acrobatic solo. Hendrix then tries and fails to navigate the bittersweetness of romance and reality during “May This Be Love,” the riff and the rhythm curling into a series of beautiful but aimless and endless circles; it’s as if the Experience are stuck in a maze, chasing feelings that will never be satisfying. The first side closes with “I Don’t Live Today,” a fuzzed-out anthem about self-destruction that sprints headlong into a thicket of feedback and formless drums. “Oh, there ain’t no life nowhere,” Hendrix sighs during a break in the melee. Amid the Summer of Love, Hendrix was content to teeter on the edge of a void. Again, that was just Side One.

What becomes clear across every variation of Are You Experienced—and the mound of outtakes that have trickled out over the years—is how much fun The Experience had making it. Hendrix, remember, had been playing guitar only for a decade, and he was so judgmental of his own voice that he apologized to his father for “Hey Joe” before it was released and insisted on being sequestered from the band while singing. Redding was so new to bass that unsubstantiated rumors Chandler played it on “Hey Joe” have persisted for decades.

They are discovering these songs and their rapport, then, in real time, free to go wherever their novel trans-national dynamic took them. The cowbell rumble of “Stone Free,” the narcoticized giggles of “Third Stone From the Sun,” the Pentecostal funk breakdown of “Fire” and the way that Mitchell does move like a hard-rock Elvin Jones as he and Redding shout the chorus back at Hendrix like excitable British goofs still in short pants: Each of these feels like discovery, as if the three of them are spotting new land from the crow’s nest of some pirate ship. In their excitement, they became the earth movers and cartographers of music’s future.

Hendrix and this music have been so ubiquitous for the last six decades that dissecting their influence seems too elemental, like trying to explain why air exists. An infinite supply of dorm-room posters, an endless barrage of gilded (and sometimes very good) compilations and archival dumps, a steadfast stream of books and biopics: Seemingly every element of Hendrix’s near-instant impact has been dissected, documented, and perpetuated, with more of his music released after his death than during his life many times over. Still, its importance on almost everything that followed remains dizzying.

Consider, for instance, that a bookish young pianist named Herbie Hancock in Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet had dismissed rock’n’roll out of hand until his mentor told him to listen to Hendrix. Several months after Are You Experienced was out, Hancock sat at a Fender Rhodes for the first time to play on Miles in the Sky, becoming the sparkplug for an electric evolution in jazz. Davis’ subsequent albums, especially 1971’s Jack Johnson, became the manna of the jam-band world; Hancock’s subsequent albums opened up nascent avenues of exchange between jazz, R&B, and hip-hop that producers and players like Flying Lotus or Mk.gee are still pursuing. In 1971, Funkadelic released Maggot Brain, Sly and the Family Stone There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Black Sabbath Master of Reality. (The first 10 seconds of “Highway Chile,” I should mention, are proto-doom perfection.) Already dead for a year by that point, Hendrix exists in all of it.

And consider but a few covers of just three of the 17 cuts on Are You Experienced. Aside from every bar band that will ever exist, both the Stooges and the Cure covered “Purple Haze,” the former blowing it out and the latter tracking it as an alien dance. Seal rendered “The Wind Cries Mary” as a lovesick lament in the early ’90s, four years after Marc Ribot turned it into a deadpan fuck-you. John Lee Hooker, the Mississippi native whose first renaissance began just as Hendrix quit the Army, gave the elemental blues core of “Red House” a bear hug. Prince, meanwhile, renamed it “Purple House” and repeatedly blew it out with gospel underpinnings and a guitar solo so heroic and gnarly that I can’t hear it without picturing Hendrix’s magnetic grin.

Prince, too, serves as a reminder of Hendrix’s essential importance beyond being a singer, guitarist, and performer. On and beyond Are You Experienced, Hendrix’s subversion of every expectation of what a rock star was supposed to be provided a vector for personal liberation, for being exactly who you felt like you were meant to be, even if that meant flipping Keith Richards’ guitar upside down and playing it that way. “A lot of people think what I do with my guitar is vulgar,” he once said. “Those who think we are filthy are the same people who don’t want to let Joan Baez sing her anti-war songs publicly.”

Like playing his guitar with his teeth, his fashion sense—radical neons, flamboyant scarves, a silk kimono and velvet pants as he joined a young and serious Ralph Nader and a bemused and aged Robert Young on The Dick Cavett Show—was derided in real time as a gimmick. He repeatedly protested such charges, insisting that it simply felt right. Hendrix upended the notion of the purely masculine, entirely cocksure rock star. Yes, he was a cad, but you could see his embrace of femininity in the clothes he wore, just as you could hear it in his unease during “Hey Joe.” An attentive student of Little Richard, Hendrix flirted with androgyny from the start.

