Many guitar players — at some point — can't help but fall under the spell of the sounds found on classic rock albums of the mid- to late '60s. Players like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend and Robby Krieger were synonymous with wah, fuzz, univibe and/or tremolo. Throw George Harrison and Brian Jones into the mix and you get sitars and other sound- (and mind-) altering effects. They were always experimenting, changing things up, trying to top each other.

As 1969 dawned, Jimi Hendrix had just come through three of the most incredible years of his life. In 1966, after years of struggling on the black entertainment chitlin circuit, he had been plucked from a New York nightclub by Chas Chandler, former bassist with British hit makers the Animals, and whisked off to London, England, home of the Beatles, Stones, Who, Cream and all things groovy in rock. There, Chandler fostered Hendrix’s innate songwriting gift, assembled a killer band around him and guided the guitarist through the recording of three albums—Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland—that made him not just an international superstar but also an icon of the emergent hippie counterculture.