Despite being a rare Black rock star in the late ’60s, Hendrix was reluctant to embrace the day’s radical politics. He’d been confronted with vile racism while touring the South before launching the Experience, and reviews after he launched the Experience often deployed racist epithets. But he criticized various Black Power movements just as they took hold in American society, uttering idealistic platitudes like “It’s the solutions everyone wants now, not just protest.” For many, his silence was maddening.

But in Karl Ferris’ photos on both sides of the American version of Are You Experienced, Hendrix stands just in front of Redding and Mitchell, the camera positioned in both instances to make him look like a god or at least a powerhouse. It is a subtle but mighty message from England for back home, delivered in a way that gave Hendrix the license to lead his part of a revolution in his own way. At the Hollywood Bowl, five days before Are You Experienced was released, the crowd must have seen that change coming and, if not cowered, then at least not clapped.

Hendrix played the Hollywood Bowl just one more time, in September 1968, 13 months after that abysmal initial appearance. Hendrix Fever was then rampant. The tickets were $1 more than they’d been for last year’s love, The Mamas & The Papas. Fans waded into the fountains in front of the stage, causing water to flow onto the band and its amplifiers, creating fears of electrocution. (The fountains were removed four years later.) “The Jimi Hendrix Experience was too much for the ushers who have managed to confine spectators to their seats during the summer series of rock concerts in the Hollywood Bowl,” began the Los Angeles Times review that ran two days later. Hendrix had wondered where everyone was a year earlier; now, they were too close for safety, let alone comfort.

Four weeks after that show, the Experience would release Electric Ladyland, its third and final album, three days after the second anniversary of their first gig. I simply cannot overstate the insanity of that timeline: Between the start of 1967 and the fall of 1968, the Jimi Hendrix Experience recorded and released three unimpeachable studio albums while touring at every available opportunity.

Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland were progressively more experimental, from the sci-fi radio drama and noise quake on the former to the 14-minute odyssey of exotic percussion and tones and experimental panning that anchored the latter. They were absolutely following the map of Are You Experienced and opening new avenues with each attempt. For my money and time, there is no other triptych of rock records—not Dylan goes electric, not Led Zeppelin begins, not the Berlin trilogy, not the Beatles arriving at Revolver—more compact, imaginative, and consequential in rock’n’roll history. In less than two years, The Jimi Hendrix Experience opened up the future of music and vanished.

“Is that the stars in the sky, or is it rain falling down?” Hendrix sang at the start of “Love or Confusion,” a song that jangled in spite of the drone squealing beneath it. “Will it burn me if I touch the sun? Yeah, so big, so round.” Fame did, indeed, burn Hendrix badly. He struggled with the gauntlet of fame, sex, and drugs, the exhaustion of his schedule, and the financial pressures of building the sound palace of his dreams, Electric Lady Studios, in Greenwich Village. Sessions for The Experience’s second and third albums were gauntlets of endless takes, that lack of expectation curdling into work and tedium. Chandler bailed before Electric Ladyland was done.

After Redding left in 1969, Hendrix began to pursue an even grander vision of the Experience’s experiments with Band of Gypsys. It ended, though, with a public meltdown on stage at Madison Square Garden before the first album could even be released. “That’s what happens when Earth fucks with space,” Hendrix told the crowd as the short set limped to an end. “Never forget that.” He was dead nine months later, almost four years after first landing in London.

It is easy to wallow in that timeline, to imagine the possibilities of what might have been had Hendrix’s safety been prioritized more than his financial solvency, had he been given better guardrails to, for, and from fame. But it is more inspiring to look out over the nearly 60 years since he made Are You Experienced and treasure him as the rarest rock’n’roll anomaly that has ever existed—the person who gave brilliantly and completely and then, for whatever reason, disappeared.

So many of his former peers, champions, and biters remain, still squeezing the lifeblood from rock’s desiccated body for at least a few more years. But as a permanent idea sprung from an ephemeral form, Hendrix remains more powerful and captivating than the lot. “We’ll get outdated,” Stella Benabou, who owned the record store where Hendrix shopped, said near the end of 1973’s A Film About Jimi Hendrix. “He won’t.” Half a century later, he still hasn’t